Oh! You Pretty Things (3 page)

I
n hindsight, maybe I should've waited to hear about Kenner's mysterious composer before I gave Pete notice. I suck at the long game—I'm more of an instant-gratification kind of girl—but I couldn't help myself.

The truth is I played it way cooler with Kenner than I felt. I wasn't totally honest about my gossip-blog consumption either. I'm not proud of the fact that I'm beyond obsessed, but the blogs are only the tip of the iceberg. I also watch
E! News
and
Access Hollywood
, devour
E!
True Hollywood
specials,
Extra
,
The Insider
, you name it. I even pick the longest lines at the grocery store so I can page through
Star
magazine and
OK!
and
In Touch
weekly, although I balk at purchasing them, because that would cross a line.

With the shiny lure of celebrity dangling in front of me, I leaped into the fucking abyss.

“It's time for me to pursue other options,” I said to Pete when I went back in. “I can give you as much time as you need. Two weeks? Three?”

Pete frowned. “I can't, Jess. The policy is to immediately cut anyone who gives notice.”

“What? Why?”

“There was a thing with a line cook a few years ago where he sabotaged the dry goods with bug larvae.”

“Gross,” I said. “I would never.”

“God, I know that, Jess. But it was, like, rule number one in my management training.”

“So, I'm just cut, then?”

“I can pay you out a few vacation days,” he said. “But yeah, basically. You know it's not personal, right?”

I craned my head around the empty office. “Kind of feels like it, since we're the only two people in here.” The truth is, I wasn't even thinking about the money, not thinking about rent or even Donna's potential visit. As I cleared out my locker and tossed my polyester apron into the dirty-linen bin, all I was thinking about was Kenner's mystery celebrity.

Sometimes you have to close one door before another opens.

Slam.

The thing is, I'm not very good at unemployment. At this point, I've been in bed for three days, surfing Facebook and Twitter and watching reruns of
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
and
House Hunters International
,
in addition to my steady gossip-blog diet. Once in a while, under the cover of darkness, I skulk across the street to get frozen yogurt, dressed in a pair of stretched-out gray sweatpants and the Sex Pistols T-shirt I've been sleeping in. And I haven't heard a peep out of Kenner. I have his number, but it feels too desperate to call.

Pretty much the only contact I have with the outside world is the guy behind the frozen-yogurt counter. He never says a word, just nods and grunts when I order, then bags my quarts of chocolate malt and old-fashioned vanilla—and, occasionally, a quart of tropical fruit that tastes like ipecac syrup, because I tell myself it has more Vitamin C. I'm invisible to him, which is fine with me. The last thing I want is to be seen.

Megan's been in San Diego for a week, shooting episodes of a new network show featuring impossibly hot lady cops who keep finding themselves in investigations involving lingerie or swimsuits. If she were here, she'd bring a salad bowl full of popcorn into my bed and tell me everything is going to be all right with the sort of sincerity only a working actress can muster.

A working actress is an anomaly in L.A. Everyone is some kind of model-actress-whatever, but when you drill down, waitress-barista–sex worker turns out to be more accurate. Not Megan. She's gorgeous, but not in a starlet way. She's a brunette, first of all, and she's curvy like a pinup model, not wafer-thin with pneumatic tits and lips, which is de rigueur in L.A. She's kind of a tomboy Dita Von Teese, if that oxymoron makes any sense. Her looks can skew toward either blueblood or girl-next-door, and once she has a few drinks in her, she becomes a bawdy, size-2 truck driver—yeah, that's curvy in Los Angeles—so of course I fell in love with her the moment I met her.

And after I read my mother's latest texts, I need her. But I can't call when she's on an audition. She'll turn off her phone while she's actually in the room, but I don't want to break her concentration if she's still sitting in some endless holding pen full of the pneumatically-titted.

Donna's texts are a cavalcade of bad news.

The first one says,
SweetP? RU there?

The second one says,
Emily's not in good shape. I'm agonized. Really must see you.

And by “must see you,” she means
must see my money
. Also, for what it's worth, I'm patently aware that there is no Emily. There's never an Emily. You know how little kids create imaginary playmates and then blame broken cookie jars and dead goldfish on them? Well, Donna never outgrew that phase. She's a master at diverting uncomfortable truths or unpopular opinions to the mouths of her nonexistent friends. (“I was talking to my friend Cecelia, and she noticed you're looking a little chubby, hon,” or, “I would love to come to your spelling bee, but I have to go to court with my friend Rachel that day.”) It's one of the many forms of Kabuki theater I grew up with—smooth, bland masks that kept us from having to have real conversations. At this point, it's just par for the course.

The third text says,
I'm planning the L.A. trip now. Hope the old clunker can make it over the Grapevine. xoxo

I start sweating damp, sticky circles under my arms. Is she really coming? Where's she going to stay? Not here. She's probably lying about that, too. She's probably just threatening to visit so I'll send her money. Gaaah.

I scrape out the dregs of a quart of strawberry frozen yogurt like maybe there's a golden ticket at the bottom, then set the empty on my cluttered nightstand. If Megan doesn't come home soon, I'm going to weigh three hundred pounds. Maybe I can join the circus. Better than living with Donna.

My only other option is calling Kenner. He scrawled his number on a Date Palm napkin after my unfortunate instant resignation with Pete.

“Call me in a couple of days,” he'd said while I'd fought back tears and tugged at my bike lock. “I'll talk to my old boss.”

“Prada guy will never hire me.”

He looked at his shoes and sighed. “They're Rick Owens. And seriously, you'd be perfect.”

“Why's that?” I asked.

“Because you have the skin of a rhinoceros and the soul of a rose.”

I stared in astonishment.

“Stella Adler,” he explained.

Believe me, I knew the provenance of the quote. Donna said it every time I came in crying from the playground. “You're better than those assholes,” she'd say of whichever girl had hurt my feelings with some imperceptible slight. “You have the skin of a rhinoceros and the soul of a rose.” For the longest time, I thought she'd made it up. Turned out it's a pretentious trope from the Actors Studio. I wasn't really surprised. Also? I have the least rhinoceros-y skin on the planet. I guess she meant it in an aspirational way.

Kenner had slipped the napkin into my hand with an agonizing pity smile. “Seriously. Call me. He won an Oscar!”

An Oscar is major, even if you're not into that kind of thing. Although, of course, everyone's into exactly that kind of thing. Which is why I'm in my room eyeing the napkin with Kenner's number when I hear a key scrape in the door.

A spark of hope ignites in my chest. Megan's home. I hear her swearing under her breath and jiggling our sticky lock.

If you're feeling generous, you could call our apartment bohemian. It's on the fourth floor of an old five-story Masonic lodge in Baja Santa Monica. Santa Monica is divided into two areas. First there's the flats, or what we jokingly call Norte, where the real-estate price tags start in the multimillions and Montana Avenue teems with Stokke and Bugaboo strollers pushed by underpaid Filipina nannies while the slim-again mothers sift through lingerie at Only Hearts or grab a Pilates mat class at YogaWorks.

Then there's where we live, Baja Santa Monica, on the cusp of Venice. Sure, we've got an Urth Caffe and some celebrities tucked into the walk-streets by the beach, but Baja Santa Monica is low-key, and our rent-controlled apartment would make a Montana Avenue mommy wrinkle her sculpted nose in disdain. There are drunk sorority girls puking and shrieking in the alley outside O'Brien's Pub every Friday and Saturday night, and a contingent of moderately aggressive homeless people form a gauntlet between our building and the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf a block down.

But there are definite pluses, such as rent control, which means we pay only $612 each for our minuscule two-bedroom/one-bath apartment, a price seriously unheard-of in this or any other livable part of the city. And we're three blocks off the beach, so when the rest of the city is sweltering during our long, subtropical summers, we've got a morning marine layer that lets the beach kittens add a layer of Planet Blue cashmere over their James Perse sundresses.

Megan scored the apartment from the makeup artist on her last movie, who took a job doing fetish porn in Japan. Megan paid her five grand in cash to walk away. Technically the lease is still in her name, and we send our checks to a PO box every month, plus an extra two hundred bucks cash, which Megan always pays. It's the vig. So far, we haven't gotten an eviction notice, but I squint at the front door every time I come home. Megan says we have nothing to worry about, but do we really think that a fetish porn star would hesitate to screw us?

Megan chooses to live modestly, in a cheap apartment with a cheaper roommate. She could afford better—hell, she could treat herself like a celebrity instead of an actress and blow through her savings in a year. But she would never. That's her greatest fear: waking up one day with no work, no money, and no prospects.

My greatest fear is that she'll wake up one day and realize that she can do better than a shitty apartment in a shitty neighborhood with a shitty roommate. Or at the very least, that she can live in a building with a working elevator.