Spoiled (4 page)

Charmaine joined Molly at the window. “Is it time?”

“It’s time.”

“Go,” Charmaine said. “I’ll… just start throwing all your random shit in boxes. You have so much stuff, I’m reporting you
to
Hoarders
.”

Molly left Charmaine alone in her garret bedroom and plodded down the narrow, curving stairs, her good mood evaporating. She
wished
she
could do the packing and delegate this conversation to Charmaine. If only she were already in Hollywood, she could enlist
a screenwriter’s help to make sure she didn’t botch it. This was so much more than saying good-bye to some boy. This was
Danny.
He’d been her savior during Laurel’s chemo, bringing her mom Slurpees when they were all she could keep down, and hiding
sunflowers where they’d surprise Molly just when she needed it most. They’d been together since their sandbox days, and the
relationship was as comforting as the cardigan Laurel hung on the back of the chair in her sewing room. Molly was packing
that sweater, but she had to find a way to leave Danny behind.

She wished she could ask Laurel what to do. Laurel always had advice. Sometimes the advice was weird—like the time she’d told
Molly never to buy yellow underwear—but at least it was always worth pondering.

“How’s the packing going?” Danny greeted her when
she opened the door. As always, Molly was struck by what a perfect, stereotypical swimmer he was—tall and lean, with an adorable
grin, like he’d just leapt off the front of a Wheaties box.

“Charmaine’s on it,” she said.

“You know she’s just throwing out all the stuff she thinks is ugly.” He sat down on the front stoop and looked up at her.
“Take a breath, Molls.”

She closed the door and took a seat next to him. The concrete was warm through her cutoffs. “I am breathing. Sort of.”

“We don’t have to do it,” he said, taking a slurp from his Big Gulp.

“Do what?”

“Have this whole weird good-bye talk. I don’t want to have it.”

His blue eyes met hers and then quickly flicked away.

“Denial,” she said. “Interesting strategy.”

“I think it could work,” he said, running a hand through the strawberry blond thicket of hair she knew he’d shave off right
before the first regional swim meet.

“Danny…” Molly began. “The last few months… I mean, did I even say thank you?”

“No need,” Danny insisted. “You’re my best friend. And I didn’t do anything you wouldn’t have done for me.”

He slung a long arm over her shoulder. “Look, I know things haven’t always been perfect. But we’re Molly and Danny, you know?
It’s gonna be okay. We’re always okay,”
he said. “Just remember, I love you like Homer Simpson loves beer.”

“Like a mean kid loves dodgeball.”

“Like a dog loves a fire hydrant.”

This was their ritual. It could go on for as long as forty-five minutes, and once made Charmaine threaten to stab them both
with a fork.

Danny leaned in and kissed her, his mouth warm and familiar and tasting ever so slightly of Dr Pepper. Behind them, in the
house, Molly could hear Charmaine screech, followed by a loud crash.

Danny pulled away. “You’d better go rescue her.”

“I don’t know how to do this without you.” Molly choked, feeling that familiar pricking sensation behind her eyes. At this
rate Indiana would put a water conservation ban on her tear ducts.

Danny stood and pulled her to her feet. He kissed her once more, hard and fast on the mouth.

“Call me when you get to L.A.,” he said.

“I will.”

Danny dropped his arms. With one last look, he crossed her front lawn as quickly as he ever had.

Molly turned to go back inside and saw a sunflower poking out of the mail slot in the front door. She hadn’t noticed it, didn’t
even know when he’d done it, but it was perfect and perfectly heartbreaking. She turned around to wave it at him, to clutch
it to her chest and thank him, but Danny was already gone. Another ghost.

MOLLY SETTLED INTO
the soothing buttery leather of seat 3A and instantly understood all the fuss over flying first class: It was like therapy
without all the intrusive questions.

Right now, Molly’s particular ailment was nerves. Excessive ones. The chaos theory kind where a butterfly flaps its wings
in your stomach and it causes your ears to ring and your left toe to swell up enough that your Converse don’t fit. Yesterday,
she’d been excited; today, without Charmaine to distract her with jokes, the monumental significance of this move was turning
her brain to mush. She needed soothing wherever she could find it, and being able to recline fully with a container of warm
nuts—and drink Diet Coke out of a crystal glass—really did help a little.

“Going on vacation?” asked the aggressively mustachioed man sitting next to her.

“I’m going to visit my dad,” Molly told him.

It sounded so profoundly
normal
coming out of her mouth. Natural, even, despite the fact that she’d gone sixteen years without saying anything remotely similar.
The butterflies gave way briefly to a pleased warmth. She flipped open the magazines she’d purloined from Charmaine’s stash.
People
showed Brick beaming as part of a story about him buying an alpaca farm for a costar who’d expressed a passing yearning to
make sweaters, and he was in
Us
’s “Stars… They’re Just Like Us!” section as someone who “loves sandwiches,” illustrated by a grainy photo of Brick coming
out of a Subway restaurant.

Away from the prying eyes of family and friends—who all seemed fixated on interpreting her body language as a way of gauging
her emotional well-being—Molly stared intently at Brick and searched for something, anything, of herself. Charmaine said their
eyes were the same. A shadow of Molly’s dimple seemed visible on his cheek, and from his gym shorts Molly could tell they
had the same runner’s quads. She wondered if his hair stuck up in the back as much as hers did in the mornings, and if he
also liked strawberry Pop-Tarts better than actual strawberries. Was he allergic to pomegranates, too?

The sheer force of her interest in the subject surprised her. Molly had never thought much about what it would be like to
have a father. In fact, she’d never thought much
about the one she’d believed she had. An orphaned college fling of Laurel’s who’d died in Iraq before Molly was born, Army
Captain Hank Walker had been a picture painted only with words, because, as Laurel used to say, Molly was the only memento
he’d left behind (which of course made a whole lot of sense
now
, given Laurel’s confession that he was actually an invention based on the novel she’d been reading when she went into labor).
At first Molly had pressed for more details, but as she got older, Laurel’s answers got more vague, and her expression increasingly
sad and remote. So Molly stopped asking. And after a while, she stopped wondering. Aside from the odd curiosity brought on
from watching the neighborhood dads play catch with their kids, Molly had never felt anything lacking in her life—especially
because her grandmother Ginger had enough stern looks and abstinence lectures in her arsenal to raise sixty teenagers. But
here was this big bear of a man, grinning broadly at the camera, seeming familiar to her in a way she’d never noticed before.
It was tangible, breathing proof that her tastes, her eyebrow furrow, or the fact that her big toe always seemed twice as
big as it should be had an origin outside Laurel’s DNA.

Molly’s eyes stung. Thinking about her mother was like slamming her hand in a car door: It hurt too much to consider doing
it on purpose. She especially didn’t want to dwell on how Laurel had almost chosen to die without telling Molly that her father
was arguably the most famous movie star in the world. Focusing on
that
made Molly kind
of angry at Laurel, and then she felt terrible for being angry, and then she resented feeling terrible….

The memory came anyway: Laurel setting aside her ever-present knitting needles and beckoning for Molly to sit next to her
on the bed, her face almost lost beneath her favorite chemo turban. It was exactly thirty-two days before she took her last
breath.

“I’m so sorry,” she’d said as her opening gambit. “I lied. I’m selfish, and I lied. Here, I knitted you another scarf. It’s
green. I love you in green.”

The story poured out of her mother like she’d turned on a faucet, and the scarf hadn’t helped Molly absorb it any faster:
how Laurel had fallen in love on set; how she’d discovered she was pregnant after the actor had married someone else; how
she’d moved home and had Molly and then, impossibly, kept quiet about this whole incredibly dramatic series of events.

Afterward, Molly spent the entire night staring at her bedroom ceiling, trying to put herself in Laurel’s place and wondering
how it was possible that her free-spirited, bubbly mother, who never had a thought she didn’t blurt out, could’ve spent the
last sixteen years holding on to the most mammoth secret Molly could imagine. Her father was
Brick Berlin
? Whom she’d just seen on
Access Hollywood
talking about a fund-raiser for hearing-impaired dogs? How was it possible that one minute you could be giggling at someone
for mispronouncing the words
cochlear implants
, and the next, be that person’s daughter? And how could
anyone
refrain from sharing something that monumental, that crazy, at the first opportunity? Charmaine, for example, couldn’t keep
to herself what she spent on shirts at Forever 21, much less anything legitimately juicy.

“Molly, you have to understand that I truly thought this was for the best,” Laurel had said, her wan face showing the strain.
“I saw what Hollywood did to people. I didn’t want to raise you in that world. And Brick
is
Hollywood.”

“What does that even mean? Is he
evil
, or something?”

Laurel sighed. “Brick is not a bad person. I promise. Please don’t blame him for this,” she said. “He always wanted to be
a part of your life. And he’s always said you’d be welcome there when we were both ready.”

“You’ve been talking to him?” Molly squawked.

Laurel covered her face with a thin hand.

“He calls to check up sometimes,” she admitted. “I know I should have told you. I know I handled this about as wrong as a
person can handle anything. But I was so tired of the showbiz rat race. I didn’t think that would be much of a life for you,
especially with his other family and something like three big film franchises to distract him. So I talked him into thinking
you’d be better off with me in Indiana until… well, I don’t know. Until the time was right. He didn’t love the idea, but he
agreed. For me.” Her eyes misted. “And then somehow I guess the time never
was
right.”

“You guys could’ve let me make that decision,” Molly had pointed out.

“Yes. I could have. I
should
have. But I kept telling myself I was saving us both from something. I was young and I was an idiot. I know that’s impossible
to imagine.” Laurel laughed without humor. “But he’s your father. I wish I hadn’t been so cavalier about ignoring that. I
wish… well, I wish a lot of things. But mostly I wish I’d come clean sooner so this transition might’ve been easier for you.”

Molly hated the word
transition
. Laurel used it countless times to describe what would happen after her death, like Molly was just switching lanes on the
freeway.

In the end, Danny had been the one to remind Molly that she had a limited amount of time left with her mother, and that Laurel
hadn’t kept that secret out of malice. So Molly had laid down all her resentment and accepted the situation as well as she
could, so their last months together wouldn’t be any more terrible. But all that suppression left Molly feeling as if she’d
grown a very nosy five-year-old inside her brain who refused to stop shouting:
How much does he know about me? Does he really want me? Or is he just doing this because he thinks he has to? Is that why
I’m doing it, too?

Deep down, she knew the last one wasn’t true. Molly hadn’t truly appreciated the intangible aspects of having a parent until
she’d lost hers, so knowing there was one more of them out there felt an awful lot like a life raft. And Molly did think she
detected sincere warmth in Brick’s eyes. Having plowed through his essential filmography, Molly suspected Brick wasn’t a good
enough actor to fake
friendliness that well during his off-hours—especially for the paparazzi. But it also seemed like ninety percent of celebrities
came across as relaxed and stable, and then inevitably the
Enquirer
would unearth photos of them playing naked mini golf at the Playboy mansion with three call girls, a chocolate fountain,
and a chimp.

What if he turns out to be crazy like that?
Molly thought.
Wait, maybe I don’t care, as long as he likes me. Oh, God, what if he doesn’t like me? What if he thinks I’m this ridiculous,
unsophisticated obligation and everyone at my new school thinks I’m totally lame, and I end up a miserable outcast in really
old sneakers?

Sometime in the last five minutes, Molly’s thumbnail had found its way between her teeth, and she’d gnawed at it unconsciously
until her hangnail began to bleed. She wiped it on the hot towel sitting next to her glass. She had to calm down or else she’d
show up in Los Angeles with hands that belonged on a horror-movie poster. This was scary, but it was all going to be okay.
It
had
to be. Laurel wouldn’t have pushed this if she hadn’t believed it would work out, and if Molly excluded the rather enormous
lie regarding her parentage, Laurel had been a great mom. Besides, surely she wasn’t going to lose her mother
and
get rejected by her father in the same three-month period. Wasn’t that statistically improbable?

Molly decided to make the thrill of anticipation unseat her nervous energy. She closed the magazines and let out a shaky,
cleansing breath that drew the attention of the flight
attendant (everyone seemed to care way more about your feelings in first class).