“I’m always here for it,” Jamie promised, glancing over his shoulder before signaling for the exit. “You’re special, Fee. I knew that as soon as I saw you in that audition room with that neon streak in your hair. The second you walked in I thought,Holy shit, that’s my girl. None of those other guys in there knew their ass from their elbow. But right from the beginning, you were different.” He reached over and squeezed her knee, just quick, before letting go and putting both hands back on the steering wheel. “Even back then, you were a fucking adult.”
Fiona smiled. She knew it was just Jamie being Jamie—he was generous with feedback like that, everybody’s big brother and best friend; just this morning he’d told Sam he was a prince among men—but there was a part of her that felt like maybe this was different. That maybe he actuallysawher, the two of them sitting here in the dark.
“This is me,” she said when they pulled up in front of her parents’ house a few minutes later. She felt suddenly embarrassed by the unremarkable smallness of it, thinking of the party he’d thrown at his place when the show first got picked up: his land and his pool and his collection of vintage arcade games on the lower level, how glamorous it had all felt. This was just a regular house where she lived with her parents. Herparent, she amended to herself. Just the one, now. “Thanks again for the ride.”
“Yeah, no problem,” Jamie said, waving her off. “I can drive you whenever.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” she said. She didn’t want to be, like, a charity case, some sad orphan he felt like he had to look out for.
But Jamie didn’t seem to be thinking of her that way at all. “Let’s see how it goes,” he hedged. “We’ll work something out. And in the meantime, take care of yourself, will you? We need you.” He grinned. “Ineed you.”
Fiona smiled at that, gulping down the sudden lump at the back of her throat. For one crazy second she almost blurted it all out:I think my dad is having some kind of serious mental health situation. My sister is wetting the bed again even though she’s seven years old. Somebody took pictures of me in a bikini at the beach a few weeks ago and now they’re all up on Reddit, with a bunch of creepy old guys in their basements saying what they want to do to me. And I don’t actually think I like being quasi-famous that much at all.
Instead she rolled her eyes, like he was silly for worrying. Shewas an adult, right? He’d just said it himself. She could handle it. “I will,” she promised easily. “I always do.”
Jamie hugged her goodbye across the gearshift, sturdy and solid. Fiona closed her eyes and held on.
“Fiona, honey?”
Fiona blinks and comes back to herself, the night air cool on her flushed, sweaty face. All at once she realizes she’s outside in the yard. She doesn’t remember opening the slider or stepping out onto the patio, but she must have, because here she is with bits of broken plate and scattered sandwich all around her; here’s Estelle peering at her worriedly from the other end of the grass.
“Fiona, honey,” Estelle says again, in a voice that makes Fiona wonder exactly how long Estelle has been trying to get her attention, “are you all right?”
Fiona’s skin prickles with shame. It’s not the first time she’s had an episode like this—hell, the whole year after the show got canceled was basically one long and continuous episode like this—but enough time has passed since they were a regular occurrence that she’d started to believe maybe they were a thing of the past, faded out of her life along with the neon streak in her hair.
“I’m fine,” she promises Estelle now, smiling across the yard in the darkness in a way she hopes looks convincingly sane. Her official diagnosis from Pam was post-traumatic stress disorder, which Fiona found profoundly embarrassing—she was on atelevisionshow, for fuck’s sake; she didn’t serve two combat tours in Iraq—and to this day she thinks it’s ridiculous and implausible enough that she’s never actually said it out loud. Still, every once ina while she’ll watch a movie or read a news story about some poor ex-military guy completely coming apart at the seams in the supermarket over how many flavors of Triscuits there are and think:You know what, dude? I get it.
“I’m fine,” she says again, still smiling. “I just...” Justwhat, exactly? What would be a valid explanation for smashing dishes on one’s patio at two a.m.? “Boy troubles, that’s all.”
Estelle brightens at that, which Fiona thought she might. “Ah,” she says sagely. “Well, in that case, I’ve got some glassware I’ve been meaning to get rid of, if you’re interested.”
Fiona laughs, surreptitiously tucking her still-shaking hands into the pockets of her shorts. “Thanks,” she says, “but I think I’ve just about gotten it out of my system.”
“Whatever you say, sweetheart.” Estelle blows her a kiss. “Just make sure you’re careful when you clean that glass up, will you?” She looks at Fiona for another minute, then turns toward her own backyard. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
The next day is worse, if that’s possible. She spills an iced coffee all over a finished batch of fundraising mailers for the Humane Society, then prints four hundred flyers from the wrong computer file and has to dump them all into the trash. When she glances at her phone she’s got an email from Thandie, who saw the pictures in some European tabloid:You and Sam???she wants to know, her surprise palpable from six thousand miles away.I require full details immediately, please and thank you.
Fiona cringes. It’s the first email Thandie has sent her in ages,and there’s a part of her that wants to fold like a house of cards and tell her everything, about Sam’s deep laugh and the warm planes of his body and the embarrassing thing her stomach did every time he said her name. But she can just imagine how it will look to someone like Thandie, who’s been quietly seeing an entertainment lawyer for the better part of two years without them ever having been photographed together: like a fame grab, some pathetic gambit to try and get back into the headlines. Desperate.
Thandie’s your friend, though, reminds a reasonable-sounding voice in Fiona’s head that sounds suspiciously like Pam.Why would she ever think that about you?
Fiona frowns, yanking idly at the ends of her hair for a moment. Debating.It scared me, she imagines telling Thandie,how much I liked him. But in the end it didn’t matter either way.
Total nothingburger,she writes back finally, throwing in a French fry emoji for good measure.We hung out for like twenty minutes and all he wanted to talk about was his upcoming appearance as a guest judge onCake Pop Wars. If I ever do try to date again, remind me to steer clear of anyone with a more involved skincare routine than the beauty editor of Goop.
Also!she types, hoping she sounds like the thought has just occurred to her and not like she’s been stewing over it for the better part of two days.Is it true you told Jamie Hartley you’d do theBirdsthing?
The rest of the morning is pretty much a wash. She’s considering knocking off altogether and taking herself to a movie when thechimes above the door sound and a middle-aged woman saunters in with a hundred-dollar blowout and the kind of flattened, swollen lips that suggest she had fat from elsewhere on her body injected into her face at some point in the recent past. “Picking up invitations,” she announces. “Last name Taylor.”
This time, Fiona manages to get her rung up before it happens. “Oh my god,” the woman exclaims, dropping the keys to her Mercedes onto the counter with a noisy clatter. “Aren’t you Riley Bird?” Then, without waiting for Fiona to answer: “My daughter is going to absolutelydie. She had the Christmas movie memorized. Hell,Ihad the Christmas movie memorized.” Her voice has the nasal quality of Chandler’s girlfriend onFriends. For all Fiona knows, thisisthe woman who played Chandler’s girlfriend onFriends, and she’s just had so much plastic surgery that she’s now virtually unrecognizable. It occurs to Fiona that perhaps that’s a strategy she should try.
“I have to call her,” the woman continues, pulling her phone out of a massive Louis Vuitton tote bag and dialing. “Maddie, honey,” she says, looking at the screen—of course it would be a FaceTime, not a regular call—“you are never going to guess who is standing in front of me right now.” The woman spins the phone around so the camera is facing Fiona. “Say hi to Riley Bird!”
Maddie blinks at Fiona for a moment, her face slightly distorted on the smudgy screen.I didn’t agree to this, Fiona thinks of saying. She imagines grabbing the phone from the woman’s hand and hurling it across the shop.
Instead she smiles and waves. “Hi, Maddie!” she says.
“I almost didn’t recognize you,” the woman says, looking at Fiona curiously. “Did you put a little weight on? Maddie, don’t you think she put a little weight on? I don’t mean that in a bad way,” she adds quickly, though it doesn’t sound like she means it in a good way, either. Fiona keeps smiling.
