My days were getting worse, and the nights were getting longer. Once all the alterations were done for the production, I’d be out of a job. Lena had been kind to me, but she’d also been honest. This was all temporary.
When it was done, I’d leave. It was time to get out of LA. I was saving up my money. Once the job ended, I’d drive back to the Midwest. The cost of living was lower there. I could get a job somewhere as a seamstress. I could start over and put this life behind me.
Eventually, hopefully, I’d forget this horrible experience. Maybe I’d change my name or my hair. Maybe I’d make it so nobody could ever connect me to the woman on Marigold’s reality show. One day, I might even forget about Tommy. But I doubted it.
He’d put a mark on my soul. What started out as a shallow, selfish desire to go to a pretty party had completely spun out of control. I was different now than I was before. Stronger in some ways. Weaker in others. But different. Definitely different. It was a shame I’d have to leave it all behind.
Even if Tommy went looking for me, he wasn’t going to find me. Nobody knew where I was. I barely knew where I was. I barely knew who I was. But at least I knew who I didn’t want to be. Cindy Brown had to disappear. I was ready.
42
Cindy
The show opened on a shower of animated gems coming tumbling out of a high heel and into a martini glass. I watched in horror as each sparkling diamond turned into one of my stepfamily members. The emerald turned into Greenlee. The yellow diamond turned into Marigold. And the ruby turned into Quincy. The announcer’s voice recapped the last episode.
“On the last episode of ‘Beauty Queens Go West, Quincy wondered if she could ever forgive her stepsister Cindy.”
The scene cut to a confessional-style shot of Quincy staring at the camera. Her mascara was smudged, presumably so it would look like she’d been crying. She was also, for whatever reason, wearing a bikini despite being indoors. Whose idea had that been? Hers, probably.
“I can’t believe that Cindy would do this to me,” Quincy sniffled. “I know she’s always been jealous of me, but stealing my boyfriend? I mean, I like Ashton Radley, but…”
I tuned her out. I was hate-watching the latest episode. Quincy rambled on for a moment before the announcer’s voice came back.
“Ashton isn’t sure about Quincy’s feelings, either.”
The D-list actor appeared next.
“I’m not sure about Quincy’s feelings for me,” he said, literally just repeating what the announcer just told the audience. “I’m in love with her, but I think she’s still in love with Tommy Prince. I have to prove to her that I’m the man for her.” He held up a ring. “I’m going to ask her to marry me.”
Oh, sweet Jesus. He was an even worse actor than Quincy was. It was painful to watch, honestly. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. At least the camera didn’t linger on him for too long.
“Meanwhile,” the announcer explained, “Greenlee is struggling with her modeling career and new YouTube channel.”
Another confessional style shot came onscreen. This time starring Greenlee. She was wearing an evening gown. The wardrobe choices were all over the place.
“I thought it would be fun having my own channel, but people are so mean online,” she said, shaking her head. Her chandelier earrings jingled. She sniffled. “Why do people have to be so cruel? Maybe I should just run away.”
“Finally,” the announcer intoned, “Marigold is running the dry cleaners alone. Can she keep the family business afloat when Cindy leaves the family high and dry?”
Marigold came on next. “She stole the van. I’ve taken care of that girl since she was ten years old, loving her like one of my own daughters. But the moment her sisters start to be successful, she just takes off? And she steals Quincy’s boyfriend to boot. I’ve given my blood, sweat, and tears for this family. I won’t let anything get in the way of our success.”
“On this episode we’ll find out what Cindy’s side of the story really is,” the announcer promised.
I took a sip of my beer. This was going to be a train wreck.
Thankfully, after the first commercial break, the show focused on Ashton Radley’s proposal. It followed him around LA as he searched for the perfect bouquet of flowers.
“I know Quincy loves peonies, but what color?” he asked the camera pathetically. “I think she likes pink, but there are so many colors of pink. This is the most important decision of my entire life.”
I raised an eyebrow at the screen. It was no wonder they were so obsessed with getting me and Tommy on the show. They were clearly hard up for plot.
The “Ashton Radley buys peonies” plot line occupied a full twenty minutes of the forty-five-minute-long runtime. He went to a number of different flower shops, bemoaning the selection at each. At one of the flower shops he ran into a woman that was purported to be his ex-girlfriend. She hit on him and he rejected her.
“I’m in love,” he declared to her face. “You’ll never be Quincy Wilson.”
She burst into unconvincing tears and ran away.
Why do people like this? I wondered to myself. I’d rather watch paint dry.
The next segment focused on Greenlee. She was working on her outfit for her next YouTube video.
“As a model, I care a lot about my image,” she said seriously. “I can’t be seen wearing just anything.” She held up one of her former pageant gowns. “But I have a problem. This dress doesn’t have enough sequins on it.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. For real?
The next fifteen minutes were spent on Greenlee bedazzling her already bedazzled pageant gown for her moronic YouTube channel. She didn’t even do it right, either. Sequins had to be sewed on. She was gluing them. Had she never watched me put sequins on something? It was infuriating to watch.
After Greenlee finished destroying her dress, the show turned its eye on Marigold. She was shown dashing around the dry cleaners, serving fake-looking customers and pretending to operate the equipment. I knew she was pretending because the lights on the machine were off. I rolled my eyes.
“I’m trying to keep everything together,” she told the camera during her confessional. “There’s nothing I won’t do for my family. They’re my whole world. I know Greenlee and Quincy are going to be big stars. This is just one more sacrifice I have to make for them. I just wish Cindy hadn’t stolen our van. When I find her, I’m going to give her a piece of my mind.”
Finally, the show displayed the setup that lured me to the apartment, but they’d taken some serious liberties with the facts. In the show, I came over to confront Quincy. The scene opened on the apartment, and using some clever trickery with the camera, it looked far bigger and more luxurious than it actually was.
I saw myself opening the front door and walking inside. I hadn’t realized the room was rigged with hidden cameras.
I looked unhappy to be there. Which was, at least, accurate. I hadn’t wanted to be there. I skulked forward into the living room, recoiling when I was confronted by Marigold.
“Why did you steal from us?” She said. It was a voiceover though, that wasn’t the first thing she said to me at all. I remembered our interaction extremely well. It had only been a couple of days. They were using fake dialogue.
“Bite me,” I retorted. To be fair, I had said that to Marigold, but not in response to an accusation of stealing. “The van is mine.”
By not showing our faces while we spoke, it was possible to edit our words together so that we were saying almost anything.
“You need to talk to your sister,” Marigold sobbed. “At least try to make up with her. We love you.”
“I have nothing to say to her,” I replied. Somehow, they’d managed to cut whatever I had said into dialogue that sounded nothing like it. There was a very talented sound guy out there somewhere who deserved a raise. I sneered at the camera. “I hate you. You’re trashy and I’m better than you. Tommy loves me. I’m leaving to be with hi
m.”
I stomped out then, they used the real footage of me doing that. Then Marigold came back on the screen.
The fact that they could make me say anything they wanted made me feel vaguely ill.
“I know Cindy likes to hang out at a bar not far from here. I bet she’s there right now. I’m taking Greenlee, Quincy, and myself over there to confront her. We need closure on what she’s done to our family with her lies.”
The announcer came back on then as a wide shot of Sebastian’s set the stage. “Cindy has gone to drink off her anger. Will Marigold, Quincy, and Greenlee get the closure they need?”
The interior shot of Sebastian’s showed me sitting alone in the corner. I looked much more pathetic in an empty bar sitting with a beer. A moment later, Quincy, Greenlee, and Marigold were shown walking in slow motion toward my table. I looked up at them warily.
“Cindy,” Quincy said, ““You owe me an explanation. You can’t just steal my boyfriend and our van.”
“Oh please,” a voice said. “You’re trash and I can do whatever I want.”
They weren’t showing my face. And the voice that spoke wasn’t even mine. They’d literally hired someone to do my dialogue for them when I denied them a sound bite to manipulate.
“I was in love with him,” Quincy whined. She was fake crying.
“Too bad. He likes me better,” fake-me said.
“I thought you were my sister.”
“I’ve never been your sister,” I told her. “I hope you have fun with your trashy little reality show. I’m leaving, forever. And I’m taking the van with me.”
The scene cut to me driving away. The sound of me, or somebody, laughing played as the van disappeared around the corner. They really made me one-dimensionally evil.
Marigold, Greenlee, and Quincy were then shown at the bar.
“She was always jealous of you,” Marigold told Quincy. “I’m sorry it had to come to this.”
Quincy raised her chin, attempting to look strong and confident. “It doesn’t matter. We always make it through. But I’ve got news.”
Dramatic music played.
“What news, Quincy?” Greenlee asked, clearly having been prompted by a producer. Her acting was really bad. I mean, everyone’s was bad, but Greenlee’s was painfully bad.
Quincy smiled knowingly. “Well, I know it’s probably not great timing, but I’m pregnant. I’m not sure who the father is, but Ashton Radley and I are getting married. We’re going to raise this baby together.”
What. The. Fuck.
43
Tommy
My dad called me at eight a.m. the next morning. My bed was empty, and the sun was bright when I opened my eyes. I squinted painfully against it. I grabbed my phone warily; he never called just to chat.
“A baby?” he roared. “Tell me right now that woman isn’t pregnant with your child.”
I rolled over in bed, wishing I’d just let it ring. But I wasn’t able to just ignore my dad when he called me at weird hours. He was old. Maybe he was sick or something. But no. He just wanted to talk about Quincy’s probably fake child.
“Nobody is pregnant with my baby,” I told him. I’d been answering this same question over and over since that stupid episode of Beauty Queens Out West had rolled its tacky-ass credits. “Quincy Wilson is lying. I never touched her. If she’s even really pregnant, the father is somebody else.”
“This is a nightmare,” he told me. His voice was hoarse and worried. “Have you talked to Elaine?”
“Yeah.” I sighed. My head hurt. I’d been up all night talking to Elaine, and Derek, and everyone else who had a vested interest in my success. Everyone had opinions and advice.
“What did she say?” my dad asked. I could hear the exasperation in his voice. He wanted me to reassure him that everything was going to be alright. I understood because I wanted someone to do that for me, too.
“She said it would blow over,” I lied. She’d said it was disastrous, calling it ‘an evil masterstroke of PR that would bite us in the ass if it didn’t rip our throats out first.’ I shook my head to try and dislodge the memory. “The good news is that the Academy has already voted. If I won, I already won. If I lost, it’ll be because of something else.”
“Fuck the Oscar, son,” my dad said, shocking me. “This is your life we’re talking about. Your name—our name actually. These kinds of allegations are very serious.”
My dad was no dummy. He was a genius. An actual, certified, verified genius. I knew better than to ignore him. But that didn’t mean I had to agree with him, either.
I blinked. “She has no proof.” I groaned.
“She could make this drag on for years. It could be very expensive. Very damaging. We have to get out ahead of it.” I could almost hear the wheels turning in his mind as he spoke. I wondered how many lawyers he’d already woken up early to chat with this morning. My own were already working on it, too.
“Look,” I told him. “I don’t know what you’ve heard from Derek or Elaine or anybody, but the story that’s on that show is very different from the truth—”
My dad cut me off with an unintelligible noise. “I’ve heard that you’re in love with the evil stepsister, Cindy. You two ran off to Napa together, right?”
“Cindy is not evil,” I snapped at him. My voice came out angrier and louder than I expected, but I was sick of hearing people talk shit about Cindy. The way they made her look on that stupid show was horrifying. I couldn’t imagine how she must be feeling right now…
“I was being facetious,” my dad said in a milder voice. I could tell he regretted his snippy comment. “Derek told me about her. Your Cindy. She sounds like a nice person. I feel bad for the girl. It sounds like her family are a bunch of monsters and that cannot be fun or easy.”
Thank God for Derek. At least he’d already laid some groundwork for me.
“They really are,” I told my dad. I shook my head in dismay although of course he couldn’t see it. “They’re next-level manipulative. And Cindy is stuck in the middle. She’s trying to get away from them, but I don’t think it’s easy. I think—”
“Whatever you think,” my dad told me, interrupting. “I hope you know that she’s pretty much the worst thing in the world for you right now.”
“Cindy?”
“Anyone in that family.” God, he sounded just like Elaine. I ground my teeth in frustration. “Tommy,” he continued, “I get that you have feelings for her. But her family is trying their best to destroy you for their own gain. You’re the smartest of my kids. Be the smartest. Figure this out before you make things worse for yourself.”
I didn’t want to be the smartest. I wanted to drive over to Cindy’s van, bang on the door, and beg her to take me back. But I couldn’t. Because everyone in my life was continuously telling me that she was human anthrax.
“Dad, I don’t need a lecture right now,” I said as calmly as I could. “We’ll be putting out a statement that any assertions that Quincy might make about me or a relationship between us is fake. The baby itself is probably fake. She’s grasping at straws to keep her relevance.”
“Well, it’s working,” he said. “And maybe a lecture is exactly what you need right now.”
“Oh?” I asked sarcastically. “Because Elaine did a great job already. I don’t think your lecture could be better than hers.”
“My lectures are the best lectures,” my dad snapped. Then he laughed and I couldn’t help smiling too. At least he knew when he was being pompous and ridiculous. “Look, Tommy, I’m honestly not trying to be a pain in the ass here. But I am worried about you. Quincy Wilson is dangerous. Paternity fights can get really ugly.”
“There’s no baby.” I shook my head furiously. “Or if there is, it’s not mine. She’s not telling the truth about anything.”
“The truth doesn’t matter.”
Everybody was saying that lately. But it couldn’t be correct. The truth had to matter at some point, didn’t it? I wante
d to believe there was still some power in what was real.
“The truth mattered to Connor,” I said, hedging. “When he was able to finally tell the truth about what happened to him in Iraq, it totally changed the way people saw him. The truth does matter.”
My dad took a minute to respond. “I know you love Connor. I love him too. But it took years for him to get the truth out. I don’t want that for you.”
Fair enough. Connor had spent about thirteen years living like hermit before he managed to clear his name. That wasn’t exactly the future I wanted for myself.
“It won’t take years,” I promised him. “When she’s not pregnant in four months, it’ll be pretty freakin’ obvious that she was lying.”
“She could be pregnant with someone’s baby. You need to get out ahead of it before she shows. You need to get out ahead of it now.”
“I will,” I said. “I’m putting out a statement. I was never alone with Quincy long enough to even conceive the damn magical mystery baby. I can prove that.”
“Good,” my dad told me. “Get out there. Prove it. Make sure it’s one hundred percent airtight. Do it now, before it gets any worse. The faster you can kill this story, the better.”
“I’ll do my best.”
He wasn’t wrong. This was bigger than the Oscar race. The lie that Quincy Wilson was pregnant with my baby could become my nightmare. If she was pregnant with someone’s baby, if the baby itself wasn’t a lie, then this could last for years.
Yet as frustrating and obnoxious and potentially scary as this situation was, it was still Cindy I couldn’t stop thinking of. It must be killing her to be cast as the villain in her own love story. The fact that Quincy was prancing around, telling everyone that Cindy was the interloper, the cheater, must really be getting under her skin.
Cindy was incredibly honest. I knew that she hated the lies. I knew she must be furious to see what Quincy was up to, and that this baby plotline must be driving her up the fucking wall.
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