“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.
Once she’s finally alone she sits down behind the counter: not in a chair or on the stool, but actually behind the counter on the floor, which is where Richie finds her twenty minutes later when he comes back from his lunch break. She feels like all the energy has been leached right out of her, like that little space rover who eventually ran out of juice and had to stay alone on Mars forever.
“You okay?” Richie asks. By the smell of him he did not actually eat lunch, he sat in the parking lot behind where the old Blockbuster Video used to be and hotboxed his car.
“Fine,” she assures him, leaning her head back. “I’m good.”
Richie nods. He pulls one of the messed-up flyers from the recycling bin and sits down next to her, leaving six inches between them. She watches as he turns and folds the paper this way and that, his hands moving with the kind of quick, efficient confidence Fiona doesn’t think she’s ever brought to anything in her entire life. She thinks again of asking him how he does it, but then it would be just another thing for her to fuck up or fail at. On top of which it looks pretty hard.
When he’s finally finished he’s got a perfectly rendered dog, which he hands over to her with zero fanfare. “Break over,” he says, and boosts himself up off the floor.
Fiona looks from the dog to Richie, then down at the dog again. Then she gets up and gets back to work.
“Shouldn’t you be getting ready?” Claudia asks late that afternoon, sitting at the kitchen table eating ranch-flavored popcorn and working on some precalc homework that Fiona doesn’t understand. “Don’t you have rehearsal tonight?”
Fiona shrugs. She does, technically, though all day long she’s been thinking about skipping it. Permanently. Like she told Sam the other day: it’s community theater, that’s all. It’s not like it actually matters. She could just stop showing up, disappear into the ether never to be heard from again. It’s not like it would be the worst thing she’d ever done.
Claudia would know, though, and in the end that’s what has Fiona stuffing a granola bar into her bag and shuffling crabbily out to her car.
She spends the whole ride downtown bracing herself, trying to figure out how she’s possibly going to explain to them all about the pictures—about lying to them for the better part of two years like something out of some cheesy Lifetime movie. She should have known there was only so long she could pretend. She did know, if she’s being honest with herself. But she also just . . . really liked being an Angel City Player.
It was a role, that’s all, she reminds herself firmly, squaring her shoulders and marching inside the theater. And now the show is over.
But to Fiona’s surprise, when she gets downstairs the only thing anybody wants to talk about is the set their tech guy has started building and whether or not it’s ugly, which it emphatically is. “Frances!” Larry shouts irritably, as Georgie wrings her hands by the listing plywood backdrop. “Are we serious thespians, or are we a bunch of fucking dilettantes? What kind of hack do you have putting this thing together?”
Fiona grins. “The kind who works for free,” she reminds him, the relief flooding through her stronger than any narcotic she’s ever tried. “We’ll fix it.”
That night is their first full run-through. It’s a little bit of a misery—all dropped lines and clumsy transitions, a rickety Goodwill chair collapsing into kindling when Hector sits down in it halfway through the second act. Still, it’s the most fun Fiona has had at rehearsal in a long time. She feels like she’s gotten away with something. She feels almost . . . light. By the time Nora slams the door at the finale, Fiona is having a hard time remembering what she was so worked up about to begin with—after all, it was just a couple of trashy gossip sites. She’s not actually even that famous anymore. Maybe it’s true, what Claudia and Estelle are always saying—the only person still holding her past against her is herself.
And whatever, Fiona thinks as she tucks her script back into her bag. If she feels a tiny pang of longing every time she remembers the way Sam looked at her in his bed the other night—well, it’s not like anything real was ever going to happen between them anyway. He’s probably at Kimmeree’s house at this very moment, scrolling through his own tag on Instagram and drinking low-cal malt beverages. Frankly, the very idea of it makes Fiona want to eat a bacon cheeseburger.
“Are you guys hungry?” she asks as they’re all heading out of the theater. “Do you want to go get food?”
Hector glances at her sidelong. “Really?” he asks.
“Really,” Fiona echoes, frowning. “Why do you sound surprised?”
“I don’t know,” Hector says. He’s in his thirties, with a day job at a marketing firm and two little girls who live with their mom in the Valley. “You just normally kind of keep to yourself, I guess.”
“Oh.” Fiona guesses he has a point. “Well,” she says after a moment, “this is me . . . keeping to other people.”
“I’ll go,” Pamela says, winding a gauzy black scarf around her neck, and Georgie and DeShaun nod amicably.
“I could eat,” Larry agrees.
Fiona smiles, trying to come up with a restaurant nearby that isn’t guaranteed to give them all hepatitis. There’s a dive bar with mostly passable burgers, or a Mediterranean place she picks up from sometimes on the way home. But DeShaun has a gluten thing, Fiona remembers vaguely, and Larry is a vegetarian . . .
She’s so busy thinking about it that she doesn’t notice the photographer leaning up against the hood of her car until it’s too late.
“Fiona,” he calls, and she’s never been mugged but she imagines this is what it feels like, her whole body going ice-cold stupid. For a moment she only just stares.
“How are you, honey?” he asks, waving at her like they’re old friends. He’s one of Darcy’s guys, Fiona recognizes him, the shutter on his giant camera clicking away like a mutant robot insect from The Hunger Games. Were there mutant robot insects in The Hunger Games? Fiona doesn’t know. He’s got another guy with him for backup, a younger one holding a phone. “Congratulations on the reboot!”
“There is no reboot,” she blurts, which is amateur hour on her part, because the absolute worst thing you can do is engage with these guys, and Fiona knows that. “I mean—”
“Frances?” That’s DeShaun, his voice soft and full of uncertainty; the rest of the cast is watching in silence. “Is everything okay?”
Fiona waves a hand. “It’s fine,” she says automatically, making a move to sidestep the photographer, but he shifts his broad shoulders so she can’t get by him on the sidewalk, the camera still stuttering away.
“You don’t need to play it so close to the vest, honey,” he tells her, continuing on as if it’s just the two of them having a conversation. “From what I hear, it’s already in production. You looked great in those pictures from Sam’s apartment the other night, PS. It’s nice to see you happy after all this time.”