Pretending to Be Us

by Taylor Holloway

  This was fine for our conversation. Good, actually. It was private in here.

  Lucy’s sapphire blue eyes were enormous. I’d almost forgotten how gorgeous she was in person. I’d been watching Vanessa’s cut of the movie just a few hours before, but it wasn’t the same. You can’t capture someone as beautiful as Lucy on film. There’s nothing quite like really seeing her. It’s like trying to capture the sun on film. It doesn’t work.

  “Leave me alone!” she squealed at me, not knowing that I was admiring her even when she was angry, frustrated, and stressed out. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  I drifted closer to her and she backpedaled. “Not a chance, and I don’t believe you.” I wanted to touch her, kiss her, make her believe me. But the last couple of times I’d tried that it hadn’t worked at all. In fact, those gestures had totally backfired. So, this time, I was going to stick with words.

  “Get out of here!” Lucy admonished. She shook her head back and forth angrily. “You can’t come in here!”

  “If they come and tell me I can’t be in here, I’ll just buy this place too,” I snapped back at her. “You can block me and avoid me, but only for so long. So please, just listen to me.”

  She froze and went quiet. “You wouldn’t dare. That’s illegal.”

  “Buying things?” I asked. “It’s a free country.”

  “Stalking is illegal.” She was staring at my feet, as if it were painful to look me in the eye.

  I replied with a shrug of my tense shoulders. “Try me, Princess.”

  I was done playing games. It had taken me weeks, three fucking weeks, to buy the stupid house and arrange this trap, I mean, closing. I tried to arrange it faster, but the damn bureaucracy wouldn’t be rushed. Now I only had one day to arrange what I needed to with Lucy.

  “It’s illegal to follow someone around and harass them,” Lucy told me.

  “Call the police. I’ll wait.”

  That shut her up. She gaped at me in obvious irritation, but she stopped yelling. Thank God.

  “You bought our house,” she said crossly instead. “Why did you do that?”

  “So that you’d show up and see me,” I told her. Wasn’t that obvious?

  “That’s the only reason?” Her face was flushed.

  I nodded. “Why else would I buy it?”

  “Charity,” she said, spitting out the word like it was poison. “Because you felt guilty that I saw you en flagrante delicto with Darcy. I don’t want your money.”

  She was so proud. I liked that about her. Lucy didn’t want anyone just handing her anything. Even if she deserved it. I also appreciated that she’d worked the phrase ‘en flagrante delicto’ into an actual, serious conversation. For a high school dropout, she had a really amazing vocabulary, encyclopedic film knowledge, and spoke two languages. She was a remarkable person by any standard, although she didn’t seem to know it.

  “I promise you there was no charity involved,” I said, hiding an admiring smile. “I don’t have your guilt complex for one. For two, I don’t have anything to feel guilty about because what you saw with Darcy wasn’t real. And three, I basically only paid a little above asking price.”

  She ignored the dig about her guilt complex.

  “It wasn’t worth what we were asking,” she hissed. Her expression turned skeptical. “Have you seen that house?”

  I don’t think she knew how to address what I was saying about Darcy and was choosing to draw the conversation in another direction to deflect, but I let her. At least this way she was calming down a little bit.

  I nodded, thinking she was right. “Yes, it needs to be condemned. I probably took a loss on that deal. Look, can we please stop talking about the house? I bought it so I could talk to you. If you want me to walk out of this deal after we talk, I will. It’s not bought yet, okay?”

  She paused. “You can’t back out,” she stuttered. “I mean, I didn’t want you to be the buyer, but my mom...” she bit her lip. “This is horrible,” she said eventually. Her tone was almost conversational. “I hate this whole situation. You’re driving me insane.”

  “Well, at least we can agree on one thing,” I told her. “This is horrible. I just want to explain to you what happened with Darcy. I have to make you understand it wasn’t what it looked like.”

  She stared around the women’s bathroom, but there was nowhere to run. Just stalls and sinks. Lucy’s long-fingered hands fidgeted restlessly at her sides and her expression, when she finally looked back at me, held just the slightest, tiniest bit of hope. I felt my heartbeat double.

  “I don’t see how it could possibly be anything other than exactly what I saw. And heard.” Her voice was vulnerable. She wanted to believe me about this, just like she wanted to believe that I forgave her deception. But she was so used to being kicked when she was down that she couldn’t. I knew she didn’t like me psychoanalyzing her, but honestly, I’d had a long time to think about it over the past few weeks. I was pretty sure I had her figured out.

  “It wasn’t real,” I told her. “What you saw with Darcy wasn’t true. I was tricking her. I was playing her and making her trust me so she’d turn over the rights to ‘Admit You Want Me’.”

  Lucy snorted. “Oh sure. I’m not that stupid and neither is Darcy.” Her derision was obvious. “You must think I’m really, really gullible and dim.”

  “You couldn’t be more wrong about my assessment of your intellect. But you’d be surprised what people will believe when they want to believe something,” I told her. Then I smirked against my better judgment. “Actually, you probably know better than most people that I’m right, eh Princess?”

  Her condescending expression faded into a more familiar one: guilt. “I don’t believe Darcy would ever trade her personal ego-stroking production for anything.”

  “Even if she was trading one ego-stroking production for eight ego-stroking productions?” I asked, cocking an eyebrow and attempting a casual lean against the hand dryer. Women’s restrooms were a lot cleaner and less smelly than the men’s, I realized distantly. “That’s a lot of stroking.” That’s what she said, Mark’s disembodied voice said in my head. I silently told him to shut up. This wasn’t the time. “And she totally bought it,” I continued.

  “I see. You fucked her into it.” She stared me hard in the eyes. There was pain, determination, and pride in her narrowed gaze. “I guess that would be enough to convince her. You’re pretty good, although my experience is limited.”

  I stood up straight. This was the important part. “I didn’t fuck Darcy!” I exclaimed. “I swear to God, I didn’t touch her except for what you saw. You literally walked in at the worst possible moment and saw everything. It didn’t go anywhere before that and it didn’t go anywhere after that.”

  Lucy looked incredibly skeptical.

  “I wouldn’t have sex with Darcy if she was the last woman on Earth,” I told Lucy. “On some level, I know you believe me. You know I’m in love with you. Otherwise why would I do this? Why would I do any of this? Lucy, please, you’ve got to believe me.”

  That tiny sliver of hope that I saw earlier widened and then collapsed. Lucy all but folded in on herself. “Why would you want her over me? I lied to you.”

  “And Darcy lied to everybody over and over again. Plus, she’s evil.” I was beginning to get beyond exasperated, and into apoplectic. “I know this is hard for you to believe, but I love you. Was I happy about learning that you lied about who you were? No. I was pissed off. I didn’t appreciate it. But now I get it. Sometimes, the ends do justify the means. And your end was to protect your family.”

  “It didn’t even work,” Lucy mumbled. “And besides, I also did it for me.” She looked up at me. I suddenly had the feeling we were on the verge of something. “You know I did it for me, too. I wanted to be an actor. I wanted my chance at the spotlight. I figured that if I didn’t try when I saw an opening, it would go away and then I’d never get another shot for the rest of my life.”
/>   “I get that.”

  The fact that Lucy also did what she did for her was part of the great psychoanalytical revelations I’d gleaned over the sleepless weeks between this conversation and the one in the diner. It was why she was having such a difficult time forgiving herself and believing that I forgave her. She felt selfish. She wasn’t, not really, but it was too difficult for her to come to terms with her own guilt for her to imagine that anyone else would.

  “How?” she said eventually. She seemed shocked that I was not surprised by her admission. ”You’ve never had to worry about things like that.”

  “Empathy?” I shook my head at her. “I’ve never been poor, but I can imagine how much it would suck. I’ve never had a disability, but I can imagine how much it could hurt. I’ve never gone to the moon, but I can imagine the awe. I mean, that’s how we do our jobs, isn’t it? Empathizing with others and then acting out those emotions?”

  “Maybe that’s why Darcy can’t act,” Lucy said, momentarily distracted. “She can’t empathize with anyone.”

  “Yeah, cause she’s a narcissistic sociopath.” I was still disgusted that I’d kissed her. I’d obviously already done so on film prior to the moment in her trailer, but that was different. It was professional. This had been deceptive, but also personal. And now I was stuck with the memory. And the guilt.

  “Probably,” Lucy mumbled eventually. “She’s the worst person I’ve ever met.”

  Our moment of agreement didn’t get us any closer to a resolution.

  “You really didn’t sleep with her?” she asked. Her voice was tiny, like I assumed her hope was.

  I wanted desperately to take her hand, but I was sticking to words. I’d thought all this through beforehand and I’d promised myself I’d only convince her with words. “No. I didn’t. I was trying to help me. And you. I was trying to save ‘Admit You Want Me’.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s a good film. Because we both did an amazing job on it and worked our butts off.” I smiled at her. “And because I knew you’d never forgive yourself until we fixed this and set everything right.”

  “I was supposed to fix it. Not you.” She looked frustrated.

  “You did fix it.”

  She shook her head. “No, I didn’t.

  I shook my head. “You gave me the courage to fight for it. To take a risk. To fight for us as well as what’s right.”

  Lucy frowned. “I still don’t see how you could have saved ‘Admit You Want Me’.”

  “Let me tell you. Better yet. Let me show you.”

  44

  Lucy

  Given that Peter had purchased my childhood home in a weeks-long attempt to talk to me, which had now culminated in locking me in a bathroom with him, I wasn’t sure if I had any choice but to listen to him. Still, I looked around again to see if there was any escape I had somehow missed.

  There were windows behind the stalls, but they would only lead to a three-story dropoff. There were vents overhead, but I doubted that my five-foot ten-inch body could get more than eight inches into one. The floor was tile, so there was no escape there. I was pretty much stuck.

  “I know what you told me in the diner wasn’t true,” Peter said into the silence of me attempting to find some way, any way to get myself out of this conversation.

  I looked over at him. I put on a look of supreme condescension. I could still channel the ice princess when I needed to. “Then you’re an idiot. Because I was being honest with you for the first time. You were always just a means to an end for me. And you know I believe the ends justify the means.”

  I’d been very convincing. I’d been really cold. I’d been sure I’d been such a cold-hearted bitch that he’d believed me.

  He cocked an eyebrow that insisted I was wrong. “I may not be as smart as you are, but I’m not a complete idiot. I figured out how to get you here. I even figured out how to save ‘Admit You Want Me’.”

  I crossed my arms over my middle defensively. I’d put enough mental distance between me and Peter that I’d thought I was starting to recover. Now that he was here again, in front of me, it was obvious that wasn’t true. I was just as raw, as wounded, as I ever was.

  “Did it involve fucking Darcy? Because if that’s what it took to save the movie, I don’t even want to hear it.”

  Peter sighed. “I already told you I didn’t fuck her." He stared at me evenly. “Do you want the proof or not?”

  I felt my mouth fall open in surprise. “You can’t prove a negative.”

  He fished a familiar old-fashioned tape recorder out of his pocket. Daniel’s tape recorder. Daniel’s lucky-turned-unlucky tape recorder.

  “Ordinarily that’s true. But not this time.” He pressed play. “This is from last week.”

  “Now that the ink is dry, and I no longer own Fantasy Pictures, now what?” Darcy’s voice carried out from the tiny speakers in a seductive whisper. “Should we celebrate?” The innuendo in her voice was obvious.

  “No,” Peter’s voice replied. He sounded profoundly relieved.

  “You’re right, the trailer’s not a great place for us, is it? We deserve better.” Her voice was positively dripping with sexiness and it was just gross. It made me feel ill.

  “One of us definitely deserves better.” Peter sounded like he’d just swallowed something unpleasant and was about to throw up.

  “I thought we were waiting until the deal was done because you didn’t want me to think you were trying to manipulate me with sex?” she crooned. “Well, now that I’m a free agent, there’s nothing standing in our way.”

  Peter laughed. “You’re right, now we can be totally honest.”

  “About our feelings for each other.”

  Yuck.

  “Sure. I’ll go first.” Peter sounded entirely businesslike and detached. My heart lifted a little bit. Was there a chance he was telling the truth? I was scared to even consider it. Terrified. I didn’t know if I could handle any more Peter Prince in my life.

  “Please do,” Darcy was saying, still in that bedroom voice that was vaguely sickening. Having seen her in an ‘aroused’ state, I could even imagine it, although I didn’t want to.

  “I hate you,” Peter replied. His voice was casual. “I’ve hated you since I first saw the way you treated the people around you who couldn’t give you anything. There’s not a lot that you can figure out about a person by the way they treat their equals or their superiors. But there’s a lot about a person that you can figure out by how they treat the people that they consider to be beneath them.”

  “What?” I could hear, for the first time, genuine surprise in Darcy’s voice. I’d never actually seen her be surprised. She’d always been one step ahead of me, all this time. She’d always had a snappy comeback when I tried to get one over on her. It was, I’ll admit, intensely satisfying to hear her sound shocked. Considering that I knew she was a godawful actor, I knew that this had to be genuine.

  “And since we’re being honest with one another,” Peter continued, “I might as well come clean about that deal you just signed in front of a roomful of lawyers and notaries. You just got screwed. Fantasy Pictures belongs to my dad now, yes, and you got his distribution deal in return. But did you read the fine print on that distribution deal? It’s not for Hollywood. It’s for the European Union’s public television arm. You’re going to be distributing cultural films on behalf of the European Union.”

  “I... what?”

  “You just bought a distribution deal to make foreign language films about nature.”

  “You’re lying!” Panic edged Darcy’s voice.

  “I’m not. I’m finally telling you the truth,” he said. “The first film starts its production schedule two weeks from now. In Switzerland. Don’t worry, my dad was very fastidious about making sure he had a lot of input into the actual work of filmmaking. You’re going to be onsite. It’s actually a contractual obligation. You’ll have to fly to Switzerland, but don’t worry; it’s a
ll arranged. You’ll be spending three weeks on the side of a glacier while scientists take b-roll of flowers and naturalists wax poetic about the alpine wilderness.”

  Darcy didn’t reply when Peter stopped talking. I heard papers shuffling frantically. I also heard something shatter, glass maybe? I could only imagine the scene, but I was guessing that Darcy was silently losing her shit. It was too bad that I didn’t have video recording in addition to audio. I would have liked to see her meltdown. Schadenfreude was sweet.

  “Oh, and one other thing,” Peter said. “Now that my dad owns the rights to ‘Admit You Want Me’ again, we’ll be releasing the cut of the film that starred Lucy. Vanessa has been working on it for weeks. We never did film that last sex scene, but it was ninety-nine percent done without it, so Vanessa was able to work around it. We lost your ticket to the premiere.”

  45

  Peter

  “Do you believe me now?” I asked, clicking the recorder to stop the audio. “We also happened to find a whole bunch of listening devices in Darcy’s trailer when we were turning it in. I’m sure you don’t know anything about that,” I added, staring at her until she flushed and looked away. “Anyway, if you want to you can listen to hundreds of hours of footage to make sure I’m telling you the truth about what happened between me and Darcy. I brought it all. The recordings are in the car.”

  Lucy looked up at me with an expression I couldn’t guess. Her eyes had danced with a mix of emotions while I played the tape and they were full to the brim with what I hoped were happy tears. She shook her head back and forth.

  “I believe you,” she said slowly, as if each word took a lot of effort. “I believe you didn’t sleep with her.”