The Comeback(30)

“I didn’t . . .” I trail off because I’m not sure what I didn’t mean to do. Appear ungrateful?

“No, it’s cool. I guess it’s true what they say, being beautiful makes you lazy. Thank God for us plain girls.”

My eyes automatically flick to my reflection in the rearview mirror, and I can feel the disdain dripping from Esme.

“I’d probably worked more hours by the time I was eighteen than most people do in a lifetime,” I say defensively.

“You’re extraordinary. You were supposed to tell me I wasn’t plain,” Esme says, her tone searing.

“You’re not plain. At all,” I say, too late. “You could do with a little less makeup though.”

I pull into the strip mall, swinging into an empty parking space outside the old-fashioned ice cream parlor I spotted when I was at the drugstore the other day.

“Not to be rude, but you could do with a little more. I saw that Best Buy pic. That guy really got you, huh?” Esme climbs out of the car and slams the door. I do the same, and we walk into the ice cream parlor together, except I pull back so that I can study her walk. It’s still the same as when she was a little kid: she’s always walked on her heels, leaning back slightly.

“He didn’t seem the type,” I say as we join the queue.

“That’s guys online for you,” Esme says airily, and it doesn’t seem like she’s not enjoying this. “Get any cretin behind a screen and they think they’re Ryan Gosling.”

“So it turns out,” I say. Silence again, this time stretching as flat and wide as the San Bernardino Valley. I pretend to be excessively interested in the ice cream flavors on offer.

“I’m getting Rocky Road. You?” I ask. Rocky Road was our favorite flavor before I left home, but now Esme looks at me like I’ve just suggested eating my own hand.

“I’m going to get a kombucha from next door,” she says haughtily.

I pay for my ice cream and follow her around Whole Foods until she finds the brand of kombucha she likes—the apple-flavored one made with stevia, not cane sugar.

The guy ringing up Esme’s drink is only a little older than her, and he’s cute in that baby-faced way that never lasts long. He will no doubt soften over the years to come, his features filling out to form something only vaguely reminiscent of his former self, in the way that has happened to most child actors I’ve worked with. Esme fidgets excitedly next to me anyway, and when I try to give her a fifty-dollar bill to pay for her drink, she bats my hand away, pulling out a credit card I didn’t know she had. I try not to smile when her cheeks turn pink underneath her mortician’s powder as she says good-bye to him.

We’re nearly back at my car when I feel a hand on my shoulder. The guy who was serving us has followed us out. Esme holds her breath next to me, and her obliviousness to what’s happening makes my chest feel tight for a moment.

“Did we forget something?” I ask, even though I know what he wants. In the past, it was rare for me to be found anywhere like this. Whenever I spent too long in a public place, I’d start to notice people staring, whispering, and then before long they would approach me with their phones gripped tightly in their palms. It was like something out of a zombie movie; everywhere I looked there would be another stranger sliding toward me, sometimes shyly but more often than not brazenly, hungrily, as if they owned part of me. I could never work out whether they did or not.

“No . . . I just . . . I fucking loved you in that hooker movie. I think I watched it every day for the whole of last summer,” he says, grinning widely as if to reinforce the point that he can see my naked breasts anytime he wants. “Do you think I could get a photo with you?”

Esme makes a frustrated sound and is stalking around to the passenger side of the car when he calls after her, waving his phone.

“Hey? Excuse me? Can you take it?”

Esme pauses, and I flinch when I see the expression on her face before she walks back to take the phone from his hand. For just a moment, my sister looks at me as if I orchestrated the entire exchange on purpose, just to show her how much better I am than her. The guy stands next to me, grinning cluelessly as Esme takes a couple of shots. After it’s done, she wordlessly holds the photo up for me to check, and, when I shrug, she hands the phone back to him.

“Lights of Berlin,” I say over my shoulder as I’m getting in the car. The kid squints at me.

“What?”

“Lights of Berlin. That’s what the hooker movie was called.”



* * *



? ? ?

It seems that neither of us is in the mood for conversation during the drive back to Coyote Sumac, and when I pull up outside the house, we both stay in our seats, staring out the windshield for a minute.

“Do you want to talk about the suspension?” I ask reluctantly.

“No,” Esme says, unbuckling her seat belt. “Can we just watch TV or something?”

I nod, relieved. Once we’re inside, we both sit down carefully on the sofa, and I turn on an episode of Friends for her. Friends reruns were the only thing guaranteed to be on in whatever country I was filming in, but Esme doesn’t appear to have seen it before. She watches quietly, her eyes tracking the characters and then occasionally flicking back to me.

“This show is entirely problematic,” she says, once the episode is over. “But I think I don’t care.”