He was beginning to suspect, however, that he needed to take a clearer-eyed look at how he defined his future. He’d gotten greedy with his shortcuts. He’d gotten in so deep that he couldn’t assess when he was blurring the lines and when he was walking right over them. Maybe Francesca had been right to put boundaries around his work. Maybe Mona had been right to put boundaries around Birdie. Maybe he was too arrogant for his own good and too reckless to be reliable. Maybe he slept with women all the time because it was easier than being alone. Maybe being alonereminded him of the one pure thing that he’d had and how that was gone too. Maybe the brilliant Elliot O’Brien was actually a fool: he was working so hard on a series of articles that ran counter to exactly what he wanted. Birdie. Birdie was what he wanted. Who he wanted.
Elliot pushed up to his elbows, smelling waffles and coffee wafting from downstairs. He should come clean with Mona. Tell her the truth about that night in New York all those years ago. How was he expected to write the rest of this series if he couldn’t be honest about his part in it? But he thought of how angry she’d be and couldn’t bear one more calamity. He flopped back on the bed.
Tomorrow. He’d tell her tomorrow.
Then, as if Mona had read his mind, the door to his boyhood room burst open.
“Come on,” Mona sang, “I made your favorite breakfast.”
She bounced onto his bed and jumped on top of him like she used to when they were kids. It was one of the singularly odd things about being orphaned, even as an adult in your midthirties. How specific and granular your memories were of a time when your parents were still alive, and how you could carry on in all the same ways, but without them, everything shifts just five or ten degrees, so nothing is the same at all.
“Get off of me,” Elliot said with a huff, just like he always did when they were kids too.
“Okay, but hurry up or else I’m going to eat all the waffles.” Mona really always did level with you.
He pushed himself up to seated, then swung his feet to the floor and was surprised at how delightful he found this: his sister’s wide-open enthusiasm for the everyday mundanity of life. Sometimes, he resented that she’d claimed Birdie as her own, thateven as he so profoundly loved her, Mona got there first. But other times, like now, he saw it with utter clarity: that he and Mona were all the other had.
He wiped the sleep from his eyes and found a T-shirt in his drawer that readBarton Varsity Swimmingand tugged it over his head. He thought again of Birdie, how he lingered at school for her after that rehearsal with the Cheetos or Doritos or whatever, how he’d been wearing his full varsity garb like that would impress her. How he thought that maybe it had, but what did it matter?
He wound his way downstairs and found Mona halfway through a Belgian waffle.
“It’s been like thirty seconds,” he said, then reached for the other half.
“Sit,” she replied. “I have another one coming.”
He sat, surprised at how grateful he was to be taken care of, even for something as simple as a homemade breakfast. Mona was so often looking out for him, he realized now. And he mostly repaid her by nagging her about Caltech, by quietly—and sometimes less quietly—judging her choices.
“Do you think Birdie is really done with me?” he asked. “I mean, with the articles?”
She hovered by the waffle iron, pouring the batter in, watching it sizzle before she closed it.
“I think,” she said, “that if you want Birdie to trust you, you need to give her a reason to. So my advice to you is to give her a reason to.”
Elliot sighed, squeezed his eyes closed, and pressed his fingers to his lids like he was staving off a headache. “Soyouthink she doesn’t trust me?”
“I think I’m the wrong person to ask,” Mona said. “There are only two people who can answer that. And one of them is you.”
34
BIRDIE
Birdie had uneartheda mountain of pillows and sheets last night from a box that Andie had earmarked for Goodwill, and she was piled under the entirety of the bedding when her phone started vibrating again on her nightstand. She’d already muted nearly all her notifications: Twitter and Instagram and text and email. She knew what America thought of her; she didn’t need the play-by-play. But she’d forgotten to set the ringtone to silent, so here it was, haunting her. Had been for the better part of the morning and afternoon.
She heard the door to her room open, then her sister’s thundering footsteps.
“Oh my god,” Andie said, flinging the sheets off Birdie, as if Birdie’s hideaway aggrieved her personally. “Get. Up.”
“Hey!” Birdie snapped, flopping onto her back. “I wasn’t bothering you. I thought that would make you happy.”
Andie grabbed the phone and held it directly in Birdie’s eyeline. “Elliot. Elliot O’Brien has called you nine times in the past three hours.” She dropped it onto Birdie’s belly. “So do you wantto tell me what’s going on or are we still pretending that you can handle this all on your own?”
“I thought you were totally disinterested in my business,” Birdie said.
“I am. But even I can see that when a world-famous movie star is hiding in a pillow fort, it’s a pretty pitiful cry for help. But a cry for help all the same.” She paused. “Also, I found this cashmere sweater in your duffel bag, and I’m keeping it, so I came up to say... thank you. And I suppose in return, I can be a little generous with your problems. But that could wear off in about ten minutes, so I suggest you hurry.”
Birdie groaned and flung an arm over her eyes, like she couldn’t bear to tell Andie the truth if she could see her. She felt something soft smack her in the face, then opened her eyes to see Andie hovering above, armed with a pillow.
“You do not get to resort to violence!” Birdie cried just as Andie pummeled her one more time.
