Fiona looks from the dog to Richie, then down at the dog again. Then she gets up and gets back to work.
“Shouldn’t you be getting ready?” Claudia asks late that afternoon, sitting at the kitchen table eating ranch-flavored popcorn and working on some precalc homework that Fiona doesn’t understand. “Don’t you have rehearsal tonight?”
Fiona shrugs. She does, technically, though all day long she’s been thinking about skipping it. Permanently. Like she told Sam the other day: it’s community theater, that’s all. It’s not like it actually matters. She could just stop showing up, disappear into the ether never to be heard from again. It’s not like it would be the worst thing she’d ever done.
Claudia would know, though, and in the end that’s what has Fiona stuffing a granola bar into her bag and shuffling crabbily out to her car.
She spends the whole ride downtown bracing herself, trying to figure out how she’s possibly going to explain to them all about the pictures—about lying to them for the better part of two years like something out of some cheesy Lifetime movie. She should have known there was only so long she could pretend. She did know, if she’s being honest with herself. But she also just . . . really liked being an Angel City Player.
It was a role, that’s all, she reminds herself firmly, squaring her shoulders and marching inside the theater. And now the show is over.
But to Fiona’s surprise, when she gets downstairs the only thing anybody wants to talk about is the set their tech guy has started building and whether or not it’s ugly, which it emphatically is. “Frances!” Larry shouts irritably, as Georgie wrings her hands by the listing plywood backdrop. “Are we serious thespians, or are we a bunch of fucking dilettantes? What kind of hack do you have putting this thing together?”
Fiona grins. “The kind who works for free,” she reminds him, the relief flooding through her stronger than any narcotic she’s ever tried. “We’ll fix it.”
That night is their first full run-through. It’s a little bit of a misery—all dropped lines and clumsy transitions, a rickety Goodwill chair collapsing into kindling when Hector sits down in it halfway through the second act. Still, it’s the most fun Fiona has had at rehearsal in a long time. She feels like she’s gotten away with something. She feels almost . . . light. By the time Nora slams the door at the finale, Fiona is having a hard time remembering what she was so worked up about to begin with—after all, it was just a couple of trashy gossip sites. She’s not actually even that famous anymore. Maybe it’s true, what Claudia and Estelle are always saying—the only person still holding her past against her is herself.
And whatever, Fiona thinks as she tucks her script back into her bag. If she feels a tiny pang of longing every time she remembers the way Sam looked at her in his bed the other night—well, it’s not like anything real was ever going to happen between them anyway. He’s probably at Kimmeree’s house at this very moment, scrolling through his own tag on Instagram and drinking low-cal malt beverages. Frankly, the very idea of it makes Fiona want to eat a bacon cheeseburger.
“Are you guys hungry?” she asks as they’re all heading out of the theater. “Do you want to go get food?”
Hector glances at her sidelong. “Really?” he asks.
“Really,” Fiona echoes, frowning. “Why do you sound surprised?”
“I don’t know,” Hector says. He’s in his thirties, with a day job at a marketing firm and two little girls who live with their mom in the Valley. “You just normally kind of keep to yourself, I guess.”
“Oh.” Fiona guesses he has a point. “Well,” she says after a moment, “this is me . . . keeping to other people.”
“I’ll go,” Pamela says, winding a gauzy black scarf around her neck, and Georgie and DeShaun nod amicably.
“I could eat,” Larry agrees.
Fiona smiles, trying to come up with a restaurant nearby that isn’t guaranteed to give them all hepatitis. There’s a dive bar with mostly passable burgers, or a Mediterranean place she picks up from sometimes on the way home. But DeShaun has a gluten thing, Fiona remembers vaguely, and Larry is a vegetarian . . .
She’s so busy thinking about it that she doesn’t notice the photographer leaning up against the hood of her car until it’s too late.
“Fiona,” he calls, and she’s never been mugged but she imagines this is what it feels like, her whole body going ice-cold stupid. For a moment she only just stares.
“How are you, honey?” he asks, waving at her like they’re old friends. He’s one of Darcy’s guys, Fiona recognizes him, the shutter on his giant camera clicking away like a mutant robot insect from The Hunger Games. Were there mutant robot insects in The Hunger Games? Fiona doesn’t know. He’s got another guy with him for backup, a younger one holding a phone. “Congratulations on the reboot!”
“There is no reboot,” she blurts, which is amateur hour on her part, because the absolute worst thing you can do is engage with these guys, and Fiona knows that. “I mean—”
“Frances?” That’s DeShaun, his voice soft and full of uncertainty; the rest of the cast is watching in silence. “Is everything okay?”
Fiona waves a hand. “It’s fine,” she says automatically, making a move to sidestep the photographer, but he shifts his broad shoulders so she can’t get by him on the sidewalk, the camera still stuttering away.
“You don’t need to play it so close to the vest, honey,” he tells her, continuing on as if it’s just the two of them having a conversation. “From what I hear, it’s already in production. You looked great in those pictures from Sam’s apartment the other night, PS. It’s nice to see you happy after all this time.”
Fiona shakes her head. She’d forgotten this, or tried to—the way these guys monologue, the way they act like they’re your friend. “Enough,” she says, her face flaming as she glances over at her castmates’ curious faces. “You got your pictures, can you just—”
“I think she asked you to stop.” That’s Georgie drawing herself up tall and regal; Pamela stands at her shoulder like a pale, goth bodyguard.
But the photographer shakes his head, teeth flashing in a lascivious grin. “Trust me,” he assures them. “She wants it.”
That’s when Fiona loses her temper.
Later she won’t remember consciously deciding to lunge for the guy’s camera, but she must, because the next thing she knows Hector and Larry are holding her back while she thrashes, her limbs flailing in every possible direction. She thinks she catches Hector in the nose. “Fuck you,” she’s yelling, and for a second she’s not even sure who she’s talking to.
“Frances,” Larry is saying, “take it easy, will—”
“That’s not my name,” Fiona interrupts—still fighting, shrugging them off once and for all. She doesn’t want any of them touching her for one more second. She doesn’t want anyone touching her ever again.
“Enough,” she says again, once they finally release her, reaching out and slapping at the camera one more time. “Enough! Is this what you wanted? Congratulations, I’m a fucking psycho! You win!”
It’s a hurricane, noisy and furious: DeShaun and Georgie are trying to soothe her. The photographer is yelling about a lawsuit. The kid with the cell phone got the whole thing on film. And here’s Fiona at the eye of it just like always, leaving a trail of chaos and destruction in her wake.
Finally she takes a deep breath, raking her hands through her hair and setting her shoulders. She is not not not going to cry. “I’m going to take a rain check on dinner,” she manages quietly. Then she gets into her car and drives away.
Chapter Twelve
Sam
“I mean,” Erin says the following morning, both of them staring wide-eyed at the grainy video on her laptop, “the girl’s got a flair for the dramatic, that’s for sure. It’s almost a shame she doesn’t act anymore.”
“Yeah,” Sam says distractedly, scrubbing a hand through his hair as Erin hits play one more time, Fiona’s wild-eyed face filling the computer screen. She looks feral—her hands flying around like demented birds, her hair enormous—but more than that, Sam keeps thinking, she looks scared. “I mean, she actually does still act, sort of, but—whatever.” He shakes his head. “Can we go out?” he asks abruptly, shutting the laptop harder than is probably necessary and standing up. “Let’s go out.”