Messy (3 page)

Max threw a pillow at him. “Shut up. I have to get out of that smellhole and I only have two more minutes of Molly’s help before she clocks out,” she said. “Or else I might get desperate and reply to this ad for…” Max paused. “Wait. I could make
twenty-five grand
as a surrogate mother? For that money I could be Juno, no problem.”

Teddy nodded very seriously. “You
do
own a lot of hoodies.”

“Hey, how about this one: ‘Wanted: same-age Official Blogographer for teen actress/It Girl’s social media empire. Competitive pay, social and lifestyle perks, complimentary Diet Coke,’ ” Molly read. “Actually, that’s kind of perfect.”

“Are you cracked out?” Max retorted. “I would never in a million years work for one of those nutjobs. Also, in this town, ‘lifestyle perks’ usually means ‘colonics.’ ”

“I actually like this idea,” Teddy said, rubbing his hands together. “My sister, the professional hanger-on.”

“Because I
so
want to fetch dry cleaning and, like, be forced to buy this girl meth in a bathroom stall,” Max countered.

“Just think, in four months you could be dating a Jonas brother.”

“Or dumping a drink on him.”

“Will you still talk to us when you’re wrangling her gown at the Oscars?” Teddy pretended to fret.

“Give her a break, Teddy,” Molly said, laughing. “Seriously, Max, maybe you should think about it. You want to write. This is a writing job. You could probably do it at home half the time. And aren’t you even a little bit curious?”

“Oh, no, not Maxine,” Teddy said. “She doesn’t believe in how the other half lives.”

“What is wrong with thinking it’s ridiculous, for example, to pay a facialist to exfoliate you with diamond dust?” Max said hotly. “And it doesn’t even help. Jennifer Parker
still
looks like she fell asleep on a pizza.”

“Maybe this
is
Jennifer,” Molly mused. “I heard her saying the other day that she’s working on adding a message board to JenniferParker.com, because she’s applying to be on
Celebrity Roller Derby
.”

“ ‘Celebrity’? Please.
Cancún Barracuda Swarm
was two years ago, and I think it might’ve even gotten yanked
while
it was airing.”

“Yeah, but not before the scene where one of them ate her face,” Teddy said. “It was so moving, Molly. Max made me watch it with her because Jake tweeted—”

“Aren’t you guys late for something?” Max said frostily.

Molly closed her laptop and stood up, squeezing Max’s shoulder. “Look, I know it seems bleak, but I promise you are not going to be making toham sandwiches for the rest of your life.”

Teddy joined her near the door. “That blog thing could be a pretty painless gig,” he said. “Maybe writing about something else every day will cure your writer’s block.”

“Who says I have writer’s block?” Max said, shooting a poisonous look at Molly.

“Your delete key,” Teddy said. “I can hear it crying all the way up in my room. You have a signature deletion pattern, sometimes mixed in with just bashing the keyboard with your palms, like it’s a drum—”

“Go away now.”

“Maybe if you tried writing a romance novel? I hear they’re timeless, and full of artsy synonyms for—”

“OUT.”

Max saw Molly smack Teddy lightly as he closed the door while reaching for her hand with his other arm. Max sighed. She really
was
happy for the two of them—they’d spent most of Molly’s first six weeks in Los Angeles not admitting they were into each other, and all the unsubtle yearning was more annoying than the hand-holding. But having your best friend date your brother meant you had
to share custody, and Max hadn’t felt done with Molly yet today. She still needed a job. Or a writing topic. Both.

She flopped back down into her desk chair.

She stopped her hand on its way to the delete key, then highlighted it all and clicked Cut instead.
Take that, Teddy
.

Since she obviously wasn’t getting anywhere with her submission, Max opened up a new browser window and headed back to craigslist. There it was again:
official blogographer
. It was terrible word. A nonexistent mash-up. Weren’t
real
words good enough anymore?

On the other hand,
blogographer
had nothing on—and nothing to do with—
toham
.

Max leaned back in her rickety wooden chair and took stock of things. At this rate, she wouldn’t get into the NYU program, because she couldn’t make her brain operate above a fourth-grade level, probably because she spent every day inhaling lethal meat-substitute fumes. Dennis was pickling her brain. And then stealing her tips.

Her eyes drifted around her room, past the giant heap where her hamper had exploded, across the posters of classic Keanu Reeves movies (Max had decided in middle
school that his rampant awfulness came back around to making him amazing), finally settling on the gray-and-red paisley wallpaper that was peeling in several places. Her dad had promised her room would be next to be renovated, but then he’d lost his job at Cal Tech and she’d overheard her parents having a tortured conversation about how they’d make ends meet on her mother’s salary. Max had marched right in on them and announced how much she loved paisley.

So even though CRAPS—Max’s favorite nickname for Colby-Randall Preparatory School—paid Mrs. McCormack enough that they weren’t poverty-stricken, they definitely weren’t rolling in spare cash. Max knew she had to fend for herself if NYU was going to happen, and that might require drastic measures. Casting a furtive sidelong glance at the door, Max clicked the “Reply to” link.

Relax
, she scolded herself. Probably nothing would come of it, anyway, and it could just be her dirty secret. But Molly and Teddy were at least a little bit right. If writing was the end game, a job doing
any
writing had to be better than where she was now. Whoever Teen Actress/It Girl was, she couldn’t possibly be any worse than assault with a deadly sandwich meat.

“… AND SO I WAS
, like, Mom, of
course
the Chloé bag is fine, but it’s not like it’s
Chanel
.”

With a shrill laugh that echoed sharply in the school’s high-ceilinged hallway, Jennifer Parker and three of her cronies brushed past Max—bumping roughly into her arm without acknowledging it, as if Max’s limb were merely very thick air—toward Mr. Kemp’s classroom. Max cursed her predictable bad luck. Of
course
Jennifer was on the Colby-Randall Spring Carnival Planning Committee. Far be it from Max to make it through one semester without being forced to hear Jake Donovan’s girlfriend drone on about how she was one audition away from getting a
final
audition to read for the part of Third Cheerleader on the Left in one of the straight-to-DVD
Bring It On
sequels.

“
So
tremendous to see you, too,” Max groused at their backs. But none of them answered. In Max’s experience, nobody ever had much to say to a headmistress’s kid except “You’re not going to tell on us, are you?” Her mother would say this was because Max tried to push everyone away, with her caustic tongue and her neon coif. Teddy—to whom this problem did not apply, because he was in a rock band, which was so Hollywood—would say it was because of her habit of preemptively thinking everyone sucked. But Max knew better: Everyone
did
suck. They always had. Following her mom to three different L.A.-area schools had taught Max that much, from being kicked in the face in fourth-grade gym by a future Olympian who told her to “get out of the way of greatness”; to getting stuck at a table in sixth-grade art with Carla Callahan, the kid from the
E.T.
sequel
E.E.T.
, who did nothing but make dots on paper with her Hello Kitty pencil while yapping about how Spielberg thought she was the next Anna Paquin (and yet still got an A for her “brave minimalist approach”); to Jennifer Parker, whose credentials for social greatness included one long-dead sitcom and a string of execrable made-for-TV movies, most recently
The Pied Viper
, about a murderous flute player. Max had nothing to say to these people. If she was destined to be a pariah, better to do it on her own terms.

Max hung back from following them into the classroom. She felt jittery and weird. Not at the prospect of spending more time marinating in her and her classmates’
mutual hostility—sometimes that could be invigorating—but because after this, she had a meeting with YourNewIt [email protected]. At It Girl’s suggestion, they were meeting for dinner at Mel’s Drive-In on Sunset to see if they had “a copacetic rapport.” Max focused her nervous energy on retying her Doc Marten boots and trying to brush the fine film of chalk dust off her black skirt. It had never recovered from this morning’s blackboard race in calculus. Nobody else had come out of class looking like a powdered doughnut. Maybe designer pants repelled dirt in a way H&M’s one-ply cotton could not.

Swatting at her skirt was just making the situation worse, so Max gave up and leaned against the wall to watch other kids trickling into the meeting—prim student-government types, a couple of overeager freshmen, and Magnus Mitchell and some other athletes who were clearly there for their college transcripts or under parental duress. Max could relate to that. Mrs. McCormack tried to force school spirit into Max by prescribing extracurriculars as punishments, in the hope that one of them would stick (the carnival planning committee was for routinely ditching her last two classes to drive down to Irvine to go to concerts). It was a cunning plan, in theory; alas, if only the esteemed Headmistress Eileen McCormack had known that the motherly and teacherly pushing made Max
less
interested, and in fact made her want to drop out of high school altogether in favor of being one of those stoner trustafarians who panhandled in front of
The Grove. Except without the trust fund. Or the drugs. So, basically, a loiterer.

“Are you coming in, Max?” asked Mavis Moore as she passed by.

“I guess,” Max said, shouldering her book bag. She glanced down at the tangled gray lump under Mavis’s arm, which had long skinny needles poking out of it. “Your colon is looking good.”

Mavis, a fellow junior described most diplomatically as “quirky,” had been knitting her way through the human body since spring of sophomore year.

“Thanks,” Mavis said proudly, holding up what looked like a soft, squishy sausage. “I’m almost done. Just a few major organs left. I’ve got the spleen going at home.”

Max grinned. “You know, if you could mass-produce those, you’d probably be a millionaire. It’s either a great study aid or something doctors could safely throw at the TV screen whenever
Grey’s Anatomy
makes up something idiotic.”

Mavis blinked several times rapidly. “I would never sell my innards,” she said, wandering into the classroom.

“I love that girl,” Max said under her breath. For every ten Jennifer Parkers with their competitive Chanel and razor-sharp elbows, there was at least a Mavis to keep things fresh.

Mr. Kemp’s room had been chosen for the meeting, ostensibly because the tall, arching windows got fabulous natural light, but Max spoke CRAPS fluently enough to
know that translated to “Because there is a perfect view of lacrosse practice.” As if anyone needed such a hormonal excuse to like that room—in fact, all the rooms at Colby-Randall were beautiful. The school was a rambling old estate that had, over the years, annexed surrounding properties and either converted or rebuilt them. The result was a lot of newfangled outbuildings (like the Brick Berlin Theater for Serious Emotional Artistry that rose like a white shark fin from the ground by the man-made lake) surrounding the majestic old main house, with its lead-paned windows, dark wood paneling, creaky old floors, and closets that were surely as full of juicy secrets as they were of upperclassmen making out. It would be perfect for a horror film. Half of Max’s classmates were Jennifer-flavored zombies, anyway; she could just turn a camera on and let it roll.

As soon as Max headed in, she saw Jake Donovan sitting next to Jen in the back row. “Over here, dude,” he called out.

Max felt a wave of pride, then quickly squashed it. She didn’t want to be the kind of girl who trembled every time a popular kid acknowledged her existence.

“Ugh, you can’t sit here,” Jennifer whined, throwing a pained look at Max’s clothes. “I’m allergic to dust.”

“Then how come you auditioned for that horse movie?” Jake asked, befuddled.

“Sweetie, movie sawdust is hypoallergenic,” Jennifer said, as if addressing a very small child. “It’s make-believe. Like Fox News.”

“Did you get the part?” Max asked. “Or did they give it to an actual horse?”

Jake snorted gleefully. Max turned to face front, but not before she saw Jennifer whip out her cell phone and start typing. No doubt this would make for a frosty Twitter update. Jake and Jen were constantly sniping at each other through the Internet. As much as Max liked Jake’s congenial doofyness—and his hot, hot face—she couldn’t figure out why he and Jennifer were still dating. Did the universe give Jake six-pack abs in exchange for common sense?

“Okay, everybody,” Max heard a familiar, commanding voice say. “Let’s bring to order the first meeting of the Colby-Randall Spring Carnival Planning Committee.”

A hush fell over the room as Molly’s half sister Brooke Berlin walked into it, immediately owning the space with her imposing height and, of course, even
more
imposing paternal pedigree. Brooke was alternately adored and feared by everyone in the school. Until last fall she was mostly feared, thanks to her tendency toward bossy, imperious behavior; however, after her nemesis Shelby Kendall broadcast some very personal letters of Brooke’s on the school news station, everyone developed sympathetic amnesia about the many ways Brooke had terrorized them. Now she was seen as more of a benevolent dictator, less Kim Jong Il than a very bronzed Simon Cowell. Max tried to tolerate Brooke for Molly’s sake, but after years of being treated like a piffling underling, she
privately would’ve enjoyed it if Brooke seared off every last blonde hair in a tragic tanning-booth accident.