Fiona smirks. “That’s the plan,” she says, and keeps going.
Sam keeps his eyes on hers for as long as he can manage before his forehead falls forward onto her shoulders, his breathing dense and ragged against her ear. Fiona rubs the back of his neck until he’s finished, the hot wind rustling the leaves of the palm trees high above them.
Chapter Fifteen
Fiona
They get back to Fiona’s just at the shadows are starting to get longer—the sunlight taking on that golden, late-afternoon toastiness and the outlines of the palm trees going a deep, moody blue. “So, um,” he says as the car idles in the driveway, looking suddenly bashful. “I guess I’ll text you? I mean, if you want—?”
Fiona presses her lips together to keep from laughing. Her hair is wet from the pool, the weight of it damp against her shoulder. Her mouth is still swollen and stinging, a low sweet ache throbbing between her legs. “Sure,” she says, casual as she can manage. “That’d be fine.” Then she fists her hand in his T-shirt and yanks him close for a kiss.
Inside the house she finds Claudia eating an after-school snack of potato chips dunked in peanut butter and watching Nosferatu on her phone. “Hi,” Fiona says, opening the fridge to see if there’s anything in there that could conceivably become dinner. “How was your day?”
Claudia raises her eyebrows, popping a chip into her mouth. “Long drive,” is all she says.
Fiona shrugs. “Hit some traffic,” she shoots back, then completely fails to keep her cool about it, smiling goofily across the kitchen.
Claudia grins back.
By the time she throws together some pasta and heads into her room to change for rehearsal, though, Fiona’s mood has plummeted to somewhere below sea level. Spending the day blowing off her responsibilities and running all over town with Sam may have been distracting, but the idea of marching back into the Angel City Playhouse after the little one-woman show she put on makes her want to stroll directly off the end of the Santa Monica Pier. She hasn’t talked to anyone from the cast since she sped off in her car the other night. It felt easier to try and forget it had happened altogether, to leave them to their shock and gossip. She thinks again about disappearing, letting herself become a ghost story for them to tell at cast parties: Remember when Riley Bird joined the company for a while and then it turned out she was just as batshit as everyone said?
It would be easier that way, Fiona thinks. Cleaner. Less humiliating.
But as she stares at herself in the mirror above the dresser, she’s surprised to realize she doesn’t actually want to do it.
Sure, there’s a part of her that feels obligated to finish what she started. And yeah, she doesn’t want her sister to think she’s a coward. But the plainer truth is she loves that stupid theater—the sweat-and-greasepaint smell of it, the lights going down on opening night—more than she ever loved working on Birds of California. More than she’s loved working on almost anything. She doesn’t want to let anyone to take that from her, especially Darcy Sinclair.
So. She goes to rehearsal.
When she opens the door to the theater, the whole cast is already assembled onstage, gathered close together like a cluster of flamingos riding out a hurricane. They fall silent as she walks down the center aisle, their expressions wary. She feels like she’s going to puke. “Hi,” she says finally, holding up one sheepish hand. The set looks better, she notes distractedly, though it still needs a little bit of work. “I owe you guys an apology.”
None of them says anything for a minute, a silent game of hot potato playing out on the stage. “For what?” DeShaun finally asks.
“I mean.” Fiona runs a hand through her hair. “I think that’s pretty obvious, don’t you?”
Another too-long moment of silence; shit, this might be the longest any of them have been able to keep their mouths shut since Fiona joined the company. Then Hector clears his throat. “First of all, that douchebag deserved it,” he says, surprisingly emphatic. “Second of all . . . it’s not like this was some giant shock.”
Fiona feels her eyes narrow. “Meaning what, exactly?”
“Frances,” Georgie says gently. She’s wearing flowy pants and a culturally appropriative kimono, her hair up in a little blond-gray knot on top of her head. “Fiona. We knew.”
Fiona blinks. “What do you mean, you knew?” She shakes her head, looking around the circle with a mix of horror and dark hilarity. “Like, this whole time?”
“Of course we knew,” Pamela tells her. “We’re theater actors, not mole people.”
“No, I know that,” Fiona says, though mole people is basically exactly how she described them to Sam just the other day. “I just—”
“Give us a little credit,” Larry says from his cool-dad perch on the arm of the Helmers’ couch. They’re going to need throw pillows, Fiona notes distractedly. “You were on the cover of every gossip magazine in America every week for like three years.”
“My son has the picture of you with the alligator on his wall,” Georgie tells her.
“I saw a rumor on Twitter that you were dead,” DeShaun chimes in.
“Okay,” Fiona says, holding a hand up. “Maybe I don’t need all the details.” She shakes her head. “You guys all just . . . collectively decided to let me get away with it this whole time?”
“It seemed like you needed some privacy,” Hector says with a shrug. “I think everybody here can relate to what it’s like to want to be someone else for a little while.”
Fiona nods, looking around at this group of spectacular weirdos—Pamela boredly gnawing the chipped black polish off her fingernails, Larry scowling under his thick, bushy brows. She’s filled with an emotion that feels physical, like something inflating inside her chest. After a moment it occurs to her that it’s love. She wants to tell them that, but she doesn’t know how and also it’s corny as shit, so instead she swallows hard and claps her hands once.
“Well, in that case,” she says brightly, “let’s put on a fucking play.”
The next couple of weeks pass by in a blur. She works at the copy shop. She goes to rehearsal. When she finishes at night, instead of going home and watching Homicide Hunter in bed, she goes to Sam’s house and they listen to music on his ridiculous sound system and drink beer on his terrace and fool around.
They grab a six-pack and catch a movie at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. They eat breakfast burritos on the beach. They go to Richie’s ska show at a club downtown that’s almost definitely about to be shuttered by the health department; neither of them has any idea how to dance to the music so instead they jump up and down for a while, holding hands so they don’t get separated in the crowd and emerging sweaty and damp-haired and laughing an hour later, a strange exhilaration fizzing through Fiona’s veins.
“You came!” Richie says when his set is over, beaming at them. He wraps Fiona in a slightly smelly hug, then shrugs like What the hell and wraps Sam in one, too. For once, he looks one hundred percent sober.
“Sweet guy,” Sam says once Richie has been absorbed back into the crowd, another band clanging their introduction onstage. Sam likes people, is a thing Fiona has noticed about him; he’s pals with everyone, from his publicist to his trainer to the barista at the coffee shop around the corner from his apartment.
“Richie? He is, actually,” she agrees. “I mean, he’s basically my best friend, so.” Then, feeling weirdly embarrassed: “Well, Thandie, obviously. But other than her.”
Sam nods. “How is Thandie?” he asks.
“Good!” she says immediately, then feels herself sag a little bit under the weight of the lie. She shakes her head, leaning back against a metal support post. “Honestly, I have no idea. I haven’t had a real conversation with Thandie in years.”
That surprises him, she can tell. “Really?” he asks. “You guys were, like, inseparable.”
“Yeah,” she says slowly, remembering it: Thandie’s bawdy laugh and steady hand with liquid eyeliner, how much she loved art museums and string cheese. For Fiona’s eighteenth birthday Thandie rented a vintage convertible and they drove up the coast to San Luis Obispo, where they ate rib eyes and shrimp cocktail in the gilded pink dining room of the Madonna Inn. “We were.”