Chapter One #2
“I’m going to be Alfred Hitchcock. I got the part, babe!”
I blink a few times at the redirect.
“What does that have to do with you in our bedroom with Elsa on my birthday?”
“I couldn’t talk about it in front of anyone!”
“So… why wouldn’t you have pulled me into the bedroom?”
He goes red.
“Because they haven’t casted the Grace Kelly part yet and I think Elsa would be good for it.”
I roll my eyes at casted and then say, “You don’t think maybe I would be good for it?”
Even saying it embarrasses me.
It clearly embarrasses him too.
“They’re probably going to go with a big name, anyway. Like Margot or Saoirse or Evan. Maybe Lily. Someone who’s… you know, done more.”
“So if you were going to suggest—ugh, forget it. God.” I shake my head.
“How are you going to play Hitchcock?”
I motion at his CrossFit-keto-intermittent-fasting-sculpted body.
“I’ve got a freezer full of Van Leeuwen and a kegerator being delivered on Monday. My trainer has a plan too. Gotta pack on the pounds.” He pats his hard stomach, and it sounds like he’s banging on a marble countertop.
“This is it, babe. I’m going to kick my career into hyperdrive.”
One would argue that came when he did the remake of The Outsiders as a teenager, played Sinatra in the Luhrmann Hollywood Canteen movie, or, yeah, when he got the lead role in the newest chapter of the limitless Marvel Cinematic Universe, a film that grossed the most since Avengers: Endgame.
Grayson Gamble is not just famous.
He’s nepotism famous.
Hollywood royalty famous.
His grandmother was in movies with Bing Crosby.
His mom was a producer on most of the erotic thrillers of the nineties.
His cousin headlined the last Coachella.
His whole family tree is hyperlinked.
“I wanna be taken serious, you know? I’m over going to like, Kardashian Christmas parties and doing collabs. I want to be… like… eating dinner at Vespertine with like… Joan Didion.”
I shut my eyes with desperate patience.
“Grayson.”
“Is she dead too?”
He says too because he is constantly making this kind of mistake.
So many women on this earth would do anything to be with this guy and they have no idea the labor it takes.
I am, in fact, simply impressed he even got her name right.
“Yes, Grayson. She’s dead.”
“Why?”
“ Why? Do you mean how?”
I’ve confused him.
“Well. You know what I mean,” he says, shaking his head like an Etch A Sketch.
“Look, this is really important to me. Can you not ruin it?”
I gape at him.
“Are you being serious?”
“Yeah?”
I let out a deep breath.
“When our agents hooked us up, and we decided to go for it, we swore we’d be honest with each other if something needed to change. We’re supposed to help each other, not make things worse.”
“I didn’t cheat on you.”
I stare at him for a long moment and then say, “Okay. Then I have no choice but to believe you.”
He closes his mouth and nods slowly.
Grayson rejoins the party with ease, and I take to floating around the place like a barely remembered ghost.
The house is full of somebodies and wannabes, delirious from the tidal downpour that has drenched and inflated the heat wave that’s been pulsing outside for the last few days, ending twenty weeks straight of perfect weather.
No one here has eaten a carb since 2019, but a bottle of champagne is popped every five minutes because drinking carbs is different.
In the kitchen, someone has produced a bottle of Sotol from some apparently magical town in Mexico and is talking about its aromatics.
On the couch, two people are getting the idea to write a script together, saying, Wait…
are we doing this?
over and over.
One girl keeps taking ostensibly subtle pictures of the goings-on, but I don’t get the feeling she’s planning to sell them.
More likely she’s gotten here by some series of mistakes and is texting them to her mom or best friend with a lot of omg s and skull emojis.
It’s regular, run-of-the-mill Hollywood Hysteria.
I take an unopened Bollinger from an ice bucket, deciding to say fuck it to my caloric allocation and to the former service industry worker inside me who still thinks she needs to be the consummate host at all times.
I go upstairs to hide.
The noise from the party muffles when I close the bedroom door.
My eyes catch on something sparkling on the duvet.
I go closer and find that it’s a diamond earring.
Not mine.
I arch my eyebrow at the multi-thousand-dollar clue and consider throwing it off the balcony.
But my formerly bank-account-always-in-the-negative heart can’t do it.
I place it on Grayson’s nightstand.
Asshole.
My black Lab, Dido, stretches as she awakens from a deep sleep in her bed.
I go over and collapse onto her, sighing deeply.
It’s very melodramatic to say, but sometimes I feel like she’s the only real thing in my life.
Dido, with her sad little backstory of abandonment that had been written up on the rescue website alongside several photos of her adolescent, spindly frame.
Already not a puppy anymore by the time I found her.
She always follows me around the house like I’m the only real thing in her world too.
God, I really am being very tragic.
I don’t even know why it’s hitting me so hard tonight.
Maybe it’s the insult of catching Grayson with Elsa.
Maybe it’s the fact that Brilliance might end.
Maybe it’s because it’s my birthday?
I know some people get emotional on their birthdays, but that’s never been me.
Though it is my thirtieth.
That’s a pretty big deal.
I decide I’ll feel better, and perhaps less like a damsel in a Christopher Nolan movie, if I get out of this horrible dress that makes me look like Mermaid Batman.
I strip out of it, with great effort, and change into a baggy T-shirt and my favorite sweatpants.
Gray, full of holes, and soft as a cloud.
Down one leg they say Burchell ; down the other leg, Hawks .
My high school gym pants.
They’re soft in the way only well-made, decades-old cotton can be.
I wipe off every ounce of makeup, which takes about half a pack of Clinique wipes, then double cleanse my face, deciding to skip most of the fourteen-step regimen of serums and acids by which I usually abide.
I put my product-laden hair into a ponytail, leaving the extensions in a creepy pile on the side of the infinity tub like a scalped Barbie.
I take my phone, headphones, and champagne out onto the covered balcony.
The heat has gotten even heavier in the air, and I plug in the fan and lie back in the macramé hammock, looking out at the wet, starless sky.
Well.
Stars are there.
You just can’t see them in this city.
Deciding to lean into my misery, I put on Phoebe Bridgers and let the melancholic notes enrapture me, the Vornado blowing rainy mist onto me every now and again.
Phoebe sings Jesus Christ, I’m so blue all the time and it resonates so deeply that I feel guilty.
I know I have no right to be this miserable.
I can’t even say it out loud.
I can’t say it to my parents, who would think I’m ungrateful for my success.
I can’t say it to Grayson, who thinks the cure for unhappiness is, under every circumstance, a good workout.
I can’t say it to my friends because I don’t really say anything to them at all.
They know me as I was most of tonight: boisterous and fun, charming and spontaneous.
Not this version of me, who thinks all of this is kind of, somehow, bullshit.
No one has sympathy for you when your life looks this good from the outside.
It’s like complaining that your enormous boobs make it hard to find clothes that fit properly.
Or whining that you’re afraid of heights when you’re at the top of an ivory tower.
No one wants to hear it.
And no one believes it, even if it’s true.
I feel like my life is an illusion and even I can’t see quite through it.
I did tell my therapist about my discontent, though honestly, I didn’t fully open up.
And yes, of course I have a therapist.
An Angelino without a therapist is like a Taylor Swift song without a story.
It simply does not exist.
My therapist told me to search my past.
To find when I last felt truly happy.
I admitted that I genuinely couldn’t think of when that would be.
She said to go back through my photos and videos.
See which ones made me feel happy, not shitty.
I’ve made the hunt a nightly ritual.
So far, I’ve gone back about ten years, and I still haven’t found anything that brings me pure joy.
How depressing is that?
Especially considering that during that time, I was desperate for the life I have now, and I’m still not happy?
Obviously, it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me .
But then…
what?
I scroll now through the years of my life in my phone.
Past the Getty Images of me on the red carpet in dresses I starved myself to fit into and then had to return after each event; past the unflattering before-and-after photos from the rhinoplasty, the brow lift, and the buccal fat removal.
Past the photos of my first LA apartment in Miracle Mile, which was a few blocks from the neighborhood Italian restaurant called Met Him at a Bar where I used to bartend.
Past the Red Bull Vodka–fueled pictures of me partying in West Hollywood when I first moved to LA.
I scroll a little too far and my thumb lands on a low-quality video.
I immediately know exactly what it is, even though I haven’t watched it in years.
I hesitate before pressing Play.
It’s me and my best friend Aimee in my high school bedroom.
We met at the beginning of middle school when we got very well cast as Rhyme and Reason (me as Rhyme, Aimee as Reason) in our fall production of The Phantom Tollbooth.
After that we were inseparable.
Not that our parents didn’t sometimes try when we were shrieking at two a.
m.
during a Friday night sleepover.
In this video, we were that kind of slumber-party-girl drunk that comes from no alcohol at all, but a stash of candy, banana-yellow microwaved popcorn, and a friendship that is mostly based on inside jokes.
It starts on a frame of Aimee’s arm pulling away from the camera, which has been propped up.
“Is it filming?” She checks the back of what I remember to be a Nikon Coolpix camera from Costco.
“Oh, yeah it is. Okay, Meg Bryan, how have you changed since coming back from Avalon School of the Arts?”
She is, of course, using my real name, and not the stage name I’ve assumed since then, Lana Lord.
She holds out a hairbrush she’s using as a microphone.
I come into frame wearing a red wig, with a red moustache drawn on in one of my mom’s Revlon lipsticks.
“Who, me?” I say in a bad Irish accent.
Both of us devolve into laughter.
When we finally compose ourselves, Aimee puts the hairbrush in front of my face.
“You’re a famous actress now. Do you think the fame has gotten to you?”
She’s trying so hard not to crack a smile that it makes me, the real me watching the video, smile so hard that it hurts.
“No, no, I don’t think so,” says teenage-me, still in the accent.
“I’m the same as when I left America! Only now, me favorite food is potatoes!”
This is too much for us both, and we burst into laughter all over again.
We’re both laughing so hard that we’ve stopped making any sound.
Our mannerisms are so similar to each other; we spent so much time together.
Both our tongues are blue from, I’m sure, Pixy Stix or Baby Bottle Pops, and both our faces are spotted with pimples in part from, I’m sure, Pixy Stix and Baby Bottle Pops.
“It’s so”—teenage-me gasps for breath—“not funny!”
Aimee shakes her head slowly, still cracking up.
I didn’t think so at the time, but hearing our voices now, we sound so young.
Goofy and unselfconscious.
High pitched and silly.
“Okay, let’s never show this to anyone, ever,” teenage-me says, turning off the video.
It freezes on my phone as it ends.
You’re a famous actress now.
Do you think the fame has gotten to you?
It’s strange that this fantasy came true.
For me.
I am a famous actress.
Has the fame gotten to me?
Not in the way people mean.
In that video, I was seventeen years old, and I was about to get into the college of my dreams.
Avalon School of the Arts, a small but highly renowned art school in Ireland, known for its theatre program.
Hence the borderline-insulting stereotyping in the video.
Aimee and I had fallen in love with the school together, and we had both applied at the same time, with the same expectations: that we’d both get in, live there together, succeed together, and then be famous together.
But that wasn’t what happened.
I got in.
Aimee didn’t.
We had sworn that if one of us got accepted and the other didn’t, then whoever did wouldn’t go.
We’d attend our backup school together, which we’d definitely get into (and we did).
But once Aimee got wait-listed for Avalon, she insisted I go anyway, tearfully telling me she couldn’t live with herself if I didn’t.
But we’d promised each other.
So I stayed in Florida with her.
I stayed, and we went to college twenty minutes from home.
Staying in Florida, not going to Avalon, was probably the biggest mistake of my life.
Which means that this video of Aimee and me, which I know to be about three days before we found out she didn’t get in, is possibly the last time I was truly happy.
Except for the moments between finding out I got in and that Aimee didn’t.
It was delusional to think both of us would get accepted, but at that age and time it just felt like really shitty luck that we didn’t.
Three days before we got the news that changed our lives.
Instead of going overseas to a cute little school in a misty village, we would be staying in Florida, going to a charmless state school and living in awful dorms.
I shut my eyes now, unable to think about what happened later.
I inhale deeply and put a hand on my chest and try to keep a potential panic attack at bay.
Breathe in and out.
Everything’s fine.
But it isn’t.
I know, in my heart of hearts, that I was supposed to go to Avalon, and since I did my part wrong, I’m living out the wrong version of things.
That’s what it feels like.
I scroll through more pictures and videos, skipping around and coming to one from college.
I don’t recognize it.
I’m holding my phone up in the mirror, showing my own reflection in the video.
“Okay, Aimee is in a mood, so we’re going to try and see if this works.”
College-me points the camera at my feet as I walk, laughing to herself as she does so.
Oh God, I do vaguely remember this.
With my iPod plugged into a portable speaker, I walk into Aimee’s room blasting “Who Let the Dogs Out” by Baha Men.
Aimee looks jarred and shakes her head, gesturing to turn it off.
I do, and then say, “Okay, so like I said, Aimee’s in a mood.”
“Are you filming right now?” She looks exhausted with me.
“I don’t want to be filmed right now. I mean it— stop. ”
I hear a meager sorry and then the video ends.
It may as well have been a slap.
I feel so embarrassed that I’m actually nauseous.
I hate seeing myself on camera.
It’s an oddly common affliction for actors.
I can’t watch my own stuff without feeling itchy.
But it’s way worse in a video like this, when I was actually myself, not even a character.
Young and unselfconscious, hadn’t learned tact or social caution.
My voice was loud, unbraced for rejection; I was uncool in every sense of the word.
Why had I even kept that video?
Why would I ever want to revisit that feeling?
I sit up, tossing my phone aside and taking off my headphones.
The hot, fabricated breeze ripples over the porch.
I need to do something.
I don’t know what, but I need to do something .
I pop the bottle of Bolli and take a big swig.
Then, as the bubbles foam over and spill down my front, I am struck with an idea.
Maybe I need to get out of here for a little while.
I used to dream of discovering new places, and yet now all I do is work in LA, with only the rarest work trips to Georgia and Vancouver and the occasional weekend in Palm Springs, Joshua Tree, Big Bear, or Lake Arrowhead.
I hardly ever go farther than a few hours, and I rarely even go to the beach.
Which, to be fair, is something that can be said by most Eastside Angelinos.
It takes forever and the traffic-jammed trip back sort of eclipses any seaside relaxation.
But seriously.
I need to think bigger; I mean, I’ve never even been off this continent.
I open my phone and pull up the Airbnb app.
Number of guests?
One.
I’m not bringing Grayson.
I need a break from Grayson.
Duration of trip?
Uh…
one week.
My heartbeat quickens at the idea of getting away.
Far away.
To really change the scenery.
Destination?
I hesitate.
Then I select Anywhere .
I browse for a while: an Airstream in Santa Barbara, a beachside casita in Rosarito, a hut in Bora Bora, a tree house in San Jose, a city loft in Lisbon, a high-rise on Bondi Beach.
Then I do what I was always going to do.
I change Anywhere to Avalon, Ireland.
There is only one result.
I’ve got flash-sale fervor as I scramble to get it before someone else does.
It’s a little white cottage called Surrey House with a red door and green vines.
There’s soft-looking grass in a gated front yard.
It has old, warped pane windows and a crooked mailbox.
Inside, there are exposed wooden beams and a high-arched ceiling.
There’s a stone fireplace in the living room and a stack of magazines on a coffee table (when was the last time I even saw a magazine?
) in front of a plush love seat draped with blankets.
The kitchen is cramped, with a miniature gas stove and fridge, a huge copper sink beneath a window, and a wide wooden butcher-block island in the middle.
In the bedroom, packed built-in bookshelves surround a bed that looks like an absolute cloud with a fluffy duvet and pillows.
There is another fireplace at the foot of the bed.
This place is a dream.
Maybe not to everyone.
Maybe someone else would look at this and see a drafty old cottage with no modern appliances.
Not me.
I don’t even look at the total before I press Book .