Two nights later, Avery lay on her bed, her face buried in the pillow. The hotel the King & Crown cast and crew were staying at was awful. Usually she didn’t mind. She liked meeting families with kids road-tripping to Disneyland. She liked making their trip a little more special. And she liked going out early in the morning or late at night and swimming in the over-chlorinated pools and pretending she could be anyone, anywhere. But she wasn’t anyone tonight. Tonight she was the woman Merritt hated. She was the woman who had had one perfect night before property-savant Pam managed to buy an apartment building in the time it took the crew to order their IPAs.
She rolled over and texted her friend DX. Texting DX was a sketchy proposition. DX was the kind of friend you were a little bit afraid of. Parties thrown by DX probably counted as terrorist acts in countries like Canada and Switzerland. But Avery didn’t want to see Alistair’s poorly concealed worry. Everything she had done put King & Crown in jeopardy.
I messed up, she texted.
DX texted back, Grand theft? Guns? [Tombstone emoji. Skull emoji. Dead fish emoji.] Cm on tour. China then S. Korea. Won’t let them catch u.
Avery’s phone rang. The screen flashed a picture of DX’s curly black hair and aviator sunglasses.
“What’s up?” DX asked cheerfully. “You and Al break up?”
For a moment Avery couldn’t speak. It was all too much to explain to a woman who owned a retrofitted Russian military helicopter that she might have stolen and was in the most remarkably healthy relationship that Avery had ever seen.
DX’s voice softened. “Hey, for real? What is it?”
“I fucked up.”
“Well, good. Finally, schoolgirl. Did you crash one of those comped cars you guys are always driving? Just put it in gear and pushed it over a cliff to see what would happen?”
“I’m in Portland. There aren’t any cliffs,” Avery said miserably. “It’s a girl. She hates me.”
“No one can hate you.”
“It’s possible.” Avery picked a ball of lint off the orange-brown coverlet.
“Who was it?”
“A girl I liked”—she had to say it—“in high school.”
DX hadn’t even gone to high school.
“It’s that reunion,” DX said. “They plan them to make you feel old. Think about death. Then you’ll give more to the school.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“Didn’t they talk about legacy giving? Vultures.”
They had talked about legacy giving.
“I’ve never had sex like this before,” Avery blurted.
“Did you find the clitoris? I wondered whether you knew about that.”
“Give me some credit!”
She told DX about her night with Merritt, the Elysium, and Merritt’s arrival on set.
“Wait,” DX said. “I’m googling her. Ooh, pretty. Like lesbian supermodel pretty.”
“And now Warren Venner—he’s a new TKO exec—he wants her on the show. But he called her, and she told him to fuck off. It blew his mind. He’s kind of in love with her. No one tells Venner to fuck off.”
“Tight!”
“But that’s how much Merritt doesn’t want to see me. She’d turn down a chance to be on King and Crown.”
“That’s not absolute proof of hatred. Just ask me to hang some chintz curtains with you, and I’ll show you. But this is easy. You just have to convince her to be on the show. You can go into whatever little dressing room trailers you have. Walk around in your underwear and win her back. Explain the whole thing. Be like, ‘Sorry. Totes my bad. Let’s get a room and make love on a waterbed full of man-of-war jellyfish.’ Or go romantic. Be like, ‘Marry me, you androgynous goddess.’”
Most of Avery’s conversations with DX involved DX suggesting ways Avery should enrich her life and Avery saying, No. There’s actually a lot of good reasons not to do that. Except in DX’s life there weren’t.
“There’re no jellyfish here. And it’s not just about here.” Avery sighed.
Avery remembered Merritt bursting through the doors of the Vale gymnasium like she had just run a long distance, and for a second Merritt had looked relieved and apologetic. Then Merritt had seen Alistair. Avery had read it in her eyes. First confusion, then hurt, then anger. Above Merritt, the disco ball had cast a snow flurry of white lights on the walls. Avery had wanted to throw her arms around Merritt. She had wished she had some excuse. She wished she could tell Merritt that Alistair had kidnapped her, that she had been drugged and had only now woken up, that her mother was being held for ransom and this dance was the price of her release. But, of course, she had no excuse. She only had a reason: She wanted to be on television.
“We have history.”
“You never told me about her.”
Of course she hadn’t. When Avery had started at Vale, DX was about to go platinum. Every conversation they’d had for four years had been DX yelling over the sound of an after-party and Avery saying, You know I can’t hear you, right?
“We were going to go to the prom together. As friends.”
She was waiting for DX to mock her, but DX just said, “Classic.”
“She bought me a dress. She loved antiques, and she found this old wedding dress. She said I looked like an old doll…but not the creepy kind with teeth.”
“I kind of like the ones with the teeth. You’re just waiting for their little eyes to blink, like, Hello, Satan. Did you sleep with her back in the day?”
A month before prom, Avery had spent a long, hot night in the sexuality aisle of Powell’s Books, perusing advice on how to make love to women, including a book by a man named Bingo Sterling. His book Cunnilingus! You Can! had recommended sticking her tongue in and out of a shot glass for practice. She was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be like that.
“If I’d gone with her, I think we would’ve. It would’ve been my first. Hers too.”
She had written I will! on her hand, in her notebook, on the bottom of her pumps. It was her mantra. She would not chicken out, no matter how much she blushed and stammered. After prom they were going to rent a hotel and stay up watching television, but before they turned on the TV, Avery was going to say it: I want to make love to you. If Merritt said no, at least she would have tried. She wouldn’t look back on her life and think I wasn’t even cool enough to ask. Avery had felt the anticipation in every fiber of her body.
Then she’d done so much worse than not ask. She’d picked Alistair.
“I didn’t even tell her what was going on,” Avery said as she finished the story.
“Why’d you do it? Lesbians are sensitive about getting left for a man.”
“I’d been talking to my mom about coming out. She said no one could know because it would follow me forever. Then a week or two before the prom, my mom introduced me to Alistair. I was so excited about King and Crown.”
Avery got up and walked over to the fridge. Alistair had left her a King Cobra malt liquor. Good old Alistair. He did not understand that King Cobra was only comfort food in Stone. She cracked open the forty.
“I just kept acting like nothing had changed. I told myself Merritt should have made a move. I flirted with her all the time, and she never really went for it. I told myself my mom was right. I wasn’t going to marry my high school crush. Should I ruin my career just to tell her I liked her? I thought there’d be other women.”
No other woman had filled Avery with the sense of wild possibility, that feeling that she could wake up in the sunshine and grow wings.
“I felt so bad after I saw her at the prom, I just couldn’t face her. I just left. I never explained anything. She was so alone.”
Everyone at Vale knew rules didn’t apply to Merritt. The other kids thought it was because her parents were rich. Only Avery knew it was because Merritt’s parents were so definitively absent. Then one day near the end of Merritt's first year at Vale her uncle had learned of her existence and had trundled into the school office with empty suitcases. You’re coming with me. The other girls had decried the injustice. To move into an uncle’s spare room! With a curfew and dinnertime! Only Avery had heard Merritt lament, What if he changes his mind?
“She’s not going to forgive me. If I’d only messed up once, maybe. But twice? And anyway, we’re leaving. What am I going to do, leave her again? Hide her in my trailer?” Avery sipped her King Cobra. It tasted like an alcoholic tea bag. She wished she could drink straight from a bottle of vodka. “I can’t come out. Yesterday a woman wrote me and said that her daughter died of cancer and the only thing that cheered them up before it happened was watching King and Crown. It was their last special thing. They trust me. What happens when I tell people like that that everything was a lie?”
Merritt had trusted her too.
“Damn,” DX said. “You’re screwed.”
That was another reason why Avery hadn’t gone down to Alistair’s room to cry on his shoulder. She didn’t want to hear that she was a good person who’d just made a mistake. She wanted DX to slap her. She deserved it.
“Don’t worry,” DX said. “I know what you’ll do. My helicopter is getting a tune-up, but she’ll be ready to fly soon. We’ll kidnap your girl. Tony and I will fly you out to Taha’a. Forget Tahiti. Taha’a is so pristine, you’ll want to eat the sand. And there are vanilla plantations. You can take her out into the vanilla on a full moon and ask her to marry you. Tony and I can fly over with a load of cherry blossoms and dump them on you right as you go down on one knee. You love that shit.”
Avery imagined Merritt standing beneath a purple sky, the ocean lapping at a sandy beach in the distance. The petals would drift down like butterflies. But the reality was, DX would probably have to fly so low to drop the blossoms, Merritt would think they were being bombed—as though she wouldn’t be terrified enough after being kidnapped.
“What do vanilla plantations even look like?” Avery asked.
“So you’ll do it!”
“Of course not.”
“Well, don’t worry. I’m flying up to Portland. We got to wrap up this set we’re recording, and then I’ll be there. We’ll fix this.”
Coming from DX it was almost a threat, but it was a threat Avery was glad to hear.