Chapter Sixteen
I should’ve thought about an explanation for Nat as I crossed the street. I couldn’t imagine what was going through her mind, watching Danny and me come out of his house together. But I also had questions for her.
“What are you wearing?”
This wasn’t an Oscars red carpet question because Nat was certainly not in a designer gown. She was fully covered in a black catsuit and electric blue wig, which made her either a terrible burglar or an obscure X-Men character. I couldn’t decide which.
Nat pursed her lips. “Since you didn’t bring my clothes, I walked off set in costume.”
“What about what you wore to set? You couldn’t wear that?”
Nat flipped her blue hair over her shoulder. “I wasn’t going to show up in sweatpants.”
Ah. Nat wanted to look hot. Well, mission accomplished.
She nudged me aside. “Excuse me, but is that you, Danny?”
“Hi, Nat.”
Danny offered her a wave, rather than a hug. They weren’t close back in high school, but I wondered if Nat looking like a naked shadow also played a part in his cool response. Either way, Nat didn’t seem to mind. She was preoccupied with checking him out, raising her (blue) eyebrows in her assessment. “Congrats on your show. I see the billboards on the freeway.”
When Nat turned her attention back to me, she was smirking. It was the kind of smirk that let me know that she figured out what she’d overheard a few minutes earlier. Instead of saying anything, she threw her leather jacket around her shoulders, showing me some mercy. “Shall we go inside?”
Danny led us through the side gate, which took us directly into the bustling backyard.
“Whoa.”
The place was packed. “There’s more people here than at the actual reunion.”
“Don’t tell Mariana that,”
Danny said.
I didn’t have to. Mariana was sipping from a red Solo cup with a bunch of water polo folks on the other side of the pool. She could see it for herself.
“Hey! You made it!”
Tao came over to greet us with open arms. I’d managed to avoid those arms when he picked us up earlier, but since he was the host here I let him wrangle Danny and me into a bear hug. “And this is . . . ?”
It took Tao a second to see beneath the wig, but once he figured out it was Nat, he did something unimaginable. He gave her a bow. “Famous actress Nat Huang! Someone bring this woman a drink!”
“Oh, stop it.”
I hadn’t seen worse acting from Nat since she tried to fake cramps for a birth control commercial. You’d think someone who’d walked their own red carpet would be used to this kind of attention by now. Nat was practically preening.
Tao cleared the path for our group and led us to the center of the party. “I can’t believe the turnout. Everyone’s back in town!”
“Yeah, it’s like there was a reunion tonight or something,”
Danny commented, only loud enough for me to hear. Tao’s goldfish memory was the least bizarre thing about the party. While our former classmates danced to the Vengaboys, a collection of Tao’s relatives, young and old, were barbecuing by the patio, having their own gathering. It was hard to tell who was intruding on whom.
“Oh yeah. Don’t forget to wish my mom a happy birthday,”
Tao said as he left to check in with other guests. “Drinks in the kitchen.”
“I’ll go put this away,”
Danny said, hefting his beer. “Do you want anything?”
“Whatever you’re having,”
I replied, sending him on his way.
“I can’t wait to hear all about that,”
Nat said once Danny went into the house. “I know you’re not on the clock right now, but heads up. After South by Southwest, my schedule’s going to pick up. I’m flying back to wrap up the last episode of the season. And then there’s that indie family dramedy I signed on to do in New York.”
I thought back to Nat’s calendar. I’d seen it so often, I had it memorized. “Isn’t that a couple months away?”
“Well, a friend of mine texted me about doing a digital short in April. I’ll be out all summer, so can you look into subletting the apartment?”
We’d done this before when Nat was getting paid peanuts to film some small movie that no one’s ever heard of, but that was before she had thirty thousand Instagram followers.
“Why are you doing a digital short? You’re the lead of your own show! Aren’t you afraid some fan is going to post about where you live and what your room looks like?”
Nat stopped to think about this, possibly—probably—for the first time. “Can’t you cover rent for a few months?”
Nat chewed on her lip. An awkward silence fell between us, making me wonder if I needed to find Nat a financial adviser too. “You’re not the only one FreeStream axed.”
“Is the show getting”—I could barely get the word out—“canceled?”
“It’s going to hit the news tomorrow.”
Nat’s face fell, and I felt her sadness instantaneously. That was me a week ago. I searched for a quiet place to talk. Maybe there was something we could work out that didn’t have me rooming with a stranger for the summer. I was too old for this shit.
“There are scripts sitting in your inbox right now. You’re going to be okay, Nat.”
“That doesn’t mean anything, Rach. I’d have to go through the audition process. It could be months before I find out if I was selected or not.”
The fear of rejection still loomed over Nat. When there was no guarantee that you were going to work in this town again, it was hard to turn down a sure thing. Wasn’t I doing the same? “But what does your agent—”
A group of clamoring women emerged out of nowhere and effectively pushed me out of my own conversation.
“OMG, Natalie!”
some woman shrieked. “We weren’t sure if it was you, but then we saw the Commander’s badge on your costume!”
Really? The badge gave Nat away? Not the Marge Simpson blue wig?
“Can we take a selfie?”
the woman asked, already holding up her phone to their faces.
“Sure!”
Nat put on her winning smile and threw up a peace sign. After posing for a few pictures, Nat picked up some shots off a tray Tao’s cousin was parading around. “I need to let loose for tonight,”
she said to me, “and we’ll talk business tomorrow, okay?”
She handed me a glass and clinked it with her own. “Fuck FreeStream.”
Hear, hear. I threw back my glass. Ugh. It was like drinking fire. When I regained my senses, Nat had already been whisked away by her old drama friends, who peppered her with all kinds of questions about her acting life. Without Nat, I didn’t know where to go, but if she needed a fawning audience to lick her wounds, then I wasn’t going to get in her way.
“You need a chaser?”
Mariana handed me a red cup with an orange slice floating in it. “It’s beer. If Tao catches you drinking water, he’ll pour you a shot.”
“Thanks.”
I swirled my cup, unsure if I wanted to drink it. The shot Nat gave me was more than enough. “Thanks for putting on the reunion.”
“Yeah, right,”
she said before she took a sip. “It was a shitshow.”
“Sorry,”
I said, remembering my own contributions to her headaches. “For what it’s worth, I thought it went well.”
“Not as well as this party.”
Somewhere on the lawn, Tao had set up a table for beer pong, which drew a rowdy crowd. “I should’ve thrown a kegger,”
Mariana lamented. “This was easier when we were younger. The committee took months to plan the reunion, and yet we still couldn’t make anyone happy. Stuff kept falling through the cracks. People wanted to keep ticket prices low, but then people complained about the refreshments. There’s only so much I can do with a shoestring budget. Meanwhile, my wife is texting me all night, asking if I made goodie bags for my kid’s class. Like damn, it never ends.”
So Mariana wasn’t invincible. I thought I’d be happier about this revelation, but I related to the feeling hard. I knew better than anyone that we all had our limits. “Well, you have one less thing on your plate now.”
“There is one last detail I need to close out.”
Mariana placed her hand on my shoulder like we were about to have a heart-to-heart. “Rach, I can’t let you keep the award. We had other people under consideration who are . . . how do I say this?”
“Who are what? Employed, therefore more deserving?”
“Yes,”
she said, so visibly relieved that I was afraid she might hug me. “You get it. It wouldn’t be a good look. How would we be able to explain it to the students or the school board that we awarded someone who was essentially unemployed? What kind of message would that send?”
“Sure. We wouldn’t want anyone to think that you can bust your ass your whole life and still get let go. That’s not aspirational.”
For a second there, I thought I could empathize with Mariana, but I was never going to forget this. This conversation had cemented her as the enemy. I handed her my beer. “Wait here. It’s in the car.”
“It’s not personal, Rachel. We want to be fair.”
“Oh totally. We don’t want people to think that awards are rigged, right?”
Mariana gaped, and I accepted that as a win. It was a small win, but I wasn’t choosy these days. I pushed through the crowd to find Danny. I ran into a few old tennis teammates, sitting around a fire pit. I promised to come back and hang out when I wasn’t burning with resentment. I finally spotted Danny mingling with Tao’s family.
“Hey,”
I said, waving him away from their dinner party. An auntie shoved a plate of birthday cake in his hands before letting him go. “Can I get your car keys?”
“What do you need them for?”
Danny’s eyebrows arched with fake suspicion. It was terribly cute. “I can’t have you going joyriding.”
“Mariana wants the award back,”
I muttered.
“Damn, that’s cold. Let her wait. It’s not urgent.”
Throughout our friendship, I had respected Danny’s neutral stance on Mariana despite my one-sided rivalry. However, it was nice to have him siding with me this time.
Danny stuck his fork in a square piece of cake, which had two layers of vanilla sponge cake divided by a layer of whipped cream frosting and yummy crunchy pastry. He tipped the plate at me. “Do you want it?”
I wasn’t one to say no to cake, but this wasn’t a regular offer. He’s watching what he’s eating, I recalled. Can’t have too much sugar.
“You don’t want it,”
I stated as I took the plate. Danny shook his head. “Because you can’t have it.”
He replied with an innocent smile that could let him get away with murder. At the very least, it let him get away with my heart. It was scary how effortlessly we were falling back into our old ways. Him leaving me to decipher what he really meant. Me seizing the challenge like it was a game I wanted to win. I used to feel so special, as if I cracked Danny’s code or something. Now that I was older, I didn’t look at it through the same rosy lens. I’d been around too many sweet-talking, bullshitting Hollywood types. I just wanted people to say what they meant.
I dug into the cake and people-watched from our little corner. A swell of hollers came from different corners of the party.
“Come on, Winnie!”
some guy shouted from the diving board. “Get the pool party going! We know how much you love to skinny-dip!”
Winston took a bow, but declined, instead smoothing his tie as if to show people he was a serious adult now. It didn’t stop a group of guys from chanting, “Take it off! Take it off!”
Near the dance floor, a group of former cheerleaders huddled together to put the record straight on some hookups. Everyone had an agenda that night.
There was something I’d been curious about, and the alcohol had loosened my limbs and my lips. “Do you remember calling me one night after one of these parties?”
“Vaguely,”
he said, averting his eyes. He was a bad liar.
I pointed my fork at him. “You were drunk.”
“I might’ve been.”
His voice echoed in his cup as he sipped his drink.
“You asked me if I ever kissed anyone.”
I kept my tone casual because that wasn’t the point I was trying to make. “You said you wanted to be good at other things, but you never said what. I always wondered what you meant by that.”
Danny pulled a longer sip, buying himself some time. “I felt like I was pulled in a lot of directions back then, trying to make everyone happy. I wanted to help my brother stay out of trouble. I wanted to help my parents by supporting myself. I wanted to be better at school. I wanted to be a better friend.”
He held on to his cup like it was his security blanket. “I wanted to be with you, but . . .”
That “but”
made my heart fall to the floor with a thud.
Danny shrugged in a pathetic way, like he didn’t want to finish his sentence, but he did. “But you know. You were you and I was me.”
I honestly had no fucking clue what that meant. “What? Like you couldn’t imagine being seen with me?”
Danny stepped back like he’d been punched in the face. “W-what? No! The opposite. You were so driven that I didn’t think you’d give a guy like me a chance. You had every minute of your day planned, Rach. It was impossible to see you outside of the hour you blocked off to tutor me.”
I took Danny’s cup, but it was empty. I had nothing to chase the burn. Everything Danny said was true. I had a one-track mind back then, and it was scary to think how little attention I paid to anything outside of school. I knew better now, but it had been a hard habit to shake.
Danny reached for my face. I thought I had frosting on my chin, but he was thumbing away a tear. I didn’t know why I was getting emotional about it all of a sudden. As horrifying as it was to cry at a party, I had some answers now. This was progress.
“That’s fair.”
I was proud of how diplomatic I sounded. I blinked away any remaining moisture from my eyes before anyone else noticed. “I didn’t really know how to be anyone’s girlfriend back then.”
Or now, for that matter.
Danny’s eyebrow arched, confused. “It wouldn’t have been that hard, Rach. I would’ve been on cloud nine if you walked me to class like this.”
He held my hand, firmly, lulling me closer with every swing of our joined hands, making my heart skip.
Some people around us took notice. It was hard to ignore their eyes, waiting and wanting for something to happen. Anxiety crept up the back of my neck. I considered letting go of Danny’s hand, but I didn’t want that either.
“People are looking at us,”
I whispered.
Danny glanced side to side, tipping his chin when he made eye contact with some of the onlookers. He was remarkably fine with being gawked at like a circus act. My reputation hadn’t made me popular, but at least it had shielded me from distracting gossip. I wasn’t strong enough back then to withstand being talked about, whether the speculation was true or not.
“Let them look,”
Danny said, challenging me with an irritating calmness.
“Danny,”
I warned. Fortunately, a rousing game of beer pong took the spotlight away from us. A belligerent Belinda shouted at Nat to chug. “Some of us weren’t built to be the center of attention.”
“Says the person who collected awards for fun.”
“That was different.”
Awards were based on merit, or at least I thought so at the time. “I didn’t want people asking me if we were hooking up during tutoring.”
“Well, we kinda were,”
he pointed out. My face heated at the drop in his voice. “So what? It’s no one’s business but ours.”
Danny and I had different memories of high school, when everyone had made it their business to know other people’s business. But he also had a point. Why did I care what my high school friends thought? They had no bearing on my life anymore. Besides my own, there was only one person’s opinion that mattered right now, and he was looking at me with the same playful smile on his face as on the day we ditched school.
Before I thought too hard about the people around us, I kissed his cheek. As we broke apart, Danny stole a kiss from me, catching the corner of my mouth. Somewhere in the distance someone—someone who sounded like Nat—cheered. “Was that so bad?” he asked.
“No,”
I admitted, despite some embarrassment.
“We don’t have to stay,”
he reminded me. The arch in his eyebrow told me where his mind was going. I looked around. It was kind of hard to sneak out now that we had made our presence known.
Tao walked over and handed me a shot, just as Mariana warned me he would. “Cheers,”
he said, smirking as he waited for me to drink up. I threw the glass back just to get it over with. I think it was tequila. Everything was starting to taste the same. Seeing that his job was done, Tao turned around and moved away to mingle with others.
Danny seized the opportunity and made a break for it. I yelped as he grabbed my wrist and dragged me toward the side gate. “Let’s go before he sees us.”
Refreshing cool air filled my lungs as we escaped. We said hi and bye to a blur of faces. For a second, I thought that things were finally turning around. I freed myself from caring about this party and everyone in it. I was ready to leave it all behind, but I underestimated Tao’s popularity. More people were coming in, slowing our getaway. A mob of people broke our joined hands, but I kept pushing forward.
“Rachel!”
I swung my head around, hoping to find Danny, but my eyes landed on someone else. For the first time since we broke up, I was face to face with Josh.