Method(78)

But I shake my head. “This is bullshit, Mom! What happened? Did Dad hurt you again?”

My mother snaps to attention, looks back at Maddie embarrassed and then leans in to me with a vicious bite. “You have no business at your age staying with that woman. You’re growing.” My mother leans in, brows quirked. “Is she asking you to touch her?”

My eyes widen. “What? No!”

Maddie’s door slams shut before we hear the shatter of glass. I glare at her accusingly. “She heard you!”

“Good, she needs to keep her paws off my son!” she shouts past me toward Maddie’s trailer.

“All we do is run lines!” I say, standing my ground. “What’s wrong with that? I need all the practice I can get!”

She harrumphs. “You should be playing football or something. That’s not good for you.”

“What do you care what’s good for me!?” I dig my feet in as she tries to pull me toward our trailer. “There’s nothing to do in there!”

“You need to study and make good grades,” she says, clearing the two cement steps up to push the broken button on our screen door.

“All of a sudden you’re a mother?” I yell at her from where I stand. “She’s more a mother to me, and you know it.” I must have lost my mind, but my tirade is cut short when she looks back at me.

“What’s that red mark on your face?”

“What?”

She peers closer. “Did she slap you?”

“No, Mom! We were just acting.”

“She hit you?”

“No, that’s your job when you drink too much, smoke all your cigarettes, and have no one else to blame.”

The truth barely pauses her tirade. “She’s an old weirdo. You either stay away from her or I’m calling the cops!”

And with those words, my universe crumbles.

The next day when I get home from school, there’s a dictionary and a glass of carrot juice on the steps of my trailer. I look over to see Maddie staring through the window and drink the juice in a few gulps before I begin to walk toward her door using the glass as an excuse. She shakes her head as I approach and lets her curtain fall. I grab the dictionary and open it to see a note scribbled on the back of the front cover.



I don’t know why this is happening, my boy, but everything in life is a test, and you have to be ready to play the part. I don’t know what they’re teaching you in school, but you’re going to need a better vocabulary to make it in the biz. Drink your juice.





X


Maddie



Maddie died alone of pneumonia in her sleep the day after my fifteenth birthday. She was only sixty years old. She didn’t have enough money or a way to get the medical attention she needed. Actually, she did have enough money to be seen, but she’d refused to waste it saving her life in order to save mine. Some may not see it that way, but when you’re in the shittiest and most desperate of circumstances the way we were, you have no choice but to see it. Giving up anything when you have nothing is the biggest of sacrifices. And she did save me. What she left was just enough to get me a ticket to Hollywood and off the streets for a few weeks. It was a chance, and that’s all it was, and I took it. Because I wanted out of that hell and because I wanted to make her proud.

Her hopes were all pinned on me. I’d bidden my time until my parents started taking my paychecks. Luckily, I’d had my girlfriend Jessie hide some of my cash at her house. She was loaded and looked out for me. Aside from leaving her behind, I didn’t hesitate when my father and I had it out over their constant harping on payday. I had no future there. None. And no amount of sitting idle would help it. Some family had moved into Maddie’s trailer a few weeks after she died, and it was all I could do to watch life moving on without her. I didn’t leave my parents in the trailer in West Virginia. The only parent I had died. So I took her money, kissed the girl that took my virginity, and left.

And I did it.

I did it all.

I fulfilled our every dream. But even as I should be satisfied, I’m not. I’m considered the picture of success in my community and I feel like I’m nowhere. Because I’m still the same kid worrying if the lights are going to get cut off in freezing temperatures. Still afraid they’ll see the scars from my scratching when I shave my head for a role. Still the same bastard whose dad came home drunk from NASCAR and told him his mother was a whore and he’d played daddy long enough. I’d fooled them all. All of them, except my wife. Even now I see the pity in her eyes when my childhood comes up. Money, fame, it’s all a fucking lie we tell ourselves, and others strive for.

“Maddie, what the fuck is all this for?” I whisper as I peer out into the parking lot from my trailer. At first, it was a means to get out of hell. To make something of myself. And then somehow it got twisted into a pile of ambition where I now find myself unrecognizable. I’ve got nothing left to prove, no goals to aim for.

I’m on top of my mountain. I got the money, the career, the girl. I’ve got everything I could possibly want, and yet nothing I genuinely need, aside from Mila. She’s growing tired of my charade, and pretty soon she’s going to realize I’m just a fucked-up guy who says some words on camera, who’s void inside, and then where will we be?