Break It Up

by Tippetts, E. M.

  “Does she ever smile?” says Zach.

  “Yes,” I snap. “But you know what she does for a living? What she’s doing right now?”

  “Yeah, she worked on that case where the kid died.”

  It’s as if someone’s just sucked all the air out of the room. He says this lightly, as if it was part of the plot of a television show and not real life.

  “Excuse you,” I say.

  “You see this press conference?” Zach pulls out his smartphone, taps the screen a few times, and holds it out to me.

  It’s Chloe standing behind a podium, the APD seal on the curtained backdrop. Jason’s wife is rigid with discomfort, but her voice is clear and her tone measured. She doesn’t read from notes, but rather looks straight out into the crowd of assorted press.

  “It is with regret,” she says, “that I report that Esperanza Dominguez is deceased, and her case has been deemed a homicide. We cannot release details at this time—”

  I snatch the phone out of his hand and am on my feet in one fluid motion. “Turn that off.”

  “That’s one cold fish,” says Zach. “She needs to work on her media presence.”

  “You ever have to tell the world about a small child getting murdered?”

  “That’s part of her job.”

  “No it’s not. She’s a forensic scientist. Her job is in the lab.”

  “She chose to be the spokesperson for that case.”

  “She goes above and beyond,” I say. “A lot.” I think about last summer, when she came with me to New York where Jason was working on a film. She was my roommate when she could have lived anywhere on whatever terms she wanted. I was still in a relationship with Nate Bowers, who was five years older than me and trying to convince me to move in with him. Chloe wasn’t preachy or pushy, but she was there for me twenty-four-seven. That, and she lived her life in that quiet yet determined way of hers. She and Jason still weren’t sleeping together, which I still think was pretty ice princess of her. But Jason’s response to that was to get down on one knee, which I thought was insane. They were both obviously out of their minds.

  But I learned something that summer. I learned that it’s okay to be yourself, even if you’re completely weird, and the people who matter in your life won’t hold it against you. I decided to get to know myself a little better and stop trying to be who others wanted me to be. And I realize now, staring at Zach, that I’ve been too much of a coward to make good on that promise to myself where he’s concerned. He may be the hottest guy I’ve ever seen, the subject of countless erotic dreams, but at the end of the day, he’s just another person.

  Nobody disrespects Chloe.

  “Listen,” I say. “You can say what you want about whoever you want, but you do not attack my family.”

  “She’s your step-aunt-in-law. How is that even family?”

  “Do you even know what family is?” I shoot back. “Yours is just a bunch of business relationships. You ever consider while you’re putting Ben down that he’s your cousin? That Triple Cross probably won’t last forever, but he’ll still be your cousin fifty years from now?”

  “I know that Chloe probably won’t be your family fifty years from now, given Jason Vanderholt has moved on.”

  “I’m leaving. Goodbye.” I throw his phone down on the couch, make a beeline for the door, bypass the elevator, run down the stairs, and don’t stop running until I’m standing in front of my hotel room door. That’s when I catch my breath and think about poor Chloe. People watch her give everything for her job and then mock her for it.

  I get out my phone and tap in Jason’s number.

  “Kyra,” he says. “You in trouble?”

  “What?” I shout. “Gee thanks.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Lisbon.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Why do you let Chloe get screwed over by the media? Why don’t you protect her?”

  “Hey, calm down.”

  “People make fun of her. They make assumptions about her. How come you don’t help her?”

  “Help her how, Kyra? Teach her to smile for the cameras? This is Chloe we’re talking about.”

  “You let them roast her alive.”

  “Are you drunk or something?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, why did you just call me and start yelling at me about this?”

  “Someone made fun of Chloe.”

  “Well…great.”

  “And I wish you’d stop that from happening.”

  “I would if I could, Kyr, but the media are unstoppable when they go into attack mode. I’ve tried, believe me, to rein them in. I mean, I got People not to run that picture of you, but the arguments that worked that time, they don’t ever work with Chloe. Nobody cares that she’s not a famous person in her own right or that she wants people to respect her privacy. By marrying me…she basically waived all those rights.” He’s agitated too.

  I burst into tears. In moments like this, I am so grateful I’m not famous. Right now I’m just some random girl crying into her cell phone in a hotel hallway. I let myself into my room and go flop down on the bed. This room’s bigger than the one I had in Madrid, but I still get it all to myself. It’s also not on the floor reserved for the crew again.

  “Kyra?” says Jason. “What’s this really about?”

  I hate how well he reads me. “Nothing.”

  “Ky-ra,” He draws my name out. “What’s going on?”

  “I got my feelings hurt.”

  “Well, I’m sorry.”

  “By someone I trusted.”

  “With the initials Z.W.”

  “It hurt.”

  “I can tell.”

  I sniffle into the phone. “We got in a fight.”

  “I sensed that with my keen powers of intuition.”

  “He really hurt my feelings. He was so cold, and he said just totally awful stuff about Chloe.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  I lift my head. “For what?”

  “For loving Chloe that much.”

  “Enough to ditch Zach over her, yeah.”

  “Yeah, not easy for you to do, huh?”

  Yeah, I don’t want to talk about this with Jason.

  A knock on my door startles me. “Who is it?” I call out.

  “It’s Zach,” says Jason.

  “Shut up,” I tell him.

  “It’s Zach,” says that unmistakable voice on the other side of the door.

  My sniffle cuts short in a sound rather like a gasp.

  “Was I right?” says Jason.

  “I gotta go.”

  “All right. Kiss and make up.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I hang up my phone and go to open the door.

  Zach stands in the hallway, hanging his head. He looks at me through his lashes then at the phone in my hand.

  I turn to toss it onto my bed before I turn back to face him.

  He stands stock-still and says nothing. The moment stretches on and on until I begin to wonder if I’m supposed to say something.

  “Um…” I begin.

  “Okay,” he says, “tell me what you know about film contracts.” His posture is pure resignation, as if he’s had a fight with himself and lost.

  “I know nothing about them. I can call around and ask, though. Or maybe you should talk to your lawyer about what rights you have under your contract.”

  “Our lawyers would probably tell us off.”

  “Why?”

  He bites his lip hard enough that it’s a wonder he doesn’t draw blood. “They didn’t review the contract before we signed it.”

  A panic rises in my chest. I feel l
ike I’m watching someone I care about ride on a car hood on the freeway, certain they’re about to get squashed. “You didn’t have them look at the contract at all?”

  “That was the decision, yeah.” He shrugs. He motions for permission to come in, which I grant. He saunters through the door and I shut it behind him.

  I go to sit down on my bed and rake my fingers through my hair. “Where is the contract? A copy of it at least?”

  “I dunno.”

  Don’t yell, I think to myself. You’ve fought with him enough already. “Can you find one? Let me show it to my grandparents or my uncle.”

  “Vanderholt has time to read contracts?” Zach sidles over to the one chair in the room and sits down.

  “I meant my other uncle. Steve. He’s a lawyer like my grandparents.”

  “Well, they’d be your step-grandparents.”

  I roll my eyes. “You sure do have a lot of opinions about my family, whom you’ve never met.”

  He ducks his head, chastened. “I’ll try to find a copy of the contract.” After a pause he adds, “Thank you.”

  “You shouldn’t ever sign stuff lawyers haven’t read. Every word counts in a contract.” It’s not like I ever really paid attention to Steve babbling away with Doug and Lillian about this, but I guess I noticed how much time they spend in their discussions. Sometimes it seems to take a whole afternoon to hash out one paragraph.

  Zach looks down at his hands as if his fingernails have suddenly become fascinating. “I know.”

  “Then why did you—”

  “It was Ben and Logan’s decision. The whole concert movie was. And yeah, it made me nervous to sign the contract, but Rick was so positive about it.”

  “Does Rick know anything about contracts?”

  He won’t look at me.

  So I wait. I don’t just want to sit and lecture all night.

  “I screwed up, didn’t I?” he says. “I should have forced the issue. The thing is, Logan and Ben don’t listen to me like they listened to my mother, and I get tired of being the bossy one.”

  “You don’t know that you screwed up,” I say. “I just think you should be clearer on what Aidan can and can’t film. I assume you approved the teaser clip he put up the other day?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “What teaser clip?”

  I clasp my hands together, my nails biting into the skin on the back of my hand. “The one on YouTube.”

  “I didn’t even see it.”

  “Did Rick? Did anyone?”

  He picks at a nonexistent piece of lint on his jeans. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  I gouge the skin of my hand with my nails as I try to think of an appropriate answer. My window, I now realize, isn’t covered. The view is of inky blackness punctuated by a row of windows, their yellow lights like eyes peering in. I get up and pull the curtain, hoping that I would have seen anyone taking pictures. Surely the flash would have given them away? I check and note that Zach is sitting out of line of sight. They might have photographed him coming in, but they wouldn’t have seen much else. All he and I have done is talk.

  This is messed up, having to think about this kind of thing all the time.

  “I’m just…I have no actual skills,” says Zach. “I’m no musician. I can’t dance.”

  “Please don’t have a self-pity moment,” I beg.

  Wrong thing to say. He hangs his head and scrubs the back of his neck with one hand. He looks like he’s just been rejected in the first round of auditions. Which makes no sense. He’s Zach Wechsler, and right now, his lack of confidence is annoying.

  “I used to just sign whatever Mom put in front of me. I never even thought about where a contract came from. I mean, this’ll sound completely stupid, but I didn’t realize you even could sign a contract that a lawyer didn’t look over first. Rick took us out to dinner with Aidan and he handed us the contract and Ben and Logan didn’t even want to read it. They signed it. It didn’t occur to me that something like that could happen. It was the first time anyone other than Mom handed me something to sign.”

  He looks up at me. “For the next week I felt like I’d pulled the pin on a grenade,” he goes on. “Any minute this was going to blow up in our faces. But the deal went forward. Aidan joined our tour. I stopped worrying about it.”

  “It might still all be fine,” I say.

  “Except that they film us fighting. They film Ben drunk. I have no idea what to do if they decide to edit this thing to make us look like a bunch of screwed-up, self-entitled idiots. I don’t know what my rights are. I haven’t got a clue.”

  “So you talk to a lawyer.” I feel like a broken record.

  “And if the contract’s no good?”

  This is unlike any problem anyone’s ever put to me before. The stakes are real. This isn’t a hypothetical or a test. Wrong moves make a real impact on Triple Cross.

  I guess this is what it’s like to be an adult. There are no training wheels to keep us steady, no obnoxious teacher to call time and take the blame for the problem being so hard. Mistakes actually count for something.

  I’m hollow inside with fear, and this isn’t even really my problem. I take a moment to calm my racing pulse. Maybe this is too much for me, but I can at least bluff a little. “First things first. You call your lawyer. Call them right now. It’s evening in the US.”

  “I don’t have their number.”

  “Who would have it?”

  “Rick who’ll be asleep right now.”

  “And your mother.”

  “I’m not gonna make her violate her restraining order over this.” He pulled out his cell phone. “Yes, this is me being an obnoxious celebrity.”

  “I won’t film it,” I deadpan.

  “Thank you.” He puts his phone to his ear, waits, then taps the screen to dial the number again. “Hey, it’s Zach…I do know what time it is. I need something…The number of the lawyer we use for our contracts…Never mind why. I need their number and I need it now. Uh-huh. Uh huh. Thanks.” He hangs up then stares at his phone until it chimes.

  “Text?” I say.

  “Yep. I have the number now.” He taps the screen a few more times and puts the phone back to his ear. “Hello? Hi, I’d like to speak to Mark Wilcox please? This is Zach Wechsler. I’m one of his clients. The singer, yeah. Uh-huh. Triple Cross.”

  Judging from Zach’s smug smile, whoever’s on the other end of the line has scrambled to put him through. I glance at my watch and do the math. It’s approaching five o’clock in California, so the lawyer should still be in the office.

  “Mr. Wilcox, hi. I was wondering if you could review a contract for me? Yeah. A week is too long…Well it’s already signed. I just need to know—”

  He winces as a voice shouts loud enough for me to hear, “What do you mean it’s signed? By whom? By you?”

  “Yeah, I—”

  “You signed a contract without consulting me?”

  Zach gives me a helpless look.

  “Just tell him to review it,” I say. “You’re the boss. You pay him. He works for you.”

  He sits up a little straighter. “Just review the contract and tell me your thoughts on it. You can lecture me then, all right? If I have to pay extra to have you do it by tomorrow, then fine. Three days?”

  That is clearly longer than Zach wants to wait.

  “You’re Zach Wechsler,” I press, “of Triple Cross.”

  He nods to himself. “I’m going to have to insist on tomorrow. Impossible?” The knuckles of his hand holding the phone turn white.

  “Hang on,” I say. “Just let him take the three days.”

  “Why?” Zach mouths to me.

  “Because anyone who can say no to Triple
Cross has some serious clout.” That theory is a shot in the dark, but it sounds credible to me.

  “Okay, three days,” he says. “I’ll wait for your call.” He hangs up, looks at me, and says, “I still need to find a copy of the contract.”

  Oh, right. This being-an-adult business is no fun at all. Right now I really wish my dad or a teacher or someone would step forward, wave the contract in our faces, and make some snide comment about how we should be better prepared. I’d give anything for that.

  Rick is not happy to be woken up for the second time in the middle of the night. He flings his door open and stands in one of the hotel’s luxurious bathrobes, his hands on his hips. His room’s on the same level as the band members’ and I wonder if that’s normal. “What?” he snaps.

  He doesn’t notice me. I’m down the hall, trying to stay inconspicuous because in order to stand where I can see him, I’m standing where he could also see me if I called attention to myself, so I don’t even dare move.

  “I want a copy of our contract with Aidan. I just need to get clear on some stuff,” Zach says.

  Rick looks him up and down. “Why would I have a copy of that?”

  “Well, who would?”

  “Ask Aidan.”

  “Okay, fine,” says Zach.

  It’s shocking to see how quickly he backs down. This is not the hyper-confident Zach Wechsler I know. This is a whole new side to him.

  Rick slams his door and leaves us standing in the hallway. Zach heads over to me, his head down.

  “Ask Amy,” I suggest.

  “I guess I could. She’s back downstairs.”

  Well, at least I’m getting good exercise tonight.

  Amy opens her door in a nightgown, looking bewildered. She sees Zach and then cranes her neck and sees me. I wave, unsure how to react.

  “Hey,” says Zach. “Do you have a copy of our contract with Aidan?”

  “Mmm? Yeah. I have a scan of it.”

  My heart lifts.