Messy (31 page)

Max waited until the red light went off over the door to Stage 32, signifying that the cameras were no longer rolling. Then she tapped on the door and whispered a greeting at Mario, the security guard who answered it. He waved her through into the dark space, putting a finger to his lips and pointing to the set.

Rough day
, he mouthed.

Max tiptoed toward the action. Brooke and Brady, plus
a couple of secondary actors and about twelve extras, were standing in a makeshift police station. Tad, the director, was crouched down next to Brooke, intently instructing her on something while she picked at a button on her costume, a simple khaki Old Navy dress and crimson cardigan (this job had to be Brooke’s first time wearing anything that cost less than sixty dollars). Brady was next to her, tugging uncomfortably at the collar of his dress shirt. The cameramen were giving one another concerned glances, and a hush had fallen despite the fact that no filming was happening. Max spied Brick looking tense, tapping his right foot on the ground, tearing into an orange like it was the skin of his worst enemy and dropping the peels onto an already-sizable hill of them beneath him on the craft services table. How apt that Brick would be the world’s first person to cope with stress by bingeing on
fruit
.

Clearly, something was going down. And Brooke was at the center of it.

Tad headed back to his chair and hoisted himself into it. “Okay everyone let’s do it right everyone find your marks okay action!” he shouted in his typical punctuation-free way.

“What do
you
know?” rasped the actor playing the cop. “You’re just a kid. A kid with no home address.”

“Homeless people aren’t stupid,” Brooke said, trying to make her lip tremble. It looked like a facial tic.

“Cut cut stop everyone cut!” Tad shouted in a mad rush.
“Brooke once again the line is ‘Homeless people aren’t less because they have no home’ so let’s focus and get it right and take a deep breath and slow down.”

Director, heal thyself
, Max thought.

“Right, right,” Brooke said, rubbing her forehead.

“And try putting your hands on the desk remember you’re really letting him have it and this time let’s nail it okay thanks,” Tad boomed.

“Right,” Brooke echoed. “Got it. Yeah.”

“Okay action!”

The cop repeated his line. Brooke woodenly planted her hands on the table and said, “Homeless people are less.
Dammit.
”

“Cuuuut!” Tad wailed. He put his head in his hands. “God okay reset go again.”

Carla Callahan was over near a wardrobe rack readjusting one of George’s cockeyed baseball caps in the mirror. Max swallowed her loathing—and a remaining stubborn sprinkling of guilt—and inched over to Carla’s side.

“What’s going on?” Max whispered.

“Brooke’s a right mess,” Carla said, savoring each word like a 3 Musketeers bar. “All’s I know is, she’s flubbing lines, standing in people’s light, blocking camera angles… totally tanking.”

Carla was barely concealing her amusement. Max felt sick knowing that her old self, from not too long ago, would’ve rubbed her hands together just like Carla and settled in to watch this catastrophe unfold with the same
morbid glee people deploy while watching the MTV Movie Awards. Max abruptly walked away.

“Action!” Tad yelled.

“Homeless people aren’t homeless,” Brooke said. Then she buried her face in her hands. “Cut,” she moaned.

Max craned her head to the left and saw Zander and Kyle whispering furiously in a corner. Tad shook his head at them, and they glanced at each other and hastily adjourned toward a cubbyhole along one of the side walls, which they used as their makeshift headquarters when they didn’t feel like walking back to the production office. Or whenever something was urgent.

This is not good.

They pulled the door closed, but it popped open a crack and hung there, a tantalizing invitation to eavesdrop. Max stole along the side of the set, mentally congratulating herself for being too lazy to dye her hair green again, because the brown was so much easier for skulking. She perched on a stray sofa next to the production office, pretending to rummage in her bag for something, and trained her ears on the sound of their voices.

“This blows, man,” Zander said. “What is wrong with her?”

“I don’t know what her g.d. problem is, but I’m f’ing majorly rethinking being in the Brooke Berlin business,” Kyle said. “She hasn’t remembered a g.d. line all day.”

Zander let out a grunt. “What the hell happened? We are screwed if she doesn’t pull this together.”

“I think Tad is going to kill her,” Kyle added. “He just motherf’ing told her where to stand and she’s f’ing acting like she doesn’t speak English.”

Max didn’t dare breathe. She summoned her strongest poker face, but it wouldn’t come. This was
really
not good.

“So do we pull the trigger?” Zander asked.

“Well, half the reason we hired her was because of that g.d. blog, and all of a sudden, it’s f’ing awful, just like her acting yesterday. Her latest entries are, like, a hellstorm of suck.”

“Booting her would be expensive.”

“A month of f’ing pricey reshoots is better than a lousy f’ing movie. Tad said it was the worst motherf’ing week of his life. Let’s just jump ship and buy another ship before we sink this ship.” He paused. “That was a shizzy f’ing metaphor.”

“Ky,
shizzy
is the dumbest version of
shitty
that I have ever heard. Snap the rubber band.”

“No! I didn’t f’ing swear!” Kyle protested.

As they argued, Max crept away from her perch and spun behind a set wall, letting out the breath she’d been holding.

Holy crap. Brooke was about to get fired.

Remind me again why you care? She’s a jerkwad who’s made the last few weeks of your life a major pain.

But this wasn’t run-of-the-mill high school melodrama; this was someone’s career. Obviously, Max’s stupidly ornate
entry about social media, which had seemed so hilarious at the time, was as much a catalyst for Brooke’s downturn as anything else. So the part of Max that had known Brooke’s financial generosity might enable Max to change the trajectory of her
own
life—the same part that had come to like (or at least not hate) Brooke Berlin—could not sit by and watch her go down in flames.

Not to mention, Brooke wasn’t technically a jerkwad at all. Max had spent eons believing that people like Brooke were rich with cash but bankrupt when it came to humanity. But now she knew that Brooke had insecurities and feelings that were unexpectedly similar to her own. They both just wanted to be recognized as something
more
. More than what people saw in them at first glance. More than what they were right now.

I can’t let them fire her
.
But how do I stop them? It’s not like I can just pop out of the shadows and warn Brooke. She’s standing in front of fifty other people, getting reamed out for not learning her lines.

Zander and Kyle came out of their room. They headed straight for Brick.

Come on. Think fast.

Defying her first instinct, Max popped out of the shadows.

“Max!” Brady grabbed her arm and pulled her aside. “Where have you been? I haven’t seen you in forever.”

“Hey! Um, this is a
really
bad time….”

Zander and Kyle were talking quietly to Brick, as Zander tugged uncomfortably at his snug Coachella music festival T-shirt.

“I need to talk to you,” Brady insisted. “Brooke is acting really strange. She’s running hot and cold, and she’s totally whiffing her lines all of a sudden, and it’s like the awesome blogger part of her just evaporated.”

“Great, Skippy,” Max said absently, as Brick—looking uncharacteristically downtrodden—beckoned to Brooke. If Max was going to do anything to stop the impending firing, she had to act fast.

“It’s so different, and
she’s
so different, and… look, Max, I need to ask—”

“I so wish I could help you, Brady, but seriously, this is
so
not a good time,” she said. Then she grabbed his arms. “Listen, do you like her blog, or do you like
her
? If it’s the latter, then the rest of it shouldn’t matter.”

With that, Max bodily moved him aside and marched up to the producers, who were in the act of escorting Brooke off the set.

“No, wait, don’t—you can’t be mad at Brooke,” Max blurted. “You just can’t.”

“Not now, Max,” Brick said sadly.

“But you need to hear this. Brooke is a mess because of me—it’s all my fault.” Max took a deep breath. “Brooke didn’t write those entries. I did.”

ON TELEVISION,
big, revealing statements always elicit loud gasps, and then a lot of background whispering with hands clapped to open mouths, while the truth-teller stands by looking refreshingly liberated. But TV is a dirty, dirty liar. Because there were no dramatic sound effects for Max’s confession, no slow clap, nor a handy background-music swell to let everyone know she’d just done something courageous. There was just silence. And then, fury.

“Wha-aaaaaaaaaat?” Brick boomed. “Explain this outrageous tomfoolery!”

“I think you’d better tell us exactly what the goddamn shit you’re talking about,” Kyle said.
Snap-snap
went his wristband.

“When this happened on
Dirk Venom 3
, we did
interrogation through yoga,” Brick boomed. “It was crane pose that broke the bastard. But I think all this will take is one downward dog.”

Max knew this meant he was truly angry. Insulting someone’s physical fitness was the nuclear option as far as Brick Berlin was concerned—his version of throwing a drink in her face. Max tried not to flinch. Everyone looked so very, very mad at her right now. Maybe she could move somewhere chill like Seattle and become a roadie for Pearl Jam’s AARP tour or something. Surely they needed able-bodied youths at this point in their lives and would at least spring for coffee.

But then her eyes fell on Brooke, who was simply staring at the floor, wan and dazed. Max shook off her nerves and stood her ground. She’d come this far.
Finish it.

“I’m just trying to tell you… I know you’re, um, concerned about the quality of Brooke’s blog and how distracted she is, and so I’m telling you it’s my fault, that’s all,” Max began. “I wrote the last couple entries of Brooke’s blog. The, um…”
How to say this delicately?
“… strange ones.”

“Ruthless trickery!” Brick bellowed. “Impersonating Brooke online for fun and profit! Making a mockery of her sensitive brain! I do pilates with Anderson Cooper, and he will not let this stand!”

“This is some major goddamn fucking bullshit,” Kyle roared, plucking his rubber band with abandon.

“I
knew
she was bonkers,” Carla piped up.

“Get me the lawyers!” Zander said, pushing his hipster glasses up his nose so vigorously that Max was worried he might end up with a bruise. “All of them. Any of them. Right now!”

“Also! I’m beginning to think there
is
no Maxschtagen cheese!” Brick hollered.

Max felt Brady’s eyes on her but refused to look at him, focusing instead on how hollow Brooke looked—Max wondered briefly if she’d fallen asleep with her eyes open, but then she started rubbing vacantly at a spot on her cheek—and how disgusted everyone sounded. This was a whopper of a lie she was telling, but at this point, what was one more? It was for a good cause.

“I didn’t do it for malicious reasons,” Max insisted. “Brooke has been really stressed, with her schoolwork and wanting to do well on this movie
and
her blog. It was too much. So I told her I’d take care of the blog so she could concentrate on her part. And I wrote a few entries, but she didn’t get to see them until… recently… and then she was so upset with me that I think she stopped sleeping.”

“Oh,” Zander said. Then he looked at Kyle.
“Oh!”

“I did think that lately the blog was missing Brooke’s usual joie de vivre,” Brick said thoughtfully, tapping his index finger against the cleft in his chin. “But I assumed she was just iron-deficient.”

“So,” Zander said brightly, “what you’re saying is, she
didn’t
turn stupid?”

Behind him, Max saw Brooke flinch. She recovered in
time to present a calm face to Kyle, who actually did a dorky little dance before throwing his arms in the air. “Man, Brooke, you had us fucking scared,” he said.
Snap.
“Those posts were so
bad
.”

Brick turned to Max. “Young lady, I have not seen such wanton commotion since Jamba Juice had a two-for-one sale on wheatgrass,” he said sternly. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

With nearly everyone’s eyes on her, from the camera guys to the makeup girls to the security officers, who may have been about to carry her out in handcuffs—everyone, in fact, but Brooke, who was again looking at her feet—Max had never wanted to disappear more than she did at that moment. What
did
she have to say for herself?

“I’m… sorry?” she ventured. “I didn’t mean for this to get so out of hand. I just wanted to help.”