Messy (15 page)

Remember, nobody cares
, Max told herself as she studied the outfit in the mirror.
This is what you wanted. An audience and anonymity all in one. Best of both worlds.

Max sprinted as fast as she could across the Warner Bros. lot. It wasn’t really that far from her house, but she’d had to stop for gas, and in that time, apparently everyone in L.A. with a car hit the road. Max’s fist had red marks on it from beating her horn so much, partly because a lot of people needed to be encouraged to use the accelerator, but mostly because her horn only worked about ten percent of the time.

She sped breathlessly around a corner onto the suburbia set—a curving road lined with a few all-American two-story clapboard houses. Max had seen at least ten episodes of television over the last month alone that used this
outdoor location, but apparently one of the buildings was the
Nancy Drew
production office.

“
All
the houses are secretly offices,” Brooke had told her. “They filmed bits of
Tequila Mockingbird
here, and Daddy said the staff of
Pals
ruined one of his takes because they were having a screaming fight over whether Rochelle and Ricky would ever get a parakeet.”

“Well, they wouldn’t,
obviously
,” Max had said. “But it must be hard to get anything done with people shooting scenes in front of your window. I would totally be the writer who snapped and started dumping water balloons on the set.”

“Somebody did throw a ham sandwich out the window,” Brooke said. “One of the extras ate it.”

Max hadn’t known what to say—it rendered her mute that she and Brick shared a past of being molested by lunch meat. Now, she gazed up at the blue house Brooke’s text message had directed her to and tried to catch her breath. She didn’t want to go inside heaving like a low-rent phone-sex operator. Or even a high-rent one.

“Max?”

Shit.
She’d been spotted. Max straightened up and came face-to-face with a grinning Brady Swift, a laptop bag slung across his body and a thick script in his hand.

“Fancy meeting you here,” he said, giving Max a light hug. It was over almost before Max registered that it was happening, although she did catch a whiff of Right Guard deodorant and peppermint. “It’s nice to see you again.”

“Hi, Engelbert,” Max said, suddenly feeling a bit clammy.
This
was why sweating was for suckers. She nodded at his script. “I’m guessing that’s not for
Psychic Lifeguard
.”

“You are wise,” he said. “You’re looking at Ned Nickerson, the earnest young student who discovers Nancy Drew huddled at a bus stop, falls in love with her, and then lets her help investigate his father’s murder.”

“No way! That’s awesome!” Max said, spontaneously smacking him in the chest with the back of her hand. “I mean, not the plot. The plot is terrible. You would never let a homeless girl whose father makes meth poke around in your business.”

“Idiocy,” Brady agreed.

“And Ned was kind of a drag in the books,” Max said. “I read them as a kid. He was like a tree with a mouth.”

“The worst,” he said amiably.

What are you doing? You need a rudeness alarm.

Max shook her head hard. “Sorry, I don’t mean that
you
are a tree with a mouth. It’s a great part,” she amended. “This is a huge movie. You made it sound like you’re just some schmo putting himself through school with glorified extra work.”

“I am. Or, I was. I only got through one quarter of school before this happened,” he said, sticking his hands deep into the pockets of his well-worn fleece pullover. “My agent called in a favor, so I read for this part about a month ago and never heard anything. Then they called last week and told me I was in.” He lowered his voice. “I
heard they had picked a big name but he wanted twenty million bucks, and they were like, ‘Sorry, kid, but
Wall Street 2
should’ve gone straight to DVD.’ ”

“It’ll be better with a cast of unknowns, anyway,” Max said. She stopped and knocked on her forehead with her fist. “God, that sounded terrible.”

“It’s okay.” Brady laughed. “I
am
a total unknown, except to psychotic fans of that episode of
Ghost Whisperer
where I got to yell at Jennifer Love Hewitt from the Other Side.”

“Oi, mate, is this the
Nancy Drew
office?”

The accent was strange—faintly British, mostly weird—but the voice was unmistakable. As Carla Callahan drew closer to them, Max tried to picture the blonde beanpole she’d known in elementary school, but her memory wouldn’t cooperate. It was like trying to draw somebody’s portrait from a photocopy of a photocopy of a picture. Carla’s chestnut pixie cut was an obvious attempt to copy Emma Watson’s from the summer she wrapped Harry Potter, and she was clad in jeans tucked into shiny flat boots, a longish military-style blazer with giant brass buttons and epaulets, and a black fedora, like the Artful Dodger after raiding Neiman Marcus.

“Hi, Carla,” Brady said pleasantly. “Brady Swift. We met a few years ago.”

“Indeed! You read for a part on
iNeverland
and they decided you were too American-sounding,” Carla Callahan beamed, rather too smugly for someone who Max
knew had been born in the Valley. Apparently Carla was so Method she forgot she wasn’t actually Wendy Darling, wasn’t actually British, and wasn’t actually still on that show, which itself wasn’t actually even on TV anymore.

“Chuffed to see you again, love,” Carla cooed, giving Brady two air kisses while putting a hand on his shoulder—no, almost putting it on his shoulder, but in fact leaving a sliver of air between it and her skin. “I never forget a face.”

“So you’re in this thing, too, huh?” Brady asked.

“Right-o, mate,” Carla said. “I’m Nancy’s best friend, George. Really knocked their blocks off at the audition.”

Yeah, which must be why I saw you sobbing when you left the room
, Max thought.

“George is ever so much more interesting than Nancy and Ned,” Carla continued in her fake accent, which probably worked on people who didn’t know she was born up the street. “She’s just ripping, honestly. So nontraditional.”

She’s also the one the books say looks like a boy.
Max was curious what would happen to Carla’s voice when she started playing George, who was written as a hard-as-nails Bostonian running a girl gang.

“That’s great, then,” Brady said evenly. “Got what you wanted.”

“Aces,” Carla affirmed. Then she appeared to notice Max. “And you are?”

Max blinked. She wished she were better at this stuff—what exactly was she supposed to do when confronted
with someone totally annoying from her youth who didn’t even have the courtesy to recognize her? If this were
Lust for Life
, she would probably reach into her pocket and pull out a test tube of disfiguring acid. If it were
Dr. Phil
, she’d be expected to blather about her feelings and then give Carla a hug. Door No. 1 sounded more fun.

Luckily, Brady came to the rescue. “This is Max,” he said. “She’s, like,
the
top person in the Berlin empire. I heard from Brooke that she and her father wouldn’t trust anyone else with, um, you know, all this… stuff.”

Carla squinted at Max’s face. “You look familiar.” She snapped her fingers. “You were one of the autographs I signed at Comic-Con, right?”

“Close,” Max said dryly. “We sat next to each other in art class a long time ago.”

“Blimey, that’s bonkers, Bob’s your uncle,” Carla said nonsensically, as if one could be British simply by blurting out random slang. “Max McCormack. You look… so…” Carla’s voice faded.

Max caught her own eye in the window. Her green hair had gotten a bit matted from the sprinting, and her fair skin was flushed beet-red. She looked like Christmas in the rain. “I had to run here,” she said lamely.

Carla cast her eyes over Max’s outfit. “Actually, you look quite the same,” she said, squeezing Max’s arm like the two of them were sharing a little secret. “Can’t think why I didn’t spot you. Don’t think you had green hair then. Go easy on the box dye, pet!”

Carla threw back her head and laughed. Max contemplated punching Carla in the neck.

“I think I hear someone calling for you,” Brady said suddenly. “You’d better get upstairs. Oh, and don’t listen to what anyone says—I think you
totally
have the right masculine essence to play George,” he added in a tone of deepest support.

Carla turned as pale as she could underneath her suntan. “Lovely. Well, must dash…” she sputtered, gesturing vaguely toward the house before scurrying off.

“Wow,” Max said under her breath. “So you’re not just an actor; you also do pest control.”

“And I might also be your stalker,” Brady noted. “At this point, the only people I see more often than you are my three roommates and that homeless guy who lives in our Dumpster.”

“Thanks for getting rid of her.”

“No problem,” he said. “I know her from the audition circuit, but I’ve never seen her be that… poncey.” He shook his head. “I told you actors are lunatics. Run away while you still can.”

Max grinned and caught sight of her reflection again. Her skin had finally returned to its normal color. “Too late, I’ve got a job to do,” she said. “I’m supposed to meet Brooke.”

“For the table read?” he asked, confused. “That’s dedication. They don’t usually let people in for that.”

“Brooke must have pulled some strings. I’m her… moral support.”

“Right. I mean, are you… You’re not, like… are you two…” Brady seemed caught up in making a series of complicated, vaguely suggestive hand gestures.

It suddenly dawned on Max what he was trying to ask. “We are dating, yes,” Max said. “We are so precious to each other.”

Brady stopped at the house’s front door and peered at Max’s face. Then he broke into a grin. “Liar.”

“I believe it’s called
acting
,” she said. “Really, I’m just her assistant. And her, um, friend. No benefits.”

“Oh, good,” Brady said, pulling open the door. “I mean… not that there’s anything wrong with… if you were… never mind.”

He looked slightly flustered. Max felt a weird ticklish sensation in her toes.

“I’m sort of curious to meet her, actually,” Brady recovered, holding open the door so Max could go inside. “Her blog is something else. I love it when people surprise me.”

“Thanks!” Max chirped. Then she caught herself. “For holding the door, I mean.”

The blue house’s ground floor was musty and barren, except for a back room that held office supplies, printers, and some computer equipment. But there was a din emanating from upstairs, and as Max and Brady trudged toward it, she saw that the top floor was all bustle: people
passing out stapled papers, shaking hands, posing for pictures, and zooming in and out of rooms. There were a couple tiny white-walled offices, whose doors were ajar enough for Max to see messy couches, half-eaten bags of Cheetos, and wastebaskets overflowing with crumpled paper failures (Max knew the feeling), and a room with a large conference table and a wall of headshots—Brooke’s and Brady’s included—near several whiteboards covered in frantically scribbled phrases like “Act One: End at crack den?” and “Nancy = no dairy” and “Carson: Gay or just nice?”

Max felt a crackle in her veins. She envied these people. It made her want to go home and type something. Even if that something sucked. It couldn’t be any worse than featuring a lactose-intolerant Nancy Drew—like, who wanted a subplot about a teen sleuth’s intestinal drama? That would be like giving Dirk Venom a sinus infection in the long-rumored sequel
Dirk Venom: V Is for Five
.

“Wow,” Brady breathed, backing out into the stairwell. “I’m… kind of nervous.”

“Really? You?”

“Yeah, I mean, I always wanted to be a behind-the-scenes guy,” he said, pointing to his laptop. “I snuck on the lot three hours early so I could work on my script at the commissary, because I always get good ideas from the extras milling around.” He glanced queasily at the office door. “I’ve never done something like this. Usually I just show up in the middle of a shoot and say two lines and then go home to my Easy Mac.”

“Well, the good news is you can probably afford spaghetti now,” Max said. “Maybe even some sauce.”

“Let’s not get crazy,” Brady said, taking off his glasses and nervously cleaning the lenses on his shirttails. “This is just big. And suddenly it feels big. Is it too late to blow this off and take up farming instead?”

“Relax. They hired you. They know what they were looking for,” Max told him. “And when you become so famous that you can’t leave the house without putting on dude-makeup, you can dry your tears with hundred-dollar bills. Now man up.”

Brady blinked. “You’re good,” he said.

Max dragged him back into the production office and scanned the room for Brooke, who was in the middle of a circle of people, Carla Callahan among them. Brooke waved, then cocked an eyebrow at the sight of Brady and Max together and excused herself, making a beeline for them. Carla seemed surprised and slightly off-kilter, as if she’d been sure Brady was lying.

“I hope you brought a notebook,” Brooke said cheerfully. “I need—” She caught herself, flicking her eyes over at Brady. “Um, I mean, Daddy needs you here as his proxy to take notes.”