Seeing Stars

by Diane Hammond

“Just me,” the girl said sullenly. “I mean, all I had was two lines. Everyone else got like five or six.”

  “But it was a good opportunity, honey,” her mother said. “And it’ll look great on your résumé.” She picked up her outsize leather purse and smiled at them bravely. “Well, it was very nice to meet you all. And thank you for the information about the dentist. I think we’ll have her teeth done this week.”

  Everyone murmured their good-byes. Inside, the kids were all standing around, clearly not filming. The woman and her daughter walked through them and to the door with a last wave. No one said good-bye to the blonde, which Ruth took to mean she’d been sullen the whole time. She’d probably figured out that the whole thing was a setup.

  Angie stuck her head into the living room. “Do you have everything you need in here?”

  Stafford didn’t even look back. “Yeah. Close the door.”

  Angie closed the door, saying, “I guess they’re about to start again. I hope nobody needed to use the little girls’ room.”

  Soon, inside the living room, the children were all moving around again, gathering up their bags and totes. “Oh! Well, I guess that’s it, then,” Angie said. She slid the glass door open and caught Allison’s attention. “Are you all done?”

  “Yup,” Allison said.

  Bethy came over. “We can go,” she told Ruth.

  “So soon?”

  “It was only a six-page script.”

  “Did it go well?”

  “Hmmm?” Bethy’s thoughts were elsewhere. “Mom, some of the kids want to go to Magic Mountain. Can I? It would be so cool.”

  “Magic Mountain?”

  “It’s that big amusement park out by Santa Clarita. Allison says it only takes like twenty-five minutes to get there.”

  “Oh? And who’s driving?”

  Bethy smiled impishly. “We were hoping you would.”

  Ruth knew when she was being set up. On her own, Bethy would never put Ruth on the spot like this. She sighed. “Who’s going?”

  “Allison and Hillary and Reba. They asked Laurel, too, but she said she didn’t want to.”

  Ruth suspected that Allison had invited Bethy only so they could rope Ruth into driving, but even if that was true, Bethy hadn’t had a day away from the studio and acting in more than three weeks. And it wasn’t like Ruth had anything else to do except watch the balance in their bank account go down. She could call Hugh from the park just as easily as from their apartment, and at least she’d be out in the open instead of indoors, in the gloom.

  “Okay,” Ruth said. “But everyone needs to bring their own money and I think it would be a good idea if you all eat before we get there. Their food prices are probably through the roof, and you know how Daddy feels about that.”

  “Yes!” Bethy triumphantly pumped her fist in the air. “I’ll tell them.” Bethy crossed the room, whispered to Allison, and then came back to Ruth. “She wants to know if you can stop at Domino’s so we can pick up a pizza. She says Mimi doesn’t have anything at the house, plus we have to go right by it on the way to Mimi’s to pick up a change of clothes for her.”

  Ruth felt a sudden wave of annoyance at Allison, but really, how could you fault the child for using whatever resources were available to her? Clearly, Mimi provided no guidance and very few services to her boarders. If Allison was cagey—and Ruth’s capitulation was proof of that—she was only trying to make her way. She couldn’t very well be faulted for wanting to eat, and she was trying to look after the other, younger girls. God forbid that Bethy ever had to fend for herself, but if she did, Ruth would hope that someone like Allison would step into the breach and make the day just a little bit easier for her, though not necessarily by buying her pizza. If she was a good person, Ruth would stop at Ralphs instead of Domino’s and buy them all some fruit, whole-grain crackers, and low-fat cheeses. It’s what she would have done at home.

  She felt a sudden, blinding nostalgia for her old life as she watched Allison get some sort of signal from Bethy and flip open her phone. She evidently had Domino’s in her speed-dial because a minute later Ruth could hear her ordering a pizza to go in an entirely adult and composed voice. That done, she donned a pair of stylish sunglasses, put on lipstick, and began loading her things—the clapboard, an enormous Super Big Gulp cup from 7-Eleven, a small makeup case—into her omnipresent Coach satchel. Ruth thought the girl might never get to be one, but she certainly looked like a movie star.

  QUINN REILLY’S BED WAS ON THE FLOOR IN A CORNER OF the living room like a dog’s. Jasper and Baby-Sue’s apartment, where he’d been living for the past six months, was in the throbbing heart of West Hollywood, a couple blocks off Santa Monica on Norton near Havenhurst, in a spalling stucco apartment building that had been cheaply built in the 1940s and hadn’t improved any with time. The place always smelled faintly of weed and spaghetti sauce, which was the only thing Baby-Sue knew how to cook. Mostly they ate cheap takeout, like everyone else in LA who lived in un-air-conditioned apartments that were too hot to cook in except for maybe December.

  The day Quinn had moved in there’d been a pile of mouse droppings in his corner. He’d cleaned it up, of course, but he still imagined he could smell the sour, musky smell of rodent feces every night as he fell asleep. It was a place to stay, though. He could probably get a real bed instead of an air mattress at Goodwill, but if he started moving in furniture, Baby-Sue and Jasper might change their minds about him—they’d never talked about how long he could live there, and it had already been six months.

  Baby-Sue was temping today at some law office, Jasper was at an audition, and Quinn didn’t feel like staying around the apartment by himself. It was dark, with hardly any furniture, and when he was alone there he got the creeps sometimes, a squirrely feeling in his gut that something bad was about to happen, though he couldn’t say what. Baby-Sue said he was just being superstitious, but he had had that same feeling the day his mom and Nelson, his prick of a stepfather, had told him he was being shipped out to LA when he was not quite thirteen. It wasn’t the LA part he’d minded, and it certainly wasn’t the acting, which he had been doing since he was nine and loved—and hell, some kids had to go to military schools, so there was that—no, it was the fact that they didn’t just tell him he was going, they tried to sell it to him. “Just think, honey, you’ll be surrounded by actors and celebrities, which I know is just going to be so exciting,” his mother had said, “and you’ll get to be in movies and on TV, and there’ll be palm trees, which I think are so exotic. Doesn’t that sound amazing?”

  Well, it had, actually; but he wouldn’t have said so on a million-dollar bet. He was being sent away from home. You could have sent him to a palace someplace and given him magic powers, and he still would’ve felt bad. You didn’t send a kid away from home and then make it sound like he was going to paradise unless you not only wanted him to go, you wanted him to stay gone. That was his point. They didn’t think he was smart enough to know what was going on, but he did.

  Now it was one o’clock in the afternoon, he’d been awake for an hour, and he had this crappy, doomy feeling and he was hungry, so what was there to do but pull on the jeans that were least dirty and a T-shirt with a hole in the upper back—weird place to get a hole—and his purple Chuck Taylor high-tops, and head for Santa Monica Boulevard. It was hot but there was a breeze—he could feel it through the hole in his T-shirt—so he was okay with it. He headed west with the vague idea of getting something to eat. His feet, as he walked, looked flat and long and thin in his high-tops. He watched them walk past a gallery that specialized in gay portraiture, and then past a pet accessories store called Waggle & Dash that sold dog strollers lined in pink or blue satin, handmade Irish knit sweaters with a loop you put the dog’s tail through so it stayed in place, Doggles, so your dog didn’t get cataracts from overexposure to the sun, boots to protect its paws from scorching sand when you took it to the Huntington dog beach on a hot day, and poochy parkas that crazy LA peop
le made their dogs wear when it dropped below sixty degrees. He’d never once seen a woman in the store, which was owned by a gay couple that clearly spent a fortune on hair care products.

  Not that Quinn had anything against gay people. Hell, you couldn’t have anything against them if you were going to live in West Hollywood, because West Hollywood was theirs; well, theirs and a bunch of people who’d come over from Russia—for the climate, he figured, because it must get pretty old living in Siberia or Chernobyl or wherever, where it snowed a zillion inches a year and you had to wear dorky fur hats and stuff to keep from getting frostbite every time you went out to feed the skinny ponies. He’d seen Doctor Zhivago about twenty-five times—that and Fiddler on the Roof.

  Anyway, since moving to Baby-Sue and Jasper’s apartment, Quinn had developed this great gay character—not over the top, because that was too easy, but a gay boy who spent most of his time alone watching other people have fun, people he wanted to be like but knew he couldn’t; a character who, from the inside out, was beautiful and lost and sometimes brave. Quinn didn’t think he’d want to be gay, though, except as his character. Regular people didn’t really like gay people, no matter what they said. They looked at a gay person and all they could see were two of them doing it. He wouldn’t want to know that everyone who looked at him was thinking about his penis.

  He walked by a hair salon, Hazlitt & Company. Not much was going on in there. One of the stylists, a slight man wearing a brilliant white button-down shirt, was sitting in one of the salon chairs reading a back issue of Vogue. Just for the hell of it, Quinn went in.

  “Hey,” the stylist greeted him, getting up. He was one of the most beautiful men Quinn had ever seen. He had the delicate build and features of a faun. “Can I help you?”

  Quinn shrugged, scratched his arm. “I was thinking of maybe getting my hair colored.” He hadn’t been, but what the hell.

  “Really? Sit down and let’s take a look.” Quinn took his place in the chair. Beneath the mirror there were several headshots of chisel-cheeked, square-jawed men, presumably but not necessarily there to show off their haircuts. They could have just been the stylist’s boyfriends. In West Hollywood, you never knew.

  Quinn sat back and the stylist ran his hands through Quinn’s hair, which was long, almost to his shoulders, and hadn’t been brushed or combed in a while. He’d washed it last night, though, and it was shiny.

  “Yum,” said the stylist. “So you were thinking, what, highlights?”

  Quinn tried to come up with something. “Maybe you could just, like, bleach it so it’s pure white. Or white with red tips. That would be awesome.”

  The stylist made eye contact with him in the mirror. “You an actor?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then no can do. No should do. Unless you don’t want to work.”

  “No, I want to work.”

  “Well, you won’t, if we do something like that.” Quinn liked that the stylist said we. “No producer’s going to recolor your hair. They’ll just find someone else.” He ran his hands through Quinn’s hair again, contemplatively, and Quinn thought it felt better than maybe anything he’d ever felt before. It had been a long time since anyone had touched him. Baby-Sue used to hug him at first, but she didn’t anymore, probably because she was sick of having him in the living room. Jasper wasn’t the kind of person who went around touching people, and Mimi Roberts had been huggy before she’d kicked him out, but that was a long time ago. His mother hugged him sometimes, but it was mostly when he was leaving.

  The stylist took a brush out of a drawer and began brushing Quinn’s hair. That felt even better than his hands had. It felt so good Quinn was having trouble keeping his eyes open. The stylist said, “You know, you don’t see good hair that much.”

  “So I have good hair?”

  “And how.”

  Quinn yawned.

  “I know,” the stylist said, still brushing, gathering the hair up in a ponytail and then letting it fall. “Isn’t it the best? My mom used to brush my hair when I got allergy attacks, which was pretty much all the time. Now I have this health insurance plan that has an allergy program where a nurse calls you a couple times a year and asks if you’ve eaten peanuts lately, or whatever—tomatoes or tomato products, in my case. The last time, when she asked me what I did when I had an attack, I said I looked for someone to brush my hair, and she thought I was screwing with her. I wasn’t, though.”

  “I don’t have allergies,” Quinn said.

  “Lucky you.”

  “Yeah.” But it might not be so bad to have somebody call you up sometimes and ask how you were doing. He thought about asking the stylist for the name of his health insurance company, but the stylist had moved on.

  “I could give you a cut, just to tidy things up.” The stylist put down the brush and threaded his fingers through Quinn’s hair and pulled it one way and then another way.

  “I don’t have any money,” Quinn said.

  “No?” The stylist’s reflection was talking to Quinn’s reflection in the mirror. “Well, come back with twenty-five bucks and we’ll talk.”

  Quinn knew that no one cut hair for twenty-five dollars, not in West Hollywood and possibly not in the entire state of California. When he was living at Mimi’s, Quinn used to go to a beauty school in Van Nuys where the students practiced on you, and even they charged thirty. “That’s not what you charge, is it?”

  The stylist smiled nicely at Quinn’s reflection. “For you it is. I get to work with gorgeous hair, so it’s a win-win.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, okay.”

  When Quinn stood up, the stylist put his hand very briefly on Quinn’s back as if to steady him, even though Quinn wasn’t wobbly. Quinn felt his eyelids get heavy again—what was that?—and then the stylist dropped his hand to the small of Quinn’s back for a second, and Quinn walked to the front of the shop in a fog, trying to look as though people touched him all the time. When he got outside he closed the door carefully, so it wouldn’t rattle or break a mirror or something. Even out on the sidewalk he could feel the stylist’s eyes coming through the hole in his T-shirt. Maybe it should have been creepy, but it wasn’t. What would it have felt like if the stylist had kissed him? He felt a thrill of revulsion in his gut, which was too bad. It would have been nice if they could spend some time together, maybe see a movie or something, but he was pretty sure you couldn’t ask a gay man to spend time with you if you weren’t gay, too, because that would seem like a come-on, and despite what just about every other person in LA thought, Quinn was pretty sure he wasn’t gay, just lonely.

  Suddenly recalling he was hungry, Quinn headed east, past a gay erotica shop and a Minute Man quick-print place and a men’s clothing boutique and on up Santa Monica until he got to Los Burritos. No one was there except a homeless guy who halfheartedly extended an open palm toward Quinn. Quinn ignored him and ordered two burritos and a taco from a pretty little Latina behind the counter. She was tiny, not like a lot of the Hispanic girls. She probably didn’t eat any of the food here. She probably lived with her family in a small, immaculate apartment with wrought-iron plant stands and a framed picture of the Virgin Mary and a mother who told her all the time how pretty and nice she was. She was probably loved just as much as her younger siblings and she probably knew without even asking that she could live there as long as she wanted. No one would turn her room into a hobby room for somebody’s stupid fly-tying stuff.

  He took his food to a table as far away from the homeless guy as he could get, so the guy couldn’t watch him eat, and thought about the hair stylist. Thinking about how good his fingers felt massaging Quinn’s head gave him goose bumps. They didn’t make his balls take a little inward breath, though, the way they sometimes did when he saw girls bending over or running or something.

  When he finished his food he watched his purple high-tops walk back down the street—slap, slap, slap—and east on Santa Monica again, on the opposite side of the street
but toward the apartment. He passed a trendy tattoo studio and stopped to watch the action through the window. Two women were getting work done. One of them had the black outlines of a dragon on her upper arm that the tattoo artist was filling in with green and fuchsia ink. The tattoo started on her shoulder, so from the front it looked like the dragon was peeking around her arm. He liked that. The other woman was getting a tattoo on her lower back. If he ever got a tattoo, he’d get one that said, “Tattoo.”

  Watching the tattoo artists was surprisingly boring. They’d scribble on the person’s arm and then wipe it off, scribble, wipe, scribble, wipe. The best part was their purple gloves. They’d look great on him with his purple high-tops. Maybe he should go in and see if they’d give him a pair. He watched for another few minutes, but then he lost interest and headed back to the apartment. Mimi had him in a showcase this afternoon at three. She was being pretty good about letting him do stuff at the studio any time he wanted, as long as he behaved himself and didn’t do inappropriate things. He just couldn’t live with her anymore. Mimi was pretty cool, even though she’d kicked him out. She’d tried to get his mom and dick of a stepfather, to bring him back home to Seattle after that. He’d heard her on the phone, saying, “—yes, but he’s floundering and I think he needs to spend some time at home.” It hadn’t worked, though. His mom and Nelson were willing to send him a shit-pile of money as long as he stayed in LA. He could have taken a class every day if he’d wanted to. He could have told them he needed a thousand dollars a month and they’d probably give it to him. Hell, he could probably tell them he needed five hundred dollars a month to buy weed or Ecstasy and they’d have sent it, that’s how much they didn’t want him to ever come back home. They never even asked him about what had happened at Mimi’s. He assumed Mimi had told them, though. He assumed pretty much everyone knew. That’s why he wasn’t in classes anymore with any kids younger than fifteen. Like he was some sort of sex freak. He didn’t see what the big deal was.