Spoiled (3 page)

Stung, Brooke stumbled to her feet. Her father’s muscles blurred before her as he typed away on his stupid phone, a stupid
smile on his stupid face. Without knowing
what she was doing, almost as if the foot belonged to somebody else, Brooke kicked Brick back into the pool and bolted up
to the house.

She burst inside her palatial top-floor suite (panting slightly; the hilly lawn and two flights of stairs were a lot of ground
to cover at tantrum speed) and slammed the door as hard as she could—mostly out of habit, since she knew Brick was still outside
shaking water out of his ears. But the explosion of noise felt good. It matched what her brain was doing. All those fantasies
of standing at Brick’s side while he called her the light of his life, anointing her the next jewel in the Berlin acting dynasty,
were dissolving like mascara at the Drama Club car wash. It wasn’t fair.

Brooke heaved herself into the plush pink wing chair by the window. Her gaze fell on a framed tabloid page from when she was
seven and Brick took her to the premiere of his kids’ film,
Diaper Andy
, about a stay-at-home dad who invents a baby-changing robot. It was her first and last public event with him, before he’d
decided he needed to protect her from people’s prying eyes.

“There’s no sunscreen for the limelight,” he’d intoned. Then they’d split a PowerBar.

Her eyes drifted beneath the tabloid page toward another treasured memento: a proof from a Vaseline campaign showing a graceful
pair of hands tenderly moisturizing themselves. Brooke stared down at her own identical fingers, then grabbed her laptop.
Her e-mail account’s Saved
Drafts folder flashed onto the screen: 198 unsent messages, one for every week since she’d gotten her own computer. Brooke
opened one at random from when she was fourteen. It read:

Brooke slammed it shut. “Stupid,” she hissed.

Since Kelly left and Brick’s career took off, Brooke could count on one hand how many birthdays she and Brick had spent together,
or how many of her performances he’d been able to attend—people
still
talked about the courageous death monologue she’d improvised when she played a tomato in her fifth-grade play about cooking.
But Brick had been in Cannes. This party was supposed to be her moment.
Their
moment. Instead, some warty love child was horning in, and not only didn’t he get it, but he didn’t even seem to mind. How
could a guy who’d given himself Lasik as an Arbor Day present be so blind?

So as much as she knew the world expected her to
embrace her tragic half sibling, truth be told, Brooke was angry at her.

No, not angry. Furious. Brooke Berlin was
furious
.

“
YOU KNOW,
you kind of have his eyes.”

Molly was supposed to be packing, but instead she and Charmaine were doing exactly what they’d been doing for months, ever
since Molly’s mother had dropped the bomb: watching every Brick Berlin movie they could get on Netflix. Today’s choice was
the fourth installment in the Dirk Venom series,
Deadly When Prodded
.

Squinting at the screen, Molly mentally compared her eyes to Brick’s. But it was hard to spot any similarities when he had
blood, dirt, sweat, and—for plot reasons best ignored—traces of clown makeup all over his face.

“Don’t taunt the snake,” Brick-as-Dirk rasped, “or you’ll get the venom.” Then he shot a cape-wearing man in the face.

“They really should’ve stopped after the third movie,” groaned Charmaine. “This is embarrassing. By which I mean awesome.”

Molly glanced at her watch. It was seven o’clock already. By this time tomorrow, she’d be in Los Angeles, living with a man
she’d just seen wield two machine guns on a tightrope while Megan Fox clung to his back. It was too surreal to absorb.

My dad is a movie star. My dad is a movie star.

Molly had repeated this to herself five hundred times since she’d found out, and it still hadn’t sunk in yet. Maybe number
five hundred one would be the charm.

My dad is a movie star.

Nope.

Shaking her head, Molly hopped up and hauled her dilapidated avocado green suitcase onto the bed. If she didn’t hurry up and
throw some stuff into it, she’d be boarding the plane to L.A. without any luggage and probably ring some kind of alarm with
the feds. A long-lost daughter on the No-Fly List sounded like a twist worthy of one of Brick’s movies.

She began rooting through her dresser for things to pack that wouldn’t get her crucified in Los Angeles. Compared with all
the über-trendy people she’d seen on
90210
episodes, who looked ripped out of the pages of
Lucky
, all Molly’s favorite stuff suddenly seemed tatty and plain.

“I have no idea how to do this,” Molly said, blowing out her cheeks. “Are running shoes even legal in Los Angeles?”

“They must be. I just read in
Hey!
that Jennifer Lopez is starting a sneaker line called Flan, where they’re all named after different desserts,” Charmaine
said.

“Well,
Hey!
wouldn’t lie to you.” Molly grinned at her friend. “You’re its best customer.”

“Isn’t Fancy-Pants Private School going to make you wear a uniform, anyway? Like on
Gossip Girl
?”

“Oh, God, I have no idea.” Molly chewed on her bottom lip. “Should I bother bringing a coat, do you think? Does L.A. even
have
seasons?”

“Maybe Brick will buy you a whole new wardrobe,” Charmaine said, a faraway expression on her face. “That’s what he’d do in
the movies. You’d get there and you’d have an entire closet full of Prada that fit you perfectly.”

“Too bad this is real life.”

Except it didn’t feel real. Seven months ago, Molly had been the daughter of a long-dead army captain she’d never known and
a very much alive seamstress, and the only time she ever paid any attention to the celebrity rags was when Charmaine thrust
one at her, usually accompanied by a frenzied query about whether or not Brody Jenner seemed like he would make a good starter
husband. Now her mother was gone, and her father turned out to be a living, breathing tabloid regular with his own cologne
at Walmart. It felt like having ten minutes to digest a ten-course meal: queasy-making and strange. (That could also describe
Trick by Brick, which she’d snuck to the store and smelled.) Life-changing deathbed confessions happened on soap operas,
not to a regular girl from West Cairo, Indiana, who ran a six-minute mile and didn’t care about her split ends.

And change generally wasn’t Molly’s thing. She’d dated the same guy since they were old enough to panic about whether kissing
would make their braces lock together, she’d slept in the cozy bedroom tucked under the eaves of her grandparents’ house since
her mother brought her home from the hospital as a newborn, and she’d eaten a peanut-butter sandwich for lunch almost every
day since she was twelve. Even her old gold shoelaces never changed, a good-luck charm she’d gotten in eighth grade and threaded
superstitiously through every new pair of sneakers she bought. Given all that, Molly couldn’t quite believe what she was about
to do. In fact, secretly, she felt a little impressed with herself for deciding to go live with the dude who’d just killed
Bruce Willis in the summer’s biggest blockbuster—even if this move had been basically her mother’s dying wish. Because as
weird as it felt to be leaving the only home she’d ever known, Molly was excited. A fresh start after months of misery sounded
like exactly the right choice. Possibly the only choice.

“Los Angeles is going to be so cool.” Charmaine sighed. “I wish I could jet off and live in a mansion. I’d make the
best
rich person. I’d have an electric car, like Cameron Diaz, and a butler like in
Batman
. I’d never empty the dishwasher again. You’re so lucky.”

Then Charmaine caught herself: “Oh, God, obviously, I don’t mean—”

“It’s okay,” Molly said. “I know what you meant.”

She sat down again on the bed.

“What do I
do
?” she asked. “Like, what do I say to him?”

“You say, ‘Papa, open your arms and let me in,’ ” Charmaine instructed.

“I can’t quote one of his own movies at him!” Molly laughed. “Especially not
Diaper Andy
.”

“Maybe you should ask him if you can have your own wing of the Bavarian castle he just bought from Nicolas Cage.”

“Good idea. Or I can ask for a job aboard his new seaworthy replica of the ship from
Pirates of the Caribbean
,” Molly said.

“That one actually might be true,” Charmaine said. “It was in the same
In Touch
where they said he insured his abs for seven figures, and that
definitely
sounds real.”

“I just don’t want to look like an idiot, you know?”

“You’re going to be fine, I promise,” Charmaine said. “Brick is going to be so stoked to have you there, he won’t even notice
what
you say. He seems really nice every time I’ve seen him on Letterman.”

Molly’s few conversations with Brick
had
been nice, if bizarre. The first time, he’d seemed gutted about Laurel’s death, offered Molly his condolences and then his
home, and sniffled through a strange digression about the merits of Krav Maga versus karate. Molly had been too numb to say
much, and she didn’t feel emotionally able to make decisions about anything other than which jeans to put on in the morning.
But she’d been tempted. Moving meant
escaping the ghost of Laurel that haunted her in West Cairo, where everyone knew and loved her as a happy extension of her
mother. And when the doctors announced that Laurel’s chemo had failed, Molly had overheard a whispered conversation between
Ginger and Miltie in which they agreed not to take the round-the-world trip they’d saved for all their lives, in favor of
helping with Molly’s expenses. So after two months of people walking up to her in the street and hugging her unbidden, and
watching Ginger absently caress her hopeful collection of guidebooks when she thought no one was looking, Molly had called
back and accepted Brick’s offer. Her grandparents needed to escape, and so did she. For his part, Brick’s glee reverberated
through the phone line so loudly that she’d had to put down the receiver for a few seconds. She’d never heard anyone whoop
before.

“Do you think famous people hang out at his house all the time?” Charmaine wondered, absently rolling up pairs of socks and
shoving them into Molly’s shoes. “Like, are you going to come down for breakfast, and there’s Samuel L. Jackson, eating a
bagel?”

“Like Brick gets within ten feet of a carbohydrate.”

“Of course he does,” scoffed Charmaine. “Those biceps need fuel. I bet he has a chef. And a Bowflex machine.”

“Awesome! I’ll be buff in no time.”

“You know, you’re going to need that positive attitude when Brick’s other kid tries to turn you into a Scientologist.”

“I’m sure she won’t be that bad…?”

Molly couldn’t keep the question out of her voice. Brooke
Berlin was the most mysterious variable in this entire scenario. Laurel had known nothing about her, and in the few short
chats Molly had with Brick to discuss logistics, all he’d said was that Brooke asked for a sister for Christmas when she was
eight.

“Her Wikipedia page was hilarious,” Charmaine said. “But that had to be accidental.”

“You mean, ‘Brooke Ophelia Mayflower Berlin is the regal daughter of one of Hollywood’s most cherished actor-directors, known
throughout the city for her tiny ankles and tremendous talent’?” Molly recited from memory.

“You’d think anyone who allowed the Internet to say that about her would’ve thrown in a picture,” Charmaine complained.

“I wish she had,” Molly said. “She’d seem a lot less mysterious if I knew what she looked like.”

“Maybe she has a dark secret,” Charmaine said. “Like a disfiguring scar. Or a man face.”

“She might turn out to be fun,” Molly offered. “Anyone whose initials spell
bomb
has to be kind of entertaining, right?”

The girls giggled. Molly was hit by a wave of nostalgic, melancholy fondness for her friend.
Can you miss someone before you’ve even left them?
But Molly knew the answer. She’d started missing Laurel, in a hundred tiny ways, the day of her cancer diagnosis. Her eyes
moistened.

“You’d better text me every day,” Charmaine said. “What did people
do
in the Dark Ages before cell phones?”

“Forget cell phones. We’ll need Skype,” Molly said. “I’ll be crying about whether it’s social suicide to wear this.”

She held up her favorite shirt, a tee with a hole in the collar that read “J. C. Mellencamp High School Cross-Country Hurts
So Good.”

Charmaine frowned, then shrugged. “Just pack it. Be yourself,” she said. “Most of Lindsay Lohan’s closet is way worse, anyway.
Just try not to turn up on Perez Hilton with your bra showing through your top.”

“I am not going to end up on Perez Hilton,” Molly said.

Charmaine cocked an eyebrow.

“Oh, my God. Am I going to end up on Perez Hilton?” Molly gasped.

“The real question is whether he writes anything on your face.”

Molly buried her head in a throw pillow.

“What am I doing?” She half laughed, half moaned. “My father is more famous than God! I’m going to have to start wearing
makeup
!”

“Don’t forget tooth-whitening strips,” Charmaine added.

“Do I have time to wax my forearms?”

“Yeah, and pick up some Restylane while you’re at it. You’re not truly a celebrity until you look like you’ve been punched
in the mouth.”

Still giggling, Molly giddily started dumping entire drawers full of shirts into her luggage. But eventually her attention
wandered out the bedroom window, where, through the dusk, she saw a beat-up truck pull in across the street
at the two-story clapboard house nearly identical to her own. A lanky boy leapt out, clutching a Big Gulp. He made a beeline
for Molly’s front door.