It was Liam, just coming through the swinging door. He looked even better than he had earlier. He was dressed in a perfectly fitted navy blazer with beige pants and a soft-looking beige-colored shirt. Not flashy, just cool. And very expensive-looking. Not at all like a bartender/out-of-work actor.
“Hi,” Elizabeth said. “I just stopped by to reserve a quiet table for tomorrow afternoon. I’m going to interview Will. You know, the playwright.”
“Sure, the guy from this afternoon. I’ll take care of that.”
“Hey, thanks. That’s great.” Elizabeth waved and turned to go. “See you tomorrow.”
“Wait up!” Liam called out. “As long as you’re here, can I buy you a drink?”
“This is a madhouse.”
“I don’t mean here,” Liam said. “I know a little café a couple of blocks away that should be quieter. Okay?”
“Sure, maybe a cup of coffee.”
On the walk over to the café, Liam told her a little about his life. The accent was real; he grew up in Dublin but had been living in the United States for six years. He had a degree in English lit from UCLA; his father was a surgeon on loan to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. His mother was a psychologist with a private practice.
Elizabeth told him about growing up in Sweet Valley just ninety minutes outside of L.A. Turned out they were two California transplants with a lot in common.
Additionally, what she’d taken for romantic interest on his part wasn’t really there. And that nonfeeling was mutual and very comfortable. They were having a conversation like friends, good friends, in fact. Strange, considering they had just met. But Elizabeth could tell when she had a friend, and she could tell when it was something else. Without any words, she could feel that something else, because it was physical, and it wasn’t there with Liam. But the friendship was.
“Have you gotten any parts yet?” Elizabeth asked.
“One. Last winter I was in an Off-Off-Broadway piece called Warfrats at a loft in SoHo. Did you happen to cover it?”
“No. We only do Off Broadway.”
“Good, ’cause I was naked for most of it, and it was damn cold in that loft. After that I got a job as a waiter here.”
“How did it go?”
“First day I spilled the soup. Fred, the owner, figured the customers would be safer with me behind the bar. He’s an ex-actor himself, a great guy, and good about giving me time off for auditions. Right now I’m up for a part in a revival of an Odets play at a café in the Village. I think I’ve got a pretty good shot. Still nothing my father can brag about so far.”
“Will they come in for it?”
“Probably, but I owe them a visit now.”
Elizabeth nearly jumped out of her seat.
“When?”
“When what?”
“The visit?”
“It’s not set. I can go anytime. Why?”
“This is such a weird coincidence. I have to go back to Sweet Valley for my grandmother’s birthday, and I would really love to bring someone.”
“I think I saw that movie.”
“Me, too. But I promise you it wouldn’t be an acting job. No pretending you’re anything but a friend. I just want the company so I don’t have to do it alone. It’s going to be hell either way, but I have to do it for my grandmother. So, how about it, Liam? But only if you happen to be going at the same time. Of course, you could let me tell them you’re a New York actor, which would give me a little upgrade. But no romantic thing.”
“When is the party?”
“Next Thursday.”
“That’s a possibility. Fred might give me a couple of days off if I said I’d be back by Saturday night.”
“That would be perfect! I plan to be in for the party and out on the red eye that same night.”
“Can’t you get more time off?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Feel like telling me?”
It turned out she did.
They sat at the café for more than an hour, and at the end Elizabeth was feeling pretty good. She’d made two new New York friends in one day. Maybe with Will it was more like friends plus, but whatever, they were two people she actually liked.
It wasn’t until she got home that the enormity of what she’d done hit.
First she tried telling herself that she’d invited Liam just for the company. That worked better before she did it, but after, it didn’t feel so good. It felt like she was lying to herself, hiding behind a ridiculous excuse, which was an oxymoron, since how could you hide something from yourself when you’re right there, listening?
Maybe she wasn’t planning something exactly like Will’s scene, but was there still some evil intent hidden there?
What if she was just moving up the inevitable? Jessica was never going to be faithful to anyone. It was her weakness. Always had been. There was no reason that should change. Elizabeth knew her sister better than anyone else did. Better than Todd, for sure.
Poor Todd. The guppy in the path of the shark. He didn’t know it, but he was in for big trouble. He was definitely going to get hurt. But, of course, that wasn’t her problem anymore.
If she could push away the ugly thoughts and just remember his sweetness, how he had always tried so hard to please her. Like that time when Jessica left Regan. Todd wasn’t happy about having her stay with them, but he tried.
It was the day Jessica was arriving. She’d left Regan that very morning, snuck out, and made a plane from Nice to Geneva, where she texted me just before she caught a flight to New York. From there she lucked into a JetBlue flight to L.A. With the time changes she would land at LAX just after five today and come directly to us.
I arrange to get off early, around three thirty, and dreading Todd’s protests, I go home.
There I am, walking in the door, a door as neat and new and nondescript as any door in any development in Sweet Valley, a door that belies the grouchy, grumpy dissatisfaction of its tenant, who happens to be the man I live with. I’m armed with megatons of reasons why he has to be nice to my poor sister. I’m so busy with excuses for Jessica that I almost walk right into this huge oak-tag sign festooned with bows, curly, hanging crepe paper, and big red Magic Marker letters spelling out WELCOME HOME, JESSICA!
It’s really ugly, like the handiwork of any cruelly untalented ten-year-old. Except this is a cruelly untalented twenty-seven-year-old man and, like I said, he’s trying.
“I love it,” I tell him. He’s standing there with the most excited, delighted smile on his face, so I give him a huge hug and say how I love the artist.
It’s a happy moment for both of us, and Todd practically hugs me off my feet.
“How did work go today?” I ask, throwing my papers down on the hall chair piled too high with dumped stuff ever to behave like a real chair.
“Who had time to write?” He gives me one of his irresistible smiles—not that I need anything more than the beautiful sign.
“Oh, God, I don’t want to be around next week when your editor starts calling.” Then I see the magnificent chocolate mousse cake on the kitchen table. With a good quarter of it missing.
“Cara?”
“Yeah. She wanted to leave some kind of pear tart, too, but I said you were allergic to pears.”
“Good thinking,”
I hate when these things happen. Steven, Cara’s husband, is my own brother and I love him, but he’s such a shit. “I assume the double dessert means he’s starting another affair. What is it with him that he keeps wandering off? And where is he going?”
Todd shrugs. Even if he did know, male camaraderie would keep him silent. “It’s a pretty good cake,” he says. “Want a piece?”
“No, thanks.”
I’ve always looked up to Steven. And he has done great. He’s just turning thirty, and he’s up for junior partner in the most prestigious law firm in Sweet Valley. But he’s a better lawyer than husband. As a husband he’s an incurable wanderer. Even in sch
ool he was like that. There were always lots of girls. He’d go from one to another and never seemed to find what he was looking for. His wife, Cara Walker, the girl he ended up with after his first love, Tricia Martin, died of leukemia, keeps herself totally in the dark, baking. Obsessively. There’s no one in the neighborhood who, hard as they try, can escape her endless desserts. Any new dalliance on Steven’s part is sure to bring out a fresh festival of brilliant recipes. The latest gossip, compliments of Caroline Pearce, is that he’s involved with Lila Fowler, Ken Matthews’s wife.
I don’t buy that; she’s definitely not Steven’s type. Who is, though, I haven’t figured out yet.
Ken is our local celebrity, our own NFL star. I think he’s the dearest guy, completely oblivious to his fame and good looks, and unfortunately, his roving wife. He had an injury earlier in the year and has been out for the season. The only good side of any of this mess was that there was sure to be a fabulous new chocolate mousse cake from Cara on everyone’s dinner table.
I can’t even have a bite without tasting her unhappiness.
“About tonight. I think Jessica will be too wiped out. I just don’t think she’s going to be up to going to Winston’s. Okay with you?”
I hardly have to ask. Any excuse not to go to Winston’s works for Todd.
We hardly ever see Winston anymore because Todd isn’t crazy about his former best friend. In fact, very few people are. The money he made from a dot-com venture with Bruce Patman changed him radically. Now he has very few real friends, mostly hangers-on, a coterie of people who think they can get something out of him. But he makes them pay a high price—their dignity. Still, the ones who stay probably didn’t have much of it to begin with.
Even before the money thing, Todd and Winston had some kind of falling-out. It happened in the spring of our senior year at Sweet Valley U. I never knew what it was about, but I know it didn’t have anything to do with us.
Actually, it was a strange time for Todd and me that had nothing to do with Winston; it was the closest we’d ever come to breaking up. And it wasn’t over a disagreement and nothing unusual had happened. We were doing the same things we always did, but suddenly our separate lives seemed to be eating into our together time. It wasn’t only the physical separation; it was the emotional distance I was beginning to feel. I thought maybe the relationship was ending.
I was waiting for my heart to break, but strangely, it didn’t. Todd must have sensed something, because I felt him watching me more intently than usual.
It took me a bit until I was ready to talk to him about it. But just before I did, there was a radical change, the distance between us suddenly closed, and it was as it had always been—we were together and possibly even closer. There was passion again. As for the Winston problem, I just figured Todd was beginning to know the real Winston, the man he would become. That would have been reason enough.
It was around that time that Bruce Patman and I were becoming really good friends. Close enough that I would have talked about this, but I never did. I was on the verge so many times, but for some reason, I held back. Even now I don’t know why. Maybe because he and Todd were old friends, it seemed—I don’t know—disloyal.
And then it solved itself. Now I have it all. Plus, the other most important person in my life is coming here this very day. I only wish it weren’t so unhappy for Jessica. But, I tell myself, one of Jessica’s best qualities is her ability to almost finger snap unhappiness away and move on. At least she could do that as a kid. Well, whatever happens, I’m here for her.
Here for her.
How could she have been so blind? Elizabeth thought. Well, not anymore.
Suppose she could find a way to satisfy her special need, pay Jessica back, and save the dumb guppy Todd, who really didn’t deserve her kindness, from the shark’s mouth? Even if the guppy was a shithead, it was normal to want to save the guppy. Additionally, it would tailor the revenge a bit closer to Elizabeth’s sense of decency.
Maybe decency was pushing it too far. It was still a rotten thing to do, but why should she be the only loser? Okay, she still wouldn’t be the Elizabeth everyone knew and loved, but maybe that girl was a woman now and finished being the patsy everyone took advantage of.
And after all, when it came to Jessica, she would be revealing only what was there to be revealed. And maybe saving both of them from a big mistake.
Taking it another step, it would give Todd a small taste of what she had suffered.
But would Liam do it?
Not if he knew what he was supposed to be doing. She had told him the whole story, but he still wouldn’t think she could be so low and devious. And if he suspected some ulterior motive, Liam was not the kind of guy who would take part in some weird revenge scheme.
But he was an actor, and he might want to please a reporter and the reporter’s friend, the playwright, especially if she put it to him the right way. Using some of her storytelling talent, she might be able to make it sound almost altruistic, like Save the Guppy.
Finally Elizabeth had to take half a Valium to shut down her brain activity, which was dancing all over the place. For the first time in months, she went to sleep not feeling so hopeless. Crazy, but not hopeless.
In the morning, the idea, even just thinking it, was repulsive. It was completely off the wall, underhanded and devious, something she would never want to be involved in. The more she thought about it, the more it sounded like fiction, not real life. It was comforting to know that she wasn’t that kind of monster.
Taking Liam was a nice idea. He was planning to be out there sometime anyway. If it worked out that he could come with her, great, but it was nothing more than that.
She’d made up her mind; there was no way she would miss her grandmother’s eightieth birthday.
Maybe all the thinking wasn’t a waste of time. Maybe one day she would use the idea in a novel.
8
Sweet Valley
Jessica worked for MYFACEISGREEN, an environmental promotion company that helped introduce new, green beauty products for the popular cosmetics market. Though the company had started less than four years earlier, it already had an impressive client list of major companies like Revlon, Almay, and L’Oréal, who wanted to break into the green market.
MYFACEISGREEN had offices in Chicago and New York, but the home office, now fifty strong, was in Sweet Valley because its main financial backing had come from Richard Fowler, Lila’s father. But if that contact helped Jessica get the job in the beginning, after two months, the CEO, Doug Spender, saw he had a genuine, runaway talent on his hands and acted accordingly by putting Jessica in charge of his biggest markets, Los Angeles and San Diego.
It was a tricky move that put her ahead of the owner’s daughter, but Lila had so little interest in her father’s company that she barely noticed Jessica’s new role on the days she deigned to come in. Besides, it gave Lila someone fun to lunch with.
Since the planning and organizing was done in Sweet Valley, Jessica had to do a lot of traveling back and forth, mostly by car, to L.A. and San Diego. And it was only on those long, solitary trips that she was able to torture herself with her Elizabeth agony in peace.
Jessica had started working for MYFACEISGREEN right after she got back from France, and though she had been at the company only six months, she knew she was in the right place. Ironically, the only reason she had studied communications at SVU was because it looked like it wouldn’t interfere too much with her busy social life. As luck would have it, it interfered like crazy; she loved it. She could socialize and advertise all at once by syncing her Twitter and Facebook accounts for both. She was a natural and seemed to know everything just by feel, even before she was taught.
Jessica had been put in charge of selecting and organizing debut cosmetics, which meant investigating the products and deciding how they would be marketed. Her first attempt was with a seaweed mask that was actually made of a sheet of raw seaweed and formed to fit the face when moi
stened. She debuted it in L.A., using models who dressed in gowns and funky plumes and pretended they were at a masked ball.
The Los Angeles Times came and liked it so much they used it for their lead story in the fashion section. Additionally, the product worked to some degree as a skin refreshment, leaving a bright, clean look to the skin. It was definitely hypoallergenic and about as green as you could get. Almay was very happy with the way she handled it.
After that, only Jessica could work on their products. Now she had a lifetime supply of unused seaweed masks and had discovered that by toasting them on top of the stove she could crisp them up enough to eat as a snack. Even Todd liked to nibble on them when he wrote at home. At least they were healthier than bacon bits, and besides, she felt too guilty to throw a gift out.
She had graduated to her own office with a window and became, for Jessica, a workaholic. That was her other protection from the Elizabeth agony, her work.
She actually loved it and was very comfortable with her colleagues. In fact, Jessica was a very different person at the office. Because she was known to be exemplary at her work, she was well respected and one of the first people to be consulted about new product promotions—not just by the junior staff, but often by people who had been in the business for years, especially Michael Wilson, a vice president who had been brought over from the Chicago office. He thought Jessica was brilliant, and even though he’d been in the business for twelve years, he was always interested in hearing her ideas.
No one here looked at her as if she were still high school Jessica, half a twin—and not the best half, either, ex-cheerleader and, it has to be said, a somewhat shallow person. But if they did they would be wrong. Jessica was every bit as smart as Elizabeth, but had a totally different style. Hers was a fabulous style, adorable, lively, and very underestimated.
Most of the people in the office were new to Sweet Valley and had no idea about her background. She was not the lesser of the twins, because hardly anyone knew she had a twin. It was the first time in her life she was being taken seriously as her own person. Maybe it mattered that Elizabeth wasn’t around. There could be no comparisons.
Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later Page 10
