When was the last time I had gone to the beach? How stupid! I loved the beach. I loved the ocean. Why did I never go? Why didn’t I spend my days there with my laptop? And when was I ever going to finish my blasted screenplay?
“This year,” I muttered to myself, and of course I’d spoken during the one millisecond of silence that had occurred all evening.
“What’s that, dear?” my mother asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing. Sorry.” I smiled at Fi in response to the questioning in her eyes.
The chatter picked back up as a waiter approached our table and began gathering empty plates.
“You okay?” Fi asked.
“I guess I’m just tired of never being the one with exciting news. Does that make me petty?”
She squeezed my hand and shook her head. “Not at all.”
Once the waiter had departed, Brandon stood up and clinked his glass. “If I could have everyone’s attention for a second, I have an announcement to make.”
I laughed softly. Fi looked at me with concern, but I shook it off.
He smiled and took a deep breath. “Mom, Dad, I wasn’t completely truthful with you guys when I said this was just routine leave. The truth is I’ve been reassigned.”
Ah. His earlier wink began to make sense. The spotlight was his. I attempted to dissipate the inexplicable bitterness I was feeling by thinking about how happy my parents were about to be.
My mother gasped, no doubt bracing herself for the worst. “Oh no. They don’t need you back in Afghanistan, do they?”
Back in Afghanistan? He had been part of the administrative team of a two-day supply mission nearly a decade ago. Still heroic and patriotic? Absolutely. Befitting of the reverence and veneration with which my mother regarded those uneventful forty-eight hours? In my opinion, not so much.
Brandon smiled at her across the table. “No, Mom, it’s okay. This reassignment is a bit closer to home.”
“So, tell us, son,” my dad said as impassively as he could as he placed his arm around my mother.
“Before I tell you, I just need to thank you. You’ve always encouraged us to follow our dreams, and I know that Liv and I are both so grateful for the ways you’ve supported us, even when we’ve done crazy things like join the military or move to Hollywood. I’ll never forget what you said when—”
“Oh, good grief, Brandon. Just get on with it!” I exclaimed, startling everyone. No one more than myself. I cleared my throat and adjusted in my seat. “I am so sorry. I, um . . . I agree. With everything you’re saying. I’m just . . . Well, I’m just so anxious to hear the news!”
“Nice save,” Fiona chortled through clenched teeth.
Brandon quirked his eyebrow at me as he continued. “Well, I guess I should get to it, then. Effective immediately, I’ve been reassigned to Hanscom.” Everyone continued staring at him. “Hanscom Air Force Base.” Silence. “You know . . . in Bedford.” Nothing.
“You guys, he’s moving home,” I said.
It finally clicked.
My parents jumped up in a torrent of squeals and lots of flapping, courtesy of my mother’s sparkly garb. Landon and Jocelyn were a little more refined, as always, but even they seemed thrilled. And Brandon soaked it all in as he always had. He thrived on being the center of attention. He needed it, like sunflowers need sun. And he had it, once again.
I didn’t move. I couldn’t. Fiona wrapped her arms around me and leaned her head against mine as she said with a sigh, “Okay. I get it now.”
“Hey, Liv, you okay?” Brandon asked, taking me off guard. I was shocked. He had never before seemed to notice how his big announcements knocked the breath out of me. Then again, maybe I’d always had the energy to cover it better than I did this time.
All eyes were on me, and I had no choice but to suck it up, once again. “Of course. I’m so happy for you. And for them!” Again, I meant it. I smiled as valiantly as I could as I stood and hugged him. “I mean, you’re ridiculous, of course.” I flicked his clip-on gold-hoop earring. “But I am so happy for you.”
“Hey, everybody,” Fiona interrupted the reverie a bit too loudly. “Livi has an announcement too.”
Wait, what? Pulling back from Brandon, I looked at her with terror in my eyes. What was she doing?
“What is it, hon?” my dad asked with all the interest he could possibly muster, considering all of the energy being diverted to the celebration that his baby boy was moving back home.
“Oh, I don’t know . . .” Seriously. I really don’t know.
“She’s just being modest,” Fi pressed onward. “It’s huge. And I, for one, am immensely proud of her, and I know you all will be too.”
“Well, let’s have it, Liv,” Brandon said, I think genuinely excited to hear what wonderful thing was happening in my life.
“I mean it. I don’t have anything.” I hoped no one noticed the tears in my eyes as I slid back into my seat. “I think Fiona is just—”
“Her screenplay is getting made into a film starring Hamish MacDougal!”
My head snapped toward Fi, while everyone else’s heads snapped toward me. Well, everyone’s except the bearer of the unbelievably exciting and extraordinarily false news. She avoided my eyes and kept on spewing the lies. “She doesn’t want to talk about it, because there are still a lot of details being worked out, and of course she doesn’t want to steal the moment from Brandon, but—”
“Liv!” Brandon ripped off his eye patch as he ran to the back of my chair and squeezed me from behind. “How dare you try to keep that from us! My little sister’s a star!”
“Oh my goodness,” my mom said, her hand covering her mouth. “I didn’t even realize you had finished your screenplay. That’s incredible! Does this mean you’ll be leaving Heartlite?”
“Of course she’ll be leaving Heartlite!” my dad boasted. And then, to complete the paternal moment, he added, “Though you still need to give two weeks’ notice, of course.”
“That’s remarkable, Olivia,” Jocelyn chimed in. “Congratulations. I’m not quite sure I know who Hamish MacDougal is, but it’s all very exciting.”
“Champagne all around!” Landon said, flagging down a waiter.
“I’m so proud of you, kiddo,” Brandon said with emotion in his voice, and then he kissed the top of my head before returning to his seat. “Okay. Tell us everything.”
I looked around the table, and every eye was on me. I had the spotlight. In a moment that had been all about Brandon, I had the spotlight. It was just too bad that the spotlight was cheapened and, in fact, meaningless because it was acquired through ill-gotten means. I had to confess the truth before things got any further out of hand, but I knew that in their eyes I was about to go from a star on the rise to the suspected victim of a midlife crisis.
“Sure.” My voice trembled. “I’ll tell you everything, but I need to run to the restroom first. Fiona, will you accompany me?” I didn’t look at her, and I didn’t wait for a reply. I just stood up and walked toward the ladies’ room, needing to escape as quickly as possible.
She began to speak as we entered the beautifully feminine restroom, which was roughly the size of our apartment. “Livi, look, I’m—”
“What were you thinking?” I hissed as I finally turned to face her. “How could you do that to me? You just . . . You made it all so much worse.”
I didn’t know if I was angry or hurt. Both, probably.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and tears rolled down her cheeks. “I didn’t think. I’m just so proud of you, and I wanted you to have your moment.”
“But there’s nothing to be proud of!”
“That is not true.”
“It is, Fi! I have an incomplete screenplay I’ve been working on for seven years. Seven years!”
“But it is getting made into a film starring Hamish MacDougal! I believe that.”
“It’s not even a great story, much less a well-written one, and the only reason I’ve never moved on to so
mething else is because of the stupid, nagging idea in my head that maybe February 4 actually means something. And all I wanted for today was for it not to mean anything. That’s all I wanted, Fi. And you said you’d support me in that.”
She sniffed before walking to grab tissues for us both. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“We were here to wash away the February 4 madness. And now . . .” I sighed.
“I know,” she repeated. “So let’s wash away the madness—but not the reality. It’s been seven years. You have three years left to—”
I growled at her. I hardly recognized the sound as my own as it echoed around the cavernous space. “Let it go, already!”
“No.” She crossed her arms and planted her feet. “No, Liv. I won’t let it go. I can’t. You’ve just happened to be in the same room with him twice since you met him. Always on the same date. How is that even possible—”
“We live in Los Angeles. I’ve seen Bette Midler three times at three separate Trader Joe’s in the last year. How is that possible?”
She stared at me, gearing up to argue, and then her eyes melted into amusement and she began to laugh. “Well, yes. That does seem somewhat unlikely.”
“See?” I smiled at her as the tension between us dissipated.
She took a deep breath and leaned against the velvet settee. “I really am sorry. I didn’t mean to throw it out there, and I didn’t think about the repercussions. I just . . . Sheesh, I thought you were exaggerating about Brandon. How have I never noticed that before?”
I shrugged rather than tell her the reason I suspected she wasn’t usually clued into Brandon’s propensity for the spotlight. It was because when it wasn’t Brandon overshadowing me, it was her. Between the two of them, I’d developed quite the vitamin-D deficiency through the years. And, again, I usually wouldn’t have had it any other way.
“Well, regardless,” she continued as she dabbed the tissue under her eyes. “I’m not going to apologize for believing in you.”
“I wouldn’t want you to.” A grateful grin overtook my lips. “Now let’s get out there. Brandon’s probably about to announce he’s been chosen to colonize Mars or something.”
I adjusted my top and ran my fingers through my hair as we approached the table. I hadn’t been sure how I was going to get out of this one, but it looked like maybe the cavalry had arrived. A new group of people were huddled around the table, and a striking brunette was sticking particularly close to Brandon. Even an actual movie being made with Hamish MacDougal right there in the country club would not have been enough to distract my mother once she put the pieces together and realized her little boy had requested a transfer because he had fallen in love. The woman who got Brandon Ross to move home would be dubbed a saint.
“Liv!” Brandon called out as we approached. “Sonya, this is my little sister, Olivia. Liv, this is Sonya.”
She hurried over and hugged me, and I liked her right away. She had warm eyes, and they never strayed from Brandon for long.
“It’s so great to meet you, Olivia. You’re pretty much all he talks about.”
I laughed. “That’s terrifying.”
Brandon continued the introductions. “And that’s my other little sister, Fiona.”
Fi looked genuinely touched, and I sort of was too. I’d never heard him refer to her that way.
“Hi, Sonya,” Fi said as she got her hug.
“He tells me the two of you have been friends since you were little.”
“Yep,” Fi confirmed. “We have decades of annoying Brandon together under our belts.”
As Brandon talked to our mother, who was predictably beside herself, Sonya introduced us to her friends. There was Sean, who worked in the admissions office at Harvard; Dehlia, an adjunct professor at Harvard; Samantha, a clinical professor at Harvard Law; and Aziza, who was a visiting lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Surrounded by that group of brilliant academics, it totally felt like the right time to confess that my entire career plan was based around keeping my fingers crossed that a movie star would stop for a cup of coffee in three years.
“Brandon says the two of you are going out with us tonight?” Sonya asked. “I’m so glad. I know you’re only in town for a little while, and I’m anxious to get to know you.”
“Of course we’ll go,” Fi replied. “Sounds fun.”
Sonya leaned in and murmured, “I told him this wasn’t the best way to introduce me to your parents—a quick drop-in with friends, then we take off. But Club Uey is just down the street, so he insisted.”
I shook my head. “No, I think it’s good. This is perfect, actually. They’ll get a little taste and then be left with their friends to rehash and analyze every moment.” I had to hand it to him. My big brother was a master of parental influence.
The master popped up behind Sonya. “You guys ready?”
“I think so.” Sonya smiled up at him. “Sean and Samantha have friends meeting us there, but this is it for our traveling party.”
“You girls are leaving too?” my mom asked as she adjusted her cloche hat.
We each walked over and kissed our parents’ cheeks, and I wrapped my arms around my dad from behind. “We’ll see you in the morning.”
“I feel bad,” my dad said as he patted my arm. “We didn’t get to finish your celebration.”
Fi and I looked at each other and resisted the urge to laugh. The cork of a second bottle of champagne had just been popped, and not a single member of the younger Mitchell or Ross generation had consumed a sip.
“I have complete faith in your ability to celebrate on my behalf.”
* * *
“Remind me,” I repeated as we walked the six blocks from the country club to Club Uey. “Why did we decide to leave the warm coast for the frigid coast in the dead of winter?”
Even Fiona was shivering now that the sun had gone down in its entirety. Through her scarf and chattering teeth she replied, “Because we’re idiots?”
“Ah, yes. That’s right.”
We arrived—by my estimation mere seconds before the cryogenic freezing process took full effect—and found a table in the back. I was sweating by the time I got to the table, having pushed through a cluster of overheated bodies dancing and shouting to be heard over the pumping bass of the music.
Sean’s friend—I think his name was Logan, but it was difficult to tell over the sound of my eardrums bursting—was there waiting and ordered the first round before we’d even pulled enough seats around the table. It was as we were finally getting coats off and struggling with what to do with them—considering we only had barstools standing between safety and sticky floors where they would most assuredly be trampled—that Samantha’s friend arrived.
“Hey, everybody, this is Liam. Liam, this is everybody.”
My back was to them, but one glance at Fiona was all it took to understand that we already knew this Liam. Her eyes were as wide and glistening as the abundant disco balls overhead. I consoled myself with the knowledge that there was at least a small chance the numbness in my extremities and my inability to breathe were nothing more than symptoms of the final stages of hypothermia. But I knew I needed to consider my options, just in case death was not imminent, and wondered if I still had time to sink below the high table and mosey into the crowd before he spotted me. Before I had to look at him. But three things were keeping me in place:
The helpless look in Fiona’s eyes as she came face-to-face with him for the first time since he’d broken up with her two years prior.
My overwhelming desire to take in the sight of him and recharge, one last time, for the rest of my life without him.
The thought of just how sticky those floors probably were.
“You okay?” I asked Fi, my back still turned to him.
It was as if someone had snapped their fingers and broken Fiona free of hypnosis. It was so instant that it was almost creepy, and I couldn’t help but wonder if for the rest of her life she was g
oing to cluck like a chicken whenever someone said, “Peanut butter and jelly.”
“Liam!” she squealed in apparent delight. “What in the world are you doing here?”
Then I had no choice but to turn around, because there could be no doubt that all eyes were going to be on her . . . and by extension us. Liam was blocked by half the current members of the Hasty Pudding Club, but I caught Brandon’s eyes. I tried to unlock some special sibling powers to telepathically communicate that this was the Liam I had told him about. Love-of-my-life Liam. Most-serious-relationship-Fiona-had-ever-had Liam. Maybe if I got lucky, I could also communicate that Fi had told a bald-faced lie when she said I was making a movie with Hamish MacDougal and that he should break the news to our parents. And maybe, if I concentrated, I could even get him to order me a drink and have it delivered to me somewhere a little farther away from the scene that was currently unfolding—like New Hampshire.
“What?” Brandon mouthed at me as he shrugged, and I silently cursed our wasted childhood in which we had not worked together to develop even one secret language between us.
“Uh . . . Fiona. Wow,” Liam stammered. “Wh-what are you doing here? I mean, it’s great to see you, of course—”
“You two know each other?” Samantha asked.
“We, um . . .”
“We’re old friends,” Fiona interjected, cool as a cucumber, and then she hurried over to hug him.
I watched her pass and caught Brandon’s eyes again as she did. He got it now. Too little, too late. “Liam?” he mouthed emphatically.
I closed my eyes and nodded subtly.
Brandon knew more than most, but even he didn’t know all the salacious details about the strange, dramatic history Liam, Fiona, and I shared. He knew I’d dated him for eight months. He knew he’d become my closest friend while Fiona was in Paris. And he knew that in Italy I’d begun to look at breaking up with Liam as the great regret of my life. But he also knew that by the time I got back home, Fiona and Liam were together. And from that point on, the details I shared with my brother were intentionally vague, evasive, and often downright untruthful.
Plot Twist Page 14
