Abby Road (4 page)

“Eventually.” I kicked off my sandals by the door.

“I
hate
that guy,” she muttered under her breath. “Hal called my cell looking for you.” She turned and fluttered her lashes at me.

“What’d he want?”

“We talked for only a few. Sounds like he’s missing you.”

“He’s bored,” I said, which was much more logical than her explanation.

“He’s
madly
in love with you,” Lindsey trilled over her shoulder while I followed her down the hall. “I’ve been telling you for years.”

“Hal and I are buds, Lindsey. Ease up on the match making.”

“Don’t break his heart—he’s sweet.”

Now my nose crinkled. “Hal?”

“He cracks me up. He’s so witty.”

“Are we talking about the same person who recently tweeted ‘I just ate some noodles’ and ‘My toenails are amazing’?”

“Funny, see?” Lindsey laughed and flipped her hair. “And so cute.” She stopped to restart the clothes dryer. “Don’t you think he’s cute?”

“Kind of.” I shrugged. “But not the type of cute that makes me want to rip his shirt open.”

“Like Miles Carlisle, you mean?”

I dipped my chin, staring at my sister through my eyelashes. “Lindsey. I broke up with that idiot almost a year ago. Again, stop with the match making.”

My sister pulled an innocent expression, complete with big, round eyes. “Okay, okay. But if
you
don’t tell me what’s going on in your life, then I’ll have to get my information elsewhere, and my sources say he’s hooked on you.” She gestured to the tall stack of magazines behind me next to the picture window. Despite everything they printed about our family and all those other crap-filled stories, Lindsey relied on the tabloids way too much.

“Max is my manager,” I said, skipping back to our earlier subject, “and he’ll be calling me at some point.”

“I thought you were on an official vacation.” She dumped the contents of my bags onto the kitchen table to examine the day’s purchases.

“I
am
on vacation.” I rubbed my nose. “I just don’t want Max to think I’m hiding from him.”

“You should be hiding. One whole summer off after five years nonstop?” She chuckled sarcastically. “How
generous
of him.” She lifted her perfectly sculpted eyebrows at me as she held up a jumbo-sized conch shell coated with cheap mother-of-pearl. “I get you for
three whole months
,” she reminded. “That’s the deal.”

I nodded, unwilling to argue at the moment. She returned the tacky shell to its blue tissue paper. “When you showed up here last night, you looked like death.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said, running my hands through my hair.

Upon further consideration, however, I probably
had
looked freakishly ghastly when I’d appeared on Lindsey’s doorstep, because I’d yet to wash off the gaudy stage makeup from my performance fifteen hours earlier or remove the several feet of pink extensions woven through my hair. I probably looked like something that was dug up then left out to rot.

Lindsey claimed I looked like death. Okay, so at least my outsides were catching up to my insides.

I held my breath and glanced at my sister, willing myself not to break into sobs. There was so much she still didn’t know. That sob hung in my chest, torn between the agony of holding in and wishing that I could’ve told her everything.

“Ah!
Muchas gracias
for this!” Lindsey suddenly exclaimed, flipping through my one purchase for her from the bookstore. “I’ve been dying to read this.”

“You’re welcome.” I smiled.

After returning my other souvenirs to their bags, Lindsey turned her scrutinizing eyes back to me. In response, I pushed my fingers through my hair, vainly attempting to appear non-dead.

She tipped her head to the side, eyebrows raised. “Don’t they let you sleep on that tour bus? Or eat?”

My spine stiffened, causing my proverbial panic-and-retreat alert to kick into high gear.

“Your hair’s thinner, Abby.” She planted her hands on her hips, continuing to study me.

I felt my face getting hot.

“You’ve lost more weight, too.” She bit her thumbnail, looking guilty. “Seriously, what’s happened to you? I saw you six months ago; you looked fine then.”

Fine?
I wanted to ask. Six months ago, I’d been merely a tragic caricature of my once happy, normal self. Now I didn’t even have the energy to keep up the façade.

“I
told
them,” Lindsey continued when I remained silent. “I
told
them you weren’t strong enough. I told them we shouldn’t have let you go back out on the road alone.”

“I wasn’t alone,” I corrected automatically, not bothering to disguise the misery in my voice. “Not for two seconds am I
ever
alone.”

She continued to chew her thumbnail, not listening. “But we didn’t know what else to do, ya know? And you wouldn’t let Mom or Dad help or . . .”

Just breathe, Abby. Just breathe. Let her talk. She’ll finish in a minute.

I stared into the middle distance between us, trying to make it look like I was listening, when I was really counting backward from one hundred in my head.

My focus was pulled when I felt something cold on my palm.

“I’m being a bad mom,” Lindsey said, after placing a bottle of water into my hand when I apparently didn’t take it. “I’m fixing mac and cheese for the boys.” She displayed and shook a blue box of dry noodles and powdered cheese. “Seriously contrary to Doctor Oz.”

“I’m telling your Mommy Group,” I warned, folding myself into a kitchen chair.

“And I’m being even lazier and making a dumbed-down version of Rachel Ray’s Cobb salad for Steve and me. I’ll fix you whatever you want. Sky’s the limit.”

“Food.” I gulped, feeling woozy just speaking the word. “Food is the last thing—”

“Then don’t worry about it,” she said, filling a saucepan with water at the sink. “You’ll have to eat sometime. I’ll try not to worry about you. At least not
openly
worry about you. I know how much you hate that.”

I leaned over, reaching for one of the glossy magazines. At a glance, I realized I’d met every single person on the cover. I grabbed a pen off the counter and idly start filling in black teeth on Angelina.

Lindsey dried her hands on a red kitchen towel then tucked it into her apron. As she examined the magazine over my shoulder, she played with a chunk of her shiny blond hair, looking exactly like pictures of our mother at that age: both natural, effortless beauties. Unlike me. I had to work like a maniac to keep my booty in check. The men in the family were just as genetically fortunate, father and son, movie star good looks, spitting images twenty-five years apart.

Falling last in line, I’d been born a hodge-podge of all four. My hair is naturally dark, and so is my skin. My peepers turned out an odd grayish-blue and larger than sometimes look normal for the size of my face. My neck is long, my face round, and my feet big. I’m also the shortest in the family by several inches, shooting up to five foot six when I was fifteen, all sharp knees and elbows.

I used to beg Mom to give me highlights so I would look more like Lindsey, but it never happened. Of course, the color of my hair was the first thing I was required to alter after I signed Max’s contract five years ago. That makeover experience was my own personal
Miss Congeniality
transformation. Out of that salon I’d stepped: new hair, new eyes, and new clothes. Malibu Abby, made by Mattel.

After that, every photograph of me was as a blond in colored contacts—an ice-blue so dramatic it reminded me of the sky in the Van Goghs I’d obsessed over in my painting classes during my last semester of college. At first I thought my eyes looked too phony, but like most things, I got used to them. Then they became my trademark.

“You did get one other phone call,” Lindsey began again, pulling me back to the present. “Mom.” She stood very still in the middle of the kitchen, waiting to see my reaction.

“Oh?”

When she didn’t get the response she was expecting, Lindsey turned her back to resume her task. “Just checking on you,” she continued from over her shoulder. “Making sure you arrived safely. You should give them a call when—”

“I will,” I cut in. “When I get the chance.”

And with that, Lindsey let the subject drop.

Lazily, I glanced past her at the refrigerator, covered in photos and drawings, some with crayons, some with markers or finger paint. I felt a little lump in my throat, slightly jealous of the normal life she was living, and feeling pained at the same time, knowing that I’d basically forfeited any kind of traditional normalcy to live
my
life.

Something caught my eye. “Lindsey?” I rose to my feet. “Why do you have
that
up there?”

Lindsey followed my stare to the magazine page taped to the side of the fridge. “I think it’s hilarious.” She grinned as she regarded it. “It was taken the night before I left you in Amsterdam, back in January. Remember?”

I stood before the picture. “I remember,” I said, smiling at the memory.

The picture was of Mustang Sally—all four of us in the band. At the far end of that ornately decorated Dutch hotel hallway, Hal and the guys had thrown a sort of cul-de-sac after party our last night in Europe. That photo captured the scene: ice buckets, pizza boxes, some random girls behind us out of focus, and visual evidence of the aftermath of a multicolored Silly String war. The guys had unleashed a surprise attack on Lindsey and me.

“Hey, they airbrushed you out.” I pointed at the photo. “You were right there next to me. You had Jordan in a headlock.”

“I know.” Lindsey shrugged, wiping down the counter.

I turned back to stare at the picture. Cameras don’t lie, but computers sure can be deceptive. Not only deleting my sister, but also adding what looked like strategically placed items of beer bottles and ladies’ lingerie. I’d been there that night, and I knew the guys were drinking nothing more than Mountain Dew. In their own ridiculous ways, the guys did try to play their parts—dating models, racing motorcycles, and other equally mature endeavors. But we weren’t your typical rock stars.

I examined the picture more closely. “It’s kind of endearing, if they weren’t so infantile.”

“I love it. Because
look
.” She pointed at the photo. “You’re laughing.”

And I was. Huh.

Frozen in time, the four of us were covered in a rainbow of sticky, wormy webs, and my mouth was wide open. Laughing. Unabashed.

No, cameras don’t lie. But I also remembered the guilt I felt right afterward, knowing that before that night, I hadn’t laughed in months. I didn’t deserve to laugh after what I did.

“What do you want to do tomorrow?” Lindsey asked, probably catching the change in my expression. I tore myself away from the picture to look at her. She was chopping bell peppers with an orange-handled chef’s knife on a turquoise plastic cutting board.

“Absolutely nothing,” I answered, returning to my chair. “I intend to be an über beach bum for the first month.” I let my head drop onto the table and then rested it on one cheek. “Just flip me over twice a week so my tan is even.” I closed my eyes.

Lindsey dropped something loud into the sink.

“Why?” I asked, popping one eye open. “What do you have going on?”

“Cleaning house,” she said. “Early in the morning before the boys are up.”

“Need help?”

She looked at me with a grin. “Abby. Please . . .”

We har-har’ed in unison, knowing the domestic gene had totally skipped me.

I propped my head on my elbow and flipped through the magazine in front of me, not really looking at the pages. I let myself be distracted for a while, my attention shifting from the magazine to watching Lindsey bustle around her kitchen, always on the go, always on top of everything, chatting away.

“Around eight o’clock,” she said, “I’m taking the boys into Panama City for haircuts, and then we have their four-year checkup in the afternoon. Steve’s meeting us for dinner at a new place that just opened on the water. Why don’t you come along? We’ll make a day of it.”

“Sounds like fun.” I yawned, shoving the magazine aside so my head could drift down to the table. “But I should probably lay low around here, if that’s okay.”

I felt Lindsey at my side. She swept the hair off the back of my neck and laid her cool fingers on my skin, exactly like our mother used to do. “Why don’t you go up to bed?” she suggested. “After all those frantic pop-sprints you do onstage, I’m sure your body is exhausted.”

I pulled myself to my feet, heading in the general direction of the guest bedroom. “Just so you know,” I said over my shoulder, “that maniac performer is the
old
me.” My legs felt so heavy, it was exhausting to climb the stairs. “I’m much more boring now. No tricks, no surprises, no—”