Messy (32 page)

At least that was true.

“I was trying to be a friend,” she added, looking at Brooke.

Also true, to Max’s everlasting surprise.

Brooke slowly lifted her head and looked at Max, expressionless. Max felt a strange, silent conversation unfold between them. Her actions stood as her apology, and Brooke’s eyes held a mixture of bewilderment, gratitude, and… was that regret?

Brick broke the bond by enfolding Brooke in a beefy hug. The set sprang to life around them, everyone talking and gossiping about what had just happened, what to do,
what it all meant. It was the period at the end of whatever silent sentence she and Brooke had been trying to write. That was it. Their tenuous association, whatever might have come of it, was broken.
Nancy Drew
would move on without Max, but not without its star, and that was as it should be.

Max couldn’t help feeling a pang of sadness. She hated endings. Maybe that was why she always made a mess of beginnings—both in her writing and in her life. If you start something, its destiny is to conclude. If you start nothing,
feel
nothing, you’re free. Max’s tear ducts constricted inconveniently. She turned away from the set… and banged straight into Brady. He looked down at her with a cryptic expression. Max knew he’d have questions. He probably wanted to ask why she ever believed her idiocy could pass as Brooke’s intellectual sparkle.

I can’t take this. Not from him. Not now.

“Max—”

And I will not let him see me cry.

“I can’t.” She shook her head. “I’ve said enough today. And I don’t need to hear how disgusted you are with me. Please, Brady, just leave me alone.”

Max’s feet handled the rest, which was good, because knowing she likely wouldn’t see him again after all this drama made it awfully hard to tear herself away.

And Brady let her go. Of course. In the romantic comedy of her life, Brady would ignore the obvious lie she’d just told him and chase after her, or she’d turn around and
he’d be staring at her back, unwilling to let her go so easily. Of course, in the romantic comedy of her life, she would also have thick, curly locks and three more inches to her height, and Brady wouldn’t have been macking on Brooke.

Max stopped by the door and pretended to look for something in her bag. She stole a peek. Brady had vanished.
I told him to leave me alone. What did I expect?
But her heart sank anyway, and a tear squeaked out of her left eye.

See?
she told herself.
Beginnings aren’t worth it.

Her hand closed on her printed NYU essay, clipped to her application. Max pulled it out and gave one last glance up to the set. Everyone had swarmed Brooke like worker bees to their monarch, with Max just a faint memory, an unpleasant speed bump on the road to the festival circuit. A tear slipped down Max’s cheek, and then another. They left ugly splashes on the printed pages in her hand. What had she been thinking? She couldn’t turn the essay in, certainly not now. So much for being herself. Abruptly Max crumpled up the application, dropped it in the trash, and left, swatting at her streaming eyes with the sleeve of her hoodie.

Brooke wriggled so that her nose was no longer buried in her father’s armpit. She was trying to piece together what
had just happened, and if she wasn’t mistaken, it went like this: She had been stinking up the joint on set, and then Max appeared out of nowhere and said exactly the right thing to get everyone to stop giving Brooke a hard time and start trying to cuddle her into mental wellness. Ergo, just as Brooke was about to be hoisted on her own petard, Max had thrown herself onto it.

She felt a swell of joy. Max had saved her. It was the perfect white lie—nobody got hurt.

Except for Max.

This all reminded Brooke very keenly of what had gone down last fall, when Brooke’s inadvertent betrayal of Molly had been revealed right before the curtain went up on the opening night of
My Fair Lady
. Brooke had a visceral memory of being paralyzed by deciding between running after her sister to set things right or going onstage and claiming Brick’s long-sought undivided attention. A timely shove from Jennifer Parker had made the choice for her, but Brooke had kept on making it, over and over, with every subsequent entrance and exit. She’d picked fame over family, and when it was all said and done, she had felt rotten about it. She couldn’t make that mistake again. Could she?

She’s not Molly
, her inner voice argued.
It’s not the same thing.

Shifting until she found a small pocket of air to use as a window, Brooke saw Max running away from a distraught-looking Brady. Something else was nagging at her. Where
had Max come from, and why? What had she known? It felt like a giant piece of this puzzle was still missing, which was only okay on
Lust for Life
, where that piece was Pip’s now
un
recapitated head.

“Well I don’t know about you guys but I feel about a thousand times better,” said Tad, popping two Red Bull cans in one hand. “After this week I was starting to think maybe y’all were drunk when you cast this one.”

“We were all wondering what the f’ we were thinking,” Kyle agreed. “Okay, so, we have an f’load to do here. Tad, figure out when we can redo those scenes Brooke totally f’ing blew the other day. Elena can jigger the schedule so Brooke gets a little time to rest up, take a break from the blog, get some sleep. F’ing rejuvenate, girl.”

“Have Elena cancel the casting session, too,” Zander added. “Man, this is going to be so much cheaper than redoing everything with a different girl.”

“Right?” Kyle crowed. “Thank f’ing god!”

Rewind
.
A different girl?

Brooke looked up and searched Brick’s face. But she couldn’t find any trace of anything except… well, there it was: relief.

“Daddy,” she whispered, “were they going to fire me?”

Brick looked down at her fondly. “It is a moot point, Sunshine. The truth is out there now. Let’s cheat on our diets and get some ice cream on the way home.”

Brooke slowly pulled away from her father. Not even
illicit dairy could distract her. “Just like that? They weren’t even going to talk to me about it?”

“Well, Sunshine…” Brick looked uncomfortable.

Suddenly Brooke wanted to cry so badly, it felt like her whole face was going to implode. She gazed around at the set and saw people celebrating, essentially, that she was not secretly a worthless waste of space. People who, somehow, thought her blog represented the sum of who she was, which—unbeknownst to them—meant that they actually thought the real Brooke Berlin truly
was
worthless. And that felt rotten. It was not okay for them to think it about her, and it was doubly not okay to sit back and let them think it about Max.

“If I could interrupt your revelry for a second,” Brooke said coldly. “This won’t take long.”

Kyle paused in the midst of high-fiving one of the gaffers. Zander put down his iPad, and Tad almost spat out the mouthful of energy drink he’d been chugging.

“Brookie, I don’t think—” Brick began.

“Don’t worry, Daddy, I know what I’m doing,” she said, steeling herself as much as she could so that her voice didn’t tremble. “It’s just that I’m watching you all basically celebrate that I was simply burned out, and not a total dumbass, and I’d like to address a couple points about that.”

“Oh, um, okay,” Kyle said, caught off guard. “Sure.”

“Point one is that you apparently were never going to sit
down with me and
ask
what was wrong,” Brooke said, tossing back her hair in what she hoped was a supremely confident gesture. “Frankly, it is inhumane to just fire your lead actress without talking to her about what might be going on in her life. You’re supposed to have my back, but instead you were going to sweep me under the rug and pretend I never happened. I am disgusted.”

That felt good—even better when she saw Zander’s eyes bug out so hard they nearly popped the lenses out of his thick-framed glasses. Everyone was hooked on her every word. It was glorious. So glorious. Like
My Fair Lady
all over again, except no pressure to fake an accent.

“Point two is that you are placing an insane amount of importance on this blog,” she continued, starting to pace as she warmed up to her speech. “If I’m not mistaken, you hired me to act, not write. If you wanted a glorified typist to play Nancy, you could’ve hired someone from a temp pool for a lot cheaper.”

“This is seriously ballsy,” Kyle said under his breath.

Brooke inhaled deeply and surveyed the room. As she processed the group’s rapt, shocked faces, she realized anew that she didn’t want to be associated with any of these people if they thought Brooke Berlin, the
real
Brooke Berlin, was so freaking inferior.

“Point three, pursuant to point two, is that you’re assuming that if I can’t write a blog, I can’t act,” she concluded. “And yet, I’ve been acting since before the blog
existed, I auditioned for you when it
barely
existed, and I’ve been awesome for most of this shoot and, in fact, my whole life. All despite the fact that I never wrote a word of that blog myself.”

Everyone gasped like they were in a courtroom scene on
Lust for Life
. Max would’ve loved it, a fact that made Brooke miss her a little bit. But she didn’t dwell on it, because her audience was still hungry. And Brooke knew exactly what to feed them.

“That’s right,” she said triumphantly. “Max didn’t write the recent entries. She wrote the
other
ones—the ones you were drooling over, the ones you said made me seem so
unexpectedly
smart.” She poured a little extra venom into her voice for that one, and it worked. Everyone, including Brick, winced. Brooke felt more in her element than she had in weeks.

Now, a little humble pie…

“Max was using her talents to be an incredible friend. Then she took a bullet for me today, and I owe her for that. But I couldn’t let her leave you thinking she’s less than she is. It’s not right.” Brooke dropped her gaze to the floor. “When Max and I had a falling out, the blog was one ball too many for me to juggle, and in the end I dropped them all.”

Brick’s expression was one of pride.
Of course. Because that sounded just like him.

Zander leaned against a desk, ostensibly wobbly at the knees. Tad was doing that dumb director thing where he
held up his hands to frame her face. Carla Callahan, that suck-up, looked gobsmacked. Suddenly, Brooke wondered why she hadn’t done this sooner. It felt really good to be honest, finally—mostly about Max, after she’d watched Max lie for her like that, but also because for the first time in a while Brooke had this room in the palm of her hand. And there was nothing she loved more than an audience.

“I admit, it was a deception, and I’m sorry for that. But the popularity of the lie took over my life,” Brooke said softly, sensing it was time to take things down a notch. She allowed her eyes to moisten. “You all were so shocked that someone like me could have something worthwhile to say. It made me feel like the real Brooke Berlin had nothing to offer. That I was… expendable. And apparently, I was.”

She let out a calculatedly shaky breath and wiped the deliciously punctual tear that trickled out of her eye. “But one thing I am
not
is worthless,” Brooke insisted, strengthening her tone. “And I only struggled when I tried to become someone else, to please masters who, as it turned out, never had faith in me to begin with.”

One of the makeup ladies let out a sob. Brooke took a moment to bless the gods of genetics for giving her Brick’s penchant for melodrama, and for having a best friend like Arugula who handed out multisyllabic words like breath mints.

“If you want to fire me, that’s your prerogative,” she finished. “But you cast me because I can act, not because I can
blog. Some of us are lyrical on paper, and others, like me, deal in the power of emotive speech. And your pro-prose bias punishes those of us who still believe that the ability to move others by baring our feelings without hiding behind a computer is our most powerful tool as a people. If you judge me for being more gifted at that than I am at typing, then I am not your Nancy Drew, and I never was.”

Brooke realized she had, unconsciously, moved to the center of the room and was all but raising her fist aloft, as if calling her comrades to arms. If she’d had the national anthem on her iPhone, she’d have cued it up right then and there.

Instead, silence.

“Well, I feel like an f’ing f’head,” Kyle eventually said.

“That was better than half of what’s in the script,” Tad mused. “
That
is my Nancy.”

“Stirring!” Brick clapped. “A tour de force!”

“You got me, Brooke,” Zander said apologetically. “I don’t like being lied to, but, yeah. We could have handled this better. And you’re right. You were our pick, and you earned it in your audition, not on the Internet.” He ran a hand through his hair, which fluffed it out to John Mayer levels. “We’re gonna get you those days off, and then we’ll all come back in here and shoot this week’s stuff over again. Fresh start.”