I push his heavy hand off my shoulder and run with Norah straight up the path toward the trailer. Terrance got what he needed. I’m done here.
16
Don’t think for a second that I’ll forget this.
My mother’s note is written on the back of Chris’s:
Joss is in my room.—Chris
It’s mother/daughter double-crossing on one piece of paper.
Viva’s makeup bag and toothbrush are gone, so it’s official. I’ve got the room to myself for the night. But if I got what I wanted, then why do I feel so lousy?
“Joss! Joss!” Someone’s pounding on my door. “Open up!” It’s Jericho pushing his eye close to the peephole and Chris standing with him.
“What are you guys doing?” I open the door and squint at the overhead light with the mosquito corpses frying inside it.
“We just saw Viva hangin’ on Terrance all the way to his room!” Jericho cackles.
“I know. I know. That’s what you came to tell me?” I shake my head and start to close the door. “Haha. It’s so funny. My mom’s a big whoretauk. Big deal.”
“No.” Chris stops the door with his toe. “We came to tell you that you’re free. Get dressed.” He grins. “You’re coming out with us.”
* * *
The local kids flick their flashlights on once the streetlamps are far behind us. The path isn’t much. The grass on either side is as high as my hip. Ray and another boy are up ahead. Me and Jericho and Chris are in the middle, and Arianne and Ray’s girlfriend, Keri, are behind us. The sound of the ocean is fading under angry crickets. My ears itch from the sound.
“You should go up and walk next to him,” I hear Keri say to Arianne. I stick my elbows out to take up the trail. Single file, I want to tell her. He’s with me.
“Where are we going?” I tug Jericho’s shirt and whisper. “The locals don’t like me. I shouldn’t be following them into nowhere. Let’s just hang out the three of us. Besides, we’ve got a surf lesson tomorrow. I don’t want to stay out too late.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he whispers back. “And if anything goes down, I got my dad’s watch. It has a glow-in-the-dark compass.”
“Should we be worried about ticks?” I zip up my sweatshirt even though I’m warm.
“No. We should be worried about murderers. The Long Island serial killer. I read about it online and in the Daily Montauk. They found bodies up and down this stretch of beach. All girls, some were prostitutes.” Jericho slows and looks back at me. “About your size and hair color.”
“Shut it,” I say.
Chris pushes him on. “Keep walking, Jericho.”
“I’m not kidding. The news is everywhere. Haven’t you been reading the papers?”
What does he do? Read the newspaper with his coffee every morning? Once again, Jericho is the know-it-all and I’m the know-nothing.
“There is a Long Island serial killer,” says Arianne. “It’s true. And he is still out there.”
“You mean, out here,” says Jericho as we weave forward. “Serial killers always have a type.” His voice gets breathier as the path gets steeper. “Criminal psychologists say that serial killers are probably killing the same woman over and over in their minds, usually their mother.”
Now he’s making sense.
“They think this guy might be someone in the community, a fisherman, maybe, because the bodies were found wrapped in fishing net. Some of them are so badly decomposed that they’re unidentifiable. The killer is probably someone close. Someone very, very close.” He turns and grabs me so fast I lose my breath, and Arianne and Keri scream behind me. Jericho lets go of me to put his arm around Keri. “Easy, easy. I’m just kidding around. I’m sorry.” He walks with her, keeping his arm slung over her. “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.”
Voices up ahead are joking and laughing, but as we get closer, the voices hush.
“Approaching! Approaching!” Flashlights swirl in our direction, swinging from side to side.
“Who goes there?” somebody asks. “Friend or foe?”
“Friend!” Ray says as he leads us up a steep hill.
Keeping guard at the top of the hill is—no surprise—Gwen holding a flashlight and a walking stick tall as her. She is a top-of-the-hill kind of girl. “Hey! You said friend!” she yells, working her flashlight over the boys and me.
“They’re friends.” Ray points a stalk of sea grass at us.
“No. They’re infiltrators!” she yells.
If she starts throwing rocks, I’m throwing them back. After the scene I did tonight, I’m allowed to be wherever I damn well please.
“Nah, just actors,” Ray says.
“Yeah, an actor with an arm around your girlfriend.” Gwen shines her flashlight behind me. “Keri, you traitor!”
Ray points his flashlight from Jericho to his girlfriend. “Keri, what are you doing?”
“Nothing, Ray! I swear!” She runs up the hill after him. “He was just being stupid. Don’t be mad. Not now, when things are going so good.”
“For who?” Ray yells. “Tell me, Keri. Who are they goin’ good for?”
Leave it to Jericho—who’s laughing his guts out—to break up a three-month romance.
“Way to bring the drama, actors!” Gwen stares straight into my eyes. “Approach at your own risk.” She turns away, and I notice the gigantic concrete box behind her, sort of like a garage that’s partially buried in the hill. Most of it’s covered in graffiti, not fancy like bubble letters on subway cars, just scratchy stuff. Nothing you’d print on a T-shirt.
“What is this place?” Chris asks Arianne.
Arianne swoops in on him, touching his arm with her fingertips. Now I know what infiltrator means.
“It’s a World War II bunker,” she says. “It’s been here, like, forever.”
How about, since World War II?
“Naw, for real?” Chris asks, fascinated.
“Come, I’ll show you,” Arianne says.
If you want my opinion, she’s shown him enough already. But Chris is walking away with her, and Jericho is already talking to another local girl who’s wearing a skirt that’s so short it could be a tube top or even a headband. So now I’m all alone in the dark. I’m left standing here to get Lyme disease or serial killed by a fisherman when Arianne ends up with Chris—again!
I’m the one Chris came to get tonight. I’m the one he hugged through the very worst scene. How could I film something so disgusting, and then afterward, end up with nothing? I feel like starting World War III.
I keep remembering Jericho’s stupid T-shirt from the other day. Is that all boys are? Hot dogs chasing buns?
“What, do you think you’re cool or somethin’?” Gwen stares at me and holds a beer can at her hip. Her friends are crowding around.
“Do I think I’m cool?” I say. I want to bite this girl’s head off. I can handle the Queen of Montauk now that I’ve stood up to Viva. “You’re the one standing on a hill asking ‘friend or foe’ and waving your big stick!”
Gwen steps back and laughs, mocking me. Something snaps inside me, and if I don’t let everything out, I’ll blow. I gave orders to an executive producer today. I’m not gonna stand here and let the surfer girl make fun of me.
“I don’t think I’m cool at all. I think I’m a Bessie.” I widen my stance. “That’s what the director calls me. Do you know what that is?”
Surprised, Gwen shakes her head. “Uh … no. What?”
“It’s a cow. It’s a piece of meat that Hollywood chops into little pieces so that they can make money off of it movie after movie.” I clench my fists. “And then as soon as I’m not cute anymore, they’ll trade me for magic beans. And it’s over for me!” I yell and wipe my sweaty face with my arm.
Unidentifiable. That’s what I’ll be. Unidentifiable …
Gwen’s eyes sparkle in the darkness. Her friends gather in a horseshoe around me.
“So what?” One of the Montauk boys
shakes a can of spray paint. “You make a shitload of money.”
“No, I don’t. My mother does. For her dud business ideas.” I rip a tall blade of grass out of the ground and tear at it. “The rest she puts away for my future, for when I’m a has-been.”
“Your future? Ha! Right!”
“You better check under her mattress.”
“You’ll get your Coogan money,” Jericho chimes in over the new girl’s shoulder. “The Coogan Law is a rule that makes showbiz parents save fifteen percent for their kids,” he explains to the girl. She gazes at him as if he’s the smartest guy on the planet.
I cross my arms. “What’s fifteen percent? I work a hundred percent!” I’m no math whiz, either, but I know what I deserve.
“True,” Jericho says.
“I need this money, Jericho.” I point at my chest. “I’m not like you. This isn’t just fun for me!”
The locals close in on us. “Oh, boo hoo. Come on, you’ve got it made.”
“Yeah, poor baby!”
“No, hey. It’s true,” says a boy with a flashlight hanging from his neck. “She needs to watch her back. Remember that guy from Nickelodeon? The one with the Mohawk?”
“Cameron Coombs!”
“Yeah! He’s, like, homeless now.”
“That’s right! He’s washing cars under the highway.”
“I loved Cameron’s Truth about the World,” Jericho’s girl says. “He’s homeless? How sad!”
“Who cares?” The boy with the spray can steps forward. “You get to sign autographs and stuff.”
“Autographs? You want my autograph?” I lunge at him and snatch the paint from his hand. Then I stomp up toward the bunker.
Reaching high against the concrete wall, I rise to my toes. I imagine I’m climbing a beanstalk up, up, up, all the way to Terrance’s castle in the sky. The paint fumes hit me hard when I press the nozzle. I breathe deeply. I’m dizzy in seconds, spraying my loopy handwriting across the brass knocker on Terrance’s fancy front door while he and my mother eat lobster at his long dining room table. They’re laughing it up about what a klutz I was climbing through the deli window. He’s wearing a tuxedo and bow tie. Underneath her dress, Viva’s wearing a dance leotard that makes her magically appear ten pounds slimmer. They’re toasting, “To Rodney and what a completely swell guy he is!”
But they can say whatever they want about Rodney. It doesn’t matter to me anymore if it’s true or untrue. If it’s true? Good for him. If it’s not? Good for me for telling him off. I’m done being pleasing.
The only thing that matters from now on is: No one. Is messing. With Joss Byrd!
MOO!
—CASH COW
I stumble back, thrilled and terrified by what I’ve done. I’m shocked at how bright, how red, how loud the letters are. The other kids shake their heads as they watch the W bleed down the wall. If I were sure how to spell Bessie, I would have.
“That’s mucked up.”
“A Hollywood tragedy.”
“Make room under the highway.”
Gwen steps forward, offering me her beer can. “Here. It looks like you need this more than I do.”
I take it—my first beer—without thanking her, and in my second wow performance today, I pretend to drink it without gagging from the smell and this strange girl’s saliva.
“But you’re wrong, you know.” Gwen’s expressionless face comes very close to mine.
I want to ask how she got to rule the ocean and become Captain of Bunker Hill because I am going to be Captain of The Locals, Captain of the Byrd Girls, Captain of Hollywood!
“It won’t be over when you’re not cute anymore,” she says. “They’ll want something else from you then.”
I think I know what she’s about to say, and I don’t want to hear it. But because she’s talking to me now like we’re actually friends, I ask, “What’s that?”
Gwen pauses, unblinking. “Sex, stupid!”
And there it is: my destiny in two words. It’s so obvious that even a surfer girl from Montauk—the farthest possible point from Hollywood—knows it.
Gwen laughs. “If you don’t pork out you could be objectified till you’re at least thirty. I bet I’d hear about you then.”
I look down at my hands that still smell of spray paint. I should’ve written “Doomed Kid Actor.”
Suddenly Chris comes yelling from around the corner, “Would you quit it already with the pictures?” It’s surprising to hear him raise his voice. “I mean it! I’m not some freakin’ zoo animal.”
“I’m sorry. I won’t post them, I promise,” Arianne says in a baby voice. “You’re just so cute. I want to remember you. Won’t you remember me? The other night was special, didn’t you think?”
Chris is trying to walk away, but he can’t shake her loose. I want to punch her in the gut.
“Chris!” Arianne huffs. “You can’t just do what you did with me and then act like it never happened.”
“Whatever. Just … sorry. Just leave me alone.” Chris pushes through the other kids and makes his way over to the wall.
“Leave you alone?” She grabs his arm. “That’s not what you said in the shed when I pulled your shorts down.”
“Ohhh!” the other kids say.
Chris dares her with his eyes.
“You said, ‘You’re gorgeous, Arianne, you feel real good, Arianne…’”
“Shut up!” I yell, for me and for Chris.
“‘… That’s sooo good, just relax, keep going, Arianne.’” She lifts her phone and swipes the screen to show everyone her pictures.
Jericho rushes her. “Delete them, you bitch!” he yells. “Let me see you do it!”
“Get away from me!” Arianne twists away from him. “Get your hands off of my phone!”
“Leave it, man! It won’t do any good,” Chris yells. He picks the spray can off the ground, holds it next to my autograph, and sprays:
GRADE-A CHUCK BEEF WAS HERE!
“Arianne,” Gwen snickers. “I thought you said he was vegetarian.”
“Go to hell, Gwen!” Arianne cries, running off.
“Jericho? Joss?” When Chris calls us, we zoom to his side. “Let’s go home.”
Jericho charges ahead to lead the way as he ties sea grass around his forehead like a bandanna. The three of us dodge through the Montauk kids and make our way around the bunker. But at the top of the hill, we groan and scratch. Even with a glow-in-the-dark compass watch, we can’t go anywhere without the locals because on our own, we can’t see a thing.
17
“In about twenty yards, I want you to turn around and face the shore!” Terrance yells through a megaphone. Me and the boys paddle our surfboards toward a man in a safety boat that’s waiting in the water. Beneath us there’s three safety divers in gray wetsuits ready if any of us wipe out. I pretend that they’re dolphins that I’ve raised from pups as their bubbles float up to the surface. If I fall they’ll catch me and lift me up on their noses and carry me to shore.
I push farther into the ocean, head on, into the waves on my very best day—the one that will make up for the worst.
Fingers together … right arm plunge, push, and glide … left arm plunge, push, and glide …
“Lift up to let the wave pass underneath you!” calls Kato, our surf instructor who’s floating on his surfboard beside us. “Just like yesterday’s lesson. Pay attention. Head up, eyes on the horizon!”
I do a push up to lift my chest. My board reaches up and over the lip of the wave. The water slips underneath me. The spray tickles my face. My neck feels tight and my arms are weak and noodly. The middle of the ocean isn’t the best place to realize you haven’t got any energy. I used mine up during yesterday’s lesson, but I can make it through today on excitement alone. I caught a wave yesterday when Kato pushed my board into it. Today I’ll do it by myself for the camera. Chris was right about this being the sweetest scene ever. And it’s all for us.
Push up … up and
over … plunge, push, and glide … Push up … up and over … plunge, push, and glide … must … start … exercising …
When I look over my shoulder, I see Terrance holding his hand up—far enough.
We all spin around to face the camera. It’s standing on legs at the edge of the shore. Now I can take a rest.
“I want you to pick a permanent point in front of you on the beach and another marker at a right angle on the rock barrier.” Kato stretches his lean, muscly arm to trace from the shore to the rocks.
I sit up and straddle my board. The boys do the same. Shielding the sun from my eyes, I choose a white sign on the beach, and on the rocks, I choose the pointy part that’s white on the side.
“If you connect yourself to those points in your mind, it’ll form a triangle,” Kato says.
The sign and the pointy rock connect with me to make a triangle.
“That’s your safety zone. Don’t go any wider or farther than these two markers. Now we wait for the waves!”
I watched Kato surf while the crew was setting up this morning. He can bounce like his board is on springs and maneuver in and out of a wave. I even saw him spin a 360. I remember everything he tells us. The current is pushing me slightly to the left, so I lean to the side and paddle to the right to stay in my safety zone.
“Holy, yikes!” Jericho says. “We aren’t the only ones who need a safety zone.”
I look toward the shore, and I see what he means—a pretty, light-haired woman in a flowy white skirt is walking across the beach toward Terrance. There’s no mistaking her. I’ve seen her in magazines and on the Internet. I even remember her from a frame in Terrance’s LA office.
Mrs. Rivenbach.
“Oh, no,” Chris says.
I hold my breath.
“I want you to check your safety zone constantly,” says Kato. “Know where you are at all times!”
Three other points make a triangle: Terrance. Mrs. Rivenbach. Viva.
My mother is underneath the black tent, watching us on monitors. She’s keeping away from the others on the sand because she’s still sore about being booted off the set two nights ago.
Unscripted Joss Byrd Page 13
