The holiday commercial started airing on Monday, while I was in Illinois, so the girls have all seen it. Every time it comes on, one of them gasps, “Diamonds are forever!” in a mocking simulation of the girl on the screen who is so clearly not me. I laugh with them, but can’t help feeling lightheaded every time I see it. I feel like I am on a high cliff, getting ready to leap off and fly.
Cici is sitting at the kitchen table when I get home from my acting class. I’m wearing heels, trying to get used to them. It’s important that the first thing agents and scouts see about me is not that I am short. These are only three-inch pumps, but my feet ache like they’ve been strapped in stilettos. I pad, in my bare feet, to the table and sit across from Cici. I fold one ankle over my knee and rub the bones of my foot. “How do you wear those things?” I ask. She wears five-inch heels at the club and manages to dance.
She shrugs. “Long day?”
I nod. “Strangely, yes.” It wasn’t. I just had the acting class, but I’m exhausted from my trip to Illinois and heartsick about my fight with Dylan.
“Margarita?” she asks, indicating the blender and its icy contents.
“Naw.” I purse my lips.
She takes a long drink and smacks her lips. “Who’s Dom?”
“Devlin?” I ask. “Why?
“He called, about twenty minutes ago.”
“Dom Devlin.” I say, looking at her like she should know who I am talking about. “Devlin Studios?” I shake my head and reach for the phone. “Seriously, Cici. Blue Sunrise?” I say the name of his most popular series, and I’ve finally hit on something she recognizes.
My tired feet are forgotten, and I stand at the counter, dialing the number that Cici had scrawled on the notepad.
“Dominic, go.” The voice is confident over the line.
I wasn’t expecting him to answer; I expected his receptionist. “Hey, Mr. Devlin, This is Ali Hayes. I’m sorry I missed your call.”
“Ali!” he calls, as if we are long-lost friends. “How are you, girl?”
“I’m great. How are you?”
“I’m good. Listen, I need a dead girl. Can you work tomorrow?”
“On Sunrise?” My heart skips a beat. Is this really my life?
“Yeah. I hate to be so last minute, but the girl we cast had something come up.” He clicks his lips, and I can almost see him, with his piercing blue eyes and sharp jaw, with his horrible comb-over hairdo that only a truly confident man could pull off.
“Absolutely. What time?” I keep my voice level.
“We start early. Be here at seven. Studio D.” He says something away from the phone, and a small conversation takes place, muffled. “You there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. See you tomorrow.” I smile. “Thanks, Dom.”
“Yeah. I’m out.” The phone goes dead, and I stand for a second before turning around to face Cici.
She is gaping at me her fingers tight around her glass. “Sounds like a celebration is in order. Margarita?”
“Yeah. I think so!” She pours me a glass, and we clink them. “I’m gonna be Dead Girl.” I don’t worry about the alcohol hitting my blood tonight. It just sings through me, and I let the happiness of my future shine down on me. I am not my mother. I am nothing like her. I am going to live a big, fabulous life.
Cici puts on the stereo, and we dance around the living room, She holds my hips, teaching me to roll them, when I can stop laughing long enough to try. We dance and sing to the music until Darla comes home, her astonished face peering at us from the door. We collapse on the sofa, exhausted, hysterical, and giddy.
“What’s this?” Darla asks, her eyes traveling from us, through the kitchen, over the more than half-empty blender. “Alison is a dead girl,” Cici says, smirking.
I squeak, “On Blue Sunrise!”
Darla joins us with a margarita, but turns the radio down, and by the time Sybil gets home the alcohol has moved me from ecstatic to tired, and I am stretched long on the couch, with my head resting on Cici’s thigh. She holds her alcohol better than I do, and she and Darla are still talking, but their words float over my head, lulled by Cici’s fingers trailing through the hair at my temple.
This is the best life ever.
Morning follows too close on the heels of the night, and when my alarm goes off at five, I still feel the wave and curl of the alcohol in my blood. My head is pounding, and my mouth feels like I sucked on wool through the night. I had slept on the couch, tucked in by one of my roommates. I sit up, looking down at the small alarm clock, not remembering setting it, not remembering bringing it to the couch. Not remembering much of anything really, after Darla got home.
I take ibuprofen and drink three glasses of water before my mouth stops feeling thick. Even the pounding headache can’t dampen the excitement in my stomach. Waiting for the coffee to perc, I eat dry toast, feeling the pulse beat in my temples, chewing like a cow on second-day cud. The medicine begins to take effect, and I take my coffee upstairs with me.
The shower washes away the rest of my hangover. After I’ve dried my hair, I dust my face with a translucent powder. They’ll do make up, and Dead Girl shouldn’t require much effort.
Most of my day is spent waiting, and from talking with some of the regulars, that is a big part of an actor’s day. I can’t just be filmed dead and head home, because there are several flashback scenes and I actually have four lines. My character’s name is Carman, and one of the principals, a regular on the show, tells me that I can put that on my resume: a named character is much better than “Dead Girl.”
A full twelve hours after I left the condo, I pull back into the parking lot and have a déjà vu moment.
Blue and red lights are flashing from one building to the next, so much like that first day when I arrived in the midst of a domestic disturbance. I sit in my car for a minute longer, watching to see what is going on, not wanting to walk into something bad. Has Cici had some guy follow her home? Has Sybil’s ex-husband shown up, half in the bottle? I grab my purse and step out into the parking lot, migrating toward one of the groups of tenants standing together, talking.
“What’s going on?”
“I think you guys got robbed,” the woman says, looking from me to the condo I share with the girls.
“Us?” I follow her eyes and see that, indeed, our door is open and an officer is standing with Darla in silhouette, backed by the light inside.
I head across the lot to our door, and Darla nods. “We’ve been robbed.” Her voice is clipped, excited.
“I heard. Is everybody okay?” I ask, and she nods. “What did they take?”
“I don’t know. You’ll want to check your room. TV’s gone.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, the slide was open when I came home.” I push past her. “Did you leave the slide unlocked when you left?” she asks, almost as an afterthought.
“No. I was gone at six. I didn’t even go out there this morning.”
“Did you check it?” The slight rise of her voice says more about her emotional state than the expression on her face. She is panicked, but trying to hold it together.
“No. Why would I? You were all here.”
“Oh yeah, that’s right. It was locked when I left,” she says. Her forehead puckers, and she chews on her fingernail.
“Can I check my stuff?” I ask the officer in the living room. He nods, and I make my way up the steps, feeling hollow, unreal. I don’t have anything, some clothes, but everything else in the room is Cici’s. My mother’s box on the top shelf flashes in my mind, and I frown. Nobody would take that. It doesn’t mean anything to anybody but me. Then I remember the envelope full of money. I take the last four steps two at a time.
Our room is ransacked. Clothes from the closet are pulled off their hangers, scattered about. The drawers are all open with their contents in disarray.
My mother’s box is not on the top shelf. It is on its side on the floor, the contents flowing out in a series of yellow envelopes.
“Miss, can I help you?” a woman asks from the hall behind me, and I turn to face the middle-aged officer with her hair in a tight knot at the base of her neck.
“This is my room,” I squeak, hearing the panic in my voice.
She taps a pen on a notebook. “Can you tell me if anything is missing?”
Cici’s CD player is gone, I notice, but I kneel in front of my mother’s box, counting the packets, coming up short, knowing which one is missing. I let out a scream, and the officer comes to my side.
“My money!” I shout. “They took my money.” I am so angry, violated.
“How much is missing?”
“Two thousand eight hundred seventy dollars.”
She whistles through her teeth. “That’s a lot of money to have stashed in your room.”
I give her a look. “I don’t like banks,” I hiss. She pushes out her bottom lip and makes a note in her book, repeating back to me the amount I had said.
“Anything else?” she asks, and I glance around the room.
“CD player. CDs.” Cici’s collection, not mine. “I don’t think there is anything else.” I get up, and she tells me she will process the scene, so I should wait downstairs
I meet Darla in the kitchen, and she asks what was missing. I tell her, and her jaw drops.
“Why did you have money like that?”
“What do you mean?” I snap. “I work.”
“No, I mean, why did you have it here? Don’t you have a bank?”
“No, Darla, I don’t have a bank.” My words clip at the ends, and I try to quell the rage I feel rising.
“Shit.” She shakes her head.
I walk away from her and out through the parking lot. The weariness and exhilaration from my day working on Blue Sunrise evaporates in the heat of my anger. I walk down Pomerado Parkway, my stomach flipping and turning while my brain seethes with anger at the person who stole from me. I needed some of that money for the Delphi Swim shoot down in Mexico. Delphi is covering our travel and hotel, but I’m going to have to eat. I was planning to buy some clothes for the trip, wanting to fit in with the other models. There is nothing worse than a thief. A person who steals from another. A person who steals possessions, a person who steals innocence, a person who steals a life. There is no difference. I don’t know what I am going to do, and it is well past dusk when my anger burns itself out and I find my way back to the condo where Sybil and Darla are cleaning up.
“Cici isn’t back?” I ask, but of course she isn’t. It’s Thursday, and she always works at The Club on Thursdays. Sybil shakes her head, and I set to work helping them put the possessions that are left back in their places. When I go up to my room, I am disgusted by the fingerprint dust on my drawers and on my mother’s box. I take a towel and wipe away the traces. I put the room back to rights, hanging the clothes in the closet, rearranging the drawers and closing them. I stand for a long time looking around the room and know that I will never feel safe here again.
I make my way down the hall and into the bathroom to take a shower and dress for bed. When I reach under the cabinet for the blow dryer, I realize it’s gone, too, and let out an exasperated yell.
Darla comes up the stairs, two at a time by the sound of it. I hear her at the door. “You okay?” she calls, and I wrap my wet hair in a towel and open the door to her.
“They stole the hair dryer,” I say, at the height of frustration. “What kind of person steals a hair dryer?” We stand staring at each other for a long minute, our expressions mirroring one another, and then she lets out a low, tense chuckle. I do the same, and soon we are laughing and holding each other . . . because laughing is better than crying and the absolute insanity of somebody breaking into our poor-as-shit condo and stealing our hair dryer puts us both over the edge.