When Bart kisses Ysabelle on-screen, she closes her eyes and feels hot all over, remembering what it felt like to hang on to him as she rode on his motorcycle. The second time he kisses Ysabelle, though, the back of her throat tightens unpleasantly as she fights off a tear. The third time, when the two of them shed their clothes (Ysabelle’s breasts are phenomenal) and hop into bed, she is just pissed. The asshole probably cheated on her while he was on location, she realizes belatedly; that’s why he came back and dumped her.
“Fucker,” she says to the screen as Ysabelle emits a banshee cry, her blond hair flying wildly around her bucking body. She drinks again. “You weren’t
that
great a lay.”
The woman sitting next to her shifts to the far side of her seat.
“Shut the hell up,” says the man on her other side, who is now leaning forward, examining all four yards of Ysabelle van Lumis’s exposed mammaries.
On the screen, Bart seems unreal, as distant to her as a glossy two-dimensional picture of a celebrity in a magazine. The icon he had always wanted to be. How did he
do
that? What did he have that she didn’t? What was the intangible
thing
all her friends—Josephine, Alexis, Claire, even her father—embodied that had somehow allowed them to find success so quickly, whereas she had not? They made it look so
easy.
She finds it hard to imagine that they wanted it more than she did, or that they worked harder, or sacrificed more, or were that much more talented than she was. (Or were they?) Perhaps, instead of caring so much about principles, about credibility, about being
right,
she should have put Paris Hilton on the cover of
Snatch
and started a shopping column.
Maybe the only way to make it anymore is to give up and sell out.
As she sits in the dark, this new consciousness makes her terribly anxious, as if a prior awareness of this fact might somehow have made a profound difference in her life. Because the truth is, as disposable as Bart’s movie is, she knows she is jealous that he has made it and she has not; that he has achieved his dream and that she doesn’t even
know
what her dream is anymore. What if she had taken the $200,000? Would she really have started
Snatch
again? She thinks of the last issue—
vibrator reviews,
for God’s sake—and suddenly sees how insular and shrill and single-minded her magazine had become. How, in a word, tiresome.
By the time the movie ends Margaret is emotionally depleted and very tipsy. She stumbles out of the theater, thinking that maybe she will just take a nap in the back seat of her car before she drives home. Stopping at the water fountain, she slurps greedily at the tepid water, trying to ignore the pale green lump of gum stuck to the drain. The water tastes of rust, but she’s so thirsty she doesn’t care.
“Margaret?” she hears a voice behind her say. “Is that you, Margaret Miller?”
She turns to see a small round woman in track pants and a yellow polo shirt, hair cut in a matronly shag that frames a squat pug nose. The woman has the pink plump cheeks of the well fed and manicured and shampooed. Behind her is an equally small man in penny loafers and a “Sand Hill Cart Races Runner Up” sweatshirt that doesn’t quite disguise his premature paunch.
The woman places herself just inches from Margaret’s face and beams, her expression not wavering from its pure childlike joy even as Margaret continues to wrinkle her brow in confusion. “Remember me? Kelly Maxfield? From your class at Millard Fillmore?”
“Oh,” says Margaret weakly. Her first thought is that she can’t believe that this woman is her age. Has Kelly aged prematurely or is Margaret simply stunted? Margaret has a dim recollection of a plump girl in her class who matched the color of her shoelaces to her socks. Pleasant if forgettable. The same girl, she now recalls, that her mother has been nagging her to get in touch with for the last month. “Wow.”
“I can’t believe it’s been ten years! We missed you at the reunion, you know,” Kelly says. She grabs the arm of the man standing next to her, who smiles vaguely. “This is my husband, Duncan. Duncan, this is Margaret; she was—I’m serious here—the
smartest girl
in my high school. Everyone used to try to cheat off her tests.” She looks at Margaret with bright eyes and laughs. “Of course,
I
never did. Which is probably why I ended up at San Jose State instead of Stanford.”
Margaret smiles faintly. “So, what are you doing these days, Kelly?”
“I’m a publicist. Do you know of Maxfield & Associates? Of course you wouldn’t have unless you were in the industry. But anyway, that’s me. High-tech PR. Mostly I do social networking and wireless and big pharma.” She grimaces. “Oh! I should have said before, great news about your father’s IPO! I’ve been tracking it. You must be thrilled.”
This is not the word Margaret would have chosen, but she holds her tongue. Despite her mother’s tirade this afternoon, Margaret is silenced by an understanding of how much it would mortify Janice if the family drama ended up in the paper. And publicists aren’t to be trusted with discretion. Los Angeles was lousy with publicists, pretty young celebrity parasites with their botoxed brows and carb-free diets who made their living lying to the papers. Bart had a publicist, a girl named Bunny who called Margaret “Meredith” and specialized in getting items planted in
Teen People.
“Absolutely,” Margaret lies. “We’re just thrilled.”
“Tell him I say hello. I saw him at a conference this spring,” Kelly continues. “Though I’m actually on maternity leave right now. We just had our first baby—Audrey, four months old. Pretty difficult to think about the wi-fi market when I’ve got a baby grabbing for my boob—pardon me, but it’s the truth—every twenty minutes. Thank God we found a nanny so that we could get out and have some mommy-daddy time, isn’t that right?” She squeezes Duncan’s hand and Duncan shakes his head briefly, as if trying to focus, and smiles again. He looks like he hasn’t slept in months. “We were dying to see a movie. Didn’t you love it?
Thruster
?”
“It was great,” manages Margaret.
“I’m such a fan of Ysabelle van Lumis. And that guy Bartholo mew Whatshisface? What a hunk. I’m a sucker for a British accent. Sorry, Duncan!” She pokes him in the ribs with a French-manicured finger. Duncan doesn’t seem to notice; he looks like he’s sleeping standing upright.
“Actually,” says Margaret. And then—the words seem to fall out of her mouth without her even thinking about it—“Bart’s my boyfriend.”
“Ha ha—no, he’s mine! I called him first!” Kelly says. Then, seeing the pained expression on Margaret’s face: “You’re serious?”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” she belatedly demurs.
Kelly’s eyes go big. “I mean…wow, Margaret. That’s just amazing. I had no idea. You’re dating a movie star!”
“Yeah, well,” says Margaret awkwardly. She eyes the exit behind Kelly’s shoulder, wondering if she can make a run for it without looking like a total moron.
“Look at you, living the glamorous life! I’d
heard
you were in L.A. And here I was just going on and on about myself. So sorry; I do that sometimes, you know? They say it’s such a bad thing for a publicist to do. We’re supposed to be zip-lipped. Wow. Bartholomew Whatshisface. I swear—Duncan, everyone always said that Margaret was going to
be
someone, and we were right…. But, wait, why are you seeing the movie here? You must have seen it before, right? Oh, gosh—did you go to the premiere?”
“Um…” Kelly stands there waiting for Margaret to say something. Margaret, backed into a corner, hopes that if she says nothing, Kelly will shut up and move on.
Kelly has no such plans. “I want to hear all about what the
interesting
people do in L.A. I mean, what are
you
doing? I recall that my mom said that your mom had told her you were some kind of famous writer or something? You were working for some women’s magazine, right? Was it
Vogue
?
Elle
? I’m so sorry, I can’t remember.”
“Well,” begins Margaret. She sees an entire alternate reality materialize in her imagination: the award-winning magazine leading to a six-figure book deal; the fulsome profile in the pages of the
New York Times Magazine;
the couture dress worn on the red carpet of the Golden Globes, Bart on her arm; the sleek midcentury modern home in the Hills; the breezy, happy family vacations on St. Bart’s, to which she is able to treat her adoring parents and sister as a Christmas present. It’s suddenly too exhausting to contemplate lying anymore.
“Oh, Christ,” she says, realizing belatedly that she is actually very drunk after all. “Here’s the deal. Bart dumped me months ago, and I owe him twelve thousand dollars. My magazine—which, let’s face it, was an outdated idea even when I started it—just went under, and never had more than fifteen thousand readers anyway. I’m a failed feminist academic, which I realize is something of a redundancy, and I’ve got a half dozen credit card companies after me. Did I mention I had to move back in with my parents? My father just called me a loser and tried to bribe me to testify against my mother, who, in turn, disapproves of everything I do. The only remaining person with the slightest modicum of respect for me is my fourteen-year-old sister, who doesn’t know any better. Yet.”
“Oh,” says Kelly, and her hand clutches at her chest in a little spasm of surprise. “I’m so sorry. That’s just terrible.”
“Hey, that’s why God invented alcohol,” says Margaret, waggling the tequila bottle, which juts from her purse. She suddenly feels totally unencumbered, as if she’s been carrying a boulder in her shoulder bag and only now thought to remove it. She laughs aloud, feeling the lightness—or is that hysteria?—in her throat. Why didn’t she come clean sooner? It will feel
good
to become the object of Kelly’s contempt. She sees the headlines Kelly will surely plant in tomorrow’s tabloids: “Margaret Miller, Best in Class, Turns Loser Boozer!”
She thought she’d hit bottom already, but in fact here it is now. And it’s exhilarating. She just doesn’t care about what anyone thinks of her anymore—not the lactating good-girl classmate before her, not her judgmental parents, not Bart, not her semifamous peers, no one. She lifts the tequila bottle and gulps down a slug of amber heat. It lights her up like a 100-watt lightbulb. Fuck yeah.
Margaret defiantly waits for Kelly to retreat backward into the protective aura of her husband, who has just focused his eyes on Margaret for the first time. But to Margaret’s disbelief, Kelly just inches in closer to her. She puts a hand out and touches her arm, leaning in so that Duncan can’t hear what she’s saying. “Hey, I’ve been there myself. Thank God for Percocet,” she whispers, her dimples vanishing and her chin hardening.
Before Margaret has time to register her shock, Kelly steps back quickly and raises her voice back into its original brisk chirp. “We should go for a drink sometime and really catch up. I’ll leave the baby with Duncan so we can have a girls’ night. That okay, Dunc? Anyway, what I’m saying is give me a call, I’m happy to talk.” She fishes in her purse and comes out with a business card, which she presses into Margaret’s hand with an affirming squeeze. “Anything you need, I’m here. I mean it.”
Margaret stands, turning the business card in her hand, as Kelly disappears from the neon-lit lobby into the darkness of the night, her shag bouncing, her weary husband trailing just a half step behind her. Echoes of booze burn in Margaret’s throat.
She fingers the embossed lettering—“Kelly Maxfield, Public Relations Specialist”—before shoving the card into her purse, where it glues itself to the tequila bottle, which has spilled the last of its contents into an odoriferous puddle that drips slowly through the leather as she makes for the exit.
“smash!” this is what the sign at the front of the room says, and Lizzie can’t help thinking that it’s a weird name for the Friday night youth group at River of Life, but maybe she’s missing something. Maybe God will smash you over the head if you sin? The Bible will smash your toes if you drop it on your foot by mistake?
The Bible Lizzie was given last week when she visited River of Life does not, however, look like a book that would smash much of anything, despite its heft. It is pink, for starters. With a photograph of three girls on the cover, girls in pastel sweaters who look like they just stepped out of a Noxema ad. They are laughing at something they have just read in the Bible (Lizzie flipped through quickly but has yet to find anything that makes her laugh out loud). Or perhaps they are just in a state of bliss. This, after all, is the name of the Bible:
The Bliss! Bible:
“A Bible for teens like you, written in language you’ll totally understand!” Exclamation points feature large in the world of teen Christianity, Lizzie is learning.
The Bliss! Bible
has not yet made Lizzie feel blissful, but she’s hopeful. She kind of wishes the Bible didn’t come with an ostentatious pink faux-alligator carrying case; but since the other girls display theirs as proudly as they would a Prada purse, she tucks hers under her arm rather than hiding it in her book bag. (The boys’ version is blue; it features three white boys in hip-hop gear on the cover and is conveniently sized to fit in the rear pocket of a pair of baggy jeans.)
Smash! is held in a meeting room at the back of the church complex. There are no pews, nor are there chairs. Instead, the room is lined with acres of blue industrial carpeting and lit by fluorescent lights, and rather than a pulpit, at the front of the room, is a neon sign that says “Smash!” and a mural of a smiling Jesus—in a Roy Lichtenstein pointillism style—painted on the wall below it. A gold glitter drum kit is set up in the corner. On the opposite wall, a graffiti artist has rendered the phrase “God is Love” in bubble letters.
About a hundred teens sit cross-legged on the floor. Lizzie pauses in the doorway and considers where to deposit herself. Zeke Bint, who has begrudgingly obeyed his mother’s orders and escorted Lizzie to Smash!, squeezes in past her and bolts for the front of the room. “Don’t even think of sitting next to me, Miller,” he whispers in her ear as he moves past. “I know all about you. Whore of Babylon.”