“It seemed like you needed some privacy,” Hector says with a shrug. “I think everybody here can relate to what it’s like to want to be someone else for a little while.”
Fiona nods, looking around at this group of spectacular weirdos—Pamela boredly gnawing the chipped black polish off her fingernails, Larry scowling under his thick, bushy brows. She’s filled with an emotion that feels physical, like something inflating inside her chest. After a moment it occurs to her that it’s love. She wants to tell them that, but she doesn’t know how and also it’s corny as shit, so instead she swallows hard and claps her hands once.
“Well, in that case,” she says brightly, “let’s put on a fucking play.”
The next couple of weeks pass by in a blur. She works at the copy shop. She goes to rehearsal. When she finishes at night, instead of going home and watching Homicide Hunter in bed, she goes to Sam’s house and they listen to music on his ridiculous sound system and drink beer on his terrace and fool around.
They grab a six-pack and catch a movie at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. They eat breakfast burritos on the beach. They go to Richie’s ska show at a club downtown that’s almost definitely about to be shuttered by the health department; neither of them has any idea how to dance to the music so instead they jump up and down for a while, holding hands so they don’t get separated in the crowd and emerging sweaty and damp-haired and laughing an hour later, a strange exhilaration fizzing through Fiona’s veins.
“You came!” Richie says when his set is over, beaming at them. He wraps Fiona in a slightly smelly hug, then shrugs like What the hell and wraps Sam in one, too. For once, he looks one hundred percent sober.
“Sweet guy,” Sam says once Richie has been absorbed back into the crowd, another band clanging their introduction onstage. Sam likes people, is a thing Fiona has noticed about him; he’s pals with everyone, from his publicist to his trainer to the barista at the coffee shop around the corner from his apartment.
“Richie? He is, actually,” she agrees. “I mean, he’s basically my best friend, so.” Then, feeling weirdly embarrassed: “Well, Thandie, obviously. But other than her.”
Sam nods. “How is Thandie?” he asks.
“Good!” she says immediately, then feels herself sag a little bit under the weight of the lie. She shakes her head, leaning back against a metal support post. “Honestly, I have no idea. I haven’t had a real conversation with Thandie in years.”
That surprises him, she can tell. “Really?” he asks. “You guys were, like, inseparable.”
“Yeah,” she says slowly, remembering it: Thandie’s bawdy laugh and steady hand with liquid eyeliner, how much she loved art museums and string cheese. For Fiona’s eighteenth birthday Thandie rented a vintage convertible and they drove up the coast to San Luis Obispo, where they ate rib eyes and shrimp cocktail in the gilded pink dining room of the Madonna Inn. “We were.”
“What happened?”
Fiona hesitates, gazing out at the teeming, writhing crowd. It occurs to her that if she keeps on casually telling him about all the people who have literally fled the Los Angeles area rather than spend one more second in her proximity, eventually he’s going to figure out it’s the only logical course of action and abscond back to the Midwest under the cover of darkness just to get away from her. A Milwaukee goodbye. “I think we both just got busy,” she says lightly. “You know, she’s got SAG awards to accept, and I’ve got informational posters about gonorrhea to proofread for the DTLA free clinic.”
Sam shoots her a look like he suspects she’s full of shit, but he doesn’t press her, which she appreciates. Instead he heads over to the bar to get them another round, but he must find somebody he knows over there, because he’s gone for what seems like forever, and the close heat of the club is starting to feel oppressive, the incessant noise grating on her nerves. She can only handle being out like this for so long. She’s just about to go find him and tell him she wants to get out of here when a hand lands on her shoulder. “Fiona St. James!” says a deep voice behind her. “I thought that was you.”
Fiona flinches at the unexpected contact, spinning around and coming face-to-face with a vaguely familiar guy in glasses and a Henley unbuttoned halfway down his skinny chest. “It’s me,” she agrees, trying to place him. A minor UBC actor, she thinks, or maybe some tangential member of the crew she used to party with? It’s also possible she’s never actually met him before and he’s trying to fake her out; that’s happened before, too. She wishes she remembered more about the couple of years after the show got canceled, except for the part where she doesn’t actually wish that at all.
“I always meant to text you,” the guy says, ducking his head close so she can hear him over the clamor. “After . . .”
“Ah.” All at once it comes to her: a wet, sloppy makeout in a booth at a club in West Hollywood, his hand creeping up the inside of her thigh. Josh, she thinks. Or Joss? “And here I’ve been waiting by my phone all this time.”
Joss/Josh’s lips twist. “Okay,” he says, taking a step closer, “I deserved that.”
You don’t deserve anything, Fiona thinks, her temper prickling. He may not have texted her, but he definitely called up Darcy Sinclair to tell her all about his wild night out with the Family Network’s most notorious young ingenue. The headline, if she recalls, was Bird in Heat.
“It’s good to see you out,” Josh/Joss is saying now, though it’s hard to hear him over the relentless clatter of the music and the dull buzzing sound filling her own head. “Who are you here with?”
Fiona shakes her head. “What?” she asks, his words only half registering. Pam once tried to get her to describe what the inside of her brain looks like when this happens, rage firing fast and powerful through every single one of her synapses. “It doesn’t look like anything,” Fiona told her finally. “It’s all noise.”
“I said,” the guy repeats—curling his fingers around her waist now, squeezing a little—“who are you here with?”
Well, that does it. “What the fuck, dude?” Fiona bursts out, batting him away just as Sam finally turns up, clutching a bottle of Pacífico in either hand. “Don’t touch me.”
Sam’s eyes widen. “Um,” he says, gaze darting back and forth between them, “everything okay?”
Fiona whirls on him. “Why does everyone think they can touch me?” she demands, loud enough to carry over the cacophony in the club. “Like, would you walk up to Sir Ian McKellen and pinch him on the ass? You fucking would not, so I don’t understand why—”
“Whoa whoa whoa,” Josh/Joss interrupts, holding his palms up, looking beseechingly at Sam. “Bro, I definitely did not pinch her ass.”
“Don’t talk to him!” Fiona snaps. Dimly she’s aware of people starting to look over at them, though she can’t bring herself to care. “You were delighted to talk to me two seconds ago, so it seems to me that the very least you can do is—”