Mona knew damn well that Elliot didn’t want to spend three hundred miles by himself in the RV. She was always able to press his pressure points and get him to bend to her will. Well, not always. But most often. Sometimes she had to play the long game.
“Fine,” Elliot replied. “Fine.”
“Fine,” Mona said, a grin spreading across her face. She threw him the bag of doughnuts. Elliot reached up to grab them on instinct.Instinct, he thought. When it came to Birdie, he needed to start trusting his own.
54
BIRDIE
Birdie was calmerthan she expected to be. She and Andie, who was beside herself with excitement about the house seats to see Clay Dodara, walked to the Bellagio early, the sidewalks pooling with puddles from the snow that had come and gone and already melted. Simon had left their tickets at the front desk, so Birdie pinged Mona and told her to meet them there. She wanted to get a move on.
Clay Dodara was the hottest ticket on the Strip. Birdie wasn’t particularly interested in magic, wasn’t interested at all, in fact. But he’d done a TV special that had blown the minds of even the toughest of critics, so Birdie had grudgingly tuned in a few months ago in her trailer, and what she liked most about him—or, she should say, what she needed most from him—was that he always invited an audience member up onstage to participate. And Birdie needed to participate.
She intentionally had muted Imani’s and Sydney’s texts this morning, of which there were many—checking in, saying hi, trying to be casual but also likely frantically waiting for updates. Butthis was something she could do on her own. This was something she wasgoingto do on her own. They could read about it when everyone else did. And if it backfired, if it didn’t go exactly as planned? Well, then Birdie had started over before, and there was almost nothing in life that stayed permanent if you didn’t want it to.
Birdie and Andie loitered in the Bellagio lobby, Birdie trying to be inconspicuous, trying to calm her nerves. She chewed on her thumbnail and shifted her weight from one foot to the other until finally Andie said, “What is wrong with you? Is this about Kai? Please tell me this isn’t about Kai.”
Andie had returned to the room last night to find Kai red-eyed and sniffling on a love seat in the suite’s living room. It took her twenty minutes to cajole him to leave. Birdie suspected he’d talked himself into crying just so someone would catch him doing so.
“It’s not about Kai,” Birdie said, just as she saw Mona and Elliot stroll into the lobby, Mona looking giddy, Elliot looking like he’d ingested E. coli–laced beef. Birdie understood because she, too, felt like she had ingested E. coli–laced beef. But the show had to go on.
“Hey,” Birdie said to Elliot.
“Hey,” he said back but did not meet her eyes.
They found their seats and waited for the lights to dim, and soon, Clay Dodara, in a tux, with extremely gelled hair and very white teeth, was in front of them. Just a few minutes in, Andie and Mona, sitting between Birdie and Elliot, were pie-eyed, giggling, astounded at Clay’s sleights of hand, at his ability to make a horse disappear. (Yes, he really had a horse onstage. This was Vegas.) About an hour into the act, the house lights came up for the big finale, and Clay ambled to center stage, directly in front ofthem. Birdie’s breath quickened. When she’d envisioned this last night, it had seemed brilliant, foolproof.
“I’d like to request some audience participation,” Clay was saying. “A volunteer?” The crowd began to cheer, and hands flew into the air. Clay’s eyes settled on the seats directly in front of him. “Wait, ladies and gentlemen, please wait for a moment,” he said. “I believe I see—yes, I definitely do—is that Birdie Robinson in row three?”
The cheers turned to squeals, and Birdie felt every stare from the entire two-thousand-person venue on the back of her neck.Shit shit shit shit.What had she been thinking, asking Simon to phone Clay to pull her onstage? She raised a hand meekly to acknowledge the crowd.
“Birdie Robinson! I can’t have you in my audience and not demand that you come onstage. Get your ass up here,” Clay called. The auditorium absolutely lost it, and if Birdie had felt like enjoying herself, she would have floated on the high of this adulation for days. Alas, she was too consumed with regretting her plan to enjoy it.
“Birdie,” Andie whispered into her ear, “I think you’re supposed to go up there.”
Birdie nodded and pushed herself up with the armrests on her seat, her legs so wobbly she wasn’t certain she’d hold steady. In any other circumstance, she’d remind herself that she was anactor, a totalpro, and she’d stitch herself into a mask, a costume, and carry on as if this were all an act. But it wasn’t. She had to do this as Birdie Maxwell, and it was absolutely fucking terrifying.
She made her way down her row, and then up the stairs, to where Clay was beaming. He gave her a quick hug, then bowed, as if she were royalty. She’d only met Clay once in passing, andshe knew that he loved nothing more than a celebrity collaboration, which inevitably drew views to his YouTube channel, so she wasn’t particularly surprised at his enthusiasm. She was doing him as much of a favor as he was doing her.
“Birdie Robinson,” he said, holding one of her hands and raising their linked arms in the air, like they’d just won Olympic gold, “it is an honor.”
The crowd went completely nuts. Just bananas. As if they’d forgotten that Birdie was no longer their sweetheart, as if she’d been forgiven for everything. It would have been easy, Birdie realized, to simply get swept up in Clay’s act, to set aside her plan and let Clay encourage a redemptive arc that she would ride like a wave. But it had dawned on her last night that she didn’t want anyone else to be responsible for her own happiness: not Imani, not Sydney, not Ian, not Carter, not her parents, not Andie, not Kai, and not Elliot either.
So she steadied her breath, reminded herself that she was more self-reliant than she’d gotten used to, and then she reached for Clay’s mic.
55
ELLIOT
Elliot was dubious,even grouchy, about wasting his time at some ridiculous magic show in a packed house full of tourists when he could have been writing. But now Birdie was onstage, and he found he could barely breathe. There was a moment, initially, when Birdie looked like she couldn’t breathe either, and Elliot wanted to run up there and wrap himself around her, like what she needed was protection. But then he saw what he knew almost no one else in the theater did: she stitched herself together and grew taller, bolder, stronger, all with a nearly undetectable shift in her posture. Elliot detected it, though, because he was made to read Birdie Maxwell like a well-worn book. Every page, every sentence, every line. He’d been reading it since he was twelve.
“Thank you so much for inviting me up here, Clay!” she said, her voice dancing, her tone animated. “What an absolute surprise. I hope you don’t intend to saw me in half. My agents would be quite unhappy if I were sliced in two today.”
“Your agents may be, but maybe not that ex of yours, the chef?” Clay retorted. The crowd roared.
Elliot saw the tiniest of flinches behind Birdie’s eyes, but she played along, the good sport. She had to know that just about every phone in the auditorium was trained on her, that fingers were flying over their keypads to update every social media app possible. Which reminded him.
Francesca was going to kill him if he didn’t scoop this first.
