“Go fucking easy on her?” Ian was absolutely apoplectic. “Are you kidding me? Do you have any idea what it’s like to sit around waiting and waiting and waiting for your phone to ring, waiting and waiting and waiting for the girl you loved and devoted yourself to for two goddamn years to call you or at least not to fuckingghostyou, all because she moved to ‘Los Angeles’?” He did the quotes thing again, and Birdie let out a cry.
“It was forLos Angeles, okay? It was only forLos Angeles,” she wailed.
“So you traded me in for a vapid city full of plastic people with plastic parts and plastic brains. Great. Absolutely wonderful. Thank you for stopping by. This has been a real joy.” He crossed his tattooed arms, like he was a bouncer ready for their departure. The hostess was suddenly by his side and rested her hand on his arm.
“Ian,” she murmured, “should I call someone?”
“Should youcallsomeone?” Birdie yelped. “You think you should callsecurityon me? I know that you know who—”
And that was when Elliot finally snapped to. He stepped between Birdie and Ian and turned toward the girl he used to love and said, “Bird, come on. Let’s not do this. It wasn’t Ian. We got what we came for, which was an answer.”
Birdie blinked back a few tears, then met his eyes. Her own were hazy and confused, as if she had been in a fugue state for this whole incident, and maybe, honestly, she had been. Birdie had always handled difficult things by putting herself elsewhere, literally and mentally. And obviously, this was more than a difficult situation. None of this was ideal—certainly, the live streams were whollynotideal—but all the rest of it felt irrelevant now. Now they just had to exit, and they had to exit quickly.
“What—no, really—whatabout me ever gave you the impression that I would...” Ian was still going. Elliot spun around, with Birdie now at his back, and saw Ian’s red cheeks, the spittle that was about to land on the front of his shirt. “That I would ‘regret’ losing you? What would I possibly regret? You dumped me even when I offered to move to LA. You realize that I had made calls, been offered an executive chef position? You never even heard me out, never spoke with me again. Poof. You were just... gone. Do you know...” He trailed off, then gathered himself. “Do you know how that felt? Do you possibly have any idea how shitty that was?”
“Look, dude, I’m sorry about this,” Elliot said.
But then Ian’s face fell and went blank. He looked over Elliot’s shoulder and then back to his sometimes patron who surely would never be welcome back into his restaurant for his delicious mussels again.
“Well, will you look at that,” he said. “Be careful with her, friend. She’s already left you.”
Elliot turned, and Birdie was halfway out the door of the restaurant.
When he found her, she was cradling the toilet in the RV. So Elliot sprang into action, jumping into the driver’s seat and heaving the RV away from Chez Nous, away from the gawkers and thefilmers and the fans. For a very brief beat of a moment, he envisioned himself as Birdie’s hero, just like in one of her movies.
But then Francesca began blowing up his phone, and he reminded himself that both he and Birdie were in this for professional salvation, and those paths to salvation might diverge. And it dawned on him that only one of them might end up coming out of it on top.
14
BIRDIE
Birdie raised herhead from the disgusting toilet bowl in the miniature bathroom of the RV and tried to stop her gagging. But the reflux was beyond her control, probably a lot more than just the reflux too. Her stomach lurched again. Elliot was driving like a banshee, and she wanted to be appreciative, that he was rescuing her, but she was prone to motion sickness, and the way he was careening around corners was not helping the situation one bit. Also, Birdie was entirely disinterested in being rescued, even by Elliot O’Brien.
Her plan had been a hotel for the night after a pleasant rendezvous with Ian. A little pampering, certainly some room service. Now, for obvious reasons, that was totally outside the realm of manageable. The press knew she was in San Francisco. The press knew she was vulnerable and in the middle of a nuclear meltdown in San Francisco. They’d swoop in and attack like vultures if they had a location.
“I’ll sleep in the RV,” Elliot called back to her after slamming on the brakes at a traffic light. “You take my bed.” Birdie raisedher head from the toilet and caught his eye in the rearview mirror even twenty feet away. He was looking at her with something that Birdie thought he meant to be sympathy but honestly felt a lot more like pity. And she hated it, that Elliotpitiedher. He’d already spurned her seven years ago. This, his pity, was even worse.
She didn’t want his bed. What she wanted was a safe space to anchor herself, a room with a locked door where no one could find her. But no one knew Elliot’s address, or at least they didn’t yet, so it was either his apartment or this landboat, and so, with no reasonably decent options, she agreed to the better of two terrible choices.
She tried not to replay the events at Chez Nous over and over again as she hovered over the toilet, but how did one simply ignore public humiliation? Her team had already called her four times; Imani had texted three. And the worst part about this—no, actually, not the worst, one of many god-awful things—was that she couldn’t even shift the blame. This was entirely on her! Her idea, her tactics, her words! She’d only glanced at Imani’s first text but already knew that she’d turned a medium-sized shitstorm into a full tornado of turds.
Birdie pushed herself away from the toilet and crawled down the aisle of the RV toward the passenger seat, trying not to consider how much about the conversation Ian had gotten right. Shehadditched him for Los Angeles; shehadghosted him after two years together. Birdie had always thought of herself as lucky whenever she landed a boyfriend, as the ugly duckling, the girl whose parents and sister were the brightest bulbs while she burned dimmer, the square peg in Barton’s paved streets of round holes. It never dawned on her that she wasn’t the victim here, that she’d actually been the awful one, the one who was completely reckless with Ian’s heart. She thought about Kai as she threwherself into the front seat—she hated thinking about Kai, but there he was in her brain all the same—and how it felt to have her own heart yanked around. Ian had it exactly right back there, which didn’t make it better and didn’t make it worse. It only made Birdie want to rewind time. Perhaps then she would have given Ian a more truthful explanation.
Ithadbeen Los Angeles; she’d been honest with him about that—she loved her bubble out there, filled with long days and actors who took themselves too seriously andSoap Opera Digestinterviews and double takes at the grocery store when shoppers tried to figure out where they knew her from. But, well, it had also been Elliot.
Just as she was getting her sea legs in LA, Mona and Elliot’s mom died. She went up for the funeral and sat between her best friend and her first love, and though it was obviously not the time for any sort of romantic entanglements, she couldn’t slow her heart, couldn’t stop her brain from racing with her own sort of fantastical fictions. By then it had been weeks since she left New York, left Ian. To be fair to her, she took a few of his calls in those early days, made a vague promise or two to find a date when he could come visit, but their hours were no longer synced—he was leaving for work when she was just crashing for bed.
Elliot had always lingered in the background of her mind, and then there he was at the funeral, in the foreground. Even when he returned to Berkeley and she drove back to her one-bedroom apartment in Burbank, she couldn’t shake it. So rather than tell Ian the truth, she simply told him nothing. After the funeral, he kept calling, and she stopped answering. Fourteen years later, she could see how selfish and cruel she had been. But fourteen years ago, Birdie genuinely didn’t think she was breaking his heart. Ian was so wholly wonderful, how on earth could a girl like her breakhis heart? She squeezed her eyes closed in the passenger seat as Elliot made one final turn toward his apartment, and tried to recalibrate everything she’d told herself about their breakup.
“Do you think that I’m generally full of shit?” she asked Elliot, who was digging into a backpack and pulled out a garage remote triumphantly. He clicked a button, and his condo’s garage groaned, then opened. Birdie gazed at the clearance and unconsciously ducked her head.
“We’ll make it,” he said. “Trust me.” He winced as he eased the RV forward, but naturally, like everything Elliot did, he turned out to be right. “I figured we hide it here for the night; maybe by morning everyone will have forgotten.”
Birdie turned toward him as both of their phones bleated. He offered a little shrug like they both knew this was preposterous but wouldn’t it be nice if he turned out to be correct.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Birdie said, aware that her mouth tasted like a rotten avocado, and hoped that Elliot couldn’t smell her breath. She patted down Andie’s cargo pants, thinking maybe she’d find a wayward breath mint. No luck. She suspected her mascara had flaked completely down her cheeks, that those cheeks were red and tear streaked, and that something mucusy was threatening to run out of her nose at any moment. She could not believe that she was in the middle of a near psychotic break in front of Elliot. She hiccuped and repeated herself: “Seriously, Elliot, do you think that I’m full of shit?”
Elliot turned the key in the ignition and the engine silenced itself. He sat staring at the Honda Accord parked opposite them, the newer version of his own car back in high school. God, Birdie thought, how she’d lived for those mornings when he would pull up and honk. How she’d tell herself today would be the day when she’d nail the lyrics to whatever they were listening to, how Elliotwould glance into the back seat and marvel at her talent, how even though no one appreciated her in her own home, Elliot sometimes looked at her and made her feel like the road could open up with possibility.
