Fiona shakes her head. She’d forgotten this, or tried to—the way these guys monologue, the way they act like they’re your friend. “Enough,” she says, her face flaming as she glances over at her castmates’ curious faces. “You got your pictures, can you just—”
“I think she asked you to stop.” That’s Georgie drawing herself up tall and regal; Pamela stands at her shoulder like a pale, goth bodyguard.
But the photographer shakes his head, teeth flashing in a lascivious grin. “Trust me,” he assures them. “She wants it.”
That’s when Fiona loses her temper.
Later she won’t remember consciously deciding to lunge for the guy’s camera, but she must, because the next thing she knows Hector and Larry are holding her back while she thrashes, her limbs flailing in every possible direction. She thinks she catches Hector in the nose. “Fuck you,” she’s yelling, and for a second she’s not even sure who she’s talking to.
“Frances,” Larry is saying, “take it easy, will—”
“That’s not my name,” Fiona interrupts—still fighting, shrugging them off once and for all. She doesn’t want any of them touching her for one more second. She doesn’t want anyone touching her ever again.
“Enough,” she says again, once they finally release her, reaching out and slapping at the camera one more time. “Enough! Is this what you wanted? Congratulations, I’m a fucking psycho! You win!”
It’s a hurricane, noisy and furious: DeShaun and Georgie are trying to soothe her. The photographer is yelling about a lawsuit. The kid with the cell phone got the whole thing on film. And here’s Fiona at the eye of it just like always, leaving a trail of chaos and destruction in her wake.
Finally she takes a deep breath, raking her hands through her hair and setting her shoulders. She is not not not going to cry. “I’m going to take a rain check on dinner,” she manages quietly. Then she gets into her car and drives away.
Chapter Twelve
Sam
“I mean,” Erin says the following morning, both of them staring wide-eyed at the grainy video on her laptop, “the girl’s got a flair for the dramatic, that’s for sure. It’s almost a shame she doesn’t act anymore.”
“Yeah,” Sam says distractedly, scrubbing a hand through his hair as Erin hits play one more time, Fiona’s wild-eyed face filling the computer screen. She looks feral—her hands flying around like demented birds, her hair enormous—but more than that, Sam keeps thinking, she looks scared. “I mean, she actually does still act, sort of, but—whatever.” He shakes his head. “Can we go out?” he asks abruptly, shutting the laptop harder than is probably necessary and standing up. “Let’s go out.”
Erin takes him for a breakfast beer at the dive around the corner from her apartment: cool and dark and a little bit grimy, the floor slightly sticky underfoot. It’s early enough that they’re the only people sitting at the bar, a friendly drunk scratching lotto tickets at a table in the corner and some daytime talk show carping away on the TV—a talk show, Sam realizes belatedly, on which they’re playing the footage of Fiona outside her theater over and over. Fiona St. James at It Again in New Viral Video, the chyron reads.
“For fuck’s sake.” Sam drains most of his beer in two long gulps. “Hey,” he calls, signaling the bartender before he quite knows he’s going to do it, “sorry. Would you mind turning this off?”
The bartender looks dubious. “You object to The View?” he asks.
“No, I don’t object to The View, I just—sports?” he begs. “There must be a sport on somewhere, right? There’s always sports on.”
The bartender rolls his eyes, but dutifully flips over to competitive bowling on ESPN2. When Sam turns back to Erin, he finds her staring at him, her eyes wide and triumphant. “Holy shit,” she says quietly, “did you catch feelings for Riley Bird?” She says feelings but it sounds like what she means is chlamydia.
Sam finishes his beer instead of answering. “Better not let her hear you call her that,” he says finally. “She’ll eat your heart in the fuckin’ marketplace.”
Erin shakes her head. “Don’t try to put me off.”
“I’m not trying to do anything,” Sam replies, knowing he sounds peevish. “We hung out a couple of times, that’s all. I barely know her.”
“Can you not be full of shit for one second?” Erin asks, setting her glass down. “Like, now that I’m actually looking at your face I’m realizing I’ve been kind of an asshole about the whole thing, so I probably owe you an apology, but putting that aside for a minute, it doesn’t have to be some bullshit game of who can be the coolest guy in Hollywood. If you like her, which you clearly do, and she’s going through a thing, which”—she gestures at the TV—“shit, she clearly is, then what are you doing sitting here with me? Go be a decent human person and make sure she’s okay.”
“It’s not—” Sam breaks off. “I mean, we aren’t—” He sighs. “She’s not taking my calls, okay? I tried her last night, and again this morning, but she doesn’t want to talk to me. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“Yes, actually.” Erin smiles, reaching for her glass again before kicking him gently underneath the bar. “I am sorry, for the record. I wouldn’t have been so cavalier if I knew it was, like, a real thing.”
“It’s not,” Sam says reflexively. “But maybe it could be?” He drops his head back. “I don’t fucking know.”
“Liar,” Erin says cheerfully. Sam orders another beer.
When he gets home there’s a residuals check waiting for him from a Hallmark movie he did a couple of Christmases ago, which cheers him up for a minute, though after he pays down his credit card enough to be able to use it he’s basically right back where he started. Sam frowns. He hasn’t been this broke since he was living with Erin, doing push-ups on the nasty carpet in their tiny apartment and splurging on ten-dollar haircuts. He can’t believe he let himself wind up here again.
He walks around the apartment for a while. He eats half a bag of baby carrots standing up at the sink. He thinks about taking a nap, but he can’t settle, even after he jerks off and watches two episodes of an afternoon court show and checks to see if maybe Russ emailed him with news about the firefighter thing, which he has not. He pulls up Fiona’s video one more time. He remembers a night back in the third or fourth season of Birds, a big party at a fancy hotel out in Malibu—the network threw one every year the week of the Television Critics Association press tour, when everyone came out to LA to watch next season’s pilots and take corny pictures of themselves in front of the Hollywood sign. The party was always black tie, candles floating in the pool and tuxedoed waiters scurrying by balancing trays of champagne and canapés. Thandie and Fiona used to call it the Sexless Prom.
Attendance, while not strictly mandatory, was strongly encouraged, and though Sam had dutifully shown up every year he’d been on the show, the whole thing never got less weird to him, all the big Family Network names mingling together: the second lead from a vaguely racist period piece about a feisty pioneer nurse chatting up the host of a morning talk show that was best known for showcasing new and novel recipes for ground beef every single day. He was angling for a little bit of face time with the star of a marquee drama about a small-town sheriff—the guy had just booked a role in a Coen Brothers movie, and Sam wanted to know how—when he spotted Fiona standing near the edge of the pool talking to a couple of older women from one of the executive teams, clutching a rocks glass in one hand and tiny appetizer plate piled with a mountain of fruit from the cheese board in the other. Judging by the expression on her face, she was seriously considering drowning herself in the shallow end.