It's All Your Fault

by Paul Rudnick

  He glares and everyone laughs dutifully as Aunt Nancy mutters, “This is why the terrorists hate us. Patriarchal pig.”

  “Is there a problem?” the judge asks Aunt Nancy.

  “No, Your Honor,” she says meekly.

  “As I understand it,” the judge continues, “we have three young ladies present. Or perhaps three young criminals who need to be taught a lesson. Could they come forward, right now.”

  “Your Honor,” says Heller, standing up, her voice shaking. “I’d like to say something.”

  I know what’s coming. Heller is going to blame me for everything. She’s going to explain that she never asked me to come to New York, and that I’m pushy and dim and annoying. She’ll be earnest and charming and everyone will believe her. Which is fine. Even if Heller manages to sweet-talk her way out of all the trouble she’s caused, I still deserve to be punished. Even if I didn’t, Heller is a movie star so she’ll get off scot-free, because that’s how things work.

  “Your Honor,” says Heller, “this is all my fault. I forced Catey and Sophie to take off and spend the day with me and I wouldn’t let Sophie call her parents and I gave Catey drugs …”

  WHAT? What’s Heller doing? I get it—she’s taking the blame, but she’s also taking center stage. She’s tossing her wet hair and she lowered her voice on the word “drugs.” She’s being selfless and noble and everyone’s eating it up. As Wyatt would say, I smell Oscar.

  “No!” says Sophie, standing beside Heller. “I did it! I blackmailed Heller and Catey into doing everything I wanted, because I have cancer! They were, like, my hostages! And … and … I did that stuff to Catey’s hair!”

  “Which is a serious offense,” says the judge, looking at me as I stand up. He’s staring at my hair as if it’s something repulsive that he’s just stepped in.

  “Your Honor,” I say, “if anybody has a Bible I would really like to place my hand upon it, especially that part of the Old Testament where the Lord smites evildoers …”

  “Just tell the truth,” says the judge. “If you can manage that, with that car antenna through your nose. And I’ll be happy to smite you myself.”

  “Your Honor,” I say, “I was the person in charge. I was supposed to make sure that we followed the guidelines and the schedules so that Heller could promote her movie and so that Sophie could spend the day with us, and I’m the most incorrigible and violent … and … and unlawful criminal mastermind who’s ever lived. I messed up everything and I disgraced my family and my country and my faith and … and … my right to ever enjoy a cupcake or anything with frosting ever again. I should be punished to the full extent of the law and even further, and even though I know that New Jersey doesn’t have the death penalty maybe you can make an exception …”

  I shut my eyes and hold my arms straight out in front of me.

  “What the hell are you doing?” asks the judge.

  “I’m ready. For the handcuffs.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” says the judge, and he chuckles in this dry, creepy way, which makes everyone in the room chuckle obediently. “First of all,” he continues, “you’re correct, New Jersey doesn’t have the death penalty, because we are a humane and compassionate state and if we had the death penalty all of our Real Housewives would be gone. But let’s attend to the matter at hand, which seems especially reprehensible. I’m told that over the course of a single afternoon these three delinquents have …” He puts on his reading glasses and studies a document that the bailiff has handed him. “They have stolen a sports car, brandished an illegal handgun, trespassed on government property and endangered the welfare of a minor. These are all activities that can incur substantial penalties, including incarceration, especially if these young felons are charged as adults. I am also told there is video footage of all or most of these activities.”

  The bailiff activates a flat-screen TV atop a nearby rolling cart and there it is: grainy but still completely identifiable surveillance video of me jumping into the convertible. Of me waving my pistol at the guys wearing ski masks in the Valu-Brite. There’s me, Heller and Sophie, one after the other, dangling from the chain and dropping into the water at the quarry. As the mechanical arm wrenches apart and tumbles into the water, missing my head by inches, everyone in the room gasps, including me.

  “Oh my Lord!” says my mom. “Caitlin!”

  “That was so rad!” says Aunt Nancy, who likes to use slang that even I know is years out of date.

  “This is like my favorite Heller Harrigan movie ever!” says Sophie.

  “Oy vey iz mir,” says Wyatt. “To the max.”

  “This footage is heinous and irrefutable,” says the judge, “and can easily be used as justification for a grand jury hearing.”

  I glance across the room at Heller and even she looks nervous. No, more than nervous—she looks scared. Good. Finally. She’s worried because there isn’t a Golden Globe category for Best Performance by an Actress Currently Serving Twenty Years Upstate.

  “However,” says the judge, again consulting his documents, “I’m also informed that the owner of the convertible in question has refused to press charges, owing to the fact that he was in possession of an illegal and unregistered firearm. Employees of both the Valu-Brite and a neighboring establishment called, I believe, the Happening Hairbomb, have told local law enforcement, quite vigorously, that these young women were in fact thwarting an armed robbery. We have a statement from one Tiffani Del Glorioso, who contends that, and I’m quoting, ‘That Caitlin girl was a super-sick effing mindblaster. She saved everybody’s butt and she looked hot doing it!’ Unquote.”

  “Caitlin?” says my dad, sounding both surprised and impressed.

  “I brought you a hat,” my mom whispers to me.

  “Which leaves us with the remaining charge of endangering the welfare of a minor,” says the judge.

  “Your Honorship?” says Sophie, waving her hand ferociously. “Can I talk now?”

  “And you are … ?” asks the judge.

  “I’m Sophie Schuler and I have cancer. I’m in remission but it’s my second time around, so, well, super brap …”

  “Sophie … ,” says Barbara Schuler, squeezing Sophie’s hand.

  “Okay okay okay,” says Sophie. “I asked the Make-A-Wish people, who are beyond awesome, if I could spend a day with Heller Harrigan, who’s only my most favorite everything ever. They said go for it and so that’s what I did. I just want to tell everybody, including Your Honor-Person and my mom and dad, that—it was the best day of my whole entire life! ’Cause I didn’t just get to meet Heller, and her fucking amazing cousin Caitlin, I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t curse, but I forgot, shit, fuck, I did it again, but, Your Honor, no one endangered me. They saved me. They made me so happy. Your Honor, in, like, conclusion, I would like to remind the court that I’m only thirteen years old and … I have cancer.”

  Sophie lowers her chin, which trembles, and she stands pigeon-toed and looks up at the judge and I could swear that she somehow widens her eyes to twice their normal size. Out of the corner of my own eye I see that Heller, while still keeping her hands at her sides, is offering Sophie a surreptitious thumbs-up and mouthing the words “Way to go.”

  “You’re in remission,” Sophie’s mom whispers to her, trying to be comforting.

  “Shhh!” Sophie tells her mom.

  “Well, goodness gracious,” says the judge, “that is extremely persuasive testimony. Sophie, you are one adorable little girl and please know that the court’s heartfelt prayers are with you. I suppose that Ms. Singleberry has demonstrated a certain degree of misguided and yet very real valor, in protecting both her companions and the staffs of the Valu-Brite and the … Happening Hairbomb.”

  “Your Honor?” says Heller, raising her hand politely. Here it comes. Sophie was great so Heller has to top her. Heller has to out-act a thirteen-year-old girl with cancer. Heller’s going to claim she has a brain tumor, or diabetes, or that she has a multiple p
ersonality disorder and that Erin, one of her other personalities, committed the crimes. Heller is shameless. Duh.

  “Yes?” says the judge, who stares at Heller, consults his papers and then asks, “Are you Heller Harrigan? The Heller Harrigan? From various television programs and supermarket tabloids and other assorted media?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” says Heller, looking shy and demure, which makes me want to strangle her. “I’ve also appeared as a teenage prostitute on an episode of Law & Order: SVU, in which I was treated more than fairly by the esteemed judge on the show, who was played by a ruggedly handsome older actor. But that doesn’t matter, even though that episode also won a Peabody Award for Excellence in Responsible Broadcasting. Because, yes, I am an actress, and a celebrity, and I do have over one point three million followers on Twitter, many of whom would love to visit Parsippany and enjoy … the scenic wonders, contributing perhaps millions of dollars to the local economy. But that doesn’t matter either. What matters is that this weekend I have been tempted to do terrible and unholy things. I mean, seriously fun stuff, are you feelin’ me? But I didn’t do any of those things, thanks to one righteous and trustworthy and God-fearing human being. She’s standing right there, wearing that one wet, filthy kneesock, and her name is Caitlin Singleberry. Your Honor, there is only one thing more important than the life-affirming decency that Ms. Singleberry teaches us all.”

  Oh my Lord! Heller is unbelievable! She’ll say anything! She’s dabbing at her eyes! I know she’s pretending to defend me, but is anyone buying this? Especially when Heller talked about decency and put her hand over her heart?

  “What might that one thing be, Ms. Harrigan?” asks the judge, and I really want to hear Heller’s answer. In fact, the whole room is leaning toward Heller. What does she consider the most important thing? A single piece of candy corn? A push-up bra? Eyeliner?

  “Your Honor?” asks Heller. “Do you have any grandchildren?”

  “Why, yes, I do,” says the judge. “I have three spectacular little girls. There’s Katniss, who’s just turned five, Bella, who’s seven and the apple of my eye, and Hermione, who’s all of nine. They are the prettiest, smartest, sweetest girls you’d ever hope to meet and I can’t get enough of them.”

  “Well, Your Honor,” says Heller, “do you think that your wonderful granddaughters might like to attend the gala premiere, as my guests, of the big new Angel Wars movie?”

  The judge decides to dismiss all the charges, especially after Wyatt comes forward holding three collector’s edition Lynnea Action-Bots complete with wings, crossbows, halos and a microchip that allows the Action-Bots to say phrases like “Stay golden!,” “Wings up!” and “Death to the Creeper!”

  This is followed by at least half an hour of hugging, lecturing, sobbing, more hugging, scolding, a group debate over teenagers and curfews and cell phones and then even more hugging, by everyone in the room. My mom and dad tell me that they’ve been worried sick about me, they’ve been furious at me, they’ve prayed for me, they are so proud of me, and they love me more than I can ever know. My dad says he is also gratified that someone has finally demolished that infernal mechanical arm at the quarry and my mom passes me a cupcake in its own little plastic container, which she’s smuggled into the conference room inside her purse.

  My mom and Aunt Nancy talk for longer than they have in years and the most shocking part is that they agree on everything, especially about how out of control their daughters are, and how concerned they are about this heedless, spoiled, entitled new generation with its tech gadgets and Twittering and secret languages involving semicolons. The Schulers inform Sophie she’s grounded, which Sophie says is fine while rolling her eyes, and then the entire Schuler family poses for selfies with Heller and I see Heller giving Sophie five of her most private cell phone numbers and email addresses.

  Heller, in this polite and totally phony voice, asks everyone if “before we go back to the hotel, can I just have a minute alone with Catey? I promise that we won’t drive anywhere or swallow anything or shoot anyone.”

  Once everyone is out of the room, Heller shuts the door and stops smiling.

  “All right,” she says. “We both just handed that judge fifteen trillion barrels of steaming horseshit so he wouldn’t put us in jail. Once we leave this room, we’ll never have to see each other ever again. And after everything you said to me at the quarry, I really should rip your smug little Christian face off.”

  “I’m sorry if you feel that way,” I say, using my most proper, talking-to-an-older-person-or-our-pastor tone of voice.

  “Cut the crap, Sister Mary Turdface. There’s something I need to tell you, just so we’re clear. So if you decide to gossip with all of the other Singlesnitches, you’ll at least have a few facts.”

  “Facts? About what? Your fifty-eight houses? Your five thousand ex-husbands? Your thirty-eight million assistants? Because if I want to know about any of those things I can just read a magazine at the dentist’s office. Right next to the pamphlets on gingivitis and root canal.”

  Heller turns away so she won’t hit me. She turns back. “First of all, pisshead, my four houses? They’re all mortgaged, and when I’m not there, they get rented out. The studio is paying for all those assistants, and once the movie opens, they’re gone. I’m still broke.”

  Broke. Only Heller could use that word before going home to her personal chef, her yoga instructor and her racks of custom-made designer gowns.

  “I’m going to tell you something I swore I would never tell anyone. It’s completely private. You’ll think it’s bullshit or a joke or just another disgusting chapter in the life of your cousin Satan. Here goes: After I shot the Angel Wars movie, I was completely exhausted, I mean, I was roadkill. I’d tried so hard just to get cast in the damn thing, and then I’d worked my ass off; everyone on the movie worked unbelievably hard, in Morocco and Wyoming and on soundstages in Albuquerque, because we wanted the movie to be fantastic, because there was so much riding on it.”

  “I really don’t care about how incredibly hard it is to be a big movie star. It must have been so difficult for you. What happened—was your trailer the wrong color? Wouldn’t the studio match it to your nail polish?”

  “Once it was over,” says Heller, refusing to acknowledge anything I said, “I thought I could take a breath. I thought, People will hate me or they won’t, but no one can say I didn’t do my best. Instead I dove right off the deep end, even for me. I couldn’t sleep or eat or sit still. I just kept going over and over the movie in my head, and agonizing over everything I could’ve done better. I decided that the haters had been right all along and that I was contaminated rat puke and that once the movie opened, everyone would know.”

  I’m about to make another nasty remark but I don’t. Heller has a strange, blank, defeated look on her face. The same look she had at Madison Square Garden after Ava Lily Larrimore hissed that hatred into her ear.

  “I started drinking again and doing meth and hanging out with the kind of people who can get you anything you want, as long as they can stay an extra two weeks or two months or two years in your guest cottage and have their friends from Brazil stay over and let you pay everyone’s cell phone bills. I went with it because it’s like, when you work that hard, when you pour everything you’ve got into those five concentrated months of filming, you need something to replace it, to keep yourself up there, spinning and shooting off sparks. Finally I crashed. I woke up one morning, or actually it was three in the afternoon, and for the first time in forever, I was alone. Which I hated more than anything because then it was just me and my I-suck-so-much-I-don’t-deserve-to-live thoughts. I noticed that my flat screen was gone and my laptop and all of my jewelry, including my mom’s turquoise ring, which she’d always said could ward off evil spirits. Then I get a text from someone telling me that my phone had been hacked and that if I didn’t wire this insane amount of cash to some account in the Cayman Islands, then naked pictures of me were going to floo
d the Internet, which would fuck up the movie and whatever reputation I had left, and my life.

  “I knew exactly which pictures they were talking about because I’d sent them to this jerk, he’s a rock star, or he thinks he is, and I thought I was in love with him and I’d wanted to show him that I was all grown up. I didn’t pay the hacker, and when those pictures were everywhere I tried to think, Fuck it, who cares if other people, if the whole world, sees me naked? Still—the whole world. Staring at me. Sending the pictures to their friends, and everybody laughing, and saying all the things people like to say, about how that stupid slutty little Harrigan bitch got what she deserved.”

  I’m more glad than ever that my parents never allow me to spend much time online. I never want to sound the way Heller sounds right now, hollowed out and sad and empty. I almost reach out to touch her arm or take her hand but I can’t.

  “I turned off all the lights and I sat in my bedroom and I lit a whole mess of candles, because this was LA and if you’re going to kill yourself there have to be candles, right? I mean at least sandalwood and green tea, with maybe a few sticks of vanilla-infused cinnabar incense in a hand-thrown mug.”

  “Heller … ,” I begin, although I have no idea what to say. I can’t tell how serious she is. About killing herself.

  “Here’s how I was going to do it. I was going to smoke some weed, and I had all of these pills, which I lined up on my little Buddhist altar, and I was going to swallow them with some white wine, it was sort of like the menu for a suicide buffet, or an LA kid’s birthday party, if you added a clown who’d bring flourless brownies and soy milk. I was planning to crawl into the tub, which I’d filled with warm water and lavender oil, with floating camellias, which I thought would sound romantic online: ‘Heller Harrigan, dead at seventeen, amid candle-glow and camellias.’ I wanted everyone in the world to sob their guts out, and forget all about those naked Anna Banana screengrabs.”