Spoiled (35 page)

Well, she can burn whatever she wants, if it puts her in a good mood.

“I can’t wait to go to the studio tomorrow and tell everyone what a talented daughter I have!
Two
talented daughters!” Brick said, sliding out of the car. “The costumes were
fantastic! Why didn’t Molly stay for the curtain call? You told her I made reservations at Craft, didn’t you? I might even
order dessert. Such tremendous accomplishments call for refined sugar.”

Brooke had about twenty minutes before Brick dragged them off for what would surely be the most awful, awkward family dinner
ever—worse even than Thanksgiving last year on
Lust for Life,
when Francesca’s brain fog caused her to serve her own severed hand for dinner, instead of turkey. Brooke had to get to Molly
first and make her see reason. See the
truth
.

“And who is this?” Brick said, crossing the driveway and walking toward the house.

Brooke looked up and noticed Teddy McCormack, who was sitting in the shadow of one of the two giant stone lions framing the
front door. He looked bummed out.

This is not a good sign
.

“Greetings, young man,” Brick said, reaching out a hand to Teddy. “Are you here to talk to one of my girls?”

Teddy stood, and shook Brick’s hand.

“I was,” he said. “But I was too late.”

Brick looked confused as Brooke’s heart sank to the very soles of her wedges.

“Molly is gone,” Teddy clarified, glancing from Brick to Brooke, and then quickly back to Brick again.

“She’s
gone
?” Brick parroted. “What do you mean, she’s
gone
? Where did she go?”

“She went home, sir,” Teddy said. “To Indiana.”

Brooke noticed that Teddy seemed to be having trouble meeting her eyes.
Of course. He blames me. I would blame me, too. I
do
blame me.

Brick turned white underneath his burnished tan.

“What are you talking about?” he said angrily. “What’s going on here? Is this some kind of prank?”

Teddy looked at Brooke. She poured every ounce of sincerity into her eyes and mouthed, “I’ll fix it.”

He nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“I’ll leave you two alone,” he said. “It was nice to meet you, Mr. Berlin.”

“Brooke, I’m confused,” Brick said, turning to look at her as Teddy disappeared down the driveway. “Who was that young person?
Has he been binge drinking?
Dateline
says it’s raping our society.”

Brooke sighed. “No, Daddy, he’s not like that,” she said. “Let’s go inside, okay? There’s something I need to tell you, and
you’re not going to like it.”

“
I’M SURE IT WON’T BE AS GOOD
as the pizza you get in Los Angeles.”

Molly accepted a warm, greasy bag from the kid behind the counter at Slice of Eden. She vaguely recognized him from freshman
comp class, but the name tag on his T-shirt—Eddy—didn’t ring a bell.

“You’re thinking of New York,” she said, pushing a twenty across the counter.

Eddy snorted. “Don’t patronize me.”

Molly stood there for a second, crumpling the waxen white paper sack in her fist, before turning and heading back out to her
car. Los Angeles had felt so far removed from her hometown that she’d forgotten everyone in West Cairo was as capable of keeping
an eye on her tabloid
shenanigans as the kids at Colby-Randall. And it was clear they’d not only paid attention but taken sides.

No one had confronted her, exactly. But when she filled up her car at the Shell an hour ago, Bonnie Turner—who had always
had a crush on Danny—whispered loudly to her friend, “I guess they ran her cheating ass out of town.” Her taxi driver from
the airport wanted to know why Brick hadn’t provided her with a private jet. Even at baggage claim, she saw a twelve-year-old
clutching
Hey!
and shooting Molly a murderous look. In L.A., Molly was just a blip, a meaningless respite between stories about legitimately
famous people. But in tiny West Cairo, she was That Assy Girl Who Thinks She’s So Famous but Is Actually a Disloyal Bitch.
The local Osco Drug would probably have
TEAM DANNY
T-shirts by next week. And Molly couldn’t really blame them. If she weren’t That Assy Girl, she’d probably hate herself,
too.

She nibbled on a garlic breadstick in the driver’s seat of her grandparents’ Honda, which smelled musty and airless from being
parked for so long in the garage. Ginger and Miltie were still on their trip around the world—their last postcard hailed from
Istanbul—so she’d had to dig the spare key out from under a potted hydrangea plant to let herself into the house. It was cold
and empty without them, metaphorically and literally, since they’d turned out their pilot light before leaving town.

Molly started the car and pulled into the street, navigating her way up to the town’s main park, a large oasis set
against a tree-lined ridge. She and Danny had hiked up there in ninth grade and found a rock outcropping that formed a de
facto bench from which you could see most of Main Street. They used to eat lunch there on Sundays.

Danny’s truck was already in Pyramid Park’s dirt lot. Dread tickled Molly’s skin as she slowly made her way up the rough,
untended slope flanking the park, left at the crooked tree onto which she and Danny had once carved their names, and out into
the clearing. Danny’s back was to Molly, but he’d clearly heard her coming, because he stood up in a hurry from his spot on
the rock. He was bleary-eyed and his plaid shirt had what looked like syrup on the pocket, but otherwise—and in fact, in those
ways, too—he was the same old Danny.

His opening salvo was, “Are we breaking up or what?”

“Wow, that was direct.”

“So was this,” he said, pulling out a copy of
Hey!
and throwing it onto the ground. His yearbook photo grinned back up at them, juxtaposed with the intimate photo of her and
Teddy leaning against her locker. Molly kicked it to a different page. Better to stare at a story about the hot new Hollywood
diet pill—horse tranquilizers from Mexico—than at that picture.

“I am
so sorry
,” she said. “I never, ever wanted you to get dragged into any of this.”

“Is it true?” he asked, sitting down again. “Are you dumping me for some Hollywood poser with an expensive haircut?”

She unrolled the crumpled bag and handed him a piece of pizza.

“Teddy’s not a poser,” Molly hedged, joining him on the rock. “And the details are totally wrong. Nothing actually happened.”

“This doesn’t look like nothing.”

“In L.A. nothing is ever what it looks like,” she said. “He’s my friend. We fought, and we were making up. That’s all.”

“So you’re home. What now? Are you coming back to Mellencamp? Because if you are, maybe we—”

His face was hopeful. Molly could feel the sad, sympathetic expression arranging itself on her face as she shook her head.

“So, it’s over?” Danny asked, but he didn’t sound as angry as she thought he might. “Definitively?”

Molly took a deep, quavery breath. “Definitively,” she said. “If it was supposed to work, I think it would have, and we both
know it didn’t.”

She promptly burst into tears. Danny looped his arm around her shoulder.

“Oh, Molls, stop crying,” he muttered. “Honestly, it’s not like we didn’t break up three times while you
were
here.”

Molly let out a half sob, half laugh. “You really deserved the one before this. Late to Homecoming because of a Colts game?
Come on.”

“It’s called fan loyalty, Molly,” Danny said with mock seriousness. “So, tell me about this guy. You like him, right? I can
tell. I’ve known you long enough.”

Molly looked down at her Converse. The hole that had been brewing her entire stay in Southern California was about to blossom.
The metaphor annoyed her.

“Yeah,” she finally admitted. “I think I do. I’m sorry. But I swear it didn’t hit me until after things with us got weird.”

“Well, that was my bad. I shouldn’t have avoided you,” he said. “But my best friend and my girlfriend was suddenly gone, and
long-distance was so hard, and I just didn’t want to deal. It felt like too much.”

“I used to think I hated change, too,” Molly said. “Now I’m not so sure. I tried going there without changing anything here,
and look how well that worked.”

Danny sighed. “But we didn’t even make it through a semester, Molls,” he said. “That’s
embarrassing
.”

“Well, it was kind of easy to stay together when I could skip your swim team parties, or you could skip my movie night, and
we knew we’d just hang out some other time,” she said. “But we’re only sixteen. We shouldn’t just do the easy thing all the
time.”

“Wow, you’re so wise now,” Danny teased.

“I don’t feel wise. I feel really dumb.”

“About what?”

“
Everything
. For being in denial about what might happen to us. For leaving L.A. without telling anyone. Maybe even going to L.A. in
the first place. It’s like I’ve become a totally irrational person since my mom died, and now everything is a mess.”

“You’ve been through a lot. I don’t think anything you
did was really that irrational.” Danny shrugged. “Except breaking up with me, of course. I just broke forty seconds on a keg
stand last weekend. I’m a hot commodity.”

They laughed as Molly wiped her eyes. “I don’t know what to do next,” she admitted. “I can’t imagine going back to Mellencamp,
but I’m not sure I can stomach going back to L.A.”

“Was it really all that bad? Is one stupid story that’s eighty percent true—”

“Thirty percent true.”

“—
sixty
percent true, really worth giving up everything you left here for?”

Molly fiddled with the crust of her pizza, then tossed it back into the bag. When she was in L.A., it seemed like getting
back to Indiana was going to solve all of her problems. But simply being in a different time zone than Brooke and Brick didn’t
mean they ceased to exist. As if to rub it in, the billboard Molly could see off to the east, over the toll road on-ramp,
was an ad for the
Rad Man
collectors’ edition DVD.

“Brooke swore she never meant to leak that photo, but, I mean, how is that even possible?” she asked.

“Dude, I hit the damn Send shortcut in Gmail all the time by accident,” Danny pointed out. “One day my sister got about ten
half-finished messages from me about how if she tells our parents I use chewing tobacco I’m going to show them where she keeps
her condoms.”

Molly thought about this. “She did seem upset, but I guess I didn’t want to hear it.”

She stared down at the park and the town below it. Two kids were playing on the swings, jumping off when they got to the highest
point in their arc. A cop was ticketing a car that was parked in a red zone. With a half smile, she thought about the dress
rehearsal for
My Fair Lady
, where Brooke tried to convince her she could park in a handicapped spot because her Christian Siriano boots had given her
horrible blisters.

“Maybe you should call her,” Danny suggested. “I mean, you don’t want to end up like your mom, making confessions on your
deathbed because you never got around to telling people what they needed to hear.”

“That’s exactly what she would have said,” Molly said softly.

Danny tapped her on the shoulder and pointed to a spot about twenty yards to their right. “Check it out.”

A sunflower was growing on a tangled, unkempt corner of the plateau, alone and wilting.

“I would pick it for you, but…” Danny let his voice trail off.

“It’s seen better days,” Molly said.

“Yeah, I’d say it’s near the end of its life cycle.”

They traded smiles, sad ones. Finally, Danny stood up and stuffed his hands into his pockets.

“I think that’s as good a sign as any that I should go,” he said.

“I understand,” she said. “Thanks, Danny. For going easy on me. For everything. You’ll always be one of my best friends. You
know that, right?”

Danny nodded. “You, too,” he said. “Good luck, Molls. Don’t be a stranger.”

Then he loped off down the hill. Molly had watched him walk away from this spot many times in her life, but this was the first
time that it felt like he was really leaving her.

But it was okay. It felt, finally, like a step forward. Their conversation had lifted some of the weight off her shoulders,
but in her heart she knew it was somebody else that she had come back to see.

Molly ran a hand against the curved top of the granite stone poking out of lush green grass.
LAUREL DIX, BELOVED MOTHER, DAUGHTER, AND FRIEND
, it read, and underneath the inscription were two quotes. One was from Joni Mitchell:
I DON’T KNOW WHO I AM… BUT LIFE IS FOR LEARNING
. The other was a snippet of Thoreau that read,
LIVE THE LIFE YOU’VE ALWAYS IMAGINED.
So many words. Typical Laurel.

Kneeling down, Molly nestled a bunch of snapdragons against the headstone.

“Well, Mom, I guess that didn’t work out the way you thought.”