“I mean, Mona knows a lot of things, but does she know that we slept together and you kicked me out the next morning? No, she does not.”
“That isnotwhat—” Birdie snapped, but then Mona was ambling back to the bar, and Birdie said, “So how long are you in town for, Elliot?” She grabbed the tequila from him and tipped her own sip back, as if the two of them were accustomed to sharing bottles all the time, as if everything were perfectly normal between them. She really was an exceptional actress, she thought.
“Unclear,” Elliot replied. “Just wanted to catch up with my twin sister, lie low, get some rest.”
“I had the most brilliant idea,” Mona said. “While talking to Nelson.”
“Talking to Nelson about me?” Birdie asked.
“He’s so much more normal now, Bird, I promise.”
Elliot rolled his eyes, and Birdie wondered if they were both thinking of the time at prom when Nelson narc’d them out to Mona. How they had slipped away into the faculty lounge because Birdie had always wanted to break in (their principal literally hung an “Off Limits” sign on the door), and Elliot was already accepted to Berkeley, so neither of them cared if they got caught. And so Birdie picked the lock (she honed various skills on her free afternoons because she took her talent résumé seriously), and they raided the fridge, which mostly had yogurts, but someone had left three boxes of Girl Scout cookies there too, so the two of them curled up on a tweed love seat and ate sleeve aftersleeve of Samoas. Birdie licked the chocolate residue off her fingers and wondered if she was misreading that Elliot very much looked like he wanted to kiss her when Mona flew through the door of the lounge, and they each jumped to opposite corners of the couch.
“What’s the brilliant idea?” Birdie asked Mona now, ignoring the idea that Nelson Pratt could be any less annoying at thirty-four than he’d been at seventeen, even if Mona vouched for him.
“You can’t just issue a press release,” she said. “No one would buy that. Thatreeksof self-aggrandizing.”
“Are you my publicist now? Because I already have one who I’m pretty pissed off at. The apology video was her idea, well, my agent’s too. Which is to say that I was outvoted, and now I would like to fire them both, but for obvious reasons, because my reputation is in the shitter, I cannot.”
“It’s notthatbad,” Mona tried.
“The only current offer I have, with all the others having been pulled, is an independent horror film that I’m pretty sure they want me for because they could claim they got to kill off America’s Sweetheart.”
“Yikes,” Elliot said.
“Nice,” Birdie replied. “Extremely helpful.”
“I’m just saying, the video was not your best—” he started.
“So youhaveseen it,” Birdie said before she remembered that she was supposed to be pretending not to care.
“But why doesn’t Elliot write it for you?” Mona was talking right over them, a million words per minute like her mouth couldn’t keep up with her brain. Which, given the speed at which her synapses fired, was probably true.
“Write... the letter? Elliot didn’t write the letter,” Birdie said. She heard her voice teeter into an octave too high. If Monasuspected that Elliot wrote the letter, then Mona knew much more than they realized. Which meant that her best friend and his twin sister was well aware that they’d been lying to her for seven years, which meant that they were about to drown at the bottom of shit’s creek. Birdie thought of ways that she could save herself, pin it all on him. He was known to have slept with women across the globe, so Birdie thought she could build a case around that.
“I didn’t write the letter!” Elliot said, tutting, also too strident to be normal. “Why would I have written the letter? I don’t even know what this letteris!” he bleated.
“Jesus, calm your tits,” Mona said, passing him the open page, and Elliot, Birdie noticed, was the color of an overripe tomato. “Seriously, will you two just relax?” Mona was still going. “No, Elliot, I was proposing thatyouwritethe storyof how Birdie is trying tofindthe person who wrote it. Then, Bird, it looks objective, and, Elliot, maybe you need to stop covering, like, the bleakest news on the planet, literally the entire planet, so you’ll get some sleep at night.”
He and Birdie both yelpedNo!so loudly, so in sync, that anyone who didn’t know better would think they had something to hide.
“Yes!” Mona responded. “Absolutely yes. Give me one reason why this isn’t perfect.”
Birdie waited for Elliot. Elliot waited for Birdie. And when neither of them could come up with a plausible explanation, Mona clapped her hands together, poured them a round of shots, and said, “Perfect, we’re doing this. I don’t want to hear another word of protest.”
6
BIRDIE
Birdie was toodrunk to drive Andie’s 4Runner home, and besides, she was pretty sure it was out of gas. Elliot, because he was always such a goddamn Boy Scout (he wasn’t, he really wasn’t, though), had the foresight to lay off the tequila two hours prior, and thus, at midnight, when Mona told Elliot to take Birdie home, once again neither of them could offer a compelling explanation why he shouldn’t.
Birdie well knew that Nelson Pratt had been snapping pictures of her all night, and god only knew how soon they’d be racing around the internet, chum for the bottom-feeders. That Birdie Robinson’s prospects were so bleak that she’d cozied up to a shitty bar and drowned her sorrows in cheap booze while swathed in a parka that resembled an REI sleeping bag. Until now, Imani and Sydney had managed to bury any leaks about her fictitious background, doubling down with aVogueshoot on the Oregon coast five years back. She knew that promises had been made for juicier scoops to outlets who threatened to run the truth, and she further suspected that Imani had an assistantdedicated to weekly internet deep dives: Reddit, Twitter, various gossip forums where catty women named something like mom2soccer4some eviscerated everything from her posture to the way she tucked her hair behind her ear when a costar was about to kiss her. But since Birdie so rarely came home, she’d never placed herself in the crosshairs of people who actually knew her back when she was Birdie Maxwell. And anyway, for a long time, Birdie coasted by on goodwill and general adoration, and if there was dirt to be scooped, few reporters were interested in doing the necessary digging.
Now she was a gazelle out on an open plain. Fresh meat.
If Nelson Pratt wanted to expose her past the way that Sebastian Carol had manipulated her present, there wasn’t much that Birdie could do to stop him. It didn’t help matters that on the way out of Monads, she marched up to his booth, rooted herself to the floor with her hands on her hips, and said,
“You, Nelson Pratt, are a fuckwad who ruins everything. So I would like to say, seventeen years postmortem, that you should fuck all the way off.”
