Messy (9 page)

“Max,” he repeated. “Explains why you were in the men’s room.” And with a wink, he hopped down and jogged outside, knocking into the door frame a bit on his way.

Max chuckled to herself and gave her nose one final, gentle squeeze. It seemed to be in working order, or at least it hadn’t fallen off. Apparently this was a night of firsts for her: first insane Hollywood party, first time passing herself off as the namesake of a rare dairy product, first potential broken nose, first encounter with someone who similarly appreciated the awfulness of Jennifer’s résumé. All that was left was her first Brooke Berlin blog entry. If only she could figure out how the hell to pull it off.

“I hope you had the tiiiime of your liiiiives,” she could hear Moxie Stilts rapping from the guesthouse, in a megaloud, mega-misguided cover of the Green Day high school graduation favorite.

With a bolstering nod, Max shoved her way back into the drunken abyss. Whatever she was going to write, it was probably going to start in there.

OPENBR
KE.COM

MARCH 12

If you’ve found this blog, chances are—unless you were looking for information on German bodies of water and you’re really terrible at Google—you already know a few things about me: I’m Brooke Berlin, I’m sixteen, my father is in at least one movie that’s airing on TV right
this second, and my mother is a hand model who ran off and left us without a word when I was a kid (no point in pretending you didn’t see the
People
article). What you may not know: My mother is going to regret that; unlike half my peers in this town, I’m perfectly content to act sixteen and not twenty-six; I can pick exactly the right shoe to go with every outfit; I’m an actress; and even though I
am
naturally blonde, I also know how to use a semicolon.

I can also use hyphens—like, technically, I am a “student-actress”—but I chose not to mention that up top because the hyphen is the most overused punctuation mark in this entire town. I don’t mean by the over-30 set; I am, after all, the offspring of a hyphenate. But my father worked as an actor for years before he added “director” and “producer” to it. In his case, I approve of the hyphen. He earned it. There is sweat on that hyphen, as opposed to the ones worn by most of Young Hollywood. They’re all in a huge hurry to stuff their résumés and claim that they’re model-actor-designers, or reality star-author-singers—or in the case of Moxie Stilts, an actress-singer-call girl, or at least I
assume
that’s the message she was sending at her party this past weekend. Why else would she writhe around in lingerie, letting men twice
her age do shots of Cuervo out of her collarbone? (Memo to God: Despite what she tells the magazines, Moxie is cheating on You with half of Southern California. I assume You’re aware, but she sure had the rest of the world fooled.)

So, my message to the junior hyphenates is: Chill
out
. You’re so busy cramming your résumés to the breaking point—paranoid everyone will forget you exist unless you do everything, everywhere, all the time—that you’re losing what there is about yourself that you actually
want
us to remember. Like, does any little kid wake up one morning and think, When I grow up, I want to have a really cheesy eponymous fashion line at Kmart? No. They want to be baseball players or rock stars or actors. But my peers are all so obsessed with being famous that they don’t care anymore what they’re famous
for
; they just want attention. Case in point: Name Moxie Stilts’s last movie. Now name her last TV commercial. I bet you remembered her bacne-cream endorsement first.

People like that are the reason you’re probably reading this blog thinking,
Great, another idiot wants her fifteen minutes.
But I don’t want to be tarred with that brush. I want to work. I am
capable of showing up on time, learning lines, arriving early and leaving late, and getting in and out of cars without flashing my underwear. (Somebody else at Moxie’s party was not so lucky. I don’t want to tell you who it was, but let’s just say I saw more
pieces of her
than my retinas could handle.) And so I’ve started this blog to try to prove that we’re not all alike. Let my fellow teen and twentysomething peers overextend themselves, act the fool, or peddle some false saintly image and then bust out of their petticoats as soon as they’re legally able to seduce a backup dancer (
ahem
, Ms. Stilts). I just want to do
me
, and do it right. I’d rather have respect, self- and otherwise, than infamy. Why nobody else seems to feel that way is a mystery. But I’m coming. You’re on notice.

And so are these people:

1) Confidential to HBO girl: HE’S GAY. ABANDON SHIP.

2) To the Cuervo lickers: Seriously? Half of you are married. I know this because a) you are recognizably famous, b) you left your rings on, and c) HELLO? WHAT PART ABOUT BEING RECOGNIZABLE DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND? Hope your prenups are airtight.

3) To Hollywood’s divorce attorneys: Pursuant to the above, you might want to increase your hourly rate.

4) To Moxie: In addition to everything else, cool it with the eyeliner. You look like you face-planted into the La Brea Tar Pits.

Until next time,

B.

MAX WOKE UP TO
the sound of her cell phone buzzing somewhere near her left foot. She hadn’t even realized she’d taken the phone to bed with her, the mystery of which was explained when Max figured out that she technically
hadn’t—
she’d just left it in the pocket of the jeans that she never took off the night before. Blearily, she stared at the screen.

BROOKE BERLIN
, it said,
6:24
AM
.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Max muttered.
I am so not on the clock
, she thought, and hit Ignore.

She flopped onto her pillow. Despite Brooke’s earlier assurance that Max could just e-mail her the entry, somehow they’d spent hours at the Berlin house the night before, poring over every last comma splice. But every time
Max felt herself getting irritated by Brooke’s nitpickery—and occasional insistence on dangling participles—she reminded herself how much cash Brooke was forking over on a weekly basis. Max had always been disgusted by artists she thought were sellouts (people who agreed to have their music in a tampon ad, for example), but now that she herself had secretly sold out, she realized a fat paycheck really did make an irritating job much easier. Dennis might’ve had a happier workforce if he’d paid above minimum wage.

The phone buzzed again.
BROOKE BERLIN, 6:26 AM
.

I am not on call
.
I don’t care how much you’re paying me. I am keeping regular business hours.

She rolled over and tried to go back to sleep for the last sad thirty-four minutes before her alarm clock would sound. But behind her eyelids, Max was wide awake. And kind of nervous. She thought her blog entry was good. Molly had laughed out loud at it. But it was the first thing Max had ever written that might be seen by someone who wasn’t biased in her favor, or contractually obligated to grade her. Strangers might read it. And hate it. And then leave rude comments telling her to shut her dumb face. Max groaned, remembering the many comments she herself had made on a variety of blogs in which she did things like correct the bloggers’ grammar or wonder why anyone thought she might be interested in reading about, say, Jessica Alba’s birthing plan. In retrospect, this all seemed karmically dangerous.

Her phone buzzed a third time. Max grabbed it angrily, but this time it was Molly.

“What the hell is going on over there?” Max answered. “It’s practically still the middle of the night!”

“I knew you were awake!” Brooke said.

“I never would have fallen for that trick if I were really awake,” Max groaned. “Does Molly even know you have her phone?”

“Of course not,” Brooke said. “I snuck into her room and stole it. She sleeps
really
soundly. I’m worried she might have some kind of medical condition.”

“I wish
I
had a medical condition. I would have loved to have slept through this.”

“Whatever,” Brooke said. “Anyway, do you think we should have given Moxie Stilts a fake name?”

Max flopped backward onto her bed. “We talked about this for
six hours
last night,” she said. “To the point where I thought I was having a nightmare where all you did was stand in front of me and yap, and then I realized it was real.”

“I had a dream that she sued me for calling her a fire-breathing ass-clown.”

“We didn’t call her a fire-breathing ass-clown,” Max said, closing her eyes. Maybe she could snooze through this conversation.

“But—”

“Oh, my God, Brooke,” Max groaned, almost involuntarily. “You have said more words to me in the last twenty-four hours than you have in five years.”

“I don’t know if you understand this, but my reputation is on the line here,” Brooke said huffily.

“We didn’t say anything that wasn’t true,” Max said, “
and
I doubt she’s even going to read it.”

“But—”

“Also, do you really think Moxie Stilts is going to sue Brick Berlin’s daughter?” Max asked. This was her last-ditch argument. “She’d never work in this town again. I’d be more worried about having publicly insulted someone your dad wants to cast in a TV show.”

She instantly regretted being so glib. There was a long moment of silence on the other end of the line. Max began to hope that Brooke had hung up on her.

“He won’t care. Brick always says that the truth is the most powerful weapon we have, besides the P90X DVDs,” Brooke said, although she sounded a bit wobbly. “Anyway. I’ll see you at school. Go back to sleep, or you’ll look like a puffer fish.”

Max punched the End button and hurled her phone at the floor.

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.
Kevin and Bean, the morning guys on KROQ, came on her clock radio braying about something that had happened on
American Idol
the night before—apparently one of the contestants had sung an R. Kelly song while wearing a toga.

“Why, God?” Max wailed at her bedroom ceiling. About all of it.

God didn’t respond, so Max rolled out of bed and went
to school. Unfortunately, Brooke was no easier to avoid there: She was waiting by Max’s locker, impossible to miss in a brightly printed Peter Som minidress and clutching her iPad like a life preserver.

“We have three comments already,” Brooke said softly by way of a greeting.

“How many of them are your aliases?” Max asked, twirling her padlock.

“None!” Brooke said, turning the tablet around so Max could see OpenBrooke.com’s pink-themed home page. There were, as promised, three comments. The first one said, “Resplendent!”

“That’s clearly Arugula,” Max pointed out. “Doesn’t count.”

“But look at the other two! LOLWHATEVER98 wrote, ‘
You’re
a tar pit.’ ”

“I don’t think that’s a compli—”

“And then right after that, Anonymous wrote, ‘Nip-slip, please!’ ”

“Congratulations. You’ve really won over the heart of America.” Max opened her locker and dumped her schoolbooks into a messy pile, on top of another messy pile.

Brooke hugged her iPad to her chest. “Everyone knows you’re not really famous unless half the world wants to see you naked, and the other half hates your guts,” she explained cheerfully. “So we’re off to a good start. Don’t forget, I’m expecting your pitches for my next three entries by noon today. You can e-mail me.”

“ ‘Don’t forget’? You never told me that in the first place! We just finished
this
one,” Max said, her voice rising a few notches.

“Shh, you’re going to blow my cover,” Brooke hissed. “And what did you think, we’d do one entry a month and be done with it? A successful blogographer’s work is never done.”

“Successful already, huh?” Molly asked, appearing at Max’s side.

Brooke tapped her head. “Never doubt an evil genius,” she said, setting off toward her class with a smug smile.

“Three comments and no lawsuits after being live for like twenty minutes,” Max said, turning to Molly. “Does that sound successful?”

“Better than no comments and three lawsuits,” Molly pointed out over the ringing of the first bell. “See you at lunch?”

“If I don’t have to work,” Max groused.

“Oh, you love it,” Molly said, swinging past her toward homeroom.

Max looked down at her clean fingernails.
Three comments and counting.
Well, it was better than toham.