Lola Carlyle's 12-Step Romance

by Danielle Younge-Ullman

  Talia notices me first, breaks off midsentence and shushes the group. Soon everyone is quiet and staring at the freak show also known as me.

  “Oh, hey guys,” I say, as if it’s totally normal and apropos for me to be wandering around crying, limbs shaking, and wearing nothing but a sheet.

  Talia’s eyes widen, her mom looks away, and her sisters stare.

  Adam stands up and starts toward me. So does Wade.

  “Don’t mind me.” I put up a hand, force a smile, and find myself speaking an octave higher than usual. “I’m just…looking for the toga party. Ha ha ha.”

  Adam glares at Wade, stopping him in his tracks, and keeps coming.

  “Lola, are you all right?”

  “Perfect! Great! By the way, my massage was just totally, totally relaxing.”

  “You were only in there for ten minutes.”

  “Well, I reached such a deep level of relaxation that I cut it short. I figured any more relaxed and I’d be dead. Now, I just need…” I wipe at my face, almost lose the sheet, cast about for an escape route.

  Adam reaches me, puts a hand on my arm, and I yelp.

  “Don’t touch me! There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “I didn’t say there was.”

  Wade hovers nearby like he kind of wants to help but kind of also thinks I’m a freak. This whole get-to-know-each-other-in-rehab idea was terrible, obviously. First I make the most asinine AA speech ever and now this. He’s never going to fall in love with me.

  “I’m perfectly fine,” I insist again. “I just didn’t like the massage.”

  Now Talia’s on her feet, coming toward us, but Adam, who can’t see her but obviously has some kind of Spidey sense, puts a hand behind him and waves her back.

  “Talia, Wade—maybe you’d like to show your friends and families the dining hall,” he says. “Or the vegetable garden.”

  “Yes!” I say as they’re leaving. “Because that’s what we do when the crazy people get loose around here. Pick vegetables.”

  There are approximately two seconds of quiet before the door behind me opens and Rose steps out.

  I recoil.

  Adam looks from one of us to the other, then she reaches out her hand, palm open. In it is my Daddy’s Girl bracelet.

  “You left this,” she says.

  I snatch it from her.

  “If you’d just come back, maybe we could…”

  I never hear the rest of her sentence because I’m pushing past her, back through the door she’s left open, and running. I find a stairwell and dash up three flights of stairs and stop at the top, out of breath and hoping not to pass out.

  I lean my bare upper back against the wall, enjoying the cold, then let the ball of clothing in my arms drop to the floor in front of me. I bend over and hunch with my hands on my knees, trying to still the shaking and hold back the new crop of tears that wants to come.

  But it’s the thoughts I can’t stop.

  I am an idiot. Again. Still.

  I know better than to need things from people or to put myself in such a vulnerable position with my dad. Normally I know better. But hearing his voice in combination with everything being so intense here—I let it get to me. And now I’m letting it get to me again when what I’m supposed to be doing is… Well, I’m not even sure anymore.

  Regardless, I need to get a grip.

  “Lola? Lola!” Adam comes sprinting up the stairs and looks very relieved when he rounds the final corner and sees me huddled against the wall. “Why didn’t you answer?”

  “You were coming anyway.”

  Adam lowers himself onto the step across from me, never taking his eyes off my face.

  “Talk to me.”

  “I don’t need to talk. I need to get a life.”

  “Lola…you should go back to the spa and talk with Rose.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “You will if I make you.”

  “Yeah? I’m practically naked under this sheet. You try that and it’s going to get awkward.”

  “I have to carry you naked through the mansion, it’s going to get really awkward.”

  “You would not.”

  “You don’t think?”

  “No way,” I say, but actually I’m not sure. “Look, I don’t know her and I’m not interested in lying around crying with my face in a freaking doughnut hole. I just need to use all my new coping skills to prevent stupid things from getting to me.”

  “Is it the fight with your dad?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “All right…” he says, then thinks for a minute. “I have an idea.”

  “No offense, Adam, but I don’t always like your ideas.”

  He smiles. “No, this one is totally… Well, you’ll like it because it could get me in a lot of trouble.”

  I look at him, feel a little spark of humor coming back.

  “Really?”

  “Trust me.”

  “All right. Don’t make me regret it.”

  “Excellent,” he says, and gets to his feet. “First, I’ll go down one flight, you…ahem…get dressed.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I’m taking you somewhere.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Five minutes later, we’re leaving from the staff door and heading to Adam’s car.

  Fifteen minutes after that, we’re sitting at the open window in a tiny beachside café, looking at the chalkboard menu.

  “Did you just break me out of rehab?” I say.

  “Koch told me you have unique needs,” he says with a devilish smile I’ve never seen before. “I’m just trying to meet them.”

  “As my mentor.”

  “As your very dedicated mentor,” he says. “Look, I know it’s been a rough few days. I felt like you needed to get out of there. And I figure I can handle you.”

  “Is that so? You don’t think I’m going to go wild and, like, do a stick-’em-up on this place demanding all their coffee and dark chocolate, and then take off down the coast?”

  “No.” He gives me a half grin. “Not that it wouldn’t be interesting to witness and not that I would put anything past you. But I don’t think you will.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m choosing to trust you.”

  “Oh.” Sudden, un-asked-for tears well up in my eyes, and I look away, blinking them back as fast as I can. “I’ll keep that in mind, then.”

  “Speaking of unique needs, what’s the coffee concoction you find so lacking in the Sunrise lounge?”

  “All of them, but especially the lattes. That machine is crap at making them.”

  “I’m an espresso guy myself. But I think the lattes are good here, too,” he says, pointing to the open kitchen and bar area. “See, they have a real machine with a human doing the foam.”

  My latte, when it comes, is steaming hot and perfectly foamy with a little design in the foam, and I sigh with pleasure at the normalcy of just sitting in a café.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “How old are you, Adam?”

  He tilts his head sideways and gives me a funny look.

  “What? It’s a normal question, isn’t it?”

  “I’m twenty,” he says. “If you must know.”

  “I’ll be eighteen in September,” I say.

  “I know,” he says.

  And then there’s kind of a long moment where we’re just looking at each other. It’s not comfortable, but it’s…not unpleasant, either. In fact, I would say it’s pleasantly uncomfortable, if that makes any sense.

  “Hey,” I say, looking for something to talk about before things go from pleasantly uncomfortable to unpleasantly uncomfortable. “I’ve been meaning to ask you—about your dad and that screenplay. Did it ever get made?”

  “Oh yeah,” Adam says with a bitter chuckle. “It got made. And my dad got paid and his name was on it.”

  “Well that’s good,
at least.”

  “Yes and no. What got made…was unrecognizable from his original script. Honestly, I hate to say it, but it was a piece of shit.”

  “Oh.” I wince. “And it tanked?”

  “As a matter of fact, no.” He shakes his head. “It was a hit.”

  “No way.”

  “Oh yeah, box office hit.”

  “Freaking Hollywood.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Okay, you have to tell me what it was,” I say. “I’ve probably seen it. I probably know people who’re in it.”

  He gives me a squirmy look, then shakes his head.

  “You won’t tell me?”

  “Lola, it was so bad…”

  “Come on. What is it—some kind of family shame?”

  “No, but…” He trails off, the look on his face confirming what his words are denying—he’s embarrassed.

  “Adam, it’s not your film. It sounds like it’s not even your dad’s film. Have I not told you an extraordinary amount of crap about my life? I mean, I’ll have you know I’ve told you more about my life than I’ve told anyone, probably.”

  He grimaces, then takes both my hands in his and says, “Okay. I’m trusting you.”

  “Wow.” I squeeze his hands back. “You’re making that a habit.”

  “Forth Shot,” he says. “It’s called Forth Shot.”

  “Forth Shot? Holy shit, Adam.”

  “I know. Craptastic. You saw it?”

  “Sure I saw it. You’re being modest—it was huge. Not…a great work of art or anything, but it was fun.”

  “Not for my family, it wasn’t. Critics hated it, and yet everybody still wanted him to write a sequel. He was done, though. How could he write a sequel to that?”

  “Mm. I see your point. Especially if it didn’t turn out anything like his original concept. But he was… He’d have had the cred to write something else, wouldn’t he? Or was it too late?”

  “Too late. Took his money and started drinking it. Et cetera.”

  “Et cetera being…?”

  “Shooting it, smoking it, snorting it.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So he had an artist crisis.”

  “Is that a thing?”

  “Are you kidding?” I say. “Artists do crises better than anyone. It should be a thing. You could, like, do a PhD on that and make it a thing.”

  “I’m not going to stay in school that long.”

  “I’m just saying you could. Anyway…Hollywood is a rough place.”

  “I can’t blame Hollywood,” Adam says. “I used to blame him. Like, why did he have to be such an idealist? Why did he have to be an idealist but also so weak? Now, though, I get how so much of it is the disease. He could have been in any career. I do think he cared too much about what people thought. Critics, his peers, complete strangers. I try not to do that.”

  “Care what people think?”

  “Strangers especially. Like why leave your measure of self-worth up to a bunch of people who don’t even know you? I’m never going to do that.”

  “Never?”

  “It’s wasted energy. Think about it. And it’s not just strangers—I try not to care what people think of me in general.”

  “How can you not care? How does that produce…a positive result, even, if you don’t care what other people think?”

  “I don’t mean I don’t care at all,” he says. “I mean if I’m making decisions from just knowing what’s right and wrong, or knowing what’s right for me to do in the moment, then the rest should hopefully…fall into place. Like this—I sneak you out of rehab—yeah, it’s against the rules. Someone might judge me for it, I might get in shit. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that…” He gazes out the window, then shrugs. “They weren’t there when I made the decision. They’re not in my shoes and they don’t get it. But I do. So if I get in trouble or whatever, I can live with it.”

  “But if you made a decision you weren’t so sure about?”

  Faking your way into rehab, for example…?

  “Well…then you do end up caring, because there’s doubt involved. Hopefully that’s the moment to admit you were wrong and apologize.”

  “Such a mature vision of the world you have for a twenty-year-old,” I say, with a grimace. “All good decisions and taking responsibility and apologizing…”

  “My mom says I was born an old man.”

  “You totally were. You are.”

  “Oh yeah? How old, then? Old-old?”

  “Yeah, like a grandpa.”

  “Oh, no.” His look of dismay is almost comical.

  “No, I’m kidding,” I say, laughing. “More…old like some friend’s older brother I’m not supposed to have a crush on who tries to pretend I don’t exist.”

  “You have a crush on a friend’s older brother?”

  “No, I’m just trying to give you a pertinent example,” I say, and then feel myself starting to blush as I realize I just made it sound like I have a crush on him. “Although that’s not quite right…uh…as a comparison. My point…my point is more that you seem my age sometimes, and then you turn into…you know, the bran muffin.”

  “Nice.”

  “From the cupcake. And that’s what tempts me to try to provoke you all the time.”

  “I see,” he says with a quirky half smile. “Well, consider me provoked.”

  “I’m a pain in the ass, I know.”

  “It’s all good.”

  “I should be better.”

  “Probably.” He nods, but he’s smiling at least.

  “I guess maybe I—wait—is this some kind of stealth therapy?”

  He laughs, his brown eyes warm. “Nah. Just two people out for coffee, talking about life.”

  “You know what I like? And that I’m surprised I like?”

  “What?”

  “That this isn’t just any old bullshit conversation that I might have with one of my friends. It’s about something.”

  “I kinda suck at bullshit conversations, so that’s good,” he says. “Although I can talk music and pop culture all day long, and I don’t think that’s bullshit, necessarily.”

  “Agreed. We should do that sometime,” I say, leaning forward.

  “Sure,” he says.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Good…” he says, and then just sips his espresso and waits.

  “So,” I say when the silence has gone on too long. “Back to this not caring thing of yours… Don’t you think our survival—whether we thrive or not—is based on whether people like us? Or approve of us? Both my parents—their careers wouldn’t exist without people wanting to see their work, and people have to like their work to want to see it, and people have to like them to want to see their work in the first place. That’s true about a lot of jobs, not just in the arts.”

  “But if they’re thinking about people liking them while they’re doing the work—how do you think that affects the work?” Adam says. “Particularly in the arts?”

  “Hmm… By the way, I love you for this latte.”

  “Oh, now you love me? Don’t you hate me most of the time?”

  “I’m taking a break from hating you, Adam.”

  “It’s that good?”

  “Yes. But you don’t really think I hate you, do you?”

  “No,” he says, and then we have another one of those pleasantly uncomfortable moments.

  “About what you were saying earlier.” I clear my throat. “When you think about it, every artist of any kind has to live with that I-don’t-give-a-shit-what-you-think-but-I-need-you-to-love-me paradox.”

  “Hence…” Adam holds his hands palms up. “Addiction. Lots of dead actors, addicted or dead-too-young musicians, writers, painters. Not everyone can live with that paradox.”

  “No, I guess not…”

  We get quiet again, finishing our drinks, and I think about my parents from the perspective of all of this. They’re not awesome par
ents, but both of them are, consciously or not, living with a lot of psychological stress, and you need to be strong to handle it. And maybe in your fight to handle it, you lose sight of other things. Like your kids.

  After, Adam says we have a little more time before he thinks we’ll be missed, so we walk out to the cove. It’s windy and overcast, but because of that, it’s deserted. We leave our shoes behind, walk along the waterline for a bit, and then I follow him onto a rocky outcrop that stretches into the ocean. Midway out is a larger, flat-ish rock, and Adam sits down on it. I join him.

  “I wanted to ask…” Adam says tentatively.

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t want to upset you again, and I really don’t mean it as stealth therapy as you called it, but I have this feeling you might need to talk…”

  “About earlier?”

  He nods. “Something really got to you today.”

  I look away, then back to meet his eyes. “I just got needy,” I admit. “It was neediness and loneliness and wishing things were different.”

  “On the phone, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop—”

  “Sure you did; you were standing right there,” I say, but without rancor.

  “All right, I was listening,” he admits. “In case you forgot, I’m supposed to be looking out for you.”

  “I know.”

  “You said something about being stuck in the airport?”

  “Oh…” I look down, feeling a stab of shame. No one needs to know, not even Adam, about how I’m such a loser that my own father forgets me on a regular basis. No one needs to know he’d forget me overnight on an empty studio set and then again, years later, when I’ve flown across the country to see him. No one needs to know how scared I was sitting in the airport all those hours or how humiliating it was to call Jo-Ellen only to have her inform me Dad was actually on vacation in Cabo.

  I never talk about it. I’m not going to talk about it now.

  I lift my head and tell Adam the fake, happier version of the story—the one I tell everyone, if I have to tell it at all—about how Jo-Ellen messed up his flights and it wasn’t his fault, but how I flipped on my dad anyway, causing a big argument.