Chapter 3
At Twenty-Two, Something’s Always Broken
Bailey rips the wrapper off the fortune cookie from last night’s dinner.
It’s not the healthiest breakfast, that’s for sure. But a quick trip to the fridge reveals that it’s either the cellophane-wrapped cookie or her roommate’s questionable, recently expired cherry yogurt. So the fortune cookie it is.
Bailey breaks it open, looking for the fortune inside.
Sadly though, the cookie’s empty. If she were a superstitious person (she’s not, really) that doesn’t feel like the best sign for the day ahead.
But, then again, it’s not as bad as those fortunes that you sometimes get that aren’t a fortune at all.
Like the time that Hannah got a fortune that simply read: Believe!
Or the one that Bailey herself got the night before she started her job: If you think something’s too good to be true, it is.
No, that was not a fortune.
It turned out, it was more like a premonition.
Bailey is the casting assistant for an acclaimed alum of her university—Alice Sleight of the famed Sleight Casting Agency.
When Bailey applied for the position, Alice said she wanted to give a young graduate a great first work experience—that the hours wouldn’t be too intensive, that the job would also allow time to work on outside projects.
Alice asked Bailey, during that interview, if she had a project she was working on. She told Bailey that it was (in fact) a prerequisite of her getting hired.
Bailey filled her in on the rest, excitedly.
For her senior thesis, she wrote the first act of a musical (a modern retelling of Pandora’s Box from Pandora’s point of view), and by some miracle her professor thought it showed real promise and shared it with a theater producer in New York.
The theater producer liked it so much that he asked Bailey to send him act two when she was done with it. Act three.
Alice said that she loved hearing this. That her husband was a visual artist and so she understood that passion—and what it means to be devoted to it.
Then she went on to explain that she was paring way back and only needed someone part-time. Nine-to-two. A dream learning opportunity! And one that would leave plenty of time for Bailey to focus on her own art.
Bailey didn’t realize, of course, that apparently Alice meant 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. Alice calling her all hours of the day and night with emergencies.
Once, Bailey was unavailable for an eighteen-minute window (10 p.m. to 10:18 p.m.) in which Alice decided she desperately needed to reach her. Alice sent thirty-eight texts in those eighteen minutes. Firing her, then hiring her again. Then firing her again.
So it is.
Who needs sleep at twenty-two?
At least, this is what Bailey tells herself. It motivates her to spend every free moment working on her musical. (As if she needs more motivation.)
And, on the plus side, she can work from her own apartment, and she loves her apartment.
It’s in the heart of Venice, overlooking Abbot Kinney Boulevard, which is exactly where she and her college roommates wanted to be, now that the UCLA music program is behind them and their lives (as underfunded as three young theater kids’ lives are) are sweeping out before them.
They had to pick between proximity to Abbot Kinney and air-conditioning. They chose Abbot Kinney.
Bailey shoves the rest of the fortuneless fortune cookie into her mouth and heads to her keyboard—which she’s set up underneath the window that’s opened all the way to let the breeze in.
She pulls her hair behind her ears, takes a seat at her keyboard, and starts to get to work.
But then her phone buzzes.
She expects it to be her boss with her first frantic, pretend-emergency request of the day. But she looks down to see CHARLIE pop up on her phone screen, an incoming call from her uncle.
Bailey’s Uncle Charlie. They usually talk on Friday evenings—and every Tuesday evening when her cousins are with him.
But a call early on a weekday morning isn’t entirely unusual.
Sometimes he calls on his way to work. Sometimes he calls just to say hello.
Sometimes, Bailey knows, Charlie just calls to make up for the times he couldn’t.
So she is smiling when she picks up his call. She is smiling until she hears the sound of her uncle’s voice—desperate and clipped—jumping in before she even has a chance to say hello to him.
“Are you with Hannah?” he asks.
“What?”
“Is Hannah with you?”
“No. Is she supposed to be? It’s eight in the morning.”
“Bailey, is Justin out front?”
Justin is the bodyguard her grandfather hired to keep eyes on Bailey. The same way Charlie’s twins, Bailey’s cousins, have bodyguards to watch over them.
Bailey looks out the window. On a workday, she can often make out Justin’s Jeep diagonally across the street, near the sunglass store. Near the fruit stand with the fresh watermelon juice.
But sometimes Justin is somewhere else entirely. This morning he must be somewhere else.
She scans her corner of Abbott Kinney, unable to spot him at first glance. It is starting to get busier with early morning traffic, folks lining up at the coffee shop downstairs, two SoCalGas repairmen standing by her building’s front door.
“I don’t see him.”
“You don’t see him?” Charlie sounds frantic. He isn’t trying to hide it. “Shouldn’t he be there?”
“He probably is. Charlie, you’re freaking me out. What’s going on?”
“You need to get to Hannah and you need to go.”
“Go where?”
“Call me back when you are somewhere safe and I’ll fill you in.”
“Is it Nicholas?”
She doesn’t refer to Nicholas as Grandpa, not all the time.
At that moment, for some reason, it’s Nicholas.
Nicholas who was diagnosed with heart failure last year.
He’d had a pacemaker put in to buy him more time.
He’d been fine at Easter. He’d been fine when he flew out for her birthday.
He was just fine, he promised Bailey, again and again.
But Bailey would put her hand on his heart, to feel the beating, like a certain kind of proof. Now she held her hand on her own heart, waiting for Charlie’s answer.
“Charlie, is this about Nicholas? Is he okay?”
“Nothing’s okay,” Charlie says.
And Bailey starts to move.