Messy (7 page)

“Too bad—I would’ve watched that,” Max said. “But your mother probably would have sued. Which one of you does he want Moxie to play?”

“I’m not sure,” Brooke said, scrunching up her face. “She’s a big name, which is perfect for me, but Moxie’s folksy accent thing might be better for someone from the sticks. No offense to Molly,” she added, after a beat.

“She wouldn’t care,” Max said. “West Cairo
is
the sticks. She told me there is actually a bar there called The Sticks.”

Brooke snickered, then tried to wave it off. “Don’t try to distract me from the problem of… you,” she said. “Can I offer you some shoes? A high heel can fix almost anything.”

Max’s toes obligingly went numb. There was a limit to how literally she was willing to be Brooke Berlin. “No,” she said firmly. “No makeover.”

“No makeover?” Brooke parroted, seeming galled. Then she tapped a finger against her well-glossed lip. “Interesting idea, actually. In those pants, you could very easily go unobserved if you need to crawl through the bushes to get a scoop.”

Max again cursed that Molly hadn’t come into the room, because all her psychic “girl, please” energies were being wasted.

“Maybe we should talk about what you actually expect me to do tonight,” Max said. “I charge extra for shrubberies.”

“Yes, let’s talk plan of attack,” Brooke said, beginning to pace across her room. “I’ve got the blog all ready to go, so all you have to do is e-mail me the first entry and I’ll post it, after a thorough edit and study of your grammar, of course. You should follow me around tonight, but keep a safe distance so people don’t suspect anything. Although
if it’s loud in there, it might be hard to hear, so maybe we need some kind of listening device….” She snapped her fingers. “Daddy has a working bug left over from
Amendment to Hell
. I could borrow it and—”

“Brooke,” Max interrupted. “Are you off your meds? I’m not going to wear a wire to a party.”

Brooke was silent for a second, picking at her bracelet. “Well, it’s just that this is really important to me. It’s…” She let out a long breath. “It has to work, is all.”

“Okay, what’s the deal with this?” Max asked, shifting so she could cross her legs in the chair. “Are you paying back a mafia debt or something?”

Brooke began to flap her hands a little. “I just… I thought being in
My Fair Lady
would somehow solve everything, but Daddy is still busy and my mother is still gone.”

Oops.
Max hadn’t been prepared for an actual confidence. She’d assumed Brooke would confess that she’d never been the same, mentally, since she chipped her last pedicure. What did people say in these situations?

“Um,” she said.

Way to go, wordsmith.

Brooke didn’t seem to notice. “If I can do this, I’m not just some kid in a school play. I’m an Internet sensation. I’m in demand. And I think… I think Daddy would feel like he needed to be part of that.”

Max was surprised to find herself without a glib comeback. She’d heard Molly talk about how hard it was on Brooke to have Brick fly off all the time without her,
ostensibly to protect her from the upheaval of his life, but in actuality ensuring he rarely saw her. Most kids probably dreamed of being left to their own devices in the plushest mansion money could build, but clearly it really bugged Brooke. Last fall, a cruel and unexpected public reading of Brooke’s private e-mails had revealed what a crappy absentee mother she had, but obviously her absentee father stung the most. Max tried to imagine how that would feel, and couldn’t: The farthest her father ever got was the garden shed, where he was usually taking apart various household objects and trying to merge them into a megainvention he could sell at Target. But that was just across the yard, and he still popped in to cook dinner (and steal the occasional toaster).

A strange calm settled over Max. “How about this,” she began. “Instead of me transcribing everything you do and say, what about something more observational? About the scene, the people. But truthful, for a change.”

“Like, ragging on them?” Brooke asked, worrying at her thumbnail before smacking it out of her mouth with her other hand.

“No, just… noticing,” Max clarified. “And you wouldn’t be lying, or talking about people who aren’t in the public eye already. But everyone is sick of reading whitewashed BS about how all celebrities love each other. Like how everyone kisses Julia Roberts’s ass anytime she even comes within sneezing distance of a movie set. I’ve eaten toffalo burgers that seem more authentic.”

“So I’d be the honest insider,” Brooke mused.

“Exactly.”

Brooke looked up at Max and gave her a genuine smile, possibly the first real one of their entire shared history. “I like it. Bold and blunt.”

“I’m on it,” Max promised. “So please unclench. It’s cracking your tan.”

Brooke let slip a small snicker, then pushed out a crisp breath. “Great. You can go now. I have to cross-reference tonight’s outfit with everything I’ve worn this past month just to make sure it’s not repetitious.” She shot Max an appraising look. “Your homework is to talk to Molly about the finer points of wearing shirts without writing on them. Rachel Zoe would die. And not in the good way.”

Max watched Brooke disappear into her vast closet. “This ought to be interesting,” she said aloud to no one.

“Are you sure about this?”

Ari had asked Brooke that question earlier, and now—two hours after Max left her room—it rang in Brooke’s head like a cowbell.
Of course
she wasn’t sure. She’d been formulating this plan so fervently, and privately, for the past few months that it felt weird to be acting on it at long last. And with somebody with whom she’d historically exchanged more glares than words.

“She’s just so
low-rent
,” Jennifer Parker had said on the
phone earlier, when they’d three-way called with Arugula to discuss Brooke’s outfit. “And she’s always up in Jake’s business. Why are you doing this to me?”

“She’s not low-rent. She’s… unvarnished,” Brooke insisted. “I can handle that. And it’s not about you, it’s about my career, so I expect your full support. If you so much as breathe a word of this to anyone, even Jake—especially Jake—I swear to God I will find a way to lock you out of your IMDb page and put every infomercial you’ve ever done on there.” Jen was silent. Brooke soldiered on. “Besides, it’s too late now. I hired her. It’s done.”

“It’s
not
too late,” Arugula argued. “This is Hollywood, honey. People get terminated midsentence in this town. It’s called a recast.”

“Actually, I welcome the challenge,” Brooke had said airily. “It would be boring if my blogographer were exactly like me.”

She
almost
believed this. Although Max had been surprisingly comforting and in command earlier—never in a million years would Brooke have imagined she’d bare her soul to a person in cargo pants—now that it was zero hour and Brooke was applying the finishing touches to her makeup, she was still worried Max would turn out to be a surly loose cannon who only wanted to insult her trendy Louboutins, thus ruining Brooke’s dream of having the designer name a pair after her.

On the other hand, hiring someone with a different worldview could be considered savvy, right?
Brooke assured
herself.
How else do you explain that Elisabeth Hasselbeck is still on
The View?

The bigger issue was that as much as Brooke felt her master plan was a theoretical stroke of genius, she also had no idea whether it would actually
work
. Phase One, at least, had gone well: Brick had been blown away by her performance as Eliza Doolittle. His unabashed paternal pride—attention she’d been craving her whole life while he was off shooting movies with other people’s kids—was like a drug. Brooke wanted more. But scoring another hit was taking longer than she would’ve liked.
My Fair Lady
had been a wild success, but it was still just a school play. She needed a larger platform. A louder one.

And it was that epiphany, which came in part after Brooke realized that Kourtney Kardashian had two million Twitter followers just because she made bad relationship decisions in front of a camera crew, that led her to what she referred to in her head as the Big Idea: a blog. Something
good
, not just some random site where she uploaded pictures of herself in novelty sunglasses and then wrote about pants, or whatever. No, it had to get people talking. About
her
.

Brooke studied herself in the mirror. Her sleek navy backless Calvin Klein looked fantastic against her tan. Surely she already had enough going for her to stir up some buzz. Was she crazy to put her public image in the hands of a pale hobbit who probably hated her?

Stop it.
This was ridiculous. They weren’t covering the party for E! or
Hey!
or any of their exclamatory brethren. Max might not even write about any of tonight’s events at all. It was just a test. Nobody at the party would know that her secret—and, she prayed, secretly brilliant—blog was even happening.

“You are going to be amazing,” she told her reflection. “You need Max. And Max needs you. This is going to work.”

It has to work.

AS THE CAR TURNED
in through the front gate of an immense oceanside mansion, Max found herself wondering if Moxie Stilts had bought her house as a cutesy pun, as it was literally built on them. The Malibu manse was three stories of modern glass and steel, carved into a cliff and kept from tumbling into the waves below by a handful of what looked like Pixy Stix.

“I couldn’t live here,” Max said, peering out the window of Molly’s SUV. “I would be down there all day staring at those things to see if they’re still solid. What if there’s a big storm?”

“Okay, for future reference, I do
not
want my blog to be full of boring commentary about architectural safety and, like, El Niño,” Brooke said as Molly guided the car toward
the party’s valet-for-hire. She was clearly feeling like herself again. “Although, actually, maybe Daddy decided to come for research. They’re already talking about an
Avalanche!
sequel called
Mudslide?!?
”

“That can’t be. They only just finished shooting
Avalanche!
last week,” Molly pointed out.

Brooke fiddled with the clasp of her silver evening clutch. “Well, I saw a script outline on Daddy’s desk, and that’s what it said. I don’t make these things up. I just report them.”

“You seem to do a lot of snooping around that office,” Max noted.

Brooke turned around in her seat and glared at her. “I’m just observant,” she said. “Like you’re going to need to be if you’re going to pull off being me.”

“I think donating one percent of my working brain to the cause should cover it.”

“
Zing
,” Brooke retorted sarcastically.

“Okay, everybody, retreat to your corners,” Molly said, throwing the car into Park. “We’re here.”

The girls climbed out, gave their names to a ponytailed blonde wearing a black shift dress and holding a clipboard, and were waved up the gravel driveway toward a large amber-lit tent that had been erected on the house’s massive side lawn. A convivial din emanated from behind the cloth as waiters bustled in and out, half of them ferrying snacks and full glasses of champagne, the others toting trays piled high with overturned plates and crumpled napkins.

Inside, chandeliers hung from the underside of the tent, throwing a dim, flattering light over the bar, a dance floor, and white-draped round tables topped with tight bunches of hyacinths. It echoed one of the receptions Max had read about in the copy of
InStyle Weddings
that had been in the Fu’d break room for the last six weeks.
Oh, please, can this be a surprise wedding?
That was almost as trendy as a secret baby. Writing about it would be a slam dunk.

“There he is,” Brooke said, gesturing with her chin toward a tall, handsome fortysomething man in a tuxedo sitting at a corner table drinking a low-carb beer and staring suspiciously at a tiny hamburger from which he had taken one bite.

Brick Berlin visibly brightened and leaped to his feet. “Girls! Welcome! Group hug!”

He pulled Brooke and Molly into a tight embrace.

“Hi, Dad,” Molly said, but it came out muffled because her mouth was covered by his giant biceps. “Burger no good?”

“Bad news, precious child—I tasted mayonnaise,” he said. “Even though I specifically asked if they were condimented. People are so careless. My trainer says it takes a thousand crunches to offset a mayonnaise incident, and I already accidentally ate a tub of potato salad this week.”

He peered over Brooke’s blonde curls at Max.

“And who is this?” he asked. “Wait! Let me guess. You’re the foreign exchange student Brooke sent away for!”

Brooke pulled away from her father. “Daddy, that was five years ago. This is Molly’s friend. She comes over to the house, like, three times a week.”

Recognition flooded Brick’s face. “You mean the girl who’s named after cheese?”

“I’m Max,” said Max, wishing she had something more glamorous to offer.