Chapter 13
After a while, I start getting the Spidey-Sense feeling that Thisbe is probably ready for a walk and a pee break, so I announce
that I have to go home.
“Do you need a ride?” Evie asks. “My dad’s picking me up soon.”
I’m about to say yes when Luke cuts in. “I’ll take her. She’s on my way.”
Evie tries to catch my eye behind his back, but I ignore her.
We say goodbye and then head out to the Bronco. The outside may be pristine, but the inside is filthy. There are piles of
old clothes, food wrappers, and empty seltzer cans on the floor.
“Still a slob, I see,” I joke, pushing the cans aside with my shoes.
“Yeah, sorry about the mess,” he says. “Once a slob, always a slob.”
“Remember your eating shirt?” I ask him.
“Yes, although I wish you didn’t.”
He was so messy as a kid that he had to wear an “eating shirt” on set whenever he ate, to catch all the dribbles of food he spilled on himself.
He always had food on his face or in his teeth, and someone from wardrobe had to check him over before he was allowed to go back to filming.
Eventually, I started doing it for him, since we always ate together.
At the end of a meal, he would bare his teeth at me without a word, and I would give him a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.
Sometimes I’d even help him pick out a particularly stubborn piece if he couldn’t get it.
The idea of reaching into his mouth right now, of touching his teeth with my fingertips, feels so unthinkably intimate that it makes me blush.
“What?” he asks. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Just imagining you covered in globs of ketchup and ice cream,” I lie.
“You don’t even have to imagine,” he says, pointing at a small yellow stain on his jeans. “Mustard.”
“Maybe you need to bring back the eating shirt,” I suggest.
“Maybe,” he agrees as he turns off Eddie’s street. Then, “You and Evie seem close.”
“We are. She’s my best friend.”
“So why haven’t you told her the truth?”
“It’s complicated,” I say, right as my cell phone goes off.
Dad, the screen announces. Luke glances at my phone and then at me.
“Speak of the devil,” I say, trying to make a joke, but it comes out sharper than I intend.
“Do you need to get that?”
“No.” I ignore the call.
Luke hesitates, as though he wants to say something but isn’t sure if he should. Finally, he says, “I heard things. About your dad, I mean. Were they true?”
“What did you hear?” I ask.
“That he took your Bricks money?”
I sigh and look out the window. “Unfortunately, yes. That’s true.”
It’s hard not to think about how much that money would have changed my life. And I do think about it. A lot. I could go to
any college I got into. I could go backpacking this summer instead of planning to work as many jobs as I can. I could be so
much freer than I am now.
“What about your Coogan Account?”
I shake my head. All child actors are required to get accounts that are, in theory, supposed to protect a portion of their
earnings. “It didn’t get filed properly. So he was able to dip into that, too.”
“Fuck. And the rest of it? Did you get any of it back?”
“Nope.”
“Can you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. My mom wants me to sue him. But I don’t see the point. It’s all gone.”
“I’m so sorry, Cee.” Hearing him use his old nickname for me gives me a strange jolt. But before I can fully process how it
makes me feel, he asks, “Was it gambling?”
Now that question surprises me. I’ve never talked to Luke about that. I’ve never talked to anyone beyond Mom and Nicky about
it. “How’d you know that?”
“He was always making bets with the crew during basketball season. I don’t know. He seemed . . . intense about it. Too intense.”
“It started with sports gambling,” I tell him. “Then horses. Then he had a bookie. Then it spiraled from there. He started
going to therapy for it a few years ago,” I add. “So he is working on it.”
Most of the time, my conversations with Dad are very surface level. I’m not sure our relationship could survive if we started
delving into the more serious stuff. But that’s the one “big thing” Dad and I have touched on. He said he wants to get back into “fighting form,” and to do that, he needed to fight his addiction.
“Has he ever apologized?” Luke asks.
“Kind of,” I say, although I’m sorry are two words I have not yet heard from my father.
“Is there more?” Luke asks.
We’ve pulled into my driveway by now. Mom’s car is here, so I guess I didn’t have to rush home for Thisbe’s sake. Luke turns
off the engine and looks at me like he wants to keep talking, so I don’t move.
“More what?”
“I don’t know. Before, when you asked me what I’d heard about your dad. It seemed like there might be more.”
I don’t want to talk about any of this. I could freeze up, end the conversation, and get out of the car.
It’s probably what I would do with anyone else.
But this is Luke. Luke, my first real best friend.
He’s also one of the only people I can talk to about this.
So for once, I decide to stay, and I give him the lowest-hanging and most obvious piece of fruit.
“Yes,” I say, tapping my nose.
“That was because of your dad?”
I nod. Thinking about it still makes my heart hurt.
“It was right after Bricks ended for good,” I tell Luke. “He told me I had a deviated septum, which I’m pretty sure was a lie, and got the whole thing
done behind my mom’s back. He found some awful plastic surgeon who was willing to give me a nose job even though I was so
young. Too young. I didn’t fully understand what was happening until after it was finished.”
He whistles, long and low. “Damn. That’s so fucked up.”
“Yup,” I agree.
“Cal’s on me to do stuff to my appearance sometimes, too. But he’s not my dad.”
“No. Your dad would never do that to you.” Luke’s dad is mild-mannered and shy. He only came to set every now and then. He
restores vintage cars for a living, and despite his tidy haircut and crisp button-down shirts, he always had dark grease under
his fingernails. “Speaking of your dad, how is he?” I make my voice light and pat the leather seat, desperate to move the
topic away from me. “I assume this is his handiwork?”
“Sure is. He had just finished it for me, and he was too excited to let me rent a car while I was out here. So one of the
PAs drove it out from LA.”
“He’d be horrified to see it in its current state, no doubt.”
“No doubt,” Luke agrees.
“And your mom? How is she?”
“She’s good. She got married last year.”
Luke’s parents were never together. They were best friends in high school and had Luke when they were both still teenagers.
I always assumed that Luke was the product of one strange moment in their friendship that likely involved a lot of alcohol.
“Do you like him?” I ask.
“Her.” Luke grins. “And yeah. Mich is great. Very good for my mom. My dad was the man of honor.”
“Wow. It’s all making so much more sense now. Where’d they get married?”
“At my—well, our—place in Brentwood. Mom and Mich spend more time there than I do.”
Younger me would have been devastated to know Stacey got married and I wasn’t invited. I wonder who he brought as his date.
Probably his ex-girlfriend, his old costar from the HBO series. Five or six years ago, I would have been Luke’s plus-one.
Without question. I might have even been involved in the ceremony, like as a flower girl. But I guess that’s the way life
works. People mean more to you than you can possibly imagine and then that meaning, that intensity, fades away. Nothing is
forever.
Luke pokes me. “What are you thinking about? You seem far away.”
I sigh. “The nature of time.”
“Okay, brainiac. Get out of my car with that nonsense.”
I make to leave, but he grabs my hand. “Wait. No. I was kidding. Stay for a minute.”
I feel every centimeter of where his skin touches mine. It sends a wave of electricity up my arm.
“All right.” I tuck a piece of hair behind my ear to break the contact.
We keep talking. We talk about everything. We talk about Stacey’s pool company and how business has exploded since Luke got
(even more) famous. We talk about his favorite projects he’s done since Bricks, the worst people he’s worked with. I tell him about school and work and Todd, and how Mom and I still aren’t all that close.
He tells me about his tattoos and rolls up his sleeves to show me which ones he designed and drew himself. He gets particularly
animated showing me the tiny round monster on his bicep he calls Pat.
“Pat is the little asshole up here,” he explains, tapping his head. “Whenever I’m on a negative spiral, or if I mess something
up and I can’t stop beating myself up about it, the voice isn’t mine. It’s Pat’s. Helps to externalize it.”
“I like that,” I say. “Screw Pat.”
“Yeah, we hate that guy,” he agrees.
Neither of us says anything for a moment, but it doesn’t feel bad. It feels normal. Comfortable. “You haven’t changed as much
as I thought you would have,” I admit.
“Thank you,” he says. “I’m going to take that as a huge compliment.”
I laugh. “It is.”
The light flashes from inside the house as the front door opens. It’s gotten dark out since we parked, and colder, too. We’ve
been sitting there for so long that the maple tree that hangs over our driveway has dropped a few leaves onto the Bronco’s
windshield. Mom comes out in a pair of thick knit socks.
“Gus?” she calls out. “Is that you?”
I glance at the clock. Luke and I have been out here for over an hour.
“Yeah, coming!” I turn to Luke. “See you tomorrow?”
I can’t make out the details of Luke’s expression in the darkness, but something about it makes my stomach flip. “Yeah. I’ll
be here.”
When I get inside, Mom says, “You were out there for a while. I didn’t want to interrupt, in case . . .”
“We were just talking.”
She holds up her hands. “Of course. That’s what I meant.”
When I’m in the bathroom getting ready for bed, I stop halfway through washing my face to look at myself in the mirror. Really
look at myself. Water drips down my cheeks, but I don’t brush it away.
I look at my mouth, my nose. I pretend I’m a stranger, looking at a stranger’s face.
Three days after my surgery—I was so swollen and bruised—I was going to say good night to Mom and Dad when I stopped dead. They were fighting, and it was bad.
“She’s thirteen,” my mom yelled. “It’s her body. This was her decision to make, and you took it from her!”
“Bricks is ending, Nina. Claire said she didn’t want to go on any new auditions because she doesn’t want to play the ‘weird kid’
anymore. Her words, not mine.”
That was only partially true. Even though I loved living in a character, loved acting, Brett had made it very clear I wasn’t
any good. And hearing that so often burrowed into my brain. I didn’t deserve to be there. I was bad, wasn’t I? I was the worst one on the show. And I just couldn’t face the idea of feeling that way again.
I had been mostly okay about the whole thing, until I heard them fighting. Then I felt confused. I thought getting a new nose,
a better nose, was a good thing. But listening to them argue, I realized maybe it wasn’t.
“Once those braces come off and she’s out of her awkward phase,” Dad continued, “she’ll be able to work as a mainstream actress.
She’s pretty now, Nina. She could even be beautiful. Thanks to me.”
My dad’s words made me feel both happy—he’d said I was pretty—and also sad. Brett was the one who was always needling me about
my looks. No—more like sledgehammering. And here was Dad, saying pretty much the exact same thing. Did that mean he thought
I was ugly before, too?
“How dare you, Rob. How fucking dare you. She’s your daughter.”
Mom never said the f-word. I went quietly back to my bedroom, not wanting to hear them fighting. Something was wrong, something
big, and I was at the very center of it.
Two weeks later, my bruises were gone, and so was Dad.
I keep staring at my face, unblinking, until it fractures into pieces. Until I almost can’t recognize it as a face anymore.
Now that I’m eighteen, do I like my new nose better? Of course I do. It’s a beautiful nose—perfectly proportioned and straight.
But I wish I’d had the chance to grow into my old one, learned to accept myself with it. Maybe it would have suited my features
as I grew up. Maybe not. Maybe I would have ended up getting a nose job anyway.
More than anything, I wish I’d had the chance to decide for myself.