by Anna Adams
But Maude stood her ground. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Denial in its purest forms. Bravo, Maude. You’ve become a much better actress than when you first displayed your pathetic acting skills on Living with the Livingstons. Just tell me this: Where was Matt hiding when I found you during the NAM after-party? Under your skirt?”
The blow was low but hit Maude square in the chest.
“At least mine stayed on,” she retorted with a look of proud disdain. Lindsey smirked just as the door opened, letting James and a couple of sound engineers in.
“You girls ready?” James asked, unaware the level of tension had risen to alarming heights.
The girls walked into the live room with as much enthusiasm as Louis XVI shuffling to his guillotine, placed themselves in front of their respective microphones, put on their casks, and glared at each other as the pop beat to “Best Friends Forever” filled their ears.
*****
On the fifth floor, a war was waging, and Daniel Siwel was the main assailant. Ever since he’d quit smoking, his irritability had spiked with devastating results on the psyche of his employees. It didn’t help that the person for whom he’d undergone this exhausting effort showed little regard for his sacrifice, wholly unaware she was the cause of his new abstinence. He couldn’t blame the entirety of his foul character on the abandonment of nicotine. He’d never been tender with his employees. One couldn’t head a team of twenty at twenty-four without getting accustomed to barking instead of speaking like a normal human being. Normal human beings didn’t have the weight of their father’s shadow lurking over them. He had little margin for error, therefore neither had they.
“Mindy!” he bellowed. The mousy-haired young woman in the cubicle next to Cynthia’s gave a small frightened squeak. She brought her hand to her mouth, desperately praying her morning bagel wouldn’t end up on her boss’ polished shoes.
“Yes, Mr. Siwel?” her muffled voice trembled.
“Your brief on the Thompson plagiarism affair is a load of crap. Ms. Carlisle?”
Cynthia lifted her head from her paperwork.
“Yes,” she answered sharply.
“Yours was interesting. Now tell me, Mindy.” He turned towards Mindy who closed her eyes with desperation. “You’ve been in Soulville’s legal department a lot longer than Ms. Carlisle yet you fail to deliver satisfactory results. How is that possible?”
Cynthia snorted before she could refrain from doing so. Daniel was prone to exaggeration.
“Ms. Carlisle, do you have something to say?” he narrowed his eyes in a threatening way. Carlisle was brilliant, and he appreciated brilliant women more than he admired fashionably dressed ones. Carlisle was both, but her intelligence shone out like a candle in their gray headquarters. It was a humble yet ascertained form of brightness coupled with calm likeability. She seemed to appreciate everyone’s value and left Daniel guessing with uneasiness he found hard to bear, what she thought of him.
“I’m just surprised you gave the same assignment to two different employees. That’s all. Isn’t that counterproductive?”
Daniel’s dark brown pupils appeared to throw flames, and Mindy whimpered. Cynthia, on the other hand, held his gaze with a bravado she showed rather than possessed. On the inside, her heart was beating in hectic spasms. But her mother had always taught her to never let her eyes kneel before a man, especially a boss as big a jerk as Daniel. The last thing she wanted was to get on his bad side again and end up at the photocopy machine again. But then her investigations on her father’s departure had come to a standstill, and she needed more sympathy from her coworkers to find out the details of how everything had gone down. And if braving Daniel’s ire was the cost, then so be it.
“It was a test, Ms. Carlisle. But since you seem to want to play tough, I want you to take half of Mindy’s files and have them finished by the end of the week. With your own as well, that goes without saying.”
He returned to his office, satisfied to have put Cynthia back in her place once more, though disturbed that the only emotion she expressed was annoyance rather than distress.
Mindy wasn’t so lucky. Cynthia followed her as she ran to the nearest bathroom. She caught up with her in the ladies room but turned away in disgust when she heard the vomiting noises coming out of the nearest stall.
She reconsidered, went inside the stall and crouched next to Mindy where she proceeded to gather her thin hair away from her ashen face.
“How long has this been going on?” Cynthia asked with soft concern.
“He makes me sick!” Mindy shrieked, before diving back into her toilet face first.
Cynthia thought she was pretty close to puking herself but held on to Mindy’s hair. Corn and candy, she thought. Keep thinking of corn and candy.
“Ever since James Baldwin was thrown out of Soulville, the legal department has been hell on earth,” Mindy moaned.
Cynthia pricked her ears. Finally, an interesting piece of information.
“Daniel Siwel wasn’t here before Mr. Baldwin’s departure?” she inquired.
Mindy shook her head, misery weighing on her face.
“Before we lived in a golden age, so to speak. Mrs. Ferris was kind. Demanding, but fair. A couple of days after James Baldwin left, Mrs. Ferris announced she was resigning. And everyone knew she wasn’t doing it voluntarily.”
“Does Daniel Siwel know Alan? Are they friends?” Cynthia asked. It would explain the fast track he was on.
But Mindy shrugged.
“Alan’s been promoting a lot of his friends and relatives lately, so I wouldn’t put it past him.”
Like Adrianna, Cynthia thought.
“Him and Alan are made from the same cloth that’s for sure,” Mindy mused with a shiver. “There have been rumors.” Mindy’s hesitation could be easily perceived.
“What is it?”
“Rumors have been circulating. People think Alan blackmailed Mr. Brighton, Baldwin’s best friend, to force him to vote Mr. Baldwin out of Soulville with the rest of the board members.”
Cynthia’s heart sank. That’s how Alan had done it. Blackmail. Travis Brighton and her father were best friends; they’d built Soulville together. How could he do such a thing, succumb to Alan’s base tactics? But most importantly, blackmail was next to impossible to prove. She’d have to keep digging.
*****
“We’re going to take five, because this is going nowhere,” James sighed. Their recording session had become a death-match for which he could no longer play the role of appointed referee.
He went into the sound room and turned to Lindsey.
“Put less emphasis on the word ‘friends.’ It sounds like you want to throw a punch or use another monosyllabic word starting with f?”
He turned to Maude, who stood, arms crossed, with a firm frown of displeasure disfiguring her face.
“Maude, we need to talk.”
Maude followed James in the kitchen and asked what the problem was.
“She’s asking me what the problem is,” James let out a dry laugh. Teenage girls did their very best to annoy adults with their stubbornness and then hid behind masks of false innocence.
“You know what the problem is,” he answered with sternness. “You aren’t making the slightest effort to make this work.”
“Me!” Maude exclaimed. “At the risk of sounding extremely childish and immature, I’ll say this anyway: she started it.”
“No, she didn’t,” James pointed out. “She was the one publicly humiliated because of you. Even if you didn’t do it on purpose,” he added, cutting off her protest.
“I’ve apologized a gazillion times, Uncle James!” Now she most certainly sounded like a child, but she brushed off her feelings of guilt with a mental shrug. What more could she do?
James gazed into his niece’s eyes and knew how his daughters always got the best of him. They burned a hole in his heart with those sad puppy eyes, and it worked every time. How could Maud
e have learned that technique in a twelve-month period of cohabitation? Girls must be born with the puppy-eyes gene.
“Try harder,” he admonished as he headed on his way out.
He was right she knew, but getting through Lindsey was a hopeless enterprise. Maude prepared two hot chocolates and brought one to Lindsey in the sound room where she had stayed. When she handed her a cup, Lindsey eyed it with suspicion.
“It’s not poisoned, unless you consider chocolate to be poison.”
“I don’t ingest chocolate. I watch my weight,” Lindsey answered. Not everyone could afford to be naturally skinny. She watched her weight like a hawk knowing the slightest carefree meal could take her back to places she didn’t want to encounter again.
“Fine, I’ll drink yours,” Maude shrugged. “So much for a peace offering.”
“No, I’ll take mine, thanks.” No way Maude was having something else that belonged to her. She took her cup and held it like the trophy she’d won six weeks ago. She never let anything slip from her fingers.
“I think we’re going at this the wrong way,” Maude declared.
“Elaborate,” Lindsey replied, taking a sip.
“You hate me, and I . . . ” She didn’t despise Lindsey, but she did sometimes feel a strong inclination to snap her neck in two. “I dislike you,” Maude completed. “A lot.”
“There you go, sugarcoating your genuine thoughts again.”
“I don’t even know how any of this started. You hated me before we even met!”
“Of course I did.” That was Lindsey’s way. She hated first and asked questions later.
“You kept on throwing the word ‘orphan’ in my face, as if it defined me,” Maude recalled. Her first meeting with Lindsey inside school halls had been memorable, what with the ear-piercing heels clicking and the blinding hypocritical smile.
“Oh, am I supposed to feel sorry for you, Maude? Hand me a tissue now, I can cry on cue.” Lindsey spat out.
“I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me. In fact, pity isn’t a feeling I particularly cherish.”
“You aren’t to be pitied. If anything, you were born under a pretty darn lucky star if you ask me!”
Maude laughed at Lindsey’s ludicrous statement. Where had that lucky star shone the day both her parents were killed? This wasn’t a competition to figure whose life sucked the most. If it were, she’d win hands-down, but Maude wasn’t one to advertise her hardships, especially to someone as egotistical as Lindsey. Lindsey preferred to concentrate on the things she didn’t have rather than on the things she did and therefore would never hear reason on the absurdity of accusations stemming from misplaced envy.
“You’re ‘discovered in Paris,’ Ms. Tragent not only takes you in her selective class but offers private lessons, and Matt . . . ” here she proceeded with caution. Maude didn’t need to know her long-time crush on Matt, how she’d always hoped he’d see her as more than just a pampered celebrity he been forced to co-write songs with.
“Never mind. You have it all, and you barely had to lift a finger!”
“And what? You had to slave to get where you are today, Lindsey?” Maude mocked. “You became America’s darling the minute you signed with Disney as a kid!”
Lindsey boiled underneath her Prada clothes. She hated to be reminded of that period of her early career. It was an image she fought to erase but still clung to her. From ages ten to fourteen, she’d played the adorable “Tammy Sunnydale,” a tween who wrote songs with unicorns and fairies and rainbows. America loved her, but in her teens, Lindsey decided she wanted more. She wanted to be a star.
“Do you know how hard it is to break away from the image of the sweet, innocent little angel, especially when you’re a Disney angel?” Lindsey asked her eyes spewing lightning.
“I guess that’s where your love for scandal comes from.”
Lindsey smiled. She’d had to create a few scandals to shatter her cookie-cutter image: The tantrum she’d thrown in a five-star hotel, dating two celebrities at the same time, calling another Disney actress a “twerp.” She’d create more if necessary. That is if Maude Laurent didn’t create them for her.
“Then why do you care so much for that nip slip? It’s the sort of scandal to further shatter the image you so readily detest.”
Lindsey put her cup down and glared at Maude. “I’m not angry about the nip slip. I love that kind of publicity.”
“Then what is it?” Maude asked astonished.
“I want you to admit this was your devious little plan to attract more attention.”
Maude rolled her eyes. She didn’t know which language to speak in to explain she hadn’t meant for any of it to happen.
“I can’t say what you want to hear. I don’t care for these publicity stunts.”
Lindsey rolled her eyes. What else was to be expected from Saint Maude?
“However,” Maude continued, an idea forming slowly in her head. “However, I have to admit, I enjoyed seeing you embarrassed. And I had to suppress a wild impulse to laugh. That is the entire truth.” Maude raised her hand with solemnity.
Lindsey perceived Maude was telling the truth and nodded. Perhaps Maude wasn’t as goody-goody as she thought she was.
“Fine, that’ll do.”
“Maybe, but this song will never do.” Maude picked up their scores and shook her head.
“We can’t sing this ‘Best Friends Forever’ nonsense. Let’s rewrite the lyrics and tell America how we really feel about each other.”
“I’m all for it if it means I get to insult you and call it art.” Lindsey answered with a bright smile.
“Come on, let’s go work in Matt’s creation room.”
“I thought he never let anyone in that room?” Lindsey asked.
Maude thought it wiser to refrain from answering but led the way to Matt’s room. Maude took her seat at the piano while Lindsey sat on an orange couch with caution, not knowing how Matt would react if he walked in on her lying among his treasured belongings.
“We should talk about how annoying you are with your piano in this revised version of BFF,” Lindsey suggested. She’d had it with Maude’s classical influences, as if it made her better than every other pop singer.
“How about we mention how you stole my song?” Maude chirped.
“Or how you stole my part as Cenerentola?”
“I auditioned and got the part,” Maude corrected. “I didn’t steal anything then, and I certainly never stole your boyfriend which is quite a different story Lexie’s been telling about me.”
“Nobody cares about you and Matt anymore. Everyone’s dying to get more of you and Thomas.”
Maude remained silent and pressed distractedly on the low keys of her Yamaha piano.
“If it’s any consolation, I know what you’re going through. I’ve also been in quite a few fake relationships and with guys far less kind than Thomas. At least he’s actually crazy about you.”
Maude’s hand slipped on the keyboard, and her head shot up. “Sorry,” she mumbled.
“You didn’t know?” Lindsey laughed. Goody-goody and blind as a bat, she thought.
“Thomas likes little other than himself,” Maude answered, pretending to be deep in the analysis of the least complicated score she’d ever learned.
“Funny, I would say the exact same thing about Matt,” Lindsey mused.
“That’s not true,” Maude responded before she could bite her tongue. She decided it was preferable to change the course of this discussion “Tell me about your fake relationships. Were you in a fake relationship with Nick Lowell?”
“Absolutely,” Lindsey laughed at the recollection of her longest relationship of four weeks with the country singer.
“Too bad,” Maude sighed. “I thought you two were cute together.”
“He had dreadful breath!” Lindsey exclaimed. “But he was way nicer than Trent Braidwood. Ugh, such a pompous ass!”
Maude burst out laughing at Lindsey’s vehemenc
e and even further when she recounted various misfortunes with multiple fake boyfriends. Sloppy kisses, moist hands, and dull conversations, Lindsey didn’t spare a single detail.
“It’s hard to pretend,” Maude explained after their laughter died down. “It’s dishonest, and I hate it.”
“You’re thinking too much,” Lindsey cautioned. Especially if she was in love with someone else, Lindsey thought but didn’t say. Fighting to keep a fragile equilibrium between stardom and reality was rather complicated when stuck between a boy she didn’t like but had to date and one she did like but couldn’t date.
When James walked past the locked door two hours later, he thought he heard laughter but attributed it to figments of his imagination, overwrought with the strain of working with teenagers.
When the girls finished, they marched to Alan’s office, and spread the new lyrics before him.
“‘Best Fiends Forever,’” he read. ‘“What is this?” he waved the sheet of paper.
“That’s the song we want to sing,” Maude declared.
“I want a song where I get to say Maude can’t walk in heels to save her life.”
“And I want one where I get to say Lindsey can’t sing.”
“It’s playful rivalry, and it’s honest,” Maude added. “I think our fans will love it, and you can keep the whole diva rivalry going on in a healthier way.”
Alan screened the document and smiled. It was genius.
“Fine, go ahead. Record this and stop wasting studio time!” he ordered.
The recording session went smoothly, and Lindsey was allowed to pronounce “fiend” with as much venom as she wanted.
When it was over, Maude walked Lindsey to the elevator with a tinge of regret. Lindsey felt it, too but nevertheless said:
