There’s a knock at the door at nine. I think it’s a neighbor, coming to complain about the noise, but it’s Antonio, my cousin from Italy, script in hand.
“Oh my god!” I say. “Antonio, I completely forgot.”
Antonio’s a male model who did a lot of runway work in Milan, and now he’s here trying to break into acting. He doesn’t have a lot of stage experience, which is a nice way of saying he’s awful at acting. I’ve been trying to help him, but he has a serious overacting problem that hasn’t been improved by his fascination with books on character motivation and method acting.
Antonio’s smile is tentative—wary, even; I can’t tell whether he’s upset that I forgot about our practice date or whether he’s overwhelmed by the angry vibe in the room.
“You guys remember my cousin Antonio, right? We were supposed to run lines.” I turn back to him. “I’m so sorry.”
“We’ll all run lines with you.” Kelsey pulls him in and shoves the book into his hands. “First you have to tell the truth, though—do you recognize this book? Have you ever used it to pick up women?”
Antonio reads the inside description, which guarantees success picking up nines and tens or you get your money back. “A pickup book? I’m a male model with an Italian accent, cara…”
“True, he doesn’t need the book,” I confirm. “Unless it’s to drive off women by beating them over the head with it. He could use it for that.”
Antonio sighs wistfully, flipping through the book, reading random pages. “Americans.” He shakes his head. Reads, “‘Never ask a woman what she wants—tell her what she wants. You are a capricious god and she is your subject.’”
We all groan.
He reads more, fascinated. To be fair, the book is fascinating.
“Such stuff would work on men, too,” Antonio observes, shutting the book. “You could wrap a man around your little finger with these techniques.”
“If you’re an awful person,” I say.
Antonio shrugs in his European way. “But if you wanted to bring a man to his knees. Some of them would perhaps need to be adjusted but…” He lifts the book. “This is what I’m saying.”
“Seriously?” Kelsey asks. “You honestly think these techniques could bring a guy to his knees?”
“Of course,” he says.
Kelsey stares at him a moment longer, then she’s grinning so wide, it squeezes my heart. It’s been a long time since I saw that look on her face, and it makes me want to smile, too.
Then she turns to me. Not just turns to me, points the high beam of her exuberant gaze at me. “Maybe even bring Max to his knees?”
I narrow my eyes. I love seeing her happy again. But I’m not sure about where this is going. “What are you thinking here, Kelsey?”
“I’m thinking about justice,” she says.
“Yes!” Jada turns to me, too, now. “Justice. You could show him how it feels, Mia.”
“I’m not doing pickup techniques on Max,” I say.
“It’s not about pickup techniques, it’s about showing him how it feels to have somebody work a system on him,” Kelsey says. “He needs to know. It’s perfect karma.”
“Except he wrote it,” I say. “It probably wouldn’t work on him.”
“Or maybe it would work on him better than it would work on anyone else,” Lizzie says. “He wrote a manual on how to get to a person’s heart. How many hearts do you think he knows firsthand? One. He only knows one heart. His own.”
“You’re assuming he has a heart.”
My pals laugh. They think I’m being extreme. I’m not.
By the time Max graduated, he was playing the most demanding pieces with stunning precision…and zero emotion. A wildly impressive robot. I’d call him that sometimes. I’d joke to my friends that he played like the Terminator, knowing it would get back to him.
“Anyway,” I say. “I think he’d recognize somebody running his own golden rules on him.”
“No way. He’d never know. He wrote that book almost ten years ago,” Kelsey says. “My sister writes books. She can’t remember anything she wrote even one year back. She says her head fills up with a new book and crowds out the old one. And this guy, he’s running a billion-dollar business and being all Mister Celeb? Trust me, Max Hilton has no memory of what’s in this book.”
Jada turns to me. “Do it! Teach him a lesson. Make him crawl on his grovelly knees.”
“I don’t know if it can be done by a person who’s just delivering sandwiches,” I say. “And the whole reason he requested my deliveries is to make fun of me.”
“You’ll see him every day. It’s perfect!” Jada says. Antonio and Kelsey agree—they’re full of ideas. Even Lizzie is getting into it.
I bite my lip.
I spent the past few hours dreading tomorrow with every fiber of my being. I even thought about quitting, weighing the pain of going without insurance, without allergy meds, and possibly even without a place to live against being under Max’s imperious thumb.
It never occurred to me to fight back.
The girl I was in high school would be all hell no! to that. The south Jersey girl full of fire and confidence and mile-high plans to conquer Broadway—she’d never buckle under and assume defeat. She’d never quit Meow Squad just because Max may or may not have ordered a sandwich. And she’d raise hell if it helped her friends.
Sometimes I wonder where that girl went.
Admittedly, it’s been a demoralizing few years of scrimping and saving, working menial jobs, trying out for every part under the sun, working my ass off in dance lessons and acting lessons and voice lessons and lessons to get my accent smoothed out. I’ve been out there hustling, but in some ways, I feel like I’m still on square one.
“Use his own system to wrap him around my little finger…” I whisper, trying it out, “and then I bring him to his knees.”
“His grovelly knees,” Jada clarifies.
Kelsey is beaming at me. She’s convinced I can do it. I bite my lip, thinking back over the endless hours of holding her, comforting her as she sobbed over how bad Nathan screwed her over—using Max’s book as his guide. And then there’s Jada. And lord knows who else.