Birds of California(23)
Claudia seems to know better than to answer. “Will you just let me do your hair, at least?” she asks, padding barefoot across the carpet. “I’ll be quick.”
Fiona sighs loudly. “I guess.”
Claudia’s smile is megawatt, which almost makes this ridiculous masochistic stroll into Mordor worth it in advance. “Thank you,” is all she says.
She makes Fiona sit on the bed while she coaxes out the tangles with a wide-tooth comb, careful not to tug too much. Fiona closes her eyes, tilts her head back. She’s always liked having her hair played with; she used to fall asleep in the makeup trailer on set sometimes, while the girls straightened and curled and teased and braided her into Riley Bird. Even all these years later it’s the one form of physical contact that’s never made her feel itchy or weird.
“There,” Claudia says finally. Fiona opens her eyes, peering at herself in the mirror on the back of the closet door. Claudia’s done something with the flat iron to smooth the frizz out; she looks nice, but not like she’s auditioning for the role of a florist slash amateur detective on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries.
“Thanks,” Fiona says, touching it tentatively.
“No problem,” Claudia tells her. “You’re pretty. Also, and I’m just going to make this pitch one more time, you should change your shirt. You’re going dancing with the Heart Surgeon, not out to hunt vampires or scavenge canned goods during the zombie apocalypse.”
“That’s what you think.” Fiona huffs out a breath. “I’m not trying to date him,” she reminds her sister.
“Why not?” Claudia asks immediately. “You should date someone.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re lonely.”
Fiona blinks, the baldness of it catching her up short. Back when she was in the hospital Pam was always trying to get her to make ridiculous pronouncements like that, to emote all the goddamn time: I feel lonely. I feel angry. I feel betrayed. Fiona could never quite get the words out, even though she liked Pam and wanted to do a good job at therapy. The whole thing made her feel, quite honestly, like a giant fucking chump.
She doesn’t say anything to Claudia for a minute. Then: “You know what?” She shakes her head. “I’m not going to go. You need somebody to quiz you on your Spanish—”
“Estelle will quiz me,” Claudia says immediately, then marches over to the window and shoves it open. “Estelle!” she yells, voice carrying across the backyard like a Klaxon. “Will you quiz me on my Spanish so that Fiona can go out?”
Estelle, who’s reading her Kindle and vaping on her patio, thrusts one thumb into the air. “You bet I will, señorita!”
Fiona rolls her eyes.
“You realize it’s okay for you to go have fun,” Claudia says, flopping backward onto the pillows. She herself is wearing vintage JNCOs and a Backstreet Boys tank top, so Fiona doesn’t actually know if she’s in any position to be doling out fashion advice. “Nothing bad is going to happen.”
“That sounds like the beginning of the zombie apocalypse to me.”
Claudia doesn’t laugh. “I’m serious,” she says, tucking one tan arm behind her head and looking at Fiona speculatively. “I know you think this whole operation falls apart every time you leave the house, but it’s okay for you to have a life if you want to. Dad is . . . you know. Dad. But Estelle is here. And I’m going to be leaving for college in a few months anyway.”
Fiona gazes at her sister for a long moment. She was ten when Claudia was born; she used to like to load her into the stroller and pop wheelies all up and down the crooked sidewalk outside the print shop. “Okay,” she says finally, wiping her stupidly sweaty hands on the seat of her jeans, “I’m going.”
“And your shirt?”
“Goodbye, Claudia!”
It takes exactly two seconds for Fiona to realize she’s made a terrible mistake.
The club is an enormously obnoxious velvet rope situation in West Hollywood, the bass from the sound system palpable through the sidewalk and a long line snaking down the block. Fiona hesitates, raking her fingers through her hair and trying to decide on a strategy. She’s not about to wait in that line, that’s for sure, but she’s also not about to announce herself to a bouncer, both because people who do that are douchebags and because she’s not at all confident it would work. Shit, this is why she doesn’t go out.
Well, this is one of a thousand reasons, at least.
She’s about to bail—it probably wasn’t a real invitation anyway; it’s not like he’s in there watching the entrance waiting for her to show up—when the guy at the front door catches sight of her. He’s a lot smaller and less assuming than she thinks of bouncers as being, like maybe he sells high-speed internet during the day and this is his side hustle. “Oh,” he says, unclipping the rope and waving her through, “shit, sorry. Go ahead.”
Fiona glances over her shoulder to make sure he isn’t talking to someone else. “Um,” she says, “thanks.”
Inside the club is dark and hot and noisy, the music vibrating belligerently up her spine. Fiona works her way through the crowd, past the bar and the DJ booth and a cluster of low leather couches until finally she spots Sam talking to a guy she thinks she recognizes from a time travel thing on cable. She watches them for a moment, Sam’s eyes and mouth expressive as he listens to whatever the guy is saying. Fiona remembers this from when they used to work together, how much he seemed to like people and how easy it was for him to talk to them, from celebrity guest stars doing cameos to impress their nieces and nephews down to the lowest of PAs.