Yacht Girl

by Alison Claire Grey

  Please don’t pursue me. Things are beyond reconciliation. “We” were a mistake, no need to revisit it. I’ll be cordial if I see you around the set, but we don’t need to talk or make things any more awkward than they already are.

  Good luck to you,

  Dee

  There was so much more to say, but Dee had to be quick and get her point across, with no room for misinterpretation. If she’d ever had the guts to say these things to him face to face, she’d expect to get her head caved in.

  After one last look around, Dee inhaled deeply, grabbed her bags, and finally left.

  Forty-Four

  It had been weeks since Dee had left the note for Rooster, and miraculously he hadn’t contacted her.

  The morning after she split, she’d changed her phone number, moved all of her money into new accounts, and did everything she possibly could to make a clear division between her life with Rooster and post-Rooster.

  She was hyper-aware of her surroundings, always looking for his thug Jed or anybody else who might be keeping an eye on her or intending to harm her on Rooster’s behalf.

  A gated community wouldn’t really offer any protection from a man like Rooster, but it gave Dee a smidgen of comfort, so she’d rented a modest home in one with 24-hour security and hoped for the best.

  They were getting ready to start filming season two of The Good Cop soon, so she’d been staying in shape and trying to look her best. They had a production meeting scheduled to go over major plot points for the upcoming season, meet new actors and actresses and read scripts.

  Dee didn’t relish a reunion with Emmett Stonewall, but she hoped maybe somehow Rooster, or somebody else, had gotten through to him during their down time from the show.

  After stopping for a smoothie, Dee pulled onto the lot and was waved through to the parking area nearest the studio. The meeting was scheduled for 10:00 AM and it was only 9:40, but the parking lot was nearly full, which Dee found odd.

  She walked inside to find the meeting room already full and the show runner at a white board in the middle of a presentation.

  Dee slipped inside a room filled with familiar faces except for a sprinkling of new people, including a stunning blonde who looked all of eighteen years old sitting in the seat next to Emmett where Dee would normally sit.

  Good luck to her, I thought.

  When everyone turned to look at her, she half-whispered, “Sorry, I was sure the meeting started at 10:00.”

  She spotted an open chair in the back and went to sit down.

  The producer, Terry Stengel, got up and approached Dee with a concerned look on his face.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I don’t understand,” Dee replied, and took a sip of her smoothie.

  He looked around, as if to make sure he wasn’t the one who was crazy.

  “You’ve been replaced,” he said. “You know that, Delilah. Don’t make this weird.”

  “For being late to a production meeting?” Dee replied with a laugh. “Not sure the punishment fits the crime, Terry.”

  “I’m serious. I don’t know why you aren’t aware of this, but you’ve been terminated. The show is going in a different direction. I must ask you to leave. Please don’t make a scene.”

  Dee recognized all the words Terry said, but the order in which he said them made her brain short-circuit somehow.

  “I don’t… What do you mean terminated? What’s going on here?”

  An older actress named Ruth, who played a minor, recurring character sat nearby. She reached across and touched Dee’s arm.

  “She’s the new you, Delilah. Sorry, sweetie.”

  She pointed to the impossibly pretty surfer girl sitting next to Emmett. “Don’t worry, you’ll land on your feet. You’re too good not to. You should be doing movies anyway.”

  Everyone was now staring at her, and the room began to spin slowly.

  Dee had started having panic attacks after the first time Rooster choked her until she blacked out in the LAX parking garage. Now she was on the brink of a massive one. It was difficult to breathe, and she felt a massive weight on her chest.

  Her legs felt like cooked spaghetti.

  Dee tried to stand, but couldn’t support her own body weight initially, so she sat back down before she fell down.

  “If you won’t leave, I have to have security remove you,” Terry implored. “Don’t force my hand. I’m surprised they let you in. Someone’s getting fired today. Other than you I mean.”

  “Just give me a moment,” Dee said, taking in big gulps of air. “I just need a minute.”

  “Are you okay?” Ruth asked, and she started fanning Dee with the script she held in her hand.

  She struggled to her feet, this time able to stand, but just barely.

  Ruth and Terry gently guided her toward the door.

  “Wait,” Dee said. “Wait just a minute. Emmett, I have something for you I don’t want to forget.”

  He’d been flirtatiously chatting with his new co-star, but his ears perked up when Dee said his name.

  “Yes?” he said, and he got up and came around the table. “What is it? You’re wasting time.”

  Dee turned her body away from Ruth to give herself a better angle.

  “Something I’ve been wanting to give you for a long time,”Dee said.

  As he approached, Dee timed it perfectly. With no waning, and all the power she could muster, Dee drew her leg back and kicked Emmett Stonewall directly in the balls.

  He made a sort of siren-like howling sound and collapsed to the floor, rolling into the fetal position. From around the room, she heard a chorus of muffled, “Oh, shits!”and a smattering of laughter.

  The next thing Dee knew, she had a uniformed security guard on each arm guiding her back to the parking lot.

  Dee had to say, she thought she may have found the cure for panic attacks. As soon as you feel one coming on, find a Grade-A, top shelf asshole and kick him in the balls.

  The moment of clarity Dee experienced when her foot made contact with his tiny gonads was startling.

  She was going to blow up this entire skewed, Alice-in-Wonderland Hollywood universe.

  Dee would go on any and every show that would have her and give an entire backstage expose of what really goes on when the scumbags in power answer to no one and treat women as a cross between livestock and sex toys.

  Before Dee even left the parking lot, she was on the phone leaving a message for her agent. Josh worked for her, after all.

  “Josh, this is Delilah Goodacre. Evidently, and I don’t quite understand how neither one of us knew this, but I’m off the show. Yeah. Effective, um, yesterday. I need you to book me on Celebrity Tonight! as soon as you can. A daytime special right now would be good. And any and every other show so I can spill all the tea on these bastards. Thanks, bye.”

  She made it home just in time to burst into tears.

  Whatever bravado she felt after “The Kick” had faded and reality was knocking on her door. There would be no season two financial bonanza. No job at all. Residuals from season one somewhere down the road when it went into syndication, but that was years away.

  Everything Dee had worked for was gone. The hand of Rooster McCoy wasn’t hard to spot in all of this. He hadn’t confronted her directly because he had nothing to gain that way.

  Instead, he was a puppet master, cutting Dee’s strings and dropping a new, younger, prettier marionette on stage. Part of her wondered who she’d had to sleep with to get her perfect butt into Dee’s old chair.

  Not that was one to judge. She’d done the same. She’d just deluded herself into believing it was her talent that had gotten her the job.

  Dee had been home for about five minutes when Josh returned her call.

  “Delilah, are you absolutely sure you want to be interviewed about this whole thing? Because if you are, Celebrity Tonight! will clear everything they had scheduled and put you on this evening if you’re willing. I
’d advise waiting a few days until you can really craft the narrative and we can get legal involved and make sure you don’t walk out of that studio and into the arms of a dozen process servers with summonses in their hands,” he said.

  Dee was pleasantly surprised to have someone on her side in this. Josh was losing out too, after all. His commission was based on what Dee made. This felt good.

  “Tonight. Yes. I want to go public first and get out ahead of all their lies and bullshit and I don’t care who sues me,” Dee replied. ”You can’t sue the truth.”

  “Okay, it’ll be tonight then. If anything changes, I’ll let you know, otherwise be there for hair and makeup at 6:00.”

  “Thank you, Josh.”

  Dee sat in the chair backstage having the finishing touches put on her face by the Celebrity Tonight! makeup team.

  She looked like a million bucks. There was a fire in her eyes that had been extinguished by Rooster, but it had been reignited.

  The show headed into its final commercial break before Dee would join Aria Skye and Flint Nichols under the bright lights so she could either start tearing Hollywood down brick by brick or make an utter and complete fool of herself. A record audience would be watching, either way.

  Dee finished off the frozen white tea Josh had brought for her. It was delicious, and claimed to help with focus and inner peace, two things she’d desperately need.

  As she waited to be called out though, she started to feel… weird. Uninhibited and foggy.

  Like she was drunk. But she’d only drunk tea?

  “5-4-3-2-1,” a producer counted the show back in and pointed to Flint Nichols.

  “Are there any fans of The Good Cop out there?” Flint asked the studio audience. They erupted with raucous applause.

  “I knew I wasn’t the only one!” he said, and the crowd laughed and clapped louder. “Breaking news today, a major shake up in the cast of the top-rated new show on television. Emmy-nominated superstar Delilah Goodacre is out! The studio is calling it a ‘conscious uncoupling,’ claiming that the starlet and the studio mutually agreed to part ways, but we have inside information that claims there’s more to the story. Aria?”

  Producers switched to the shot of Aria Skye and her dazzling smile. “That’s right, Flint, according to our source, there were fireworks today on the BDE Network lot and on her way out the door, Delilah Goodacre had a painful ‘parting gift’ for one of her co-stars. In fact, we have-”

  “Yeah, I kicked that asshole right in the balls!” Dee screamed as she pushed her way past the producer who was to signal her walk out.

  “Okay, and here she is now,” Aria recovered.

  Dee walked right out to center stage, past the chair normally reserved for guests, and did a pirouette before promptly falling on her face.

  It was her turn to recover, and she rolled onto her side and started shrieking before bouncing back up to her feet. “That’s how Emmett looked and sounded when I busted his balls!”

  “Delilah, if you wouldn’t mind taking a seat, we’re live right now,” Flint requested.

  “Hey Emmett, these are for you, too!” Dee promptly flipped off the camera with both hands.

  “Let’s go to a commercial break,” a nervous Aria Skye suggested.

  The producer called out “Cut! Three minutes!”

  Josh rushed out on stage and took Delilah’s hands in hers. “Delilah, look at me. Are you okay? Hey! Are you okay?”

  She couldn’t focus on him, even though he was right in front of her.

  Her heart was racing, and her eyes were wild. What the hell was happening to her?

  The cocktail of stimulants Josh had placed in her drink were working perfectly.

  Although he technically worked for Dee, his ultimate bosses were the McCoy family and their television network, BDE. The network that broadcast both The Good Cop and Celebrity Tonight!.

  Aria and Flint weren’t in on it, or they would never have called for a commercial. They would have let Dee go on making a fool out of herself until nobody with a script would get within ten miles of such an erratic lunatic. It was Josh’s only regret.

  By the time they returned, Dee had been convinced to sit in a chair, but that didn’t last long.

  When the red light came back on, before either co-host could speak, Dee took charge of the interview.

  “Aria, do you want to know a secret about Emmett Stonewall?” Dee was starting to slur her words.

  “Sure,” Aria replied, trying to retain a sense of decorum and let the story write itself.

  “His balls… Emmett, I mean, you know?” Both co-hosts nodded enthusiastically. “He has tiny little nuts. Did you know that? I know because I kicked them!”

  Dee stood up and pantomimed the kick. “They’re not even as big as marbles. More like unpopped kernels of corn, you know, when you pop it but not all of it pops?

  Flint laughed nervously.

  “Let’s try to keep it PG-rated if we can. We have a wide audience, lots of families,” Flint reminded everyone.

  Aria smiled and the crowd gave a smattering of applause.

  Dee promptly climbed up onto Flint’s desk, stretched out like a cat, rolled over, and threw up in his lap.

  Interview over, career likewise.

  In Holmby Hills, over a glass of expensive Scotch and with a fat Cuban cigar in his mouth, Rooster McCoy smiled.

  He then shut off the TV and returned to his bed, in which lay a pretty, farm-fresh blonde, the newest star in the Hollywood firmament. She’d just gotten her first big role and she was eager to thank him for it.

  Being on a top ten show like The Good Cop can be a springboard to great success, if you’re willing to play the game.

  Forty-Five

  There was nothing more depressing than a one-way plane ticket back to where you came from.

  That’s all Dee could ruminate on as she slumped down on a stiff chair inside her terminal at LAX, waiting for her flight to board. She’d filled a Yeti tumbler with more vodka than orange juice and she sipped it as she waited for her section to be called.

  Several people whispered around her and for once she wasn’t sure why they recognized her. Was it for the TV show or her disastrous Celebrity Tonight! interview? It was mortifying, but the vodka was numbing her ability to be ashamed.

  The flight was going to be a full one. The flight attendants had just announced they were taking volunteers to give up their seats, something Dee wished desperately she could do.

  She’d be happy to never have to get on this airplane at all. Part of her hoped it crashed to the ground and that somehow everyone on it could survive except for her.

  But unfortunately, this was the status of her life. Dee was leaving LA and going back to the good ol’ Redneck Riviera, her tail between her legs.

  At least she’d splurged on a business class seat, despite the fact that she was now unemployed. She’d get to board first.

  Her plan was to keep her sunglasses on, keep her hoodie up over her head, and take a couple of Xanax so she could pass out until her layover in Charlotte.

  Forty-Six

  Dee had been home almost a month.

  She’d barely left the house. She spent most of her days and nights in her room or in the living room, staring blankly at the television set as her father desperately tried to cheer her up.

  “This show Heroes is phenomenal,” Dad said, pointing at a bloody cheerleader who had just saved a man from a burning train. “You’d be great in something like this.”

  Dee had not told her father about what had happened in LA. He knew some things of course— he’d watched her incident on The Tonight Show and been confused and worried for her.

  But he didn’t understand that her career— as far as LA went— was truly over. He didn’t know about Rooster and the abuse. He had no idea about what she’d endured on the show. Dee had made Meg swear to never tell him anything.

  The secrets had caused an invisible chasm to exist between them.

&n
bsp; “Thanks,” was all she said. “I’m going to bed. I’m tired.”

  “Okay,” he replied, his expression showing concern, something she was starting to resent. She didn’t want anyone’s concern. She just wanted to be left alone. “I love you, sweet girl.”

  “I love you too.”

  Her teenage bedroom hadn’t changed at all since she’d left it. It was curious how so much had happened to her, yet this part of her world had stayed the same. It wasn’t comforting, so much as unsettling.

  Sleeping inside the uniform of the past was a good way to remind herself how much she wished she could go back and do everything differently— and how much that wasn’t possible.

  Dee flopped down on the twin bed and watched as her ceiling fan whirled above her, glow-in-the-dark stars still stuck to its blades, placed there by a version of herself she’d never get to be again.

  She was tired, but not in the way that made her want to sleep. Her body ached from the stress of the last year of her life. Dee had always been someone who could still see light on the other side of things, but this time was different.

  It was hard for her to see anything past the present.

  Even now, it wasn’t her career she ached for the most. It was still him. It was still Rooster.

  She loved him, even after everything.

  For so long Dee had convinced herself the man she’d known in the beginning was the real him, that he’d been taken over by his demons and he could be that person again. The hardest thing about all of this, was the realization she’d fallen in love with the façade and not the person Rooster really was.

  She was mourning someone who’d never really existed. As if he’d died, which he might as well have.