PART 6
* * *
AFTER
ASHLEY, JORDAN, WINNIE, CHARLIE, MARCELA & NATHAN
CHAPTER 52
* * *
ASHLEY
What a bitch!
No, seriously. What a fucking bitch!
She knew what that audition meant to me （everything!）， and that I’d do anything to book the job, including dusting off all those accents I’d painstakingly learned and practiced in the shower. And then she used me like a bird uses a windshield—to relieve herself and leave her mark covered with shit.
I was and will always be grateful to the brave, self-starting women who paved the way for my generation—women like Angelina Jolie, who when asked if she wanted to be a Bond girl famously responded, “No, I want to be Bond” （and went on to star in her own action movies）。 And Amy Pascal, who swashbuckled her way up the ladder of Columbia Pictures so she could turn Ms. Jolie into said action hero. All women in Hollywood owed a huge debt of gratitude to those trailblazers who had endured prejudice, cruelty, and countless untold abuses to prove that not only did women belong in the top jobs, but they could do them better.
But while some successful women brought other women along with them, others were even worse than the men. I’d heard dozens of stories of powerful women who wore their battle scars like badges of honor. “I never got a helping hand,” they would say. “Why should I offer a helping hand to you?” The monsters were everywhere, at every level. I was not a naive Midwestern farm girl when I came here—I was the calf being led to the slaughter. I just hadn’t known it until now.
I loved acting, but the dog-eat-dog culture was killing me. This incident had pushed me over the edge. I was in freefall, tumbling into the inferno, with nothing to hold on to, and no one to catch me. I was （almost） thirty now; starting a new career felt as out of reach as landing on Mars. I had no marketable skills and zero real-world job experience. Who in their right mind would hire me? I wouldn’t even hire me! I couldn’t afford to go back to school, and I couldn’t ask my mom for help—my parents had already paid for me to get a （useless） degree. I had no savings and no job. So what were my options? Accountants need degrees in accounting, teachers need degrees in education. I had a theater degree. My most impressive skill was being able to recite all the lines from Macbeth in a Scottish brogue—hardly applicable to any kind of serious job.
Of course, Louisa had done more than decimate my ego and sour my career aspirations; she had also humiliated me in front of the one guy in a million whom I liked and liked me back. We would never have a second date now. To Nathan I would always be the dumbass who let his aunt roll all over her—or worse, if he didn’t believe my denials, a coconspirator never to be trusted.
And then there was the matter of what she’d done to poor Winnie and Charlie, humiliating them like they were naughty children begging for a spanking. I had no doubt they were the victims here, and that this cruel trick was the capstone of a lifetime of abuses. As my dad used to say, people show you who they are. If this woman was willing to deceive and use someone after knowing them for five minutes, what abuses had she inflicted on the people she’d known her whole life?
As I lay in my bed staring up into the darkness, I agonized over how I had let myself become a pawn in this crazy woman’s con. I should have known better. Louisa’s sick scheme was right out of a movie script, and somebody who has read as many as I had should have sniffed it out sooner.
I glanced at the clock. It was nearly midnight. I was too enraged to sleep. I had been perfectly cast as the sucker, but that was not the role I wanted.
So I got up to rewrite my part.
CHAPTER 53
* * *
JORDAN
I’m normally in bed by eleven, but I wasn’t tired, so I decided to stay up and start getting organized. I’d accumulated a lot of junk in the seven years Ashley and I had lived in our Valley bungalow, and if I was going to move out, I had to get rid of some of it.
I flipped on the TV to keep me company. Moneyball was streaming on Netflix. I’d seen it so many times I practically knew all the lines by heart. I put the volume on low, then opened the double-wide hall closet to survey the jumble of old tennis rackets, sneakers, and sports memorabilia on “my” side. Some of the stuff I had accumulated since moving here, but most of it I had lugged all the way from Wisconsin, and it was probably time to let it go. I liked my fifteen-year-old Wilson Pro Staff racket, but if I was going to get back into tennis, it was probably time for an upgrade. And did I really need a foam roller in every color?