“I mean,” Erin says the following morning, both of them staring wide-eyed at the grainy video on her laptop, “the girl’s got a flair for the dramatic, that’s for sure. It’s almost a shame she doesn’t act anymore.”
“Yeah,” Sam says distractedly, scrubbing a hand through his hair as Erin hits play one more time, Fiona’s wild-eyed face filling the computer screen. She looks feral—her hands flying around like demented birds, her hair enormous—but more than that, Sam keeps thinking, she looks scared. “I mean, she actually does still act, sort of, but—whatever.” He shakes his head. “Can we go out?” he asks abruptly, shutting the laptop harder than is probably necessary and standing up. “Let’s go out.”
Erin takes him for a breakfast beer at the dive around the corner from her apartment: cool and dark and a little bit grimy, the floor slightly sticky underfoot. It’s early enough that they’re the only people sitting at the bar, a friendly drunk scratching lotto tickets at a table in the corner and some daytime talk show carping away on the TV—a talk show, Sam realizes belatedly, on which they’re playing the footage of Fiona outside her theater over and over. Fiona St. James at It Again in New Viral Video, the chyron reads.
“For fuck’s sake.” Sam drains most of his beer in two long gulps. “Hey,” he calls, signaling the bartender before he quite knows he’s going to do it, “sorry. Would you mind turning this off?”
The bartender looks dubious. “You object to The View?” he asks.
“No, I don’t object to The View, I just—sports?” he begs. “There must be a sport on somewhere, right? There’s always sports on.”
The bartender rolls his eyes, but dutifully flips over to competitive bowling on ESPN2. When Sam turns back to Erin, he finds her staring at him, her eyes wide and triumphant. “Holy shit,” she says quietly, “did you catch feelings for Riley Bird?” She says feelings but it sounds like what she means is chlamydia.
Sam finishes his beer instead of answering. “Better not let her hear you call her that,” he says finally. “She’ll eat your heart in the fuckin’ marketplace.”
Erin shakes her head. “Don’t try to put me off.”
“I’m not trying to do anything,” Sam replies, knowing he sounds peevish. “We hung out a couple of times, that’s all. I barely know her.”
“Can you not be full of shit for one second?” Erin asks, setting her glass down. “Like, now that I’m actually looking at your face I’m realizing I’ve been kind of an asshole about the whole thing, so I probably owe you an apology, but putting that aside for a minute, it doesn’t have to be some bullshit game of who can be the coolest guy in Hollywood. If you like her, which you clearly do, and she’s going through a thing, which”—she gestures at the TV—“shit, she clearly is, then what are you doing sitting here with me? Go be a decent human person and make sure she’s okay.”
“It’s not—” Sam breaks off. “I mean, we aren’t—” He sighs. “She’s not taking my calls, okay? I tried her last night, and again this morning, but she doesn’t want to talk to me. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“Yes, actually.” Erin smiles, reaching for her glass again before kicking him gently underneath the bar. “I am sorry, for the record. I wouldn’t have been so cavalier if I knew it was, like, a real thing.”
“It’s not,” Sam says reflexively. “But maybe it could be?” He drops his head back. “I don’t fucking know.”
“Liar,” Erin says cheerfully. Sam orders another beer.
When he gets home there’s a residuals check waiting for him from a Hallmark movie he did a couple of Christmases ago, which cheers him up for a minute, though after he pays down his credit card enough to be able to use it he’s basically right back where he started. Sam frowns. He hasn’t been this broke since he was living with Erin, doing push-ups on the nasty carpet in their tiny apartment and splurging on ten-dollar haircuts. He can’t believe he let himself wind up here again.
He walks around the apartment for a while. He eats half a bag of baby carrots standing up at the sink. He thinks about taking a nap, but he can’t settle, even after he jerks off and watches two episodes of an afternoon court show and checks to see if maybe Russ emailed him with news about the firefighter thing, which he has not. He pulls up Fiona’s video one more time. He remembers a night back in the third or fourth season of Birds, a big party at a fancy hotel out in Malibu—the network threw one every year the week of the Television Critics Association press tour, when everyone came out to LA to watch next season’s pilots and take corny pictures of themselves in front of the Hollywood sign. The party was always black tie, candles floating in the pool and tuxedoed waiters scurrying by balancing trays of champagne and canapés. Thandie and Fiona used to call it the Sexless Prom.
Attendance, while not strictly mandatory, was strongly encouraged, and though Sam had dutifully shown up every year he’d been on the show, the whole thing never got less weird to him, all the big Family Network names mingling together: the second lead from a vaguely racist period piece about a feisty pioneer nurse chatting up the host of a morning talk show that was best known for showcasing new and novel recipes for ground beef every single day. He was angling for a little bit of face time with the star of a marquee drama about a small-town sheriff—the guy had just booked a role in a Coen Brothers movie, and Sam wanted to know how—when he spotted Fiona standing near the edge of the pool talking to a couple of older women from one of the executive teams, clutching a rocks glass in one hand and tiny appetizer plate piled with a mountain of fruit from the cheese board in the other. Judging by the expression on her face, she was seriously considering drowning herself in the shallow end.
“There you are,” Sam said, striding over and swinging an arm around her shoulders before he quite knew he was going to do it. “I’ve been looking for you. We’re all getting in the photo booth.” He grinned his most winsome grin at the executives. “Sorry, ladies. Need to find this gal a feather boa and some novelty sunglasses, stat.”
“What the hell?” Fiona asked once they were alone, sitting down hard on the edge of a massive stone planter overflowing with tropical flowers and taking a sip of her drink. “How do you know I wasn’t dying to talk to those women?”
Sam raised his eyebrows. “Were you?”
“No,” she admitted. She was wearing a short, fringe-y dress and sky-high heels, a bunch of chunky rings on her fingers. Also, though she was holding it together decently well—not to mention the fact that she was only eighteen—he was pretty sure she was shit-faced. She’d started showing up on the gossip sites by then, a few dicey scenes at clubs in West Hollywood and a well-publicized fling with a two-bit pop star whose biggest hit featured a chorus that consisted entirely of the words my junk, my junk repeated over and over. Sam had asked Thandie about it when they’d broken up, just casually, in response to which Thandie had fixed him with an extremely dubious look and told him that if he was interested in Fiona’s personal life for any particular reason, he could damn well ask Fiona about it. “But I could have been.”
“You could have been,” he agreed, “and I apologize.”
“I forgive you,” she said politely.
“Magnanimous,” Sam teased, plucking a grape from her plate. He wasn’t interested in Fiona’s personal life for any particular reason, for the record. He’d just been curious, that was all. “Worried about getting scurvy?” he asked, nodding down at the pile of fruit.
“Cute.” Fiona rolled her eyes, fingers brushing his as she picked up a strawberry and popped it into her mouth. “I’m on a diet, technically.”
“Really?” That surprised him. “Why?”
“Jamie says I’m getting fat.”
“Seriously?” Sam blinked. It didn’t sound like something Jamie would say. It was certainly not something Jamie had ever said to him, and Sam found himself almost unable to picture it. He wondered if maybe Fiona had misunderstood, somehow, but knew better than to ask. “What the hell?”
Fiona shrugged. “Lucky for me,” she said, raising her glass in a little toast, “vodka is a low-calorie food.”
Sam grinned, charmed in spite of himself. “How drunk are you right now?”
“Fuck off,” she said immediately, but she was smiling. “How drunk are you right now?”
“Moderately,” he admitted, and Fiona laughed. In the glow of the patio lights she looked—he tried to think of another word, and couldn’t—luminous, full mouth and long eyelashes and something faintly glittery slicked across her collarbones. Then, all at once, her face fell. “This,” she said quietly, setting her glass down on the planter between them, “is not a good idea.”
Right away Sam felt himself blush, like he’d gotten caught doing something he shouldn’t have; and yeah, okay, there was a tiny part of him that had been thinking about asking her if she wanted to get out of here, that was in fact more than passingly interested in her personal life and wondered if there might be a place for him in it. Still, he didn’t think he’d been so obvious that she needed to shut him down preemptively.
But Fiona didn’t seem to be talking about whatever intentions might or might not have been forming in the back of his mind for the rest of the evening. In fact, she didn’t seem to be talking about him at all. She ran a hand through her hair, her rings catching at the tangles. “I’m fucking up,” she said, so quietly she might have been saying it to herself.
“What?” Sam shook his head, not understanding. This conversation had taken a hard swerve when he wasn’t paying attention, and he wasn’t sure how to get it back on track. “Why, because you’re drunk at Sexless Prom? Nobody can even tell.”
Fiona shook her head. “No,” she said, “I don’t mean that. I mean—”
“You’re okay,” he said reflexively, and the words were out of his mouth before he realized how stupid they were. It reminded him of his mom running across the playground after he’d fallen off the jungle gym when he was seven: You’re okay, she’d promised, presumably so he wouldn’t be scared, only then he’d looked down and realized his arm was twisted at an unnatural angle, his hand splayed limp as a dead bird. He wasn’t okay, and—he saw it now, in her panicky expression—neither was Fiona. He felt young and clueless and out of his depth all of a sudden; he was relieved when he looked up and saw Jamie crossing the patio in their direction.
“Children,” he greeted them, lips quirking. “You guys plotting your escape?” He was wearing dark jeans and a tuxedo jacket, this afternoon’s sunglasses poking out of the breast pocket. He nodded at Fiona’s drink. “I’m assuming that’s water.”
Just like that, Fiona was herself again, saucy and wry; she took a long sip, gestured with the glass in Jamie’s direction. “My warden,” she said, smiling sweetly.
“That’s me,” Jamie said. He squinted. “Can you pull it together?” he asked, plucking the glass from her hand and placing it on the nearby tray of a cater waiter as they passed by in a blur of black and white. “Or do we need to leave?”
Fiona shrugged. “Only one way to find out,” she said cheerfully. She wobbled a bit as she got to her feet, and for one horrifying second Sam was sure she was going to take a header directly into the deep end of the pool, but in the end she corrected with impressive grace, finishing with a spunky little dance right there on the patio. “Look at that,” she said, and her smile was dazzling. “Right as rain.”
“Very nice,” Jamie said, sounding distinctly unimpressed. “Still, I think that’s your cue.”
Fiona frowned. “I’m having fun,” she protested. “I’m hanging out with my friend Sam.”
Jamie’s gaze flicked to Sam for an instant, then back to Fiona again. “I see that,” he said. “I also see that you’re about half a vodka tonic from making a fool of yourself in front of every entertainment reporter in America and possibly a Canadian or two, so I’m suggesting again that you call it a night.”
“Oh, is that what you’re suggesting?” Fiona looked at him balefully. “You realize, James, that you’re not actually my father.”
Jamie didn’t react to that, though Sam thought he could see a muscle ticking in his jaw. “No,” Jamie agreed evenly, “I’m certainly not.” Then he sighed, his voice softening. “Come on, sweetheart,” he said, wrapping his hand around her elbow. “It’s time.”
“Jamie, dude,” Sam said, the words out before he could stop to consider whether or not this was a situation he wanted any part of; a minute ago he’d been relieved to see Jamie—their boss, a grown-up, a rational person in charge—but now he just kind of felt like a snitch. “She just said she was good.”
Both Jamie and Fiona looked vaguely shocked at that, and Sam thought he probably couldn’t blame them. After all, he was pretty sure it was the first time he’d ever contradicted Jamie about anything. Still, something about the vibe Fiona had been giving off a minute ago made him want to protect her—which was why he was doubly surprised when she shook her head. “No,” she said, and her voice was all surrender, “he’s right. I need to go.”
Jamie nodded. “Atta girl,” he said, the relief audible in his voice. “Let’s get you the fuck out of here. Sammy, my man, you’re in charge. Get ’em to write something nice about us, will you?”
Sam nodded vaguely, certain he’d missed something important and entirely unsure what it might be. Still, in the end he guessed it didn’t actually matter. Jamie was right—the last thing any of them needed at this point was Fiona St. James Gets Sloppy Drunk at Sexless Prom to be the lead story on every gossip website on the internet come morning. He was doing all of them a favor.
“I’ll do my best,” Sam finally said, though he didn’t think either one of them actually heard him. They’d already disappeared into the crowd.
Now, seven years later, Sam gets up off the couch and changes his T-shirt, checks his teeth in the bathroom mirror. “This is fucking ridiculous,” he tells his reflection, then grabs his keys off the table by the door.
He’s half expecting Fiona’s house to be dark and deserted, like possibly her whole family will have packed up and skipped town in the middle of the night like a traveling circus in an old-fashioned storybook, but Claudia answers the door ten seconds after he rings.
“I don’t know if this is really a good time,” she says, glancing out the door at the street behind him before crossing her arms like a bouncer at Soho House. She’s wearing a flowy skirt and cowboy boots, her hair in a complicated braid over one shoulder.
Sam nods, trying to swallow down the disappointment in his throat. “I get it,” he says. He likes her, her big glasses and serious expression. She looks like Fiona ten years ago, if Fiona had been cosplaying as Stevie Nicks. “I don’t want to make things worse for her. But if you could just tell her that I came by—”
That’s when Fiona comes around the corner into the hallway.
“Claud?” she calls. “Who the fuck is at the—hi,” she says, eyes widening. She’s wearing a sports bra and a pair of men’s basketball shorts about ten sizes too big for her, her long hair wet from the shower. She puts a hand on her sister’s back, looking out at the street the same way Claudia did a second ago—for photographers, Sam realizes belatedly, feeling like a total fucking fool. It didn’t even occur to him to check. Fiona squeezes Claudia’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” she promises. “I got it.”
Claudia looks unconvinced. “Are you sure?”
Fiona nods, stepping outside and shutting the door behind her. She’s barefoot and she looks younger suddenly, her face scrubbed clean. She smells like drugstore shampoo.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” she says.
“Thinking about trying out for the NBA?”
“Considering it,” she tells him, glancing down at her clothes. “My jump shot could use work.”
Sam nods. “Maybe Michael Jordan can give you some pointers when he comes by to get his pants back.”
Fiona huffs a laugh but then it turns into something else halfway out, her face falling. In the second before she rearranges her expression, she looks like she might be about to burst into tears. “Sam—”
Sam takes a deep breath. “Do you want to go for a drive?”
Now she really does laugh, shaking her head at the Tesla in the driveway. “Not in your car, I don’t.”
That makes him smile. “Fair enough.”
They look at each other for a long moment. He can see her weighing something in her mind. “Wait here,” she says finally, then turns and goes back inside the house.
Sam shoves his hands in his pockets and looks out at the neighborhood, at a couple of kids playing freeze tag and the bald guy dragging his trash cans up the driveway across the street. Two ladies in workout clothes power walk by him, then execute a sudden about-face three houses down and power walk by him again. Just when he’s starting to wonder if maybe Fiona isn’t coming back, if she’s planning to leave him out here indefinitely to get eaten by coyotes as a final fuck you from the other day, the front door opens again.
“Come on,” she says, holding up her car keys. She’s changed into a pair of denim shorts and a white T-shirt, the deep V revealing the tan jut of her collarbones and the skinny gold chain she wears around her neck. Her sunglasses are red plastic hearts. “I’m driving.”
As soon as they’re out of the driveway, Fiona rolls the windows down and turns the radio up, presumably so he doesn’t do anything crazy like try to start a conversation with her. Sam likes watching her drive. He’s not stupid enough to ask where she’s going but pretty soon he realizes she’s headed to Zuma Beach, past the tourists and the souvenir carts to where the sky is huge and the sand is cold and empty. The waves are enormous today. Sam had never been to the ocean before he moved to California, and even all these years later the sight of it still makes him a little uneasy—the bigness of it, he guesses, even though he knows it’s corny to think about. The smallness of everything else.
“I guess I should warn you,” Fiona says, once they’re sitting side by side on the hood of the car. “If you’re looking for an apology, you’re not going to get it.”
Sam glances at her sidelong. “Why would I be looking for an apology?”
Fiona shrugs. “For what I did outside the theater. For dragging you into it. For being myself, I don’t know.” She sighs. “It felt good, to lose it on that guy like that. The adrenaline rush, all of it. It’s been a long time since I let myself do something like that.” She looks out at the water for a moment, watching the breakers. “Sometimes I wonder if that’s what it’s like to be an addict. If I was in recovery this whole time from, like . . . my own personality.”
“Taking it one day at a time?” he asks with a smile, but Fiona doesn’t laugh.
“I’m serious.”
Sam shakes his head. “There’s nothing wrong with your personality,” he tells her. “That guy was a dick.”
“Oh, I know he was,” she says immediately. “And I can grandstand all day long about, like, consent, or what you sign up for or don’t sign up for when you’re a kid in this business, or whatever. But the end result is the same.”
“The end result being?”
“That everybody who ever called me a crazy fucking train wreck can go to sleep feeling secure in their assessment this fine evening.”
“Okay.” Sam boosts himself off the hood of the car, turning to face her in the late afternoon sunlight. “I’m going to say something to you, and I don’t want it to go to your head, all right?”
Fiona lifts an eyebrow. “All right . . . ?”
“I think you’re kind of incredible.”
She laughs out loud, throwing her head back in apparent hilarity. “Okay,” she says, holding a hand up. “Look, Sam, just because we fooled around half a time doesn’t mean you have to, like—”
“Can you stop it?” Sam shakes his head, irritated. The truth is that the public side of his job has never bothered him—the opposite, actually. Sometimes he thinks he likes the attention more than he likes the acting itself. But he’s also never gotten anything even close to the kind of scrutiny Fiona did, and it’s starting to occur to him now that he never really stopped to think about what it must have been like for her—the grinding relentlessness of a million casual cruelties, everyone in America saying the same poisonous shit about her until finally there was nothing to do but believe it herself. The whole thing makes Sam feel like a complete and utter dickhead. “I do. I think you’re moody as all hell, and I have no idea what’s going on in your head most of the time, but you’re incredible. Smart and talented and beautiful and—” He breaks off, embarrassed. “Whatever. That’s what I think.” He raises his eyebrows. “And for what it’s worth, I don’t know what rubric you’re using, but we definitely fooled around a whole time.”
Fiona smiles at that, just faintly. “Okay,” she agrees. “A whole time.”
Sam climbs back onto the car beside her, leaning against the windshield so he’s staring up at the sky, the heat from the Plexiglas bleeding through the thin cotton of his T-shirt. It’s uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable enough for him to do anything about it. It doesn’t seem to bother Fiona at all.
“My mom is sick,” he hears himself tell her. He doesn’t even know he’s going to say it until the words are already out, loud and stark in the salty air. He hasn’t told anyone in LA, not even Erin. He thinks he had it in his head that if he could keep it contained safely in Wisconsin, thousands of miles away, that meant it wasn’t actually happening. “She has breast cancer.”
“Shit, Sam.” Fiona turns to face him, pulling one leg underneath her and pushing her sunglasses up into her hair. Her eyes are wide and serious. “Is it . . . I mean, is she going to be okay?”
“Probably not,” he admits. Saying the words out loud feels like getting a piece of popcorn stuck in his throat in a darkened movie theater, like he’s choking and also trying not to make any noise.
Fiona doesn’t reply for a moment, absorbing that information. “She gave me a maxi pad once,” she tells him finally. “At the callback for Birds. Do you remember that?”
“My mom giving you a maxi pad?”
Fiona makes a face. “The callback, dumbass.”
Sam does. He was sixteen at the time; he and his mom flew out from Milwaukee in the middle of January, slinging their heavy winter coats over their arms when they landed at LAX. The callback itself was like a middle school square dance or summer camp, a dozen kids in a rehearsal room playing theater games, all of them switching scene partners until finally it was just a few of them left. Fiona had dyed a hot pink streak in her hair, which he guesses is where Jamie got the idea for Riley. “Sure,” he says.
“I got my period right in the middle of it—like, for the first time, I mean. And Caroline was the one who’d driven me over and I was too embarrassed to tell her, so I’m just standing there in the ladies’ room trying to figure out what the fuck I’m going to do, and your mom came in and took one look at me and that was it. She fixed my pants with a Tide pen and sent me back out there, like the fairy godmother of feminine hygiene products.” Fiona smiles. “She always seemed like a good mom.”
“Yeah,” Sam agrees, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “She is. And I should be there with her, and instead I’m out here trying to be a movie star like some kind of joke.”
Fiona shakes her head. “That’s not what you are,” she says.
“No?” He laughs a little. “Then what am I?”
He’s fully expecting her to say a hot corpse but instead she seems to think about it, her bare knee just brushing his thigh through his jeans. “You’re a magician,” she says.
Sam looks at her in the golden pink twilight: her mouth and her eyelashes, her hair going a little frizzy now that it’s all-the-way dry. He wants to tell her he’s afraid of how much he likes her. He wants to tell her he’s afraid of being alone. He wants to tell her that he’s sorry, that he didn’t mean it last time when he said he wouldn’t bring the show up again but he means it this time, it’s finished. That it isn’t worth more to him than whatever this potentially is here with her.
“Come over,” is what comes out.
Fiona raises one eyebrow, the possibility of it unspooling between them like the first day of summer. “Are you going to promise not to put a move on me again?”
“No,” Sam says quietly.
Fiona gazes at him for a long minute. Then she nods. “Okay,” she says. She scoops her keys up off the hood of the car, metal glinting in the setting sun. “Let’s go.”