Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Gripping the steering wheel, Bryn unleashed a string of curses while she unlocked a new level of hell. She slammed on her breaks, all four lanes of traffic coming to a screeching halt in front of her.
Nightmare. Bryn was in an actual freaking nightmare.
Quick math told her that she’d never make it to Vivian’s on time. Not when traffic was at a stand-still miles from an exit ramp. She’d left at dawn, but that wasn’t early enough to miss the crash that had shut down the highway.
Bryn stopped herself from spiraling. She was just late to voicing made-up characters. Somewhere up ahead, someone’s life had been disrupted in a much more real way. Perspective made the sweat stop dripping down her back. Slowed it, anyway.
She took a deep breath and pretended to be someone braver. She called Iris and put the call on speaker.
“Hey, um, I’m on the turnpike and it’s basically shut down.” She looked in the rearview mirror where a firetruck was zooming over the shoulder, a string of cop cars following. “And I think I’m going to be here a while.”
Iris was asking about alternate routes when Bryn stopped the useless exercise. There was nothing for her to do but wait.
“This far southwest, my only option is the turnpike. Homestead—”
“Homestead?” Vivian shrieked, surprising Bryn with her presence and her judgmental horror. “You’re coming from Homestead?” she repeated, like she was mentally calculating the size of the solar system.
Despite a surge of nervous energy, Bryn managed not to reveal the termite infestation that made her seek refuge in her childhood home.
“It’s temporary,” Bryn blurted, even though that didn’t matter when her need to travel to Vivian’s house was temporary too.
“Meaning that you will reside fewer than a hundred miles away by tomorrow?” Vivian asked with all the warm compassion of the glacier that took down the Titanic.
Bryn rolled her eyes. “It’s not that far.” She put the van in park. “But, no. I’ll be staying here all week. I’m having… work done in my apartment.”
“This is ridiculous,” Vivian thundered, her voice closer, as if she’d taken the phone from Iris. “How do you expect us to finish this book if—”
“Well, I didn’t exactly plan this interstate shutdown, Vivian.”
Without warning, Vivan put Bryn on hold. Bryn finally understood keyboard warriors. It was easier to be annoyed when she wasn’t looking right at Vivian. Nearly two minutes later, Vivian returned.
“You can stay in the guesthouse,” Vivian said, disconnected to any conversation she’d had with Bryn.
All Bryn could find in reply was an exasperated, “What?”
“Yenni Montoya remains dissatisfied with the audiobook,” Vivian said, like words cost a fortune and she needed to be sure each was perfect.
“What do you mean remains? We just started. And anyway, how does the author—”
“We will never get to the end of this damn book if you can’t reliably show up for work—”
“Unreliable? Vivian, I left my house before the sun—”
“I’m not calling you unreliable,” she snapped. “But this arrangement is… untenable.”
Bryn took a breath. She tried to put herself in Vivian’s shoes. Tried to understand her frustration. Understand why Bryn being a little late disrupted a highly regimented person. The accident was as much Vivian’s fault as it was Bryn’s and derailed her morning just the same.
“I appreciate the offer,” Bryn said calmly. “But I can’t just—”
“It’s not for you. There’s always going to be a crash or a closed road.
” She dropped her voice and muttered, “Everyone here drives like they want to survive The Purge.” She cleared her throat.
“And we’re going back to zero today. We can’t lose anymore time.
My production schedule is already suffering—”
Bryn choked down her frustration at their information gap and focused on the point. “What do you mean back to zero?”
“We have not met expectations. We’re starting over,” she said flatly, but Bryn heard the restraint.
There was something in Vivian’s tone that made Bryn picture a silent scream.
Made her imagine Vivian’s head tossed back in soundless rage.
“Your commute is a liability we cannot afford. You will stay here, we will work late, and we will get this done. Pack a bag. The gate will be open when you get here.”
The line went dead because, apparently, what Vivian del Castillo had to say was the only thing that mattered.
Bryn stared at her phone and considered Vivian’s offer.
It wasn’t an act of kindness or generosity.
It was a command. One that made her feel more like a scolded child than a colleague.
Trapped in traffic, Bryn let her head fall back against the headrest.
It wasn’t Vivian’s unhinged invitation that she kept repeating; it was the implication behind her words.
What Bryn had made wasn’t good enough. Had Vivian told Harvey about her one-act-at-a time approach?
Was he mad? Vivian sure as hell sounded mad.
Did the author, the creator of a world she entrusted to Bryn, hate her work?
Bryn’s stomach churned. Her first shot at a career-making book and she’d blown it in a single day. She blasted the AC, vents directed at her face, but it didn’t stop her sweating. Didn’t slow the speeding train of thoughts yelling about her inadequacy.
Breathing in through her mouth and out through her nose, Bryn left the past she couldn’t change and focused on the present. They didn’t fire her. She was getting another shot. And that shot had to count.
She thought about Vivian’s offer again. It was a chance to eliminate the stress of commuting.
It was an opportunity to be immersed in Magpies with the only other person who mattered right now.
Maybe with that proximity, Vivian might impart some of her knowledge.
She couldn’t recreate Vivian’s decades of experience overnight, but Bryn had never shied away from hard work.
If Vivian was willing to teach, Bryn would swallow her pride, her ego, and anything else required to learn.
She would do whatever it took to prove she belonged in that booth.
When the line of cars finally moved, diverted away from the wreck, Bryn took the first exit.
On her way back to her parents’ place, she reframed her situation.
By the time she was tossing old clothes into a bag, she had convinced herself that she was going to infuse so much emotion into her performance that Montoya was going to laugh until she cried and cry until she laughed.
It was mid-morning by the time Bryn arrived at Vivian’s house. Iris had shown her to the guesthouse, but Vivian wasn’t waiting in the booth. Instead, on a couch that pulled out into the plushest sofa bed Bryn had ever encountered, sat an iPad with a Post-it note: read the entire damn thing.
Bryn plopped onto the bed, note in hand, staring at Vivian’s incredible penmanship. Of course even her freaking handwriting was intimidating. All perfect cursive, like she’d spent a great war writing letters to keep soldiers full of fighting vigor.
Bryn cringed internally but refused to let herself get distracted. She unlocked the tablet and started reading.
* * *
Hours of careful reading took Bryn through lunch and dinner—both brought to her by Iris with no sign of Vivian.
It was late when she finished reading and nearly midnight when she dropped into bed, body buzzing.
Vivian had been right. Understanding the entire journey gave her such a deep understanding of Maggie’s character.
Gave her the color and contours she didn’t know she’d been missing.
She understood Vivian’s metaphor about the musician knowing the music, and she was ready to play her heart out.
After showering and applying her drugstore moisturizer, Bryn knew she should get to sleep. But the strangeness of staying under Vivian’s roof, or one of them at least, was too much. She couldn’t force her eyes to stay closed.
Bryn reached for her phone on the side table. Without overthinking, she googled: Vivian Taylor TV show. Immediately, video clips and articles for Gimme a Break, Already! filled her screen. It was apparently the sitcom from ’91 to ’95.
She clicked on a clip of a teenage Vivian being interviewed on a red carpet.
With braces and a wild gleam in her dark eyes, Vivian was excitedly discussing what it was like to be fifteen and the star of a sleeper hit show.
Bryn couldn’t help but smile at Vivian’s contagious exuberance and bleach-blonde hair teased for the gods.
She scrolled through articles and images before opening a video that claimed to be of the show’s most viewed episode of the entire series.
The clip opened on a brightly lit living room set, painfully 90s in its floral patterns and oversized furniture. The laugh track roared as seventeen-year-old Vivian, playing the character Cyndi, walked down the stairs.
Bryn’s breath caught.
Cyndi was dressed in the infamous gold bikini Carrie Fisher had once been forced to wear. The metal was clearly plastic, but there was no mistaking it. On Vivian, the costume looked like a crime. The studio audience whistled and catcalled, their reactions folded into the canned laughter.
Bryn’s lip curled and it was all she could do not to turn it off. But she wanted to see where the hell the scene was going.
The doorbell rang. Cyndi opened it to a man in his mid-forties. Context clues made it obvious that the man was a neighbor and recurring character. He did a cartoonish double-take, his eyes raking over Vivian’s body.
“Whoa, momma!” he boomed, wiggling his eyebrows. “Any closer to that eighteenth birthday?”
The studio audience howled with laughter.
Bryn’s stomach turned sour, her tongue tasting metallic like it wanted to spit out what her eyes were ingesting.
She almost puked when she realized that it was a running gag.
This man, who had supposedly known Vivian’s character her entire life, was counting down the days until she was “legal”—a concept Bryn couldn’t even begin to unpack.
To Bryn’s silent disgust, the scene devolved into an even more horrifying plot. Someone dressed as Chewbacca showed up at the door to take Cyndi to a Halloween party. From the moment the silent Chewy put a furry, possessive arm around her bare shoulders, Bryn had a terrible feeling.
The payoff followed moments after Cyndi and “her date” left. Moments later, Cyndi’s actual boyfriend, dressed as Han Solo, arrived to find his girlfriend was already gone. The laugh track roared through the ensuing mix-up.
The scene cut to later that night. Cyndi stumbled back into the living room, looking flustered. The plastic chain that connected her collar to her wrist had snapped in two. The creepy neighbor was there again, drinking beer on the couch and groaning over his shrew of a wife. What a prince.
“Whoa, back so soon? What happened to you?” he asked, gesturing with his beer bottle at her broken costume.
“Ugh, it was so embarrassing. My costume just… broke. I had to come home.” Cyndi sighed. “It’s just as well. Brian didn’t talk to me all night. He wouldn’t even take off his mask in the car.”
The neighbor leaned forward with what could only be described as a leer.
“Broke, huh? Let me guess, that Wookie couldn’t keep his paws to himself in the backseat?
” He stared at Cyndi’s body, Vivian’s body, so exposed under the harsh lights.
“Bet the lucky schmo didn’t last two minutes.
” He laughed along with the audience. “There are some benefits to getting older, you know,” he added with another lascivious stare.
Bryn slammed her phone face down on the duvet to keep from choking on a violent wave of nausea.
She’d witnessed a public violation packaged as a punchline.
A sick punchline. The monstrous sound of laughter echoed in her skull like a root canal.
Maybe the term rape culture hadn’t been a thing thirty years ago, but how could anyone witness that without their skin crawling? Without internal alarms blaring?
A cataclysm of questions hit her like a firehose. How had Vivian survived this? Where the hell were her parents?
Bryn picked up the phone, closing the window and opening a new one. She’d meant to find out more about Vivian’s history when she found an unexpected headline: Late Night’s Lustful Countdown: Host Puts Clock on Vivian Taylor’s 18th Birthday.
Bryn’s blood turned to frozen sludge. She clicked the link with the same compulsory curiosity of driving by a car crash.
There it was in grainy detail. A late-night host, one of the most famous of his time, had made Vivian’s impending adulthood a national joke. It wasn’t just the neighbor on the show. It was real life.
Below the headline was a photograph of Times Square. Times fucking Square. And a massive digital billboard ticking down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until America declared open season on a seventeen-year-old child.
Skin clammy and backs of her eyes burning, Bryn dropped the phone again. She couldn’t stop thinking about Vivian. Not Cyndi. Not a character she could at least take off. Vivian. A real girl, whose burgeoning womanhood had been a public commodity. A joke for leering men and cheering audiences.
Bryn clenched her jaw to hold in a scream and wondered if that’s how Vivian had fortified herself. If she’d held in scream after scream until it acted as mortar to seal herself in. If that’s how she’d endured.