by Leah Stewart
Four.
When you’re scheduled for a photo shoot on the TV Guide yacht, and then, twenty minutes later at another location, an on-camera interview with the Insider, and then, at yet another location, a step and repeat (or, as Josie’s itinerary puts it, “intimate red carpet and roundtable interviews”), and then a party the studio is throwing for fans who won a contest for access (“mandatory to stay for two hours as the studio is paying for your room”), and then after that, if she can still stand to wear her heels, the Entertainment Weekly party, it’s hard to figure out when and how to acquire a pregnancy test. Because she will not be alone until she’s dropped back at the hotel to get ready between the step and repeat and the fan party, and she’ll have only an hour then, and she couldn’t go alone to a drugstore because she has no car. Should she ask her driver to take her to a drugstore? Then Cyrus will definitely come along. Maybe hotels have pregnancy tests they can send up to your room, like a toothbrush or a sewing kit.
Josie makes these calculations sitting at a stoplight in a Mercedes van with her eyes closed, feeling the gentle pressure of eye shadow being applied. The makeup girl is holding her breath as she touches Josie up, which Josie knows because, as she leaned in with her applicator right before Josie closed her eyes, she took a breath and held it with puffed-out cheeks. This must be what she does when she’s concentrating. Josie wonders if she’s aware that she does that and assumes no because it’s so funny-looking, and then changes her mind because this makeup girl seems pretty comfortable in her own skin, doesn’t even wear makeup herself, which is interesting for someone who’s devoted her life to the beautification of the human face. Of the countenance. Josie is a keen observer of physical quirks. They are so telling and so useful. And she’s fascinated by people without self-consciousness, people who seem to be making no effort at concealment. She hopes this girl knows about her cheek puffing and doesn’t give a shit. Josie sits in the middle seat, with the girl on one side and Max on the other, and she feels Max’s leg against hers and knows he’s deliberately letting it stay there. “It’s amazing that you can do that in a car and make no mistakes,” he says to the makeup girl. “You have steady hands.” Josie has to marvel at Max. His leg against hers—the woman he’s “a little in love with”—and still he’s talking to another woman with that hey-girl tone.
“Yep,” the girl says, with a crisp lack of interest, and Josie is pleased. Good for you, makeup girl. Would the makeup girl go get her a pregnancy test? Maybe. But then would she tell anyone? Maybe her lack of concealment extends to answering, “How was your day?” with “Josie Lamar gave me a hundred bucks to go buy a pregnancy test.” Would that be too much or not enough? What’s the going rate for that job? The girl is working on her lips now, but Josie keeps her eyes closed. It’s unnerving to look at a face so close to your face.
Even if Josie could get to the drugstore before the party, this seems a dangerous time and place to make an embarrassing purchase. Fans abound, as do their cell phones. She’s got red hair and is easily spotted. She doesn’t have time to don a hoodie and sunglasses, and then change into her cocktail dress. She doesn’t even have a hoodie with her. She’d have to buy a hoodie, then change into it, somehow get to the drugstore and back, then get ready for the party, and also anyone who saw her, with the convention going on, is likely to assume that someone wearing a hoodie and sunglasses inside is famous. Right now, concealment and announcement are pretty much the same thing.
Josie dislikes people walking behind her, the feeling of a presence at her back, the sound of approaching footsteps, and this is yet another reason to resent Cyrus, who is so close behind her as they approach the yacht that she has an urge to stop and see if he crashes into her. Except she doesn’t want to fall down in her heels, and Cecelia’s in front of her and they’d all go down like dominoes, and then what if she miscarried or something? Does that actually happen from falling, like in old movies or Downton Abbey? You’re not pregnant, she tells herself, but herself does not believe her. The idea that she is arrived with a clarifying conviction. Her weepiness, her hunger, her tight pants—these things suddenly make sense, as they would on TV, where people never seem to realize they’re pregnant even as they’re copiously vomiting. Josie has always seen this obliviousness as belonging purely to narrative, divorced from reality, and yet. She’s an idiot. She can’t remember the last time she had a period. At least she’s not vomiting.
She can’t possibly be pregnant.
Well, yes, she can possibly be. But it’s such a strange idea.
If she is, she’ll need to tell Charlie. Charlie who hasn’t called her back. She could text him the news. She feels a verge-of-tears hilarity. Does her iPhone contain a baby emoticon?
They will be on this yacht for only twenty-five minutes, according to their strictly executed schedule, but the idea is to look like they’re at a party for the photos. Someone gives them each a gift bag: Josie’s contains several lip glosses, more makeup, and a Smartwater. She doesn’t really know what to do with it and is relieved when Cyrus takes it from her without a word. Maybe he wants to inspect it for bombs. The actors strike playful poses and laugh with extra vigor and answer questions about what’s on their iPods. “I don’t have an iPod,” Josie says irritably, and then sees the questioner’s taken-aback expression. Dutifully, Josie course corrects, listing her favorite songs. Except all she can think of are Charlie’s favorite songs, so she just lists those.
She could put on a costume, like actors sometimes do to walk the convention floor. It would have to be a face-covering costume. Like what, Spiderman? Where would she get a Spiderman costume in time for a run to the drugstore? “Anyone you’re excited to meet?” someone asks her, and she would dearly love to blurt out something bizarre and unhinged just to puncture the idea that what’s happening here is anything less than absurd. Why are they all pretending to be partying on a yacht? Why is everyone taking that in stride? Why is every solution she thinks of ridiculous? Because she can’t think of a solution. That’s why. She names a famous actress she’d like to meet. She asks Cyrus for her Smartwater and knocks it back like it’s alcohol. She wishes that Charlie were here. Maybe Charlie is here, wandering the convention floor in a Spiderman costume. Charlie is a lover of comic books and video games and superhero movies. She should go walk the floor, pulling off all the masks. But they won’t let her walk the floor at all. Before the panel started, she asked a convention employee, a man in a headset with a clipboard, if they could walk the floor for a few minutes, and he reacted as if she’d asked to run inside a burning building. “You’d get mobbed,” he said, in that tone of finality people use when they want to scare you into dropping the subject.
She looks at Cyrus standing there with his giant hand clasped around the handle of her little gift bag and imagines trying to persuade him to take her onto the floor. Maybe he’d do it if she rode on his shoulders where no one could reach her, and then he’d methodically pull off the masks of everyone wearing them, or at least everyone wearing them who appeared to be a six-foot-two man. This is a vivid picture in her mind. She’s losing it.
She really has to know if she is or isn’t.
When they get back in the van, Josie deliberately heads for the back instead of sitting beside Max like she has been all day so she won’t have to worry about Max seeing what she’s doing on her phone. On the way to the next interview, she checks Charlie’s social media again. Still nothing.
She manages to switch on the charm for the ET interview—she thinks—but the effort that takes distracts her from the formation of a workable plan. As they walk the two blocks between one hotel and the next—in a tight cluster with the bodyguards on the outside, parting the seas—they pass a drugstore. Josie hesitates and nearly trips August. He puts his hand on her shoulder to steady himself, and she apologizes and keeps walking.
All right. Enough dithering. It’s time for action. Their destination in sight, she deliberately
slows her steps, knowing Cyrus will slow his, good soldier that he is. By the time they reach the elevator, he and she are a couple of paces behind the pack. She stops so he’ll stop, too. She looks him in the eye. “You keep a lot of secrets, right?”
He reacts just like he did when she tried to draw him out yesterday, many, many moons ago. “Yes, ma’am,” he says, then clamps his mouth shut and refuses the eye contact, signaling that she can’t make him talk. Good. Great. He’s the man for the job.
“I have a request.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
This does not surprise him. But whatever he’s expecting, it’s most definitely not what she says. “Could you go back to that drugstore we passed and get me a pregnancy test?”
He blinks. That’s it on the reaction, but still she feels a gleeful triumph at having caught him off guard. There’s an upside, people! “Yes, ma’am.” He clears his throat. “Any particular brand?”
“I’m not picky. But I don’t have any cash. I’ll have to pay you back.”
“That’s not a problem.”
She nods, and he nods, and then she hustles—everybody’s calling her—through the open elevator doors.
The press room is set up with a red carpet—a red carpet to nowhere—and then six tables with six journalists each. It’s an obstacle course. The actors take photos alone and in all possible combinations with one another and answer questions into iPhones and recorders and cameras. Josie’s mind tracks Cyrus’s progress. He must be back to the store by now; he must have found the right aisle. She can see him as if on camera, sternly considering his options. For Cyrus, every choice is a serious one. How will he deliver the thing to her? Surely he won’t just hand it to her in a see-through plastic bag. Even double bagged is no good—it would still be clear she’d sent her bodyguard to the drugstore for an embarrassing personal item, and either people would ask and tease, or they wouldn’t ask, signaling their speculations were worse. What if he is too discreet, as seems more likely, waiting until everyone is safely in their hotel rooms before he brings the test to her door? She wants to take that test the instant she’s alone.
Automatically she turns slightly to the side for photos, hand on her hip, tightening her stomach. And how much longer will she be able to do that? She catches herself putting her hand on her stomach and jerks it back to her hip where it belongs. Going table to table, she stares at the recording devices before her, ready to catch each and every one of her words and then release them again into the internet, where they will live forever, poor words, drifting ghosts, unable to die. What words does she offer to the shiny, glowing phones? She doesn’t say a single thing that matters. What a lot of effort has gone into the acquisition of these unimportant words.
When it’s over, she finds Cyrus waiting right outside the door. She allows herself to lag behind again. When everyone else is ahead of them, he hands her the gift bag from the yacht, heavier now. Good job, soldier.
“I got you two,” he says, in a confidential murmur. “One early response and one regular, with two in the box. Three total.”
He must have children, a wife who once needed pregnancy tests. He seems convinced she’ll want to use all three. She thanks him. He holds out his arm for her to proceed before him. “Ma’am,” he says.
Five.
Back in his room, Max showers and dons his favorite suit, which is the exact match of his character’s favorite suit, and wonders what’s going on with Josie. He’d been sure the vibe between them was mutual, so sure that he’d anticipated ending up in her bed last night, but something shifted at the hotel bar, and try as he might, he can’t remember why. The memories from later that night are hazy with booze. Is she being standoffish today—changing seats to get away from him in the van—purely because she doesn’t want to sleep with him? Max isn’t used to people trying to get away from him. Because Max doesn’t push. He offers. He doesn’t push. If she’s worried that he’ll read her public flirtiness as real or if she read his that way, well, that’s annoying. She should know he knows the game as well as she does. Today has been a performance. Except for the talk during the Syfy special about their last scenes together. That was real. He hugged her because he wanted to, not because the cameras were on. No matter what, there is something real between them, something that no one but the two of them will ever understand.
In the van on the way to the fan party, she sits in the front row again, but this time by the window. He sits next to her so as not to make a show of not doing so, and she gives him a wan smile and then turns her gaze to the window. Waves of energy have been coming off her, last night and today and when he saw her after that taping—all kinds of energy, performative and sexual and also authoritative, which he’d enjoyed witnessing again, because the few times he’s seen her in the last several years she’s had her wattage down low, and in the old days he found her unshowy confidence to be one of her most attractive qualities. But now she’s giving off no energy at all. She’s gone very, very still. He doesn’t try to talk to her because it couldn’t be any more obvious that she doesn’t want to talk. He turns to Cecelia, on his other side. “How did the fans get tickets to this party? What did they have to do?”
Cecelia shrugs. “Prove they were our biggest fans?”
“What would that involve?”
“Dress up like us?”
“Get tattoos of our faces?”
From behind them, Bill says, “Recite an episode from memory.”
And Daniel says, “Change their names to Bronwyn or Malachi.”
“That would be an impressive commitment,” Max says.
“Hey,” Bill says. “Don’t you question my naming.”
“I’d never question you,” Max says. “I say what you tell me to say.”
Josie turns from the window with eyes gone flat. “It was a website contest. They just entered their e-mails.”
Max nods, but Josie has already turned back to the window. He looks at Cecelia with eyebrows raised and she shrugs. The van is silent for a moment, and then August and Bill start a conversation about a movie they both just saw.
He loses her for a while at the party, which takes place around a pool on a hotel rooftop. They’re there to talk to fans, and so he talks to fans. The cocktails on offer are named for the characters. He, of course, orders a Malachi, which he’s pretty sure contains Campari and Grand Marnier. More than one fan comes up to him and says, “I’m drinking a Malachi,” some of them shyly and some of them knowingly and some of them with nervous aggression, and if the fan is a woman, he says, “I’m flattered,” and ponies up his most charming smile, and if the fan is a man, he says, “Cheers!” and clinks his glass.
About an hour into the party, he extracts himself from a particularly garrulous fan—when you’re as charming as Max, this isn’t hard; he just rests a hand lightly on her shoulder and says, “It’s been so nice talking to you,” and leaves her still vibrating to his touch. He finds Josie with two women, a mother and daughter, who are showing her their Bronwyn action figures. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen this one before,” Josie says, holding a little self in her hands. “I don’t remember this outfit.”
“That’s from season four,” the mother says.
“You don’t have them?” the daughter asks. “I mean, they don’t give them to you?”
“They did. I don’t know if they gave me all of them. I didn’t keep them—I gave them to my mother, and I think she gave some to other relatives. I didn’t really know what to do with them.”
“I think I’d keep them,” the mother says.
“Oh, I probably kept a couple.” She hands the figure back to the daughter. “They’re in a box somewhere.”
Max, watching the exchange from a couple feet away, can see the mother and daughter are disappointed in Josie’s lackluster display of interest. He steps in, holds out his hand. “Can I have a look at that?”
&
nbsp; The two women simultaneously startle, then blush.
“Hi,” he says, grinning. “I’m Max.”
The daughter hands him the figure without a word. He holds it up to the light and examines it with care. “This one really looks like you, Josie,” he says. He puts it back in the daughter’s hand, lets his fingertips linger just a moment in her palm. “The first Bronwyn they made looked nothing like her. They brought it to set to show her, and we all came to see, because we were all excited. And as soon as she picked it up to look at it, the head popped off. The guy, whoever he was—from the toy company? Or the studio? I can’t remember. He was embarrassed. He kept saying the final version wouldn’t lose its head like that.”
“That’s right,” Josie says. “You said to the guy, ‘Don’t worry, Josie’s head pops off, too.’”
The mother and daughter laugh. That line was an embellishment—or at least Max doesn’t remember saying it. Good. She’s making an effort.
“Why don’t I take a picture?” Max says. “You two, Josie, little Josie.”
They’re delighted, beaming at him as the daughter, who’s quicker, offers up her phone. Josie moves between them, puts an arm around each, and they produce two of the action figures and each holds one. Everyone smiles except the tiny Bronwyns, who must at all times be ready to fight.
“There you go.” Max returns the phone. That’s right, ladies. Max Hammons touched your phone! “The real thing.”
They thank him and Josie profusely, and Max sees his moment. “I want to introduce Josie to someone.” He tells them it’s been lovely to meet them and they’re out.
He touches Josie’s arm to guide her in the right direction. “Did I really say that?”
“What?”
“About your head popping off.”
She shrugs. “You could have. They liked it. Where are we going?”
