by Jones, Ayla
And in spite of the damage I’d so callously caused, the Andersons, still bandaged and bruised, had pushed for probation for me. They insisted I learn the consequences of my actions by volunteering at the TBI center where Camryn did her rehab. Going there was how I’d gotten close with Lea, too. “I needed to become friends with you so I could stop hating you,” she told me one day.
“She’s different now because of me. It took her a long time to get where she is developmentally and intellectually. They don’t know if she’ll ever be where she’s supposed to be, though.” Not everything I had shattered could be put back together with science. “I want to be there for her through it all, so I go to her rehab sessions almost every other Saturday.”
“Wow.” Charlie exhaled heavily several times. Probably trying to process. “You’re in her life. And her family lets you be there. Says a lot about all of you…”
“I hurt my father, too, that night. I had a few bumps and bruises and a headache, but I walked away. I was literally able to get out of my car on my own.” I sighed. “Those bottles you saw…that’s just my therapy. I destroy them. It’s how I deal.” Well, it was out. All of it. “There. That’s the story. That’s the past part.”
I kept my focus on the windshield. I probably sounded like a PSA, rehearsed and impassive. Inside, each word had been a bullet to my lungs. My throat. My heart. My chest was aching from my attempts to control my breathing. It made me think about what the hell our bodies would really look like if emotions showed scars.
He was quiet for a long time. Actually, it might have been seconds; it played out like years. “Nikki,” he said finally. Then he repeated my name when I didn’t look at him right away. I turned my head. Charlie was staring at me, deep grooves lining his brow.
I had told parts of that story over and over in AA to strangers, but in those musty church basements with stale pastries and cold coffee, the people understood. Everyone was weighed down by the horrors of addiction. Honesty was safe there. But outside in the world, I was just a monster. I pressed my lips together until they hurt. Until the splintering in my chest shrank back to the tiniest crack. “Even if we hadn’t had a conversation about stories today, I would’ve told you soon enough, if we had talked beyond today. I make a point to tell people before…they decide whether they want to know more about me, anyway. It’s only fair. Everyone has a line.”
Maybe other people waited for trust and stronger human bonds before sharing. But what was the point? I had done a terrible thing. Whether I told the story tonight or six months from now, that was immutable. A simple Google search would’ve unearthed it. “People judge me based on it, and I don’t blame them. I deserve it.” Welcome to my Fucked-Up, Charlie. Hope you enjoyed the tour. Don’t forget to tip your guide on the way out.
Leaning in, he said, “Well, unfortunately, tonight, that’s not what you’re getting. I guess you’re gonna have to deal.” He shrugged. I shifted my gaze to the parade of people on the other side of the street. The radio’s volume went up. I heard him fall back against the seat. Kings of Leon drowned out the city.
Chapter Five
Charlie
It was nine A.M. and I had made breakfast, cleaned my bathroom and the kitchen, and swept the balcony already. I was considering doing a fucking lap around the block.
These pills were a goddamn miracle.
Deacon yawned as he tossed me the bound pages of the How to Fuck up a Friendship script from an end table. He skirted around the couch, careful not to wake the blonde whoever splayed on it. “Hey, there’s toast, eggs, and bacon, if either of you wants any,” I whispered. I’d made enough breakfast for everyone on our entire floor.
“She’s going to be here long enough to put her clothes on. If she can eat in that time, too, sure.” He’d discovered an app that used geo location to pair him with hookup matches nearby, so our apartment had the same traffic flow as Miami International these days. “You’re not about to whine all morning about that again, are you?” he asked, ticking his head at the script. “Don’t think I can take you bitching about how terrible everything is, this early.”
“No worries.” Irritation had me clenching my teeth for a moment. Anything I ever showed concern about apparently gave rise to the need for a comment from him. “Will whine about you not shutting the fuck up, though…”
He chuckled. “Where’s your piece from last night?”
“Her name’s Nikki. She’s home, I guess.”
“Can’t close, Dara?”
I flipped him off. There was something about one of your friends stating that you couldn’t get women that made you instantly want to run down the list of everyone you’d ever been with. I wish I could say I had outgrown this crude game of smell my finger, but Deacon’s negative opinion of me about everything annoyed me, even trivial shit. Maybe because we’d been a lot closer once. “It wasn’t about trying to fuck her, Deek…”
“Yeah. Okay,” he said with a skeptical smirk. “You got turned down; it’s okay to admit.” And he lived for any opportunity for schadenfreude. Even when it didn’t really exist. “Not really okay. Funny for me, though.”
I shook my head as I thought about Nikki. After you told someone what was probably the worst thing you’d ever done, you had to be scared out of your mind, of what you’d said and of how they’d react. Of course, I’d wanted to have sex with Nikki when she got to Coco’s, but neither of us was thinking about it after that conversation, probably. She and I listened to the entire Kings of Leon EP twice last night, and then I just started talking. I told her long-winded, rambling shit about my life at prep school and Leeward. I talked like she hadn’t even told me about the drunk driving accident. I hoped she’d thought she was safe with me when I drove her to work, and I wanted her to still feel some kind of security after her story. That was hard to explain to a guy who always rejected any woman using a group photo as her profile pic from the get-go because he thought she was “probably the whale in the back hiding behind her skinny friends.” I was willing to bet he wouldn’t know blondie’s name without looking at his phone.
“All right, dude. Whatever you say,” I mumbled. I walked to the door, and instead of shoving the script into my messenger bag I thumbed through the twenty additional pages I’d written, after we got back from Coco’s this morning. I loved the solitude of the very early A.M., because I usually hit my stride then. Fallon’s meds made sleep just a small hump to get over when I wanted one page of a script to become ten. Ten to become whatever. Write. Write. Write. Until it was right. I reread what I’d written when I got in my car.
It was never right. It was never, ever right.
After a defeated sigh, I drove to Fort Lauderdale to meet up with Samira, and the traffic put me there about forty-five minutes later. She was sitting at a table on the patio of a restaurant along the A1A beach strip, bouncing Lux on her lap. Samira and I met during an Accepted Students event at Miami City Prep School. We paired up during freshman orientation a few months later, and we’d been friends ever since. We got co-dependent enough over the four years of high school to apply to the same ten colleges. Then we emailed our decisions to go to Leeward together…together. She was my Work Wife but also my Life Wife. Our friends always joked that Lux was secretly my child.
“Hey, Booger!” I took her from her mom, who had barely pulled her arms away before Lux almost wriggled out of mine. Shit! Why Samira thought I was the best person to raise her kid if she and Patrick died (when I couldn’t even manage holding all twenty pounds of her) was as big of a mystery to me as the universe.
“Be careful with her,” Samira said, brushing her dark, curly hair from her face. “She’s the muscle if the Hillington guys get fresh. Aren’t you, Sweets? And isn’t Sweets a much better nickname than Booger?” Lux giggled when Samira tapped her on the nose.
“Maybe, but you like everything your Uncle Charlie does, don’t you?” I kissed the top of her head.
“Don’t worry. Patrick’ll be here soon to get h
er.”
“Good. Then you can check out the new stuff.” The waiter set a plate in front of me with all my favorites piled on. Samira had ordered for me.
“You wrote more?” she asked as I retrieved the script from my bag. I pushed it toward Samira before Lux could tear it apart.
“Yeah, twenty pages…”
“You…what…twenty…what? What?” I could’ve typed twenty more. Brody had to tell me at one point this morning that I’d written one long paragraph, single-spaced, across several pages.
“I changed what I sent you, too.”
Sometimes, Samira looked at me like I was responsible for the existence of the stars. “How’d you even get this done?” Other times it was this snarl thing she was currently doing.
Drugs. I smiled. “I got inspired…”
“You don’t say…” The pages fluttered against her thumb.
“Everyone wants Sami and Chuck to have sex right away, but what if we just played the friendship out a little longer?” I shoved eggs and bacon into my mouth; nearly swallowed them whole. “She crawls into bed with him. She’s crying her makeup off, and her dress is twisted up around her thighs, right? They have a heart-to-heart in bed—something completely not sexual—but they’re in this completely sexual position, and completely unaware of it. Completely. I mean, wait, no, they are aware, but they finally have this intimate talk about what they mean to each other, but it’s platonic. Just two friends. Talking. But. But. But there’s this stuff you have to read in between the lines for…that safety they find in each other, no matter what.”
I remembered the urge to hold Nikki last night when she thought her sins were too big. Damn, her pain had burned the air. Like I always did with people, I invested the minute the words left her mouth. Judgment was never my first instinct. I tried to put things into perspective and see the big picture usually, but like most people, there was something about hearing that someone drank themselves stupid and then got behind the wheel of a car that got to me. Still, I saw someone remorseful when I looked at her last night. I might’ve thought differently about the whole thing if people had died, but falling asleep behind the wheel after not sleeping for days could’ve caused the same kind of accident. Plus, I remembered what my stepdad always said: “The world can do with one less cruel heart.”
I’d thought of her all morning after Coco’s as I wrote these new pages. She’d bared so much to me—a stranger, but maybe with a secret that dangerous, anyone she told was a stranger. That had to be so lonely. Did she have a Chuck? Who was there when makeup was all over her face and her clothes were a mess?
“Dude, are you trying to launch my kid into outer space? Quit bouncing her so hard,” Samira said. Lux was screaming with joy when my knees went down one final time. She didn’t seem as worried as her mom. Shit. Samira knew me. She knew it wasn’t like me to be so hyper. I had to calm the fuck down. At least the high would smooth out by the time we talked to the folks from Hillington. “Is this script Nikki related?”
“You’re making her sound like a medical condition.”
“Well, I’m just trying to understand what spurred this. I mean, I like those changes, but you can’t keep this up, Charlie. You’re working too hard.”
“But they have to approve them, and I just want them to be good. They don’t feel like they are. No matter what I do. And I keep thinking about some editor, with his goddamn Microsoft Word comment box and fear of offending their audience, scribbling snarky notes all over the pages. Then I’m gonna have to fly to L.A. and beat the shit out of someone…” I was joking.
Kinda.
Samira snorted. “Stop worrying, Charlie. Oh! I downloaded the pilot scripts for Confessions of a High School Dealer and Traitor from our cloud storage. We should pitch those.”
My heart skittered to a full stop. I stood with Lux pressed to my chest with one arm. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. They aren’t ready.”
She glared at me. “Yes, they are. I already emailed them to HMD. End of discussion. Now, don’t drop my baby and let me day-drink in peace, please.”
Within the hour Patrick came to pick up Lux, and Samira and I drove to our new office space in Coral Springs. We shared it with another company during the week, but it was cool as shit to have a business address. Right now we only had a white board, a conference table with a few chairs, and a landline number that used to belong to a guy named Ahmed (we knew because people still called for him sometimes), but it was ours.
We’d never done one of these official table reads before Hillington got involved. Normally, I just emailed scripts and we did a dry run of the entire episode on set and then turned the cameras on. Without the meds I would’ve been far more anxious. I never stopped hating hearing my words read aloud, especially when I didn’t have technical filming issues to distract me, but my brain had a gentle, relaxing buzz the entire time.
Kenny Chappelle, our new agent, came a while later, when the cast was gone. Several of his clients had landed deals with Netflix over the last year and HBO for several years now, so he was good at his job, but we just needed to see it. That was why we’d insisted on a Sunday call, to be present when he talked to Hillington. We wanted a script-to-series deal for both or either of the new shows, meaning they had to buy the entire series if they approved the pilot script. By the time the meeting was over, Kenny had gotten the proposed deal for us.
A few minutes after Patrick arrived for Samira, a group text popped up with a picture of Ghost and a chick he’d met last night.
Ghost: She’s gonna introduce me to her agent at LCM.
Nikki Johnson: The modeling agency? Oh that’s awesome. Have you modeled before? I could see that.
Everyone else either LOL’d or WTF’d.
Deek: OH, COME ON. Who the fuck is that? Who the fuck is telling Ghost he can model? I don’t know the number. This is Deacon. Stop that shit, whoever you are.
Nikki Johnson: Uh oh. Wasn’t supposed to say that? This time it was a private text to just me.
Me: Hell no. You realize we’re going to hear about this for the rest of our lives now, right?
Nikki Johnson: I see why Deacon is flipping out. LOL. How’d the meeting go?
Me: Pretty good. What are you up to? I was glad she’d texted me. Her openness had inspired an entire change in direction of my work. That was worth something to me. I really wanted to see her again, but last night had gotten heavy, and I didn’t know if things would be awkward for her today if I’d contacted her first.
Nikki Johnson: Grocery shopping for the week. Then heading to Art Crawl tonight. So was I. I started to tell her that, but the “typing” indicator bubble flashed. She was writing something. It went away the minute I stopped typing. Then there was nothing. Was she waiting for me to ask to go with her? Or was she going to ask? I sat in my car for a few minutes, staring at the screen. Shit. This really shouldn’t have been weird for two people who’d had a heart-to-heart the day they met.
Fuck it.
Me: Cool. Meet me there?
Nikki Johnson: You in? You want to come with me?
I laughed. The texts were nearly simultaneous.
Me: Yes
Nikki Johnson: Yeah
****
An amphetamine crash wasn’t as bad as a caffeine one, but it left me groggy and unable to sleep the rest of the afternoon. Not that midday sleeping would ever be allowed in our apartment. Deacon and Brody had a conversation for ten minutes by shouting across the hall to each other, while they were in their respective rooms. What the fuck.
So resting got put on the backburner like always. I sat at the dining room table and worked on some rewrites for How to Fuck up a Friendship. It was way too early to be obsessively watching my inbox for notes from someone at Hillington, but the threat of panic still hung in the distance like storm clouds.
The smell of marijuana wafted in from the open balcony door when Shaw walked in. Brody stayed out there, being a creep, watching our married neighbor swim. “My bro just finished t
he score for the episode, dude. It’s hot. A little rough but he’ll clean it up,” he said. He waved his iPad at me as he sat in the chair across from mine. All of the music on How to Fuck up a Friendship was original, thanks to Shaw’s brother.
“Let me hear it,” I said.
“Okay, here goes. The whole vibe is kinda old school. Lots of instruments. Not too much production.” It was for a Sami-centric episode, and something Samira had been looking forward to filming since we signed with Hillington. My voiceover narration guided the story of the series, but this was the first and only episode where it would be completely from her point of view. There was a scene where Sami masturbated when she found an erotic Tumblr blog on Chuck’s laptop. I was worried about Hillington cutting the scene. It was in my original manuscript, the story that eventually became season one, but Samira and I had played it a lot safer last season. Now, I wouldn’t let it go so easily.
But maybe I needed to rewrite it.
Just in case. To have a backup scenario I could live with if they hated it. Actually, now that I was reading the script, none of the entire episode was my best work. There were still some lines of dialogue I thought were mediocre.
“You look so excited right now,” Shaw said sarcastically.
“What?” I pulled my hands off the keyboard and smiled but it felt forced. “No, I am. I swear.” I looked back to the screen. Parts of the story diverted from Sami’s true personality, and overall it lacked the intensity I wanted the audience to feel in this episode. Fuck.
I gulped down. Was it time to start over completely?
Shaw groaned and I looked up again. “You gotta give me something, Charlie. You look like you hate it. You want him to rework it? He can, dude.”
“No…no. Sounds good.” It did, and his brother’s work deserved better than this script.
