Golden Girl (18 page)

I gaped like a fish, but Ivy stepped between us. “I invited Jack and Callie in,” she said firmly. “It was all my idea. So if you want to be mad at someone, you can just be mad at me.”

The look on Mrs. Tully’s face said there was plenty of mad to go around, and probably enough for second helpings as well. I realized I was holding my breath, waiting to feel the pressure of the magic building around me again,
and wondering what I’d do if I did. But nothing came. Instead, I watched Tully shrink reluctantly in on herself. She was remembering what she had told me, how she and I had no real power here, not if Ivy took a dislike to us.

Or maybe she was just biding her time.

“You.” Tully turned toward Jack. “You
hooligan
. You get out of here and you wait until you’re sent for. Is that understood?”

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.” Jack tried his wide-eyed innocent look. I tell you, I’d never before seen it wither as fast as it did under the heat of Tully’s glower. The woman had to be Seelie. No human could stand up to Jack’s charm.

“I’ll just … see you downstairs, Callie,” Jack muttered as he slipped past her.

“As for
you …
” Tully turned the full force of her glower on me. I made myself remember who and what I was, and met her eyes. They were dark and popping out of her head, but I couldn’t tell if the light in them was the glare of the sunrise or something else. “You get yourself down into the kitchen where you belong!”

“She stays,” announced Ivy.

Unfortunately, this time Tully was not backing down so easily. “Miss Ivy, I am responsible for your well-being while I am keeping house, and this girl is supposed to be in the kitchen making your breakfast.”

“And she has absolutely nothing to wear,” snapped Ivy. “I mean,
look
at her.” Tully did look, all the way down that long nose. I just tried not to squirm or tug at my blouse,
which was the same one I’d been wearing the day before. “She’ll be down to fix breakfast just as soon as she’s decent.”

I concentrated on keeping my mouth shut, and remembering Ivy really was trying to help. Tully, meanwhile, looked like she’d just been forced to swallow a spoonful of vinegar.

“Very well,” said Tully, but she was in no way surrendering. It was a very good thing I’d already been planning to get out of there, because the last look the housekeeper leveled at me as she closed the door told me I didn’t have a job anymore. She’d go straight to Mr. Mayer about it if she had to.

As soon as the door clicked shut, Ivy stuck her tongue out, giggled, and bounced back to me. “There! That fixed her.”

“Sure did.” I tried to put some feeling into those words but came up more than a little short. “Look, Ivy—”

“Don’t be mad,” she said. “What I said about the clothes, that was just to get rid of her. Although, I mean, you really don’t have anything to wear.” She looked me up and down. “Wait here!”

Ivy ran to one of the room’s other doors and threw it open. On the other side waited the biggest closet I’d ever seen in my life. Clothes bars ran along both walls, and they were filled from end to end with outfits on padded hangers. You could have stocked Gimbels department store with what she’d crammed in there, even if you didn’t count the shoes lined up underneath or the hats in their cubbyholes at the back.

It took me a full minute to find my voice. “Ivy, we really don’t have time for this.…”

“Yes, we do!” She was already yanking clothes off their hangers. The smell of old roses and new mothballs rose up strong enough to make me cough. “Besides, if we don’t dress you up, Tully’ll smell a rat.” She dumped an armload of clothes on her bed and smiled like she’d never been so happy. “Look. This one brings out the color of your eyes.” She held a blue pleated skirt with a matching long sailor blouse in front of me. I looked at myself in the vanity table mirror. It did look good. I wished it didn’t. Ivy grinned, tossed it aside, and reached for another outfit. “And this one … I never could wear this. My color’s not right. I look like a ghost.” She held up a burgundy dress trimmed with black ribbons. “You could be like Marlene Dietrich, all mysterious.”

I tried to picture myself lounging on a sofa with my hand thrown dramatically over my forehead. That imaginary me looked so ridiculous that I giggled, and Ivy smiled again. It really was pretty. I’d been thinking about big things, I’d been afraid and angry and confused, and I was out of time and probably out of what little luck I’d ever had. It felt funny to be up here looking at something as stupid as clothes, but it felt good too. Like something a normal girl might do, with a normal friend.

“You know, Jack really likes you,” Ivy said.

I grimaced. I didn’t want to talk about this. I wasn’t
completely done with all the bad feelings that had been stewing since we met her.

Ivy, though, wasn’t ready to drop the subject. “He does,” she insisted. “I can tell.”

“You can?” I asked before I could stop myself.

“When you spend your life making pictures, you either learn to tell when people really mean what they say or you get trampled over fast. I’ve seen it happen.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Especially to the kids. I wish somebody really liked me,” she added, scowling down at the clothes. “But nobody does. It’s just the movies.”

“But your mama …,” I started, and then wished I hadn’t, because Ivy’s face crumpled up.

“Mama doesn’t care about me.”

“That’s not true. I’m sure it’s not.”

“It is! She just cares about the pretty clothes and the movies and the interviews and the money. She never loved me!” Ivy busted out bawling.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said quickly. I’d never had anybody cry on me before. I didn’t know what to do. I put my arms around her and sat us both down on the bed. I felt ashamed for every mean thought I’d had about her and Jack. She was just a kid in a world that was too big and too strong for her. At the same time, I kept thinking about what Mrs. Tully would have to say if the brightest little star in Hollywood turned up downstairs with swollen eyes and a red nose. I also kept thinking how Ivy might be right. If
Mrs. Brownlow was a Seelie, she probably didn’t love her. She really would love the beauty and the lights, and would want to use Ivy to be around them. But I couldn’t say that, or anything like it. Not until I was sure. I had to say something, though.

“I used to think my mama didn’t love me either.”

“You did?” Ivy sniffed. I pulled a lacy little hanky out of the pile of clothes and handed it to her. Ivy blew her nose so hard she honked. Something else I bet
Movie Fan
magazine never saw. But at least the tears slowed down.

I nodded. “Back in Kansas, after the dust storms came. There was no work and no guests for our hotel. We were flat busted and the whole town was half buried in blow dirt, but Mama wouldn’t move us. It got so bad I caught the dust pneumonia, and she
still
wouldn’t sell out. I thought … I thought she was crazy and she didn’t love me, but it turned out she was trying to keep me safe. My papa had promised to come back for us, see, and there was some kind of spell or something on the hotel where we lived that was keeping the Seelies from finding me until he did.” Grandmother had said the MGM studio was warded against the Unseelies. I guess Papa had warded the old hotel against the Seelies. One day I’d get to thank him for it, I told myself. One day soon.

Anger prickled against my thoughts. But it didn’t come from me. I stared at Ivy. She was turning one of her wistful expressions on me. But I wasn’t wrong about what I felt. Under that innocent face, she was boiling mad.

“You’re so lucky. I don’t even have a papa.” Ivy’s mouth
snapped shut and her eyes went wide. “You can’t tell anybody about that. It’d be bad for my image.”

“I won’t,” I said, but I bit my lip as a new question climbed to the top of the pile in my head.

There were all kinds of ways for an unmarried woman to try to make her baby look legitimate. She could move to a new town, tack
Mrs
. onto her name, and pretend she’d been married to a man who had died or was “traveling.” Or there was adoption. Everybody back in Slow Run knew why Sandra Keene had been sent away. When her mother turned up two months later with a baby she’d “adopted,” we all pretended we didn’t think anything of it. Except we all did. Those tricks wouldn’t be so easy to pull if you were famous, though, or if the man you were stepping out with was already married.

There were all those pictures on the mantel, and the only man in any of them was Mr. Hearst, and Mr. Hearst was wrapped up with the Seelies somehow. Miss Davies actually looked a lot like Mrs. Brownlow, or like Mrs. Brownlow tried to look. Miss Davies had also gone and given Ivy a whole house to live in. Which was a really big present to give to a little girl who was just a friend. What if the famous Miss Davies had had a baby she couldn’t account for, and she’d had to give it away?

Then I thought how Mrs. Brownlow sure didn’t act like she was enjoying any of her fame and money and pretty clothes, or even noticing she had them. I thought about how fond of kidnapping people the fairies were.

Before I got any further, Ivy honked into the handkerchief again and wiped her eyes. “We’d better get you dressed. Which outfit do you like best?”

“Gee, Ivy, I can’t go climbing around in a nice dress.” I’d ruined my silk stockings the last time we’d gone to the Waterloo Bridge.

“Oh, but you don’t have to.” She rifled through the pile and pulled out a pair of blue jeans and a checked shirt. “Here! I wore this in
Sunrise Farm
. Let’s try it on!”

She seemed so cheered up by the idea, that’s what we did. The way she fussed over me, you’d’ve thought I was going to a debutante ball or something. She had to roll the cuffs on the jeans and the sleeves of the shirt just so. She ran back into her closet to get a pair of ankle socks and penny loafers for me to wear. She even unbraided my hair, brushed it out, and tied it back in a red scarf that matched the checks on the shirt.

“There!” Ivy cried triumphantly. “The perfect country girl!”

I knew what country girls looked like, and what I saw in the mirror didn’t look anything like one. I looked like a young lady playing a kind of farmland dress-up.

In fact, I looked pretty.

“I can’t wait until Jack gets a look at you!” Ivy leaned over my shoulder and gave me a quick hug, and I didn’t even mind so much this time. I’d been nine kinds of stupid lately, and right then I couldn’t even have said for sure what it had all been about. I also couldn’t take my eyes off
the grown-up-looking me in the mirror. It was funny—I’d dressed up nice before, but somehow I felt nicer this time. Prettier. Older. Suddenly I couldn’t wait for Jack to get a look at me either.

“Oh, and there’s one more thing.” Ivy ran over to the white princess-style telephone on her bedside table. She dialed, then waited. I heard a voice on the other end.

“Little Red Schoolhouse.”

Ivy pinched her nose and lifted her chin. “Good morning, Miss MacDonald,” she said in an absolutely pitch-perfect imitation of Tully’s voice. “Miss Bright will be absent today. She has a slight fever and will be staying home to rest. Is that understood?”

“Of course, Mrs. Tully. I’ll make a note to have Judy bring her homework by.”

“Thank you.”

Ivy hung up, and she grinned at my surprise. “Not much good being an actress if you can’t use it to play hooky every now and then, is there? Now, let’s get out of here.”

The brightest little star in Hollywood grabbed my hand and pulled me after her.

Of course it wasn’t that simple. Or that quick. We had to get through breakfast first. Tully spent the whole meal stationed squarely in the dining room watching Ivy eat her toast and grapefruit. Mrs. Brownlow was nowhere to be seen. Jack was making himself plenty scarce too.

But finally I heard Tully order Ivy off to school. She held
the kitchen door open and kept her glare turned up high while I cleared away the grapefruit dish and the empty toast rack. She stood, arms folded, and watched while I washed the dishes. I clenched my jaw and wondered if I dared a little magic. Just enough to send her running for the toilet or something.

Then the phone rang, and Tully stomped off to answer it. The second she was out of the kitchen, Jack’s head popped up over the windowsill. He grinned and jerked his chin sideways. I should have known he and Ivy would have a plan. I ran for the back door without even bothering to wipe the soapsuds off my arms.

When Jack saw me all done up in Ivy’s outfit, his eyes flipped open wide. I barely had time to get a decent blush going before Ivy came running up behind us. She must have made that phone call from someplace, but I didn’t want to slow things down by asking where. Ivy grinned, grabbed our hands, and all but skipped out the garden gate.

I’ll say one thing about having Ivy along: she knew exactly where she was going. It was plain as paint that this was not the first time the brightest little star in Hollywood had gone sneaking around the studio. Lot No. 1 had straight streets, and the streams of cars and trucks and people that made up the studio’s private rush hour were filling them up fast. But Ivy ignored the main streets. She led us down alleys, between piles of used scenery and stacks of boards. She ducked through the trucks in the garage and out the back door, which opened onto the street, a route to the outside
that Jack admitted in a whisper he hadn’t even known existed.

We’d reached the studio gate that opened onto Overland Avenue and the Lot No. 2 side. Ivy had us all crouch behind the garbage cans that had been set out for collection. It stank to high heaven, but she ignored that and looked at her watch. “We have to wait,” she whispered.

“For what?” I whispered back.

“Shift change.” She nodded toward the guard shack. I could just see a shadow moving in the little white house. “Jeff and Solly will talk racing. That’s when we go.”

She’d just finished when we saw a blue-uniformed guard coming up Overland, his tin lunch pail in one hand and a big thermos in the other. He strolled up to the guard shack and stood there with his back to us, talking to whoever was sitting in the house. Pretty soon he pulled a paper out of his back pocket and spread it out.