The house was like an Italian palace, with a stately 1920s quality that Escobar was in love with. The patio, overlooking the bay, had fans with blades as wide as palm fronds, spinning lazily above the cast and crew as they finished the last of their muffins, bagels, and fruit cups from catering and prepared to shoot the morning’s scene.
Chela’s eyes were wide and excited at the sheer number of hard-bodied extras assembled before enough cameras to shoot the moon launch. It takes a village, all right.
“Who’s starring in this?” Chela asked me.
“Trust me, nobody you’d know.”
Chela grinned. “Good. You never want big stars in a horror movie. No offense.”
“Why not?”
Chela looked up at me as if I was crazy. “Hel-lo? ’Cause they suck, that’s why.”
“Johnny Depp was in the original Nightmare on Elm Street. Kevin Bacon was in Friday the Thirteenth.”
“Don’t count. At the time, they were nobodies.”
I chuckled, sipping from my latte. “You sound like you’ve got it all mapped out.”
“B and I came up with Horror Movie Rules.”
Poor Bernard had been left behind in L.A., and I was afraid he’d been forgotten. The boy had transformed Chela from street to geek. “Let’s hear them,” I said.
“One, no big stars. Two, it has to be rated R. PG-13 horror is a waste of film.”
“Not a problem in this one.” Freaknik would be lucky to get past the MPAA, considering the nudity and incest themes between the leads, who played a brother and sister. Just the thought of their scenes together made my skin crawl.
“Three, absolutely no CGI monsters. CGI’s great for talking animals, but it isn’t scary. Too fake. You always know the monster isn’t real.”
A laugh rumbled behind us. I knew the voice, but his laughter was rare.
“Fantástico,” Gustavo Escobar said. “A visionary. Where was she when I was fighting the studio suits? Who is this thoughtful young lady, Tennyson?” Escobar took off his round-framed black sunglasses to peer at Chela more closely.
Chela’s face turned deep crimson, and she moved closer to me, nearly hiding. Her shyness pleased me; once upon a time, Chela had been anything but shy.
“Gus, this is my daughter, Chela,” I said before she could speak. “She’s in high school.”
The word daughter was fudging. I’d been raising Chela since she was fourteen, but her birth mother had refused to sign the adoption paperwork when I tracked her down, and we’d never made it official after Chela’s eighteenth birthday. As a recent graduate, Chela probably wanted to stomp on my foot for saying she was in high school, but Escobar’s presence mesmerized her. His aura made both men and women stare. Escobar carried himself as if he harbored the wisdom of the world.
He leaned close to Chela’s face and spoke to her with a storyteller’s voice. “No big stars, sí. The bigger they are, the fewer chances they take. A PG-13 rating only announces to the world that you won’t make them uncomfortable. CGI monsters? As the lovely one says, they’re merely shadows on the wall. No substance. Only makeup and prosthetics will frighten us. But you forgot one rule.”
“What?” Chela said.
Escobar winked at me. “A black man must die, preferably first,” he said. “Preferably to save a white female of child-bearing age—the most valued member of our society. This sacrifice gives viewers a pang of loss and foreboding. Politically incorrect for a time, yes, but an important statement in our culture. Remember what Kubrick did in The Shining.”
How could I forget? I’d read Stephen King’s novel, so I was surprised when poor Scatman Crothers caught an ax in his chest as soon as he walked through the door. Didn’t happen that way in the book. Kubrick and Escobar apparently shared the same philosophy.
“The Sacrificial Negro,” I said blandly.
Escobar’s eyes lit up. “Exactamente! Rule Number Four.”
While Chela giggled, I almost missed Escobar’s gaze flickering to her chest. At least he had the courtesy to pretend he wasn’t checking her out in front of me.
“Kubrick broke the first rule,” I corrected him. “Jack Nicholson. A-list star.”
“Everyone knew Nicholson was crazy, so it worked, mijo,” Escobar said, shrugging. Then he pinched my cheek like a child’s before walking away.
Escobar’s novelty had worn off. Good thing he moved on, because my muscles were stone. I have little tolerance for a man putting his hands on me, and he was too close to my age to use the Spanish term for “my son,” mijo. I almost told Escobar that Freaknik wouldn’t shine The Shining’s shoes.
“Ten?” Chela whispered. “That was the coolest effing conversation I’ve ever had in my life.” Effing was her boyfriend’s contribution to Chela’s vocabulary, since he rarely used profanity. She pulled out her cell phone. “I have to text B . . .”
I knew that feeling, having something to share and the right person to share it with. April was the first person I told anything I was willing to tell. April would hear about Escobar’s little monologue, too. Later.
The pool churned with extras, and long rows of reclining beach loungers transformed the patio from a home to a hotel. I was costumed in Geek Chic: khaki shorts, leather sandals, and a loose short-sleeved, button-down shirt, with the requisite tortoiseshell glasses. My character is on a working vacation when the outbreak hits, conveniently in place to try to explain the epidemiology before he falls victim to an infected party girl’s enhanced pheromones.
Four women lay in a row on loungers, all of them topless, but there was so much nudity on the set that most people walked past them without a glance. We had their chests memorized.
“Classy stuff, Ten,” Chela said, gazing at the display.
“Told you it was nothing to get excited about. Just a paycheck.”
Gustavo was in his director’s perch inside the car of the crane that would help him oversee the high shot he wanted, as if he were shooting Citizen Kane. I could have made three movies for what the studio had given Escobar. The crane was still on ground level as Escobar huddled close to Brittany, ostensibly with last-minute instructions as he swept his arm across the crowd scene to illustrate his vision.
“Gus, what’s the holdup?” a woman said, elbowing her way past the huddled crew to the crane car. “Do you want to get stuck with noon lighting again?”
Louise Cannon, Escobar’s technical adviser, was also a producer and one of the few people on the set who talked to him with no fear of consequences. She was slightly younger than Escobar, probably in her mid-thirties. She had raven hair and dark eyes, but she was a gringa from Fort Lauderdale who had met Escobar in film school after a stint as a cop. I research the folks I work with, since it pays to know about the people who know you. She’d parlayed her forensics work into a steady stream of film and TV consulting gigs.
“Why don’t you do your job and leave me to mine?” Escobar snapped.
“These girls are waiting out here naked while you’re taking your time,” she said.
An uneasy hush came over the set, and Chela gawked at Cannon. Escobar had a temper. I’d seen it on display in his shouting matches with his assistant director, but he only smirked at Louise with pursed lips and waved his hand to scatter the cast and crew to their posts.
“Cuidate,” he told Brittany gently, kissing both of her cheeks. Escobar muttered a few unflattering things about Cannon beyond her hearing. Another gesture, and his crane whirred, rising high above the patio. Everyone assumed Escobar was screwing his lead, but I’d put my money on Cannon. There was more to them than their public arguments.
“I want to be her,” Chela whispered to me, nodding toward Cannon.
“I’ll introduce you,” I said, distracted, as I ferried Chela off to the fence that separated onlookers from the cast. The crowd beyond the fence was mostly teenagers and service workers. Locals. I wanted Chela stashed somewhere safely in view while I was working. I didn’t want to look up to find her sunbathin
g topless because she was invited to make her film debut.
“Behave yourself,” I told Chela, wagging my finger.
“What am I, six years old? Bite me.”
Strangers might not have understood what Chela and I meant to each other, but every barb from her concealed a history. As April reminded me, I’d rescued a precious soul from the edge of the world. We’d all been disappointed when her birth mother robbed me of my gift to Chela before her eighteenth birthday—“Told you she was a loser bitch,” she had said with a shrug, hiding the depths of her true feelings—and I’d sacrificed a lot to track the woman down. But I could adopt Chela much more easily now, if she would let me.
“As soon as we get home, you’re signing those papers,” I told her.
“Not if you lie and tell anybody else I’m still in high school.”
“Just do it for me. And Dad. He wants you to have his name.”
Dad was her soft spot. Chela had been raised by an ailing grandmother until she was eleven, and she’d loved Dad when there’d hardly been anything left of him. Chela shrugged. “Maybe,” she said, which we both knew meant yes.
The last thing I heard before the camera started rolling was Chela’s excited squeal after a young woman called her name.
ONLY ONE PERSON called her “Che-LAAA,” with the accent on the end, drawing her name out like a song a boy band would sing. Chela hadn’t heard the voice in years, but she knew it like yesterday, out of time and place and yet so right. She turned around, wondering if Maria was only a ghost bumping around in her head, but then she saw Maria angling her bone-thin shoulders as she slipped toward her through the crowd like a fish. “I do not believe this shit,” Maria was saying. “It’s you!”
They both screamed so loudly that a guy from the movie crew glared and waved at them, but it was hard to be quiet as they hugged. Most of the memories they shared were bad, but once upon a time, she and Maria had been each other’s only clean harbor in an ocean of filth. Maria no longer wore bubble-gum lip gloss or cheap knockoff Chanel swiped from Walgreens, one flirting with the cashier while the other stuffed her purse, but Chela could smell those old days on Maria.
They were Maria and the Kid again. Maria was the one who had given her the street name Chela, which she said was sexier than Lauren, a new beginning.
“What are you doing in Miami?” they said, and laughed when they both said, “Jinx!”
Chela was taller than Maria now, who seemed oddly petite beside her, no longer towering over her because she was two years older and had navigated the streets three years longer. Although she couldn’t be older than twenty, Maria looked at least twenty-five, with lines framing her eyes that had been absent in L.A., making her look slightly sleepy in a way that rest wouldn’t help. She was probably stoned, Chela remembered. Maria was dressed like a pop star in shredded jeans and a glitter bikini top, and she looked as if she lived a pop star’s long hours.
But she was still gorgeous. Maria’s hair shone like onyx against olive skin, hanging long across her bare shoulders. Maria had seemed so beautiful to Chela that she’d once been confused by her emotions, wondering if she liked girls. Later she’d realized that the floating sensation she felt around Maria only meant that she wanted to slip into Maria’s skin and experience the world from behind her eyes, never missing a moment of her. Not a sex thing—more like a spirit thing. If that was a girl crush, so be it.
“I’ve been partying with a millionaire all week,” Maria whispered in her ear. “He lives down the street, and he told me someone was shooting a movie. What are you doing here?”
“I’m here with my . . .” The word Dad had never seemed as wrong as now. “Friend,” she finished carefully. “He’s in the movie!”
They squealed and hugged again, the way Chela imagined two old friends might at their twenty-year high school reunion after they both learned they had married for love, had children they adored, held high-powered careers, and could still fit into their cheerleader skirts and sweaters.
The bald, fat guy on the crew who was closest to the fence glared again, his unappealing stomach jiggling beneath a tank top as he raised his finger to his lips to shush them. “Which one is your friend?” Maria said, scanning the crowded patio.
Ten was easy to spot, since he was wearing the most clothes.
“I’m not feeling the glasses,” Maria said, and Chela’s memory of Maria sharpened. Maria needed to be choosier, more discerning. She always found a defect to point out.
“That’s just for the part. He doesn’t really wear those.”
Maria nodded, relieved. “Oh, okay. Definitely fine, though. Nice face under there.” She nudged Chela. “Good body?”
Chela’s throat tightened. Ugh. “He’s not that kind of friend,” she said. “Ten’s more like a big brother. He looks out for me. I moved in with him and his dad a couple years back.”
“For reals?” Maria said, her voice hushed. She seemed confused by the concept, and Chela suddenly felt so sorry for both of them that grief stabbed her. The idea of a family almost seemed like a betrayal, since they had given up on the idea by the time they met. Families were people they saw on TV on those old sitcoms like The Cosby Show. Families were a lie.
How would she explain that her boyfriend was president of the chess club (“Wait—there’s a club at your school just for people who play chess?”) or that she’d graduated with a 3.8 GPA and that her mailbox had been flooding with recruitment letters from places like UCLA and Spelman, falling over themselves to woo her (“You mean colleges are writing to you?”).
And there was no way in hell Chela could explain that she and Bernard had never had sex—even though they were creative about their chastity—because he was born again, saving himself for marriage. She didn’t think Bernard’s resolve would last much longer, but she wasn’t pushing, either. Sex was no mystery to her, but she preferred romance. She liked holding hands and falling asleep with her head on his shoulder at the movies. Besides, if she had sex with Bernard, it would only be fair to tell him about the revolving door in her panties, and wouldn’t he run for the hills when he knew? Chela didn’t keep the number in her head, afraid to do the calculations. Too many.
“Who’s your millionaire friend?” Chela asked, deflecting.
Maria flipped her hair over her right shoulder the way she always had when she was about to tell a story she was proud of, true or not. “Twenty-six. Totally ripped. His father’s company flies executive jets, so they’re rolling. He says he’s gonna fly me to Jamaica. And he never gets tired—I mean, he can go all night without stopping.”
In another life, back when Chela had been working, Ten had rescued her from rapper M.C. Glazer, who’d put her up in his mansion and promised she could live with him forever. Now she understood how deluded she must have sounded to Ten. Maria’s millionaire might not be paying her in cash, but he was a john.
Maria’s eyes sparked as if she’d seen Chela’s thoughts. “We’re not exclusive or nothing,” Maria said. “We just like to party. We met at Phoenixx.” Maria suddenly grabbed Chela’s wrist, her eyes wide with a revelation. “Maria and the Kid! We should party tonight. Have you been to Phoenixx? Chica, it’s the best club on the East Coast, like the best clubs in Vegas. All the stars go there. You won’t believe it.”
Chela had been about to suggest that they should go to the beach or have lunch on Ocean Drive, where they could hear their conversation. Chela wanted to know where the lines radiating from the corners of Maria’s eyes had come from. If she was still in the Life. Chela hadn’t been to a club in years.
Her lame California driver’s license, which clearly stated her age as eighteen, was the only ID she carried. The Kid was dead. Nothing about going to a club sounded like a good idea.
“I don’t have a fake ID,” Chela said in her oh well, end of story voice.
Maria laughed, giving her a playful push that nearly knocked her into the toddler-wrangling woman next to her. “You’re kidding, right? Please. I
can hook you up with an ID that could get you through an airport. Takes ten minutes. We’ll pick it up on the way. Just bring an extra fifty bucks. Let’s meet at ten thirty, okay?”
Chela’s heart surged as she imagined a hypnotic bass beat and flashing lights, a dance floor writhing with bodies, and perfumed sweat fogging the air.
My, my. Seemed the Kid wasn’t dead after all.
She hadn’t been to a club in years! And hadn’t she been meaning to get a fake ID so she could sip an appletini once in a while? If people could go to war at eighteen, they damn sure should be able to have a drink.
Maybe it was true that people could feel eyes when they were staring hard enough. Something made Chela look back toward the patio just as she heard the director yell, “Action!”
Ten was staring straight at her, as if he had heard every word.
WHEN YOU’VE SPENT as much time as I have near trouble, you can smell it from a distance.
“An old friend and I are going to hang out tonight,” Chela told me after dinner. The pitch of her voice rose slightly as she tried too hard to sound casual. Even Dad caught it, glancing away from our living room’s fifty-inch flat-screen. “I’ll be home late. Just letting you know.”
My stomach gurgled, but not from the food. We’d just finished a boatload of raw fish from Sushi Rock down the street; even Dad had tried his first taste of raw fish. Any parent of a teenager knows you have to pick your battles, but it’s more important to know how to pick.
This was a test I’d been dreading. I thought of all the times I’d postponed talks with Chela about making good decisions because she was doing so well. Stayed in school and graduated with good grades. Picked a nerdy boyfriend who, aside from wrestling meets, seemed to lack the slightest trace of testosterone. Save for a single internet incident I’d squashed by spying on her, Chela had stayed far away from her old life. Now I’d brought her old life back to her feet. I’d never met the girl Chela had been chumming with at the morning’s shoot, but if she wasn’t a prostitute, she’d missed her calling. Girls like that had supplied Mother, my old madam, with enough Stoli Elite vodka and real estate holdings to last two or three lifetimes. Takes one to know one, my Evil Voice taunted.
South by Southeast Page 3
