The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (10 page)

I smiled. My mother may have been a lot of things—crazy, annoying, melodramatic, maddening—but she was also brave. We had gone to visit my grandparents once, when I was four, but Mom had had a huge fight with my grandmother and we had left early. I didn’t remember much about the trip other than Mom taking me to that ice cream place and me crying as I dropped my mint chocolate chip cone on the sidewalk, but I do remember how neither of my grandparents seemed to see my mother. Even though she wasn’t famous yet, everyone who came into contact with my mother was pretty dazzled with her—me, most of all. But the two of them—I remember that they just looked through her, as if she wasn’t even there.

It all felt very Shrink 101, but as I watched her on the bench, I thought about how maybe that was what this—the wanting to be famous, the drinking—was all about. About not having been seen by the people who are supposed to see you. Most of the time I wished my mother gave me less attention, but maybe she did it because she hadn’t gotten any.

As if she could read my mind, my mother held out her hand, and I went over and let her pull me down next to her.

“I know you don’t believe me, but I really am sorry.”

“I know you are.”

“I am, Bug. I really am,” she said as she twirled one of my curls around her finger.

“And I just said I know you are.”

“I love you, Bug.”

“I love you, too,” I sighed.

I felt her relax. “Thank you.”

We sat there quietly for a few moments. I closed my eyes so I could better hear the sound of the ocean in the distance.

“How much?” she asked.

I sighed. “All the way up to God, past God, past God.”

She squeezed me to her. “That’s how much I love you, too. Things are going to be different, Annabelle,” she said. “They’re going to be okay.”

I heard a wave crash. “Okay.” Suddenly, I felt sleepy. Like now that the storm was over and I didn’t have to worry about the roof being ripped off, I could finally rest.

I heard footsteps and opened my eyes to see Ben striding over, his usually tan face looking pale. “We have a problem,” he said gravely.

I sat up straight. So much for resting.

Mom shook her head. “Problems aren’t really problems. They’re just opportunities for growth.” She turned to me. “Isn’t that catchy? I heard that at an AA meeting the other night.”

“Well, then, what I’m about to tell you is a very, very big opportunity for growth,” Ben said.

“How big?” I asked nervously.

“On a scale of one to ten?”

I nodded.

“Ninety-five.”

“When did you become such a drama king?” Mom laughed. “This is so not like you. Unless you’re about to tell me that you just found out you have some incurable disease, whatever you’re about to tell us cannot possibly be that bad.”

“Barney’s dead,” he said.

Barney was Barney Merloff, Mom’s business manager—the one who had taken care of all her money since
Plus Zero
started and invested it in stocks and paid all the bills and drove over in his red Cadillac every Friday afternoon with checks for Mom to sign and homemade rugelach that his wife, Arlene, had baked for me. I loved Barney. He was like the sweet, balding, coins-jingling-in-his-pockets, how’d-that-quarter-get-in-your-ear-magic-trick grandfather I never had.

At that, Mom burst into tears. “No!
No no no no no no!
” she wailed.

“That’s not the bad part,” Ben said.

“What do you mean, that’s not the bad part?!” Mom demanded. “Don’t you know that Barney was like a
father
to me? What happened? Was it a heart attack?” She shook her head. “I’ve been telling him for years that all that pastrami was going to catch up with him. I even gave him a gift certificate for ten sessions with my trainer for his last birthday!”

“He . . . killed himself.”

Talk about a bad part.

“What?!” cried Mom. “How could I not have seen that he was in such emotional pain?! I guess I was just so stuck in my own misery . . . oh, God . . . how long was this going on?”

“The emotional pain? Probably from the time that the police showed up and arrested him for embezzling close to a hundred million dollars from his various clients and wiping them out completely,” Ben said.

“
Whoa
,” I said.

“Oh, my God . . . those poor, poor people!” Mom cried.

Oh, no. “Uh, you’re not going to now tell us that we’re
part
of that poor, poor people group, are you?” I asked.

Mom turned to me. “Annabelle. Stop with the catastrophic thinking, please,” she ordered. “It’s really not good energetically.”

Ben sighed. “Unfortunately, Janie, it’s not catastrophic thinking.”

“Yes, it is,” she said. “She always goes to that place. I mean, I understand why, I really do, but—”

“It’s the truth,” he said.

We just stared at him. Waiting for him to say “Just kidding!” even though Ben was not a “Just kidding!” kind of guy. Mom stood up and began to walk around in circles, dazed.

“Mom, watch where you’re going!” I called after her as she began to stumble into some roses. I turned to Ben. “Okay, maybe he took
some
of our money, but we’re not part of that wiped-out-entirely group, right?” I asked nervously.

His look alone told me that, actually, yes, we were.

So much for the things-being-okay part.

CHAPTER FIVE

Although it hadn’t hit the blogs yet, when I got back to school that Monday after Family Weekend, I could tell from the whispers and stares that the news had gotten out. And seeing that the only people I had told were Olivia, Sarah, and Maya, it had to have come from one of them. Maya had been in full obsession mode with Jade for the last month, during which, if she wasn’t talking to Jade on the phone, or texting her, she was talking about her, so I knew she wasn’t responsible. Not to mention she was out sick that day.

When I had FaceTimed with Olivia and Sarah the night before and told them, they seemed genuinely concerned. (“You’re not going to have to move to one of those shelters, are you?” Sarah had asked, all freaked out.) But by third period the next day, when they weren’t at our regular meeting place in the quad before the morning bell, or in the bathroom where we checked in during passing time, I started to think something was up. The fact that they quickly stopped talking when I got to our table at lunch didn’t help my paranoia, even though they made sure to keep the conversation light as we ate and focused on this new raspberry/yogurt/spinach/egg white diet (Olivia’s contribution) and the symptoms of Lyme disease (Sarah’s). And when I ran into them at Om My Gawd, our favorite coffee place, after they had told me they couldn’t come over after school because they both had their SAT tutors, I knew.

“Annabelle,” Olivia said nervously. “We . . . um . . .”

“Both your tutoring sessions happened to get canceled?” I suggested.

They looked at each other, relieved. “Uh-huh,” Sarah said.

They may have been my best friends, but good liars they were not.

“And we were thinking of texting you to see if you wanted to come,” Olivia said, “but we thought, you know . . .”

“That I wouldn’t want to be out in public because my life has been blown to bits?”

“Well,
yeah
,” Sarah agreed.

I watched as Olivia cringed. Sarah’s lack of tact was something we were used to and just accepted. But every time Sarah had a foot-in-mouth disease flare-up, it always had to do with someone on the outside—not one of us. And that cringe or eye roll would be done together.

If Dr. Warner had been there, she would have told me that instead of letting my fear of confrontation get the best of me and just ignoring the fact that my best friends had lied to me, I needed to call them on it right then and there. Not lie in bed that night and go through all the different things I should have said at the time but didn’t because I was a wuss.

I decided to try it. Right after I fortified myself with some Play-Doh. Once I was safely barricaded in the bathroom (between calls to check on my mother, panic attacks, and hiding from paps I could have written an insider’s guide to restrooms across the greater Los Angeles area, and despite the thrift store decor of the coffeehouse, the bathroom was surprisingly clean), I whipped out the full-size can of blue Play-Doh.

I sniffed in and stared at myself in the mirror, willing myself not to pick at the two large zits that had decided to take up residence on my chin. “You can do this,” I gasped before emptying my lungs. “These are your best friends. If you can’t be honest with them, who
can
you be honest with?”

And then the door opened.

“Ah!” I yelped.

“Whoops. Sorry about that,” a girl said.

The bathroom may have been clean, but the lock was tricky. And it wasn’t just any girl—it was Parker Wren, the Sister Of from my school.

She moved forward so she could get a better look. “Annabelle?”

I tried to hide the can behind my back, but my hand was shaking so much, I dropped it and watched helplessly as it began to slowly roll toward her.

She leaned down and picked it up. “What are you doing with Play-Doh?” she asked, confused.

I was usually good at coming up with a believable lie on the spot. But at that moment, I was at a loss. I just stood there, my mouth opening and shutting like a guppy. “I, uh . . . I just found it in here,” I finally mumbled. “And I was . . . checking to see if it was really Play-Doh, or, you know . . . something else.”

She took a sniff, wrinkling her nose as if it were dog shit. “Ugh. Yeah, it’s Play-Doh.” She tossed it into the trash as if it were contaminated and turned to leave. “I’ll see you out there.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled. After she left, I walked over to the door and locked it again. Then, with my butt against it for further reinforcement, I stretched as far as I could to reach the garbage to fish out the can, knocking it over in the process so that the top came off, the clanging echoing off the concrete walls.

“
You
,” I said to myself in the mirror as I sniffed in a moment later, “are beyond pathetic.”

When I got back to the table, the three of them quickly stopped talking.

“Hey,” I said as I looked around for a chair. Parker was lounging in the one I had been sitting in, so laid back that she was almost reclining.

“Oh,
hey
,” Olivia said, as if it had been five years since we had seen each other rather than five minutes.

“That totally sucks about losing all your money,” Parker said, slurping her iced latte.

“Yeah, it pretty much does,” I agreed.

“And that you can’t go to Cabo now,” she said. For the last three years, the four of us had gone to Olivia’s parents’ vacation house there right after school let out. Obviously, after the Barney news I had been sure I couldn’t go, but as we were driving home from Oasis, Ben made a point of telling me that there was no way I was canceling, and that it would be another birthday gift from him.

“I didn’t say I couldn’t go.”

“Although I guess your loss is my gain,” Parker said, slurping some more.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, confused.

At that, Olivia fiddled with a lock of her brunette hair while Sarah moved her jaw from side to side—habits that came out when they knew they were busted.

“Parker, we—” Olivia started to say.

Parker shrugged. “The fact that I’m going in your place.”

“—hadn’t exactly decided that was the deal,” Olivia finished. She turned to me. “It was just something we were thinking about. If, you know, it turned out—”

“—you couldn’t afford it,” Sarah finished, so loudly that the table of fedora-wearing hipsters turned to see who the poor loser was.

“I thought you said she
definitely
wasn’t going,” Parker said.

I waited for them to tell her that of course they hadn’t said that; that she had misheard them; that I was their best friend and this was a tradition; and that, actually, because she was acting like such a bitch, it was probably best if
she
didn’t go. Instead, they just looked away.

Which was the only answer I needed before I ran out of the coffee place to Mom’s surprise Sweet Sixteen present to me—a Prius. Which was probably going to be repossessed. Having just gotten my license, I wasn’t a great driver to begin with, but trying to navigate pre-rush-hour traffic (which, because it was L.A., was just as bad as rush-hour traffic) with tears streaming down my face got me more angry honks than usual. As I drove, I flashed on a documentary on the Discovery Channel that I had once seen about how, in the wild, when an animal is sick and weak, sometimes the other animals, instead of protecting it, will just go in for the kill because they know that it can no longer be of use to them and pull its weight in keeping the whole ecology of the animal kingdom going. That didn’t just happen in the wilds of Africa. It happens on the Westside of Los Angeles, in all-girls private schools, too.

Once home, I got into bed and wouldn’t come out—even though Esme, in an attempt to deal with
her
feelings about the life-blown-up thing and the fact that she was losing her job of nine years, had been on a manic cooking binge and had made her famous homemade empanadas. I had never been a big crier—I guess after the first few times I cried over Mom and nothing changed, I decided it was a waste of time—but that night I couldn’t stop. First, I tried to stave it off with some lists, but as I felt the feelings rise up, I finally just curled up and let it go. I cried until snot ran out of my nose; I cried until my gasps for air sounded more donkeylike than human; I cried until I was emptied out of all the anger and fear and sadness that could fit in my body.

I cried through the texts from Maya saying she had heard what happened and those guys were assholes and we didn’t need them anyway and she totally wanted to talk to me but was with Jade at some spoken-word thing in Venice and would call me later. And the ones from Ben asking how I was doing and—staying with the theme that if we continue to pretend everything is just business as usual, maybe it will be—telling me that there was a documentary on HBO about the photographer Annie Leibovitz that I might like. And the e-mail from Mom—typed on an Android belonging to Sam, the Reiki energy healer at Oasis who really wanted to direct—telling me how excited she was to come home tomorrow night and to keep an eye out for some curtains she had ordered online from Anthropologie and that before I started freaking out because our financial situation was a little “up in the air at this moment,” they were on sale—“VERY ON SALE!!” she wrote in caps—so it would be just fine.