Just Like Me, Only Better (8 page)

 

 

 

S
he loved you.
Loved
you!”

“Who is this?”

“What—? Oh, sorry, just assumed you had Caller I.D. It’s Jay—Jay Sharpie. Just wanted to follow up on today’s meeting and tell you how
excited
Haley is about working with you She said she felt this instant connection.”

“Really? ’Cause she didn’t seem all that, um . . .”

“I know.
I know!
She can come off as distant when she first meets someone. And here you are, expecting to meet Kitty Kilpatrick, and well . . . It’s just been hard for her, all these people feeling like they know her. When, really, she’s a very private, even shy, individual.”

“What I meant was, she seemed tired.”

“Oh . . . that. Right. Haley’s a real burn-the-midnight-oil person. She can’t help it—she’s wired that way. Says that’s when she does her best work. You’d be amazed at how much truly great stuff gets created at two, three o’clock in the morning. Anyway, the reason I’m calling—aside from to tell you how much Haley loved you—is to check your schedule for the rest of the week.”

“I’m subbing tomorrow,” I told him. One of the sixth-grade teachers had a root canal scheduled. “But Thursday’s wide open.”

 

 

And just like that, I was back to my real life.

“Her name is Melissa,” I told Mrs. Ortega, the P.E. teacher. “She’s ten.” My hands shook as I poured weak coffee into a paper cup. The first bell would ring in five minutes. For once, I wished the Mott children had made me late.

“You’d think she’d get a tutor closer to home. Where’d you say she lives? Brentwood?”

“Beverly Hills. She has other tutors, too. You know, Spanish . . .” The synapses in my brain fired wildly. I really should have thought out the details more thoroughly. “Calculus.”

“They’ve got their fifth-grader taking calculus?” another teacher called from across the room.

Ugh—how could I be so stupid?

I ripped open a packet of nondairy creamer. “Yeah, but she’s struggling. They’re thinking of dropping it and going back to, you know. Long division.”

I hadn’t planned on saying anything at all, but when I arrived at the teachers’ lounge, someone said, “Hey, Veronica, where’ve you been?” and someone else said, “Is it true you got another job?”

So I said what Jay had told me to say—that I’d gotten a job tutoring the child of a wealthy Hollywood executive. I hadn’t counted on all the questions: What’s the house like? Is the kid completely spoiled? Will you get to go to any movie premieres?

“Why does she need a tutor in the middle of the day?” Mrs. Ortega pressed. “Doesn’t she go to school?”

“She’s homeschooled,” I said. “Her father travels a lot, but he doesn’t like to be apart from his family. So they go with him.”

“I can’t
believe
they’re teaching calculus to a ten-year-old,” Mrs. Ortega said. “That’s just sick.”

 

 

When I arrived at the El Taco Loco parking lot late Thursday morning, Rodrigo was waiting in his green Prius, the engine quietly running. I tried the door handle: locked. He popped the lock, but as soon as I’d shut myself in, he clicked it again.

“The neighborhood’s not that bad,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows and handed me a trucker hat and a pair of aviator sunglasses.

“Are these supposed to make me look like Haley?” I piled my hair into the cap, feeling weirdly elated by the game.

“Of course not. Haley wouldn’t be caught dead wearing something like that. Simone wouldn’t let her.”

I felt slightly less elated.

Traffic was less hideous than it had been on Tuesday. Not that it mattered: Hank had Ben until tomorrow afternoon. I could stay as long as they needed me.

Finally, we crept through Hollywood Hills and climbed the winding streets to Haley’s gated neighborhood. As we approached the stucco house, Rodrigo said, “Shit,” under his breath. He turned to me. “Use your cell phone! Cell phone! Cell phone! Keep the phone on the window side! Chin down!”

“What? Who am I supposed to call?” Rodrigo and I had barely spoken since meeting up at Santa Fe Springs.

“Just do it!” His voice cracked. He plucked his own sleek phone from the console and thrust it at me.

I understood just in time. Rodrigo didn’t want me to talk on the phone; he wanted me to use it to shield my face against the two photographers who lurked in the bushes outside Haley’s gate. They pointed their enormous lenses at us and aimed for an instant before dropping them in disappointment.

In the driveway at last, Rodrigo, breathing heavily, brought the car to an abrupt halt. The matching black Cadillac Escalades were there, the burly—and evidently useless—security guys tossing a football near the side of the house.

I burst out laughing. “I thought you were going to drive right into the gate!”

“Good job keeping your head down,” he wheezed.

“That was kind of fun,” I said, still smiling. “How’d they get past the gatehouse, anyway?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. They just do. They climb over fences, or they lie. They bribe other people’s housekeepers to say they’re here for maintenance. This loss of privacy—it’s the price you pay for fame.”

I thought of my little house on the Mott’s property. You didn’t have to be rich and famous to sacrifice privacy. At least Haley didn’t have to ask permission to sit in her backyard.

She did, however, require special assistance to turn on her music.

When we entered the living room, she was out of bed, at least, and sort of dressed, in a pink velour track suit. She was standing right next to one wall in the cavernous room, staring at a white digital control panel, a trim silver phone decorated with pink rhinestones pressed to her ear.

“It says bedroom on the top bar,” she said. “But I’m not in the bedroom—I’m in the living room!”

She sighed into the phone and pushed the screen. “It’s still not working, Josh!” she whined. And then: “I already hit the location button! Oh—wait. Maybe I hit the source button.”

She jabbed at the touch pad some more. “It’s still! Not! Working!”

My rubber-soled shoes squeaked on the wood floor. Haley turned. “Oh, wait. Rodrigo’s here. He can do it.”

She turned off her phone and flung it on the nearest chair. And then, lest she miss an important call or the opportunity to boss someone around, she scooped it back up and held it near her heart. “Rodrigo! All’s I’m trying to do is listen to my fucking iPod, and I can’t get this fucking sound system to work!” She sounded like she was going to cry.

I kept my face as neutral as possible—not that it mattered. Haley didn’t even glance at me.

“It’s
o-kaaaay
,” he said in a soothing voice I’d never heard before. “I’ll take
caaaare
of it.”

Haley exhaled. “Why does everything have to be so fucking hard?” I feigned interest in a horse painting.

Grimacing with concentration, Rodrigo poked at the pad for a bit before scurrying off to another room. Almost immediately, music blared from speakers in the ceiling: bouncy bubblegum rock sung by a nasal-voiced girl.

Rodrigo strolled back in, grinning with satisfaction. “The iPod was out of the console. I found it on the floor.”

Haley nodded, comprehension spreading across her familiar features. “
Riiight
. I pulled it out because I was thinking I might go out for coffee, but . . .” She left the sentence unfinished.

She looked up at the speakers. “Can you pick something else? I’m sick of listening to myself sing.”

Rodrigo went back to the touch pad and pecked at the screen until Haley’s song was halted in mid- “Baby, Baby,” replaced by some beat-heavy R&B.

“Where’s Jay?” I asked.

Haley blinked, as if noticing me for the first time. “Are you my new food coach?”

I shook my head. “Your food coach is Sasha. I’m Veronica. Your, uh—double.”

“Oh. Right. I thought you looked familiar,” she said without irony. “Sasha’s not my food coach anymore. I had Jay fire her.”

She wandered toward the kitchen. “Jay called to say he’d be here at, like, one. So I guess you can just, like, hang or whatever.”

“Okay,” I said. A pile of magazines sat on an immense coffee table fashioned from snowshoes and weathered wood. I hoped to find a
People
or even an
Us Weekly
but finally settled for
Vogue
. On one of Haley’s soft (
really
soft) leather couches, I flipped through the perfumed pages, which instantly confirmed my suspicions that my clothes were hopelessly out of style.

I checked my watch, annoyed by the delay, when I remembered: I was getting paid a hundred dollars an hour for this! Jay could be as late as he wanted.

When he finally came barreling in (at one-thirty), he was all apologies: Traffic! Phone calls! Putting out fires! So sorry, so sorry, so sorry, I recognize that your time is incredibly valuable, blah, blah, blah.

“No worries,” I said pleasantly. (A hundred dollars an hour!)

“Have you eaten?” he asked, clapping his hands together.

“No.”

“Good! Because we’re going to dress you up as Haley and send you out for coffee.”

My stomach fluttered. I didn’t realize I’d be making my debut today. Plus, I was pretty hungry.

“Great,” I said. “But how about sending me out for a sandwich?”

Jay shook his head. “Haley never eats solids in public. Though maybe she should . . .” He considered, and finally shook his head again. “Some other time. First, we have to get you dressed.”

I glanced at my clothes: jeans, a long-sleeved black T-shirt, sneakers. “I wasn’t sure what to wear.”

“You can wear whatever you want driving over here,” he said. “But when you’re being Haley, you’ve got to wear Haley’s clothes.”

What had Haley worn in all of those tabloid shots I’d seen of her? I vaguely remembered some cowboy boots.

Cowboy boots were the least of it. Once I’d gotten over my astonishment at the size of Haley’s closet, which was at least as big as my entire living quarters and had a door at either end, I started focusing on the individual pieces. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought I was looking at the wardrobe of a rodeo queen, not a pop star. There were cowboy hats, cowboy boots, fringed jackets, checked shirts, and white leather skirts. There were spurs and studs and spangles.

“Haley’s from Montana,” Jay said.

“I can see that.”

“Though she’s actually been in L.A. since she was nine—her mother brought her here after she won a local talent contest. Anyway. Simone should be here any minute. She was supposed to be here an hour ago. I’ll call her.”

He left me alone in the closet. I felt uncomfortable, like I was invading someone’s personal space. Which I was.

The door on the far side of the closet swung open and Haley stepped inside.

“Sorry!” I said. “Jay just told me to . . . I’ll go.”

“You don’t have to,” she said. At first, I took that to mean that we’d get a little bonding time. But as Haley started to rifle through the racks, I realized that she was just really, really good at ignoring people. Finally, she plucked out a velour track suit—identical to the one she was wearing, only baby blue instead of pink—and retreated to her bedroom. I glimpsed an enormous log bed. What a surprise.

Once I got over the sequin shock, I started noticing Haley’s other clothes: a rack of filmy sundresses, a row of exquisitely cut gowns. There was an entire wall of jeans and more pairs of shoes than I could count.

I heard Simone’s spike-heeled boots clicking on the wood floors before she entered the closet. She looked at the clothes before she looked at me. Her nostrils flared. “I’d set fire to all of the Western duds, but there’s so much artificial material, I’m not even sure they would burn.”

I smiled. She looked at me but didn’t smile back.

“Size six,” she said in her flat voice. She was wearing a different gray sweater today. The sleeves looked like wings.

I cleared my throat. “Sometimes I can fit into a four.”

“Vanity sizing,” she announced. “You’re a six.”

She clicked over to a rack, still tiny even in her enormous heels. She muttered something about “Vegas cowboy crap” before pulling out a denim miniskirt with a frayed hem. She peered at the tag and thrust it at me. “You’ll have to suck in your gut.” She crossed the closet to the shirt wall and came back with a black tank top and a lose-knit tan sweater.

“Thanks.” I waited for her to leave. She didn’t.

I cleared my throat. “Is there a, um, restroom I can use?”

Simone shot her enormous eyes to the ceiling. She pointed toward the door with her beige fingernail, a hundred bracelets hanging from her skinny wrist. “Around the corner,” she droned, impatient with my modesty.

Forget sucking in my gut: nothing short of surgery would make me fit into that skirt. And I don’t mean liposuction—I’m talking organ removal. When I told Simone the bad news, she rapped on Haley’s door once and then opened it.

“Hi, Hale—just me.” She caught sight of the blue velour track suit. “Oh. My. God.
What
are you wearing?” She sighed. “Anyway, love, I’m trying to get Virginia dressed, and we’re having a little trouble with the sizing.”

“It’s Veronica,” I said to no one in particular.

Simone kept her attention focused on Haley. “Remind me, love—where do you keep your fat clothes?”

From a plastic box in the uppermost reaches of Haley’s closet, Simone dug up a white miniskirt to go with the black tank top and tan sweater. The sweater was really loose around the neck—it actually slipped down one shoulder—but Simone assured me it was supposed to look that way. The slouchy calfskin boots she picked out were a half size too small and made my pinky toe hurt. I had to wear a hat, of course—something big to hide my brown hair, which Simone had already pinned up. After studying me for an uncomfortably long time, she plucked a black felt cowboy hat off of Haley’s shelf and rammed it on my head. She pursed her lips in distaste. “Hideous, but it will have to do.”