“He thought?” Spencer said. “
He
said not to tell me?”
“You can’t blame him. I’m the one who didn’t tell you. I’m sorry. I’ve been sorry every single second since I did it.”
Spencer was shaking his head and almost laughing, a grim laugh.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said, still smiling the rueful smile. He rubbed the remnants of white makeup off his eyelids with his hand. “There’s nothing I can say.”
This was infuriating. For one second, she understood some of the frustration that Lola felt when dealing with Spencer. It had never made sense to her before.
“He
likes
me,” she said. “Can you just get over the fact that it’s someone you know? I won’t hurt your show. Just let me be happy, please?”
This got rid of the smirk.
“You don’t really look happy,” he said.
Which was true—she wasn’t at the moment. Not with Eric, and not with life in general. And really not with Spencer. She would have started screaming at him except the other cast members were coming out, so she just turned and walked away from him, back to the theater.
Most of the cast had gone out by now, saying their good-byes to Scarlett as they went. None of them asked her along, but they didn’t look like they were hiding anything, either. Maybe they all just assumed that Spencer would bring her along.
Eric was still there, packing away his spare clothes and makeup into his bag. He had done a slightly better job getting all the white stuff off of his face. He gave Scarlett a friendly wave and nod as she approached.
“I heard there’s a thing tonight,” Scarlett said. Her voice still had a touch of a quiver from the argument with Spencer. She tried to play it off like she had to cough, but it just came out a bit odd.
“Oh,” he said. It was an apologetic, long ohhhh. “Yeah. It’s a cast thing.”
There was a long pause in which an invitation, if it was going to be offered, would have gone.
“I’ll give you a call later, okay?” he said.
“Yeah. Sure. No problem.”
Those four words strung together were the most insincere in the English language.
As they stepped outside, Scarlett turned one way, and Eric and the remaining actors turned another.
And then she went home.
Lola, still on her campaign to be the most efficient person ever, was both manning the front desk and studying up on career choices. There was a clear plastic file full of brochures and letters about different schools and companies, and she was researching online at the lobby computer.
“You staying here tonight?” Scarlett asked, mooning around the front desk.
“Actually,” she said, “I’m going out later with some friends who are home from Smith. You remember Ash and Meg, right?”
“Oh. Yeah…”
“If you’re not doing anything, we need all these mailers addressed and stamped. It would be a huge favor.”
She pointed to a huge box next to her full of newly minted Hopewell Hotel brochures.
“We’re doing a massive mailing to travel agents booking for fall tours,” she said. “I tucked the list and stamps into the box.”
The box was absurdly heavy. There had to be hundreds of brochures packed in there. Scarlett lugged it on to the elevator and
dragged it along to her room. It was much, much too hot in the Orchid Suite. Much too hot, and much too dark. Scarlett peeled back the purple sheers and turned on all the lights, but it still seemed dim and unpromising. She looked out over the view. Saturday night in New York. And here she was.
Her neighbor who could never decide what to wear was fully dressed and obviously preparing to go somewhere. Anything for Breakfast Guy was unloading several six-packs of beer on his kitchen counter. Even Naked (now clothed) Lady made an appearance, dressed in some kind of coordinated blouse and pants thing with beading on it. She was going somewhere, too.
Only Scarlett was staying in to stamp and address.
She fell back on her bed, feeling the heat crushing on her lungs. Why couldn’t they live in a suburb where you just got in your car and went to the mall when nothing else was going on…like normal human beings? Not that Scarlett felt like she could have lasted very long in the suburbs. She’d spent two weeks with her grandparents in Florida once, and once the initial shock of all the sun and the proximity to Disney World and manatees wore off, the fact that there was nowhere to walk to except some fast-food seafood place and a pet supply store about a quarter of mile away got a little old.
Really, nowhere was good. Except with Eric. He had both perfumed and poisoned her entire world.
She picked up the box and lugged it down a few more doors to the Jazz Suite, the one room on the fifth floor that was decently air conditioned. She switched on the TV and tried to get lost in a
Crime and Punishment
marathon.
Crime and Punishment
was very soothing—the most wonderfully predictable show on television. Murder in the first ten minutes. Police investigation in the next ten. Wrong suspect cleared by half past. By quarter of, the correct suspect was on trial, and after a surprise twist about eight minutes from the end, all was resolved in the last moment. This is what she needed. Something that did what she expected it to do, that didn’t let her down. Slimy suspects and cops with good quips. It was all balm to her frayed nerves. That is, until Marlene came stomping in just after the real murderer had been fingered.
“I have the TV now,” she said. “I called it.”
“What do you mean,
called it
?” Scarlett said. “Called it to who? Is there a TV committee that I don’t know about?”
Marlene ignored this. She took the remote control and changed the channel.
“I was watching that!” Scarlett said.
Marlene dropped Scarlett a devastating look over her shoulder.
“Why are
you
home?” she said. “Where’s your
guy
? Did he dump you or something?”
There is a limit to everything, and Scarlett had reached it.
“You know what?” she said. “It isn’t always going to work. Not everyone, for the rest of your life, is going to care that you used to be sick. You’ll have to act normal, like the rest of us. Because if you don’t, everyone will just think you’re evil and miserable. I’m not even sure they’d be wrong.”
Even as she was saying them, Scarlett was regretting the words. They were true, but they landed like a hammer. Marlene’s face, which usually looked slightly contemptuous, begin to sag. At first,
Scarlett felt a kind of relief that she’d finally made a point with Marlene. Then Marlene began to cry. Scarlett held her stance for a moment or two. She went over and tried to sit down and put an arm around her sister.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Look, Marlene…”
She got a push off the couch. Then Marlene really began to wail.
Scarlett went back to the Orchid Suite and sat on the bed. Her phone sat there, its screen depressingly blank. No call from Eric.
It took about fifteen minutes for the general alarm to be sounded and the footsteps to come to her door. Those were her mother’s. She let herself in after a sharp knock.
“What did you say to Marlene?” she asked. “Did you tell her she was evil?”
Obviously, she already
knew
the answer. Why was she bothering to ask?
“Scarlett, what were you thinking?”
“I was thinking what everyone thinks,” Scarlett said. “She’s rude. She does things that other people can’t get away with. She’s eleven. I couldn’t act like that at eleven.”
“She isn’t like you. And you thought the solution was to call her
evil
?”
“It just came out,” Scarlett said.
“You know what she’s been through.”
“That was over four years ago. And what—no one is ever allowed to tell Marlene she’s wrong? Other people aren’t going to
care
that she was in the hospital once. No one is going to want to deal with her.”
There was too much truth here, seething under the surface. It
wasn’t a fun truth, but it could not be denied. There was little to be done, though. Scarlett was
already
inside. She was
already
stamping brochures. She had practically grounded herself. Her mother didn’t even sign off on it with a “I’m disappointed in you, Scarlett,” the most meaningless and chilling of parental rejoinders. She just left the room.
Lola knew all the details by the time she arrived home. She let herself into the Orchid Suite quietly, wearing an infuriating expression of placid righteousness.
“Don’t,” Scarlett said.
“I wasn’t,” Lola replied, going to the dresser to take off her pink stud earrings. She pulled her hair up into a knot, changed into shortie pajamas, applied moisturizers and toners, and generally did everything but give herself highlights until Scarlett couldn’t take it anymore.
“Fine,” she said. “I lost it. I told her off. You’re going to say that she actually really likes me, aren’t you? That she really admires me, and I’ve just jumped all over her and crushed her.”
Lola turned, still rubbing something into her face in a light circular motion.
“No,” she said. “I mean, I don’t think she really hates you, but she definitely doesn’t like you. She probably will when she’s like, twenty, but then again, maybe not. Some siblings hate each other for life.”
On that note, she settled into her bed to read one of her brochures.
“Spencer’s home,” she added, crisply flipping a page. “He looks as miserable as you do.”
“I don’t care.”
“Oh, stop it, Scarlett. Hanging out with these theater people has made you dramatic. Go down there, open the door, and sit on him until you’ve talked this out.”
“He’s probably locked it.”
“So knock.”
“What if…”
“Go!” Lola said. “You can’t be fighting with all three of us at once. And don’t come back until you’ve fixed it.”
She sounded serious enough that Scarlett found herself getting off the bed and walking robotically down the hall toward the Maxwell Suite. Lola had that kind of presence, if she really wanted to use it. That was how she managed to become one of the top salespeople on Bendel’s makeup floor before she got herself fired.
Spencer’s door was shut, but there was a light on underneath. Scarlett reached up to knock, but then recalled his strange reaction that afternoon. The smug look, the odd laugh…it made her angry and uneasy all over again. She turned and went back to the Orchid Suite room, but the door had been locked.
“That was way too short,” Lola called from inside. “I’m serious. Go and talk to him.”
This night was unfair, and every door on the fifth floor led to some kind of pitfall. It was only a situation this dire that could make her go down one flight and approach the room at the end of the hall. That door flung open after one knock.
“I was wondering when you’d come and fess up,” Mrs. Amberson said. “When I didn’t see you at the cast party…”
“
You
were there?”
“Take a deep breath, O’Hara. All things can be overcome if we remember to breathe. I take it you have some personal issues to sort out?”
“Kind of,” Scarlett admitted.
“Then you have done the right thing by coming to me. Meet me in the lobby in five minutes. We’re going somewhere fabulous.”
Somewhere fabulous turned out to be a restaurant called Raw Deal, where none of the food was cooked above a light steaming and nothing was quite as it seemed. The burgers were made of sesame seeds and millet. The tomato sauce was made of beets. Even the “cola” was some syrupy concoction of tree sap and human misery.
They took one of the sidewalk tables so Mrs. Amberson could smoke, a fact that clearly annoyed the other diners and the staff.
“For the last week,” she said, gleefully exhaling a plume in the direction of a particularly peevish looking guy eating a pyramid of lentils, “you have looked like someone about to be sent to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in a second hand Citroën. If you don’t tell me what’s wrong, I will be forced to investigate, and you don’t want that.”
The waiter came over, presumably to request that she stop puffing like a dragon at his other tables, but she undercut him with an order for the adzuki dip with blue algae crumbles, punctuated with a “do not cross me or I will set you on fire” smile.
The one thing Scarlett’s life was currently missing—and could happily continue to miss—was a deep investigation by Mrs. Amberson. Plus, she had run out of options on her own. It was easier just to tell her.
“I’m sort of…with someone in the cast.”
“Ah, the missing verb,” she said. “It’s like the lost chord. And how are things with Eric going?”
“They’re…okay,” she admitted. “I guess.”
“What do you mean okay? I lock you together in a romantic theater, throw a party, distract your brother while you make your escape…I’ve practically sent the two of you out to sea in a tiny rowboat. What could possibly be the problem?”
She was, as Scarlett had suspected, already aware of the general situation.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “With him, with Spencer…”
“Give me the details. And don’t be precious. I can’t help you unless you give me all the facts.”
So, Scarlett told the story. All of it. Mrs. Amberson listened intently. When Scarlett was finished, she snapped her cigarette case open and shut a few times.
“I understand completely,” she said. “It all makes complete sense.”
“It does?”
“Let’s start with Spencer,” she said. “He’s upset for two reasons, a superficial one and a deeper one. The first I am sure you have already guessed. He’s afraid that you might break up, because then he’ll have to hate Eric. Working on the show becomes difficult. The deeper reason, the
real
reason, is that he’s jealous.”
“Jealous of what?” Scarlett asked.
“I watch your brother on stage every day. When he does something, do you know who he looks to? Not me. Not Trevor. Not that poor girl who’s been slogging around after him for a week.
You
are
his audience, Scarlett. Out of everyone in the room, it’s your opinion that matters most. If you laugh, if you are impressed, that counts more than anything I could say. But now you are paying more attention to his partner. Someone else is going to know your secrets first. Someone else will be sharing the inside jokes. And this is very, very annoying.”
This all sounded weirdly right.
“He’s probably not even aware of where his feelings are coming from,” she went on. “But things
have
to change between you sometime. He’ll move out. You’ll go to college. Someone or something will get in the way. Don’t fight the change, just deal with it.”
“I’m trying to. But he’ll barely talk to me, not like normal.”
“We’ll move on to Eric,” she said. “It all ties in together. They’re both actors, and I know actors. That’s one subject I’ve covered in depth.
Believe
me.”
She trailed off here and began playing with her lighter and failing. It clicked and spluttered as she tried to light her cigarette. Scarlett watched her, hypnotized, until she finally got it lit and took a long drag.
“An eighteen-year-old actor is a dangerous thing. Especially in New York. They’re hungrier than you can possibly imagine. They work very hard to be liked. Eric is no exception.”
“He’s Southern,” Scarlett offered in his defense.
“Being Southern is his gimmick. That’s not a bad thing—all actors have a gimmick. It doesn’t change the basic profile. You see, a lot of actors think in order to be appealing, they must seem to be available to anyone and everyone. Their lives are one long
flirtation. It’s not because they are bad people—it’s because they want to work.”
“So you’re saying that he won’t say if we’re dating because he’s a flirty actor?”
“No. I’m just saying that his being Southern has nothing to do with anything. Using it as an excuse for why he couldn’t answer the question about whether or not you were dating was a bit of a brilliant move, though. ‘I didn’t think people in New York had these discussions.’ That’s genius.”
“It was bad for me to ask, right?” Scarlett said, drooping. “Really bad?”
Mrs. Amberson waved away her smoke.
“Don’t worry about that, or his lack of an answer. They
all
dodge the question as long as they can. Welcome to the wonderful world of dating, O’Hara. You need to start thinking strategically. He certainly is. He complimented you on being urban and experienced, all the while sidestepping the issue…not because he doesn’t like you, but because this is how the game is played.”