Kelly tossed the birdy into the air. It hung there for a few seconds, sparkling in the sunlight before she whacked it with the badminton racket. She loved this game. She’d never played it before—never even seen anyone play it, except for maybe on a TV show. But then a few weeks ago Bellamy’s dad had set up the net in their yard “to get Shane and me out of the house,” Bellamy had explained. She’d handed Kelly a racket and Kelly had taken to it instantly. She loved how the birdy lingered, holding still for her like nothing else in life seemed to be doing.
Today had been the last day of school. She had no idea what senior year would feel like, let alone next month or next week or even tomorrow.
“Good one!” Bellamy smacked the birdy back over the net. Kelly returned it easily and the birdy nose-dived into the soft grass on the other side before Bellamy could get anywhere near it. “You’ve got super-good aim,” Bellamy said.
“Thanks.” Kelly said. Now’s the time. Tell her now.
For the past month, before and after her two-week suspension, Kelly had been wanting to tell Bellamy about the girl she’d seen in John McFadden’s window—something easier said than done. Bellamy had other friends besides Kelly, and during Kelly’s suspension she began relying more on their company, shopping after school with them, going to their parties—tanned, grinning groups of shimmering stars’ kids who wanted nothing to do with a nobody like Kelly.
Vee’s party, the Jailbird Party, was probably old news to Bellamy and the morning after even more so. But it haunted Kelly’s thoughts—and she was spending so much time alone with those thoughts . . .
Once she started going back to school, Kelly had been making plans to get together with Bellamy every chance she could. She’d call and invite herself over or pass Bellamy a note, asking if she wanted to go to McDonald’s in the afternoon. Once or twice, she’d even invited Bellamy over to Jimmy’s place, embarrassing as it was with the plastic flowers in the window box, the old lady next door gaping from around her draperies. She needed, so badly, to talk to her about the girl.
Bellamy said yes every time, which was encouraging. But much as she rehearsed speeches in her mind, Kelly just couldn’t get herself to bring up the subject of the girl in John McFadden’s window—especially when she was stoned, which she was most of the time when she was with Bellamy. Kelly would smoke a little pot and wind up staring too hard at her own memories. She’d start to doubt them, the image of the Mounds girl going hazy and dreamlike in her mind, her features rearranging themselves. Kelly would start to question the way her brain had been working the morning she’d gone to the castle, hungover as she’d been, upset over the missing necklace. Maybe it had been Cynthia Jones in the window after all, she would think. Maybe it had been no one—just a shadow. Paranoid, she’d wind up keeping quiet. “Penny for your thoughts,” Bellamy would say, and Kelly would just laugh and take another hit or ask if she wanted to go outside, play a game of badminton.
But the thought continued to nag at her—John McFadden, standing in his barely opened doorway, the hard look in his eyes, the scratch on his neck. Sometimes, she would even see him in dreams, smiling at her with snake’s teeth, opening his door wider, rearing back and ready to bite.
“Your serve,” Bellamy said.
She dropped the racket, sat down on the grass. “Hey. Can I talk to you about something?”
“Sure.” Bellamy slipped under the net and collapsed next to her.
“Remember at the party, how you said John McFadden is weird?”
Bellamy plucked at one of her silver bracelets, looked down at the bright green grass. “Yeah.”
“What did you mean by that?”
“That’s what you wanted to talk about? Really?” She laughed a little.
Kelly didn’t.
Bellamy sighed. “Just . . . he’s one of those obsessive director types, you know? And he isn’t very nice to Vee.” She cleared her throat. “Don’t worry, though. Your screen test will go fine.”
“This isn’t really about the screen test.”
“It’s not? Well . . . wait a second.” Her gaze drifted past Kelly’s shoulder. “Get out of here!” She shouted it at the big magnolia tree next to her house, then jumped to her feet and waited, glaring at the tree until two skinny legs emerged from the tallest branch, followed by the rest of Kelly’s little brother. “Unbelievable,” she said, Shane shimmying down the side of the tree with Bellamy watching him, hands on her hips. “I swear to God, he’s like a monkey,” she said. “An incredibly annoying, ugly little monkey who never leaves me the hell alone!”
With both hands, Shane grabbed onto a lower branch and hung there, swinging back and forth like a chimpanzee. “Ooo oooh aaa aaa!” he shrieked.
“Go away!”
He dropped to the ground. “You’re not the boss of me!” he shouted in his squeaky little voice, so much smaller than he thought he was.
Bellamy started toward him, but he scurried away, took off around the side of the house. “Seven whole years, I got to be an only child,” Bellamy said. “It isn’t fair.”
Kelly stared at the tree, thinking about Shane, still a tree-climbing little boy, a little monkey, not even half grown up yet. And Shane was just two years younger than the Mounds girl.
“Bellamy.”
“Yeah?”
“About a month ago . . . I saw something.”
“What do you mean?”
“John McFadden . . .”
“We’re still talking about him?” She sighed heavily. “Can we play and talk at the same time?”
“No.” Kelly felt as though she were standing at the edge of a cliff, but there was a raging fire barreling toward her. She had to jump and she had only seconds to do it.
“Oookay, weirdo,” said Bellamy. “What did you see?”
Kelly jumped. She told Bellamy about going back to the castle to look for her necklace, about knocking on Vee’s father’s door by mistake. She told her how strange John McFadden had seemed, so secretive and angry, told her about his unbuttoned shirt and the scratch on his neck and the sound she’d heard—a girl’s sigh. The whole time, Bellamy kept picking at one piece of grass, ripping it to shreds. “There was a girl in there,” Kelly said, “in John McFadden’s apartment. I saw her.”
Finally Bellamy looked at her. “I saw her too. Remember? In the window? He’s been screwing that model Cynthia Jones.”
“It wasn’t Cynthia Jones.”
“No, it totally was. It’s been all over the gossip magazines.”
“Bellamy. It was the Mounds girl.”
“Who?”
“That girl from Vee’s party. The kid. She’s like an eighth grader at the most.”
Bellamy stared at her for a long time. She plucked at her bangle bracelets, wiped her nose. “Did you ever find your necklace?”
“No. But . . . Are you serious, Bellamy? Did you hear what I said?”
She nodded. “I heard you.”
“So . . . What do we do?”
Bellamy pushed a lock of hair out of her eyes. “We go up to my room,” she said, very quietly. “We get super-stoned. You forget you ever saw what you did. I forget you ever told me about it.”
“But—”
“Kelly.”
“What?”
“Stop.”
Kelly blinked at her. Bellamy pulled herself to standing, brushed the grass off her shorts. “Just be glad,” she said quietly, “that you’re too old for him.”
She gave Kelly a hand up. The two of them picked up their rackets, started heading toward the house.
Kelly followed her into the house, into the kitchen where Bellamy grabbed a bag of Doritos off the counter, then up the stairs, into her room. Bellamy locked the door, opened her window wide. The magnolia tree had just started to bloom, and the sweet, buttery scent swept into the room as Kelly tore at the bag, Bellamy sliding open her vanity drawer, sneaking out her Baggie full of weed and rolling papers—same drawer where, a month earlier, Kelly had found the other Baggie, the blood-crusted razor. She thought about that razor and her mother’s years-old box of chocolates and how, a few nights ago, she’d gotten up to get a glass of water and heard Jimmy crying in his sleep, saying Mom’s name.
So many things better left unsaid and she’d heard them all. She knew too many things she didn’t want to know.
Bellamy couldn’t finish rolling the joint fast enough. Once she was done, the two of them smoked the whole thing, taking long, gulping drags, exhaling out the open window, neither one of them saying a word until only ashes were left and they were both numb, floating.
Bellamy unlocked her bedroom door, shoved a tape in her VCR. The screen lit up, and before long, they were looking at the mouth of a saxophone and then, the cute boys of Madness in their fedoras and mod clothes, bouncing and weaving to “One Step Beyond.”
“Our song,” said Bellamy. She grabbed a fistful of Doritos, handed Kelly the bag, and she turned the volume up, full blast. Kelly forced her mind back to that first day of meeting Vee, to the three of them racing round and round Bellamy’s Rabbit. She remembered how Vee had laughed, how thrilling that was to see, the first time she’d ever seen someone that perfect-looking laugh that hard and with all those angry drivers blasting their horns around them, that saxophone wailing . . .
A whole other world. Kelly had barely known Bellamy and Vee that day. She’d never heard of his father.
Kelly shoved a few Doritos in her mouth and put her head on Bellamy’s shoulder.
Bellamy threw an arm around her, kissed her forehead. She smelled of pot and herbal shampoo. “My sister,” she said.
There was a knock on the door. Sterling Marshall stuck his head in. His hair was glossy and his dark eyes twinkled and he wore a blue-and-white-striped Oxford that picked up his movie star tan.
“Please turn the music down, girls.”
“Okay, Dad.” Kelly hoped she didn’t have orange Dorito dust all over her face. She scooted over to the TV, turned the volume down.
“Oh, before I forget, Kelly,” he said. “John’s girl didn’t know how to get hold of you, but he’s got a break from shooting Resistance at the end of next week. He can see you on June seventh, at two P.M. in his Century City office.”
“Um . . .”
“You should write this down.”
“Huh?”
He frowned at her. “Your screen test,” he said. “With John McFadden.”
She swallowed hard. “Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
“All right then. I’ll let him know I told you.” He closed the door.
Kelly turned to Bellamy, confused, a little scared. “Bellamy,” she said. “I don’t really want to be an actress. I just said I’d do the screen test so you guys would like me.”
But all Bellamy did was grin. “Did you just call my father Dad?” she said. “Oh my God, that’s so cute!”
“I HAVE A BOYFRIEND!” BELLAMY SAID RIGHT AFTER KELLY PICKED UP the phone, first thing the next morning. Not even a “Guess what?” Not even a “Hello.” Kelly was still half asleep. She’d gone into the kitchen to answer the phone with her eyes still closed, stubbing her toes twice on the way. She glanced at the kitchen clock. 7:00 A.M. Parts of her dream still swirled around in her head—Vee smiling up at her, his head in her lap . . .
A sound escaped from Jimmy’s room, a type of half breathing/half snoring, so loud she figured Bellamy could probably hear it. Kelly once watched a TV movie—Robby Benson dying on a respirator. That’s what the sound reminded her of. It worried her a little, though for Jimmy it was probably normal. Last night, when she’d come home, he’d been in bed already, door closed, snoring and moaning. It had been only 8:00 P.M. What if he just started sleeping forever? He hadn’t worked for two weeks, and since school was out, he didn’t have to get up and make Kelly’s lunches, so it was possible.
Bellamy said, “Did you hear me?”
“You have a boyfriend?”
“I was going to tell you yesterday, but you got me all distracted.”
Jimmy let out a long, pained groan. Kelly winced.
“What’s going on over there?”
“My dad’s sleeping.”
“Huh? Okay. Anyway, he’s an actor in Vee’s new movie Resistance.”
Kelly swallowed hard. Vee had been cast in a small part in his dad’s latest. “Your boyfriend is in the John McFadden movie.”
“Uh-huh.” Not even a pause. Not one minute of knowing, of understanding. You forget you ever saw it. I forget you ever told me. Bellamy Marshall, girl of her word . . .
Kelly said, “What’s your boyfriend’s name?”
“Steven Stevens. Isn’t that cute?”
“That’s his real name?”
“He goes by Steve.”
“Wow.”
“Anyway, Steve plays the best friend of the male lead and he’s older and totally mint. Like, he makes Vee look like a dog.”
“How old is he?”
“Not that old.” She said it with a bite. Guess she does remember. “He’s nineteen.”
“Oh,” Kelly said. “Okay.”
“And you know what, Kelly? John McFadden isn’t that bad. He’s been really nice to Vee on set.”
Kelly rolled her eyes. “That’s great.”
“He treats him like a real actor, not just his kid. I bet your screen test goes great.”
Kelly wanted to tell her that not everybody is able to forget things just like that, that it might take her a few days before she joined the John McFadden fan club. “You know . . .” she started. But then she stopped. “I don’t hear anything,” she said.
“Huh?”
Once, one of Kelly’s movie magazines had run an interview with a soap opera actor who had survived a plane crash. The actor had described how quiet the airplane had been right before the flight crew made the announcement. “You could hear a pin drop,” he had said. “And let me tell you. That absolute silence, in an airborne jet, was more terrifying than an explosion would have been.” The silence, the actor explained, had meant that both the plane’s engines had died.
“Are you still there?” Bellamy said.
“Hold on a second.”
Kelly put the phone down, ran to Jimmy’s room, pushed open the door. Blackout curtains shaded the window, the room washed in darkness. Even with the door open, it took her eyes a few minutes to adjust in this room, this thoroughly quiet room. She went for his bed, kicking an empty bottle, the clink the only sound. “Dad!” She clicked on the light on his nightstand, took hold of his shoulders, shook him hard. He didn’t move, didn’t speak. His face stayed still, his eyes shut. There was a bluish tint to the skin around his mouth. Kelly fell to her knees. Put her ear up to his nose, his mouth. “Dad!” she screamed again.
He wasn’t breathing.
“DO YOU HAVE ANYBODY YOU CAN CALL, HONEY?” SAID THE EMERGENCY room doctor. “How about your mom?”
Kelly looked up—not at the doctor. At the clock on the wall. It was almost noon. She’d been here, in the waiting room at Hollywood Presbyterian, for four hours. “I want to see my dad,” she said.
“I know, sweetie,” said the doctor—a female doctor with big pitying eyes behind thick glasses. “But that’s not gonna be possible for a while.”
“How long is a while?”
“Forty-eight hours.”
Across from her, a Mexican woman who couldn’t speak any English held a baby that wouldn’t stop screaming. The woman and the baby were the only two other people waiting right now, but since she’d been here, Kelly had seen an older man complaining of heart attack symptoms, a panicky mom whose little girl had swallowed bleach, and a boy a few years older than she was rushed in on a stretcher, his leg mangled in a motorcycle accident. Two out of three of them had been treated and left. Even the boy with the mangled leg was seeing visitors. Kelly tried again. “I want to see my dad. Please.”
“I know it’s a long time,” the doctor said. “But that’ll be how long it takes to detox.”
“Detox?”
“You seem like a smart girl so I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Your dad overdosed on Percocet. You know what that is?”
She nodded.
“So your dad took around ten times the prescribed amount, mixed with a significant amount of alcohol.”
Kelly stared at her, awful thoughts running through her mind—Elvis and Keith Moon and Sid Vicious and all those other celebrities she’d read about in her gossip magazines, lifeless on hotel room floors or curled up around toilets, choking on their own vomit, dead on arrival. The screaming headlines: TRAGIC OD, DRUG CASUALTY, GONE TOO SOON . . . She thought about all the times she’d given Jimmy his pills, his glass of Jack on the rocks, and wished she could punch herself, pound her head into the wall. Wished she could take all the pills Jimmy had taken, so she could feel nothing like him.
“He’ll be fine,” the doctor said. “He didn’t stop breathing long enough to incur much brain damage.”
“Much?”
“We just need to clean him out, dust him off, he’ll be good as new.” She looked at her. “But I am going to make a pitch for the Betty Ford Center.”
Kelly tried to smile. “That’s a good idea,” she said, thinking, Not much brain damage.
“So,” the doctor said. “Your mom? Should I call her?”
Kelly shook her head. She heard herself say, “I don’t have a mom.”
“Your dad said . . .”
“He’s wrong.”
“Well, do you have a family friend? You are a minor, and if there’s no one to take care of you, I will have to contact foster services . . .”
“I have a family friend,” Kelly said quickly.
The doctor introduced her to a nurse, who brought her to the front desk, let her use the phone. She called Bellamy first, but Flora the housekeeper said she’d gone out. Weird. Bellamy had said “Call me if you need me” this morning, right before Kelly had hung up with her to call the hospital. Had she shut Kelly and Jimmy out of her mind, just like she’d shut out the girl in John McFadden’s window?
Next, she called Vee’s apartment. He picked up fast. “You’re lucky you caught me here,” he said. “I was just getting a few things.” It wasn’t until she heard his voice that she realized how much she’d missed him these past few weeks while he’d been away shooting Resistance. “Kelly?” he said. “You sound like you’ve been crying. Are you okay?”
“My dad stopped breathing this morning.”
“What?”
She told him everything—from waking up to Bellamy’s phone call on, her voice cracking, breaking over the details. When she got to telling him how she’d pounded on her dad’s chest, how she’d shaken him and driven her fists into him, she felt it again, that blind, awful panic. “I love him so much,” she said. “Why couldn’t I make him stay?”
Vee said, “Oh my God, if that ever happened to my dad . . .”
Kelly started to cry.
“We’ll be right there,” said Vee. “You can stay with us. Long as you need to.”
She could barely speak. “Thank you.”
After she hung up and sat back down in the waiting room again, Kelly let Vee’s words sink in. She ran them over in her mind. “We’ll be right there,” he had said. “You can stay with us.”
And sure enough, when he arrived at the waiting room forty-five minutes later, Vee wasn’t alone. His father was there, standing right behind him, his hands crossed over his chest. “Your dad is one of the strongest men I’ve ever worked with,” he said to Kelly. “I know he’ll pull through this.”
Vee rushed over to her, hugged her hard. She put her arms around him but her gaze stayed fixed on John McFadden, her whole body tensed, a feeling coursing through her . . . a growing, tearing rage.
“It’s okay,” Vee said. “It’s okay.”
Kelly couldn’t reply. She stared at John McFadden and the world turned in on itself, crushing her, taking bits away . . . Why didn’t I see it before? How could I not have known? But she couldn’t say a word about it, not to Vee. How could she? A dim, drunken memory unfolded in her brain. Vee at the Jailbird Party, crying into her neck . . . “I loved her,” he had said. “I loved Catherine.”
Kelly hugged Vee tighter, tears springing into her eyes.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m here.”
“I want my dad,” she whispered, crying for Jimmy and for Vee. Poor Vee, who believed he had a father worth wanting.
John McFadden was dressed all in black. He was wearing the same mirrored aviator glasses, so there was no mistaking it, no lying to herself, no looking away. John McFadden was the man in the Porsche. He was the older man who had taken Catherine home.