eight

IN THE DREAM, Molly was two inches tall. She fought through the blades of grass in Brick’s backyard, running in slow motion, trying to tell him something very important. But she was too small. He couldn’t see her. Then Brooke appeared, sauntering toward Brick with a plate of mini quiches. Her shoe came down toward Molly’s matchstick-size head, closer, closer, closer, making an odd rapping sound as it found Molly’s skull….

She cracked a bleary eye.

Tap, tap, tap.

“Molly?” said a male voice from outside the door.

Molly pulled the covers over her head then lowered them enough to peek out without actually exposing her bedhead.

“Come in,” she mumbled.

Stan popped open the door and backed inside, carrying a large silver tray with a domed lid on it. He took one look at her in her down comforter cave and smiled empathetically.

“Feeling okay?” he asked. “You seemed a bit the worse for wear last night.”

Molly groaned and rolled into her pillow.

Stan reached out to where her foot seemed to be and patted it. “We’ve all been there. Even Brick. Especially Brick, since he won’t eat the food at his movie premieres—says it’s a caloric trap designed to make him fat and force down his salary.”

He set the tray down on the large bench at the foot of her bed. “He ordered this just for you,” he said. “A shot of wheatgrass juice and a vegan prune muffin bar. He swears by them. So if you lift this dome and see an Egg McMuffin with hash browns, well, I’m afraid I won’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Thanks,” Molly mumbled, and tried to summon a smile for him. It didn’t exactly work. Her mouth was dry, and it tasted like the bottom of a birdcage. “It’s nice of you to do this for me on a Sunday.”

“No worries. It’s my job. In Brick Berlin’s world, there are no weekends,” he said. “Why do you think I know the best hangover cures?”

Stan headed for the door, stopping just as he reached for the knob. “He does want to see you, though,” he added, looking a bit grim. “Come on down to his study as soon as you feel up to it.”

He closed the door behind him. Molly rubbed her face and sat up, then immediately regretted moving. Her stomach sloshed, and it felt like someone had gotten trapped inside her brain and was trying to tunnel his way out using a ball-peen hammer. It might be a long time before she felt steady enough to go downstairs, physically or emotionally. A week ago she’d never met her father; now he was about to punish her for crawling down the neck of a beer bottle. What a great first impression. He probably thought she got hammered all the time in Indiana, and was on the phone with Ginger asking if she’d ever staged an intervention.

Molly could barely remember what happened after Brick picked her up off the grass, though she had faint, misshapen memories—like photos accidentally sent through the laundry—of Brooke towering over her, squealing something gleeful. But she didn’t want to think about that, or what it might mean. Plus, her head really hurt.

Molly burrowed through her bedding until her head popped out next to the tray, then grabbed the McMuffin and dragged it with her back under the covers. She’d face the world later.

Brooke’s phone rang. And rang. Irritated, she lifted her head just enough to check the clock. Eleven thirty in the morning. Obscene. Who called at this hour?

She groped at the nightstand until her hand found her iPhone. Brick’s name flashed up on the screen, along with a picture of him on the red carpet at the Oscars. He’d done a cameo as an unusually muscular Rasputin in Night at the Museum III: MoMA, Mo’ Problems, which had been nominated for best costumes. Brooke smiled, remembering how funny his bit with Ben Stiller had been when they presented Best Editing. Then she heard his stern voice in her head from the previous night and recalled the disappointed way he’d looked at her—at her—when she brought him to Molly’s slumped, drunk body.

She sent the call to voice mail.

Almost instantly, Madonna’s “Material Girl” kicked up again. Brooke ignored it, still stung that Brick had seemed so put out when she was only trying to be helpful by showing him what Molly was really like. She wondered how much inertia it would take before her body forgot how to function. Once she was rendered immobile by her psychological pain, maybe Brick would see how much harm he’d done, bringing this ruinous boozehound into their lives. The question was whether he’d realize this before or after Brooke got an oozing bedsore.

Her phone tolled a third time. “Shut up, Madonna,” she mumbled. But this time, it was Brie.

“Good morning!” her assistant chirped. “This is your daily tabloid report. One of the Real Housewives of Santa Fe threw her pottery wheel at a photographer, that new Fashion Week documentary opened huge, and one of those girls from The City wore the ugliest orange poncho to an MTV party last night. And that’s it. Nothing else made news. At all.”

“You are a terrible liar, Brie.”

“No, it’s true, the poncho was awful. E! Online said she looked like the Great Pumpkin’s trashy girlfriend.”

“Brie.”

On the other end of the line, Brie took a deep breath.

“Okay, it’s actually not that bad. Most of what’s online from last night are just pictures of Brick and Molly smiling. But Hey!…” Brie trailed off. “They got a picture of you hunched over Molly and talking on your phone, while she was passed out. It really looks like you’re laughing at her.”

“Dammit!” Brooke swore. “Why did you tell me that?”

“Because you—”

“In the future, please recognize when to tell me what I want to hear,” Brooke huffed.

There was a loud banging on her door.

“Go away,” Brooke crabbed. “I’m very busy.”

“Unless what you’re busy with involves being comatose, you will come downstairs right now,” Brick’s voice boomed.

“Um, Brie, gotta go. My trainer’s here.”

Shoving her feet into fluffy slippers, Brooke padded downstairs hoping she looked childlike and innocent. The last time Brick yelled at her, she was six and had spilled her apple juice on his pager; he’d been so overcome with guilt that he’d bought her a pony named Mr. Pickles. She doubted this would end as happily: From his tone, Brooke could guess that Brick had seen exactly what Brie had, and it wasn’t sitting well.

Brooke shuffled toward her father’s study, through the hallway that contained every certificate Brick had ever received—including one from the American Dental Association honoring his teeth as the best in showbiz—and a gallery of her school photos over the years. When she reached fourth grade, Brooke stopped, noticing a tiny, dog-eared picture that had been tucked into the corner of the frame. It depicted a little girl with crooked front teeth, brown-red braids, and a grin so earsplitting you couldn’t see the color of her eyes.

Molly.

Brooke resisted the urge to rip it down, knowing that act of vandalism wouldn’t actually affect anything except possibly her prospects of getting a car—though those already looked bleak. She took a deep breath and reminded herself to deny everything for as long as possible. This worked well whenever celebrity couples ran into rumors of marital problems.

“Brooke? I hear your footsteps. Get in here.”

A fire blazed in the hearth in Brick’s study despite it being a steamy ninety degrees outside. Brick once read on the Internet that being warmed by the heat of a burning log was great for the pores. Brooke often thought Brick was a perfect example of why literacy was overrated. He believed anything holistic-sounding as long as more than two posters on a message board agreed with it.

As she closed the door, Brooke noticed Molly already there, slumped down in a chair opposite Brick’s desk and sipping from a steaming mug of coffee.

“Good morning!” Brooke all but yelled, enjoying watching Molly wince at the volume.

“Oh, don’t you play the James Cameron card with me, Harvey,” Brick bellowed from his wing chair, which was facing away from them. “You want him so bad? Why don’t you just flush five hundred million down the toilet and save yourself a three-year shoot?”

He tossed the phone onto the rug and swiveled around to face them, drumming his hands on the desk.

“Well, well, well. Last night was interesting,” he said.

“Wasn’t it?” Brooke bubbled. “I overheard the movie critic from the L.A. Times saying he thought the Avalanche! script was dynamite.”

“You know that’s not what I’m talking about,” Brick said sternly. Then he pursed his lips. “But that is splendid news,” he added. “Remind me to send him some branded snowshoes.”

“Brick… I mean… Dad… I’m so sorry,” Molly blurted, sitting forward and slamming her coffee down on his antique oak desk in her urgency to be heard. A few drops sloshed over the mug rim. “I swear I’m not usually like that. I just… I don’t know what happened.”

Brick regarded Molly for a second in silence. Then he came around to perch on the corner of the desk in front of her chair, sandwiching her left hand between his two paws.

“Sweet girl, I know what happened,” he said. “You were lost, you were alone, and you did what every teenage kid does in that situation. I asked too much of you.” He hung his head. “I drove you to drink.”

Brooke couldn’t believe her ears. Was Brick seriously letting this troll off the hook?

“Daddy, you’re being too hard on yourself,” she began, but Brick held up a hand.

“You’re to blame here, too, Brooke,” he warned. “You practically took out a megaphone to announce that Molly was drunk. Where was your discretion? And who were you on the phone with?”

Brooke gulped as Brick showed her a printout of the Hey! photo from today’s home page. The headline read SISTER ACT? Brooke had to admit that it looked bad—like she was kicking Molly and laughing, instead of merely prodding her sharply with her toe to see if she was still alive. In the “win” column, though, she herself looked fantastic.

“Why the smile?” Brick’s face was stern.

Brooke let her gaze flutter down to her hands, which she kneaded theatrically. “I wasn’t smiling, Daddy, I was hysterical,” she said, suffusing her voice with agony. “We learned in health class last year that alcohol poisoning can kill you. So when I found Molly passed out, it was just so frightening. I called Ari for help.”

It had been Arugula on the phone, but the call had been more focused on wondering if dragging Molly’s semiconscious body through the yard would send too strong a message. Brooke kept her eyes down for a long period, then peeked up to see if she’d sold the half-truth. Brick picked up the photo again, studied it for a second, then patted Brooke on the head and ran it through the waist-high power shredder. It sounded like R2D2 eating lunch.

“Well, it’s done now,” he said. “Luckily, none of the other major magazines have decided to run with this. But a lot of the gossip blogs are feeding off Hey! and its photos, and there is nothing I can do about that. At least Trip agreed to ax the cover story. I can’t even imagine what it would have said. I had to promise him a few Avalanche! exclusives and I may have to date that girl from Beer o’Clock for a month or so, but at least we’re covered.”

Brooke widened her eyes and let her lip tremble a bit.

“Save it, Brooke,” Brick said. “You let me down, you let Molly down, and you let yourself down.”

“By staying sober?” she taunted, unable to resist.

“By vanishing,” he said. “Where were you when Molly needed a shoulder, and a friend? Where were we both when she needed a hand to hold instead of a beer bottle? Where were our minds, when she needed our hearts?” He got a faraway look in his eyes, which Brooke knew meant those words would eventually turn up on the big screen being uttered by a young heartthrob boasting an excess of hair product.

“No, I screwed up,” Molly interjected. “It’s my responsibility. I didn’t mean to do this to you. Either of you,” she added, looking pointedly at Brooke.

“I don’t want it to happen again,” Brick said. “But I don’t blame you for it happening now. And I am going to make this right.”

He stood up again and crossed over to gaze into his fireplace. “You are my daughters,” he said. “You, and Netflix, represent my legacy on this planet. So I will not rest until my early work on Cop Rock is available on DVD, and I will not be satisfied until you are the true support system for each other that you both deserve to have. Expecting either of you to adjust to all these changes alone was a mistake. Fate tied you together. And that is exactly how you’ll cope with this.”

Brooke blanched. “You’re going to tie us together?”

“No, no. Although that might make a fantastic Nickelodeon movie,” he mused. “Billy Ray Cyrus could… well, hang on, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’re discussing you two. And what I’m about to do, I do only out of love.”

Brooke groaned inwardly. She recognized that self-satisfied expression from Tomorrow’s Really Yesterday, right before Brick’s character announced that the only way to stop global climate change was to time travel to 1987 and freeze the equator.

“You two,” Brick said, “are going to be roommates.”

The entire room moved. At first Brooke thought it was because the ground was dropping out from under her feet, but then she realized she’d leapt from her seat.

“Is that… really necessary?” she croaked.

“Ladies, it’s about to get real,” Brick said, clearly thrilled with himself. “We will move a bed into Brooke’s room. You will drive to school together, do homework together, work out together, do everything together. Brooke, you will be the helping hand that Molly needs, and Molly, you’ll be the sister Brooke’s always wanted. Closer than sisters.”

Brooke felt herself sway. She had wanted a sister… when she was eight, and needed to learn how to French-braid hair. But now it seemed pointless, superfluous. Like Solange Knowles.

“And what do you plan for us to drive to school in?” Brooke asked, trying to keep her voice from inching into dog-whistle territory. “You said taking limos everywhere makes us look ostentatious.”

“I was just getting to that,” Brick said.

He dropped a set of keys on the desk. They bore the Lexus logo.

“Molly, those are for you,” he said.

“She got drunk and she gets a car?” Brooke squeaked.

Brick raised an eyebrow. “Last time I checked, Brooke, you don’t have a license.”

“I do, too.”

“A preordered personalized license plate doesn’t count,” Brick said.

Brooke thought she heard a snicker coming from behind Molly’s coffee mug, and shot her a look so sharp it could dissect a frog. Molly at least had the good grace to seem chastised.

“Fine, Daddy. I accept this,” Brooke said, grasping at one last straw. “You’re absolutely right, and I bow down to—”

“Sucking up to me isn’t going to get you the car,” Brick said, amused.

“Well. I am offended that you think I could be so shallow,” Brooke said through clenched teeth.

She turned on her heel and sailed out of there with all the grace she could muster. Then she broke into a mad sprint. Time to lock up her Louboutins. The enemy was on the move.