The Lie(11)

I leap out of bed, throwing the blankets aside, and quickly search my room for something to wear. I pick up a pair of jeans, but yesterday I spilled tomato sauce all over them when Melissa and I went to the football match. Which makes me think I didn’t take a shower when we got home last night, and there’s no way I’m showing up for Professor Irving’s class smelling like beer and meat pie.

I throw on my robe and hurry out into the hall, pounding on the bathroom door.

“I overslept!” I yell. “How long are you going to be?”

For a second I don’t think she can hear me over the blaring of R. Kelly, but then the water turns off and she yells back, “Give me a minute!”

I wait until the door opens and she appears, face flushed from the shower, hair wrapped up in a towel. “I was wondering if you were ever going to wake up,” she says. “Here, it’s all yours.”

“You could have tried to wake me up,” I tell her. “You know I have class at eleven.”

She rolls her eyes. “Who am I, your mother?” Then she sashays back to her room.

I know she’s got a point, but still. Sometimes I think Melissa wants me to fail just so I’ll be at her level. She says I care far too much about school, but after everything I’ve been through, I have no choice but to throw myself into the program. I was gone for nearly four years, and aside from a few credits here and there, I basically have to start my master’s degree all over again. The degree at King’s College is modeled differently than it was at Met, as well. Meanwhile, Melissa didn’t even go to her classes last week because she was at the bars off-campus, searching for prey.

I jump into the shower, washing my hair and conditioning at record speed. Even if Melissa didn’t go to her classes, I went to mine, and I learned what a pain in the ass it’s going to be to try and get back on track. What if there was no point in coming to King’s College? What if I should have stayed in France with my father and just left my education as it was? The fact that I have to do everything over is both disheartening and staggering.

Breathe, I remind myself, closing my eyes and taking a moment to let the water run down my back. My panic attacks are fewer and fewer these days, but I know one has been creeping up on me, just waiting for me to break down.

Oh, that inevitable breakdown.

That’s the price you pay for trying to come back to life.

Somehow I manage to shake it out of me and hop out of the shower. I can’t even be bothered with makeup. There’s just no time. I’m Professor Irving’s teaching assistant for Film 100, and even though it pains me to look like a chump in front of a hundred students, I fear my professor’s wrath even more. Last week he kicked a student out just for looking at his phone.

“Want some tea?” Melissa asks from the kitchen as I hurry to my room and start throwing things around, looking for a pair of pants that don’t have some kind of stain on them. I’d like to say I wasn’t this disorganized or messy before the incident, but that would be a total lie. I’m twenty-nine years old and I’ve only slipped backward.

“No time!” I yell, holding up a skirt that might do if I’d started going to the gym regularly like I promised myself I would. The one good thing about recuperating in France was that I’d lost some weight I needed to lose. Even so, I still have hips and ass for days, and now I have a little belly that wasn’t there before. I blame all the meat pies I’ve scarfed down since moving back to London.

I pull the skirt on anyway, throw on my bra, a light knit sweater, and a raincoat. It’s pouring outside and I have to walk a while to get to the tube. Then I run into the kitchen and grab a banana while Melissa sits at the table. She dumps artificial sweetener into her tea, swirling it around and around with her spoon.

“Aren’t you going to class?” I ask her. “What do you even have?”

“Eh,” she says. “Some class about analyzing film comedy or something.”

“Who’s teaching it?”

She shrugs and slurps her tea. “I don’t know. Someone.”

I frown at her. Melissa is a very smart girl, which is probably why it bugs me so much that she’s so lackluster about school. She barely goes and she still gets good grades. She’s not even getting her master’s degree for any other reason than to appease her parents. What she really wants to do—what she does—is acting. I grew up with a mother who was obsessed with it and stardom the same way Melissa is, and I know how it all ends. Even I did my fair share of it when I was growing up in LA, but that lifestyle wasn’t for me.

Melissa and my mother are in love with the idea of fame, the idea of being wanted and adored and validated, but not the reality of being an actor. Maybe that’s why when I first met Melissa six years ago, we hit it off. She reminded me of my mother, the very person I escaped LA from. How is that for irony? Come all the way to England and then meet pretty much the exact same person you were trying to run away from.

When I first met Melissa, I had gone with my undergrad class to a film set she was working on as a standin. We’d got to talking, clicked, and the rest was history. I guess I liked Melissa because even though she was as vain and self-obsessed as my mother—always taking selfies, posting about how much more talented she is than other actresses and that she deserved so much more—she was also a lot of fun, and I needed some of that in my life. She also looked up to me for some reason, maybe because I was a bit older or because I grew up in LA. When she found out I was going to school for film, she wanted to do the same thing. Of course she one-upped me, and by the time I was in the first year of my master’s at the Met film school, she was starting her undergrad at King’s College—a much better school.