twenty-three

“AND BREEEEEEEEATHE,” intoned Trixie, the petite blonde yoga instructor with shoulders the size of apples.

Molly sucked in a lungful of air as her right foot slipped out of position and slammed onto her mat. She’d imagined that her first weekend of being actual buddies with Brooke would involve lying out by the pool and marking up a copy of Lucky magazine with those cool little “YES!” stickers. Instead, she was standing in the middle of a softly lit wood-floored studio, wearing a pair of lululemon yoga pants and a snug tank top (both gifts from Brooke) that were drenched with sweat. It was over a hundred degrees in the Bikram yoga classroom, and although everyone glistened with sweat, nobody else had it raining so hard down their faces that it could qualify as class-four white-water rapids.

Molly wiped the perspiration from her face and tried her pose again. The instructor, along with Brooke and the sixteen or so other spandex-wrapped students in their class, was grabbing an ankle behind her head and pulling it forward while balancing on the other leg, but Molly couldn’t even get her foot high enough to get a good grip on her toes. Her leg just didn’t go in that direction.

“And now, tree pose,” the instructor said in a strange half-hum.

Everyone gracefully lowered their feet and then pulled the other leg up, resting their heels on their upper thighs and raising their hands skyward. They all made it look easy: Brooke, the teacher, Matthew McConaughey up there in front, the busty toothpicks with dry, unmussed hair, and the one busty toothpick who Molly hadn’t realized was pregnant until she twisted sideways and revealed a bump like a beach ball. Molly’s foot slid down to her knee. She suspected even the gestating fetus was more adept at this than she.

“Beauuuuutiful,” purred Trixie, coming around behind Molly. “Feel your roots.”

She shoved Molly’s pelvis forward and cranked her leg up high into her groin. Molly bit back a yelp and flailed as she tried to hold her balance.

“Are you maybe still out to get me?” she whispered to Brooke, who looked like she was trying not to laugh.

“Yes,” Brooke whispered back. “It’s murder by posture correction.”

“Swaaaaay, with the breeze,” Trixie said. “Beeee the palm treeeee.”

Molly obliged, and promptly toppled over.

“No, you have to be the palm tree, Molly, not chop it down,” Brooke hissed, now giggling uncontrollably.

Molly rolled onto her back and grinned. “I am being a palm tree. After an earthquake.”

Brooke snickered harder, and her foot slipped. She collapsed on all fours beside Molly.

“I’m being a banyan,” she said.

“I have never hated trees more than I do right now,” Molly panted. “When we get home I’m going on Amazon to buy a ton of paper I don’t need.”

“Brick will be so happy when you become a lumberjack out of spite.”

They cracked up again.

“Ladies, if you can’t be quiet trees, then please leave us.” Trixie frowned.

Brooke looked startled for a second, then threw a mischievous glance at Molly and shrugged. “Okay, then. Namaste, babe.”

“I think I pulled every muscle I own.” Molly winced as she lowered herself into her seat.

“That means it’s working.” Brooke beamed, setting down their tray, loaded with two coffees, a half-dozen doughnuts, and enough napkins to clean up after large-scale food fight. “Here, have a bear claw. The sugar high will distract you from the pain.”

“This doesn’t seem like your usual breakfast,” Molly noted as she took the pastry.

“Today’s my cheat day,” Brooke said around a mouthful of jelly doughnut. “Besides, I sweated off, like, six pounds of water weight in that class.”

Brooke shoved the rest of the doughnut in her mouth and drank in the Farmers Market’s dingy but quaint open-air courtyard, edged with food stands selling everything from tacos to fresh oysters to Middle Eastern food, and packed with a similarly diverse sampler tray of Los Angeles residents. A woman dripping with gold jewelry tapped her cell phone with the tip of a long acrylic nail as she tried to eat a fruit plate. Two old men, dining on pancakes at the rickety iron table next to them, were arguing about whether the Dodgers needed better relief pitching. In front of them, a couple was cooing at each other in Spanish over crepes. And to the right, an Asian family ate bagels and passed around sections of the Los Angeles Times in companionable silence. It reminded Brooke of coming here with Brick when she was a kid. He would read to her from the trades while she colored.

“I like it here,” Molly said, interrupting her people watching.

“I thought you would.” Brooke beamed, feeling like a proud hostess whose dinner party has been a great success. “These are the best doughnuts in Los Angeles. They even make them shaped like dinosaurs, for kids. Brick bought them for me every weekend when I was little, while Kelly had her spa mornings.”

Brooke gazed down at the cruller in her hand, then shook herself like a dog climbing out of a pool. I am tired of thinking about that woman.

Her yoga bag buzzed. Brooke reached in and grabbed Molly’s phone. Danny’s name flashed on the screen, accompanied by a photo of him with an arm slung around Molly and wearing a Notre Dame baseball cap. She handed it to Molly, who bit her lip, then handed it back.

“I’ll call him later.”

Interesting.

“Interesting,” Brooke said, deciding this was no time to censor her internal monologue. “I thought he was supposed to be your boyfriend.”

“He is,” Molly said. “But it’s not like we could get into much of a conversation right now.”

“What, you’re worried those two old dudes are going to overhear? They can’t even hear each other.” Brooke scoffed. “Dish. What’s up with the hayseed?”

“He’s not a hayseed,” Molly reminded her.

Brooke waved a hand. “Potato, po-tah-to,” she said. “Listen, I made the decision to give up a personal life this semester for the good of my career. The least you can do is entertain me with your boy problems. Besides, maybe I can help.”

She folded her hands underneath her chin and tried to look supportive, like Tyra Banks during the segments on America’s Next Top Model where she counseled models to stay strong in the face of bad weaves or homelessness. Molly made a grunting noise and stuck a piece of doughnut in her mouth.

“I’m just starting to wonder if the long-distance thing is doomed to fail,” she said eventually. “Not seeing him every day has been so much harder than I thought it would be.”

“Should we have him come out and visit?” Brooke asked. “Ooh, we could throw a party! A real party. No grown-ups. We can play all those fun drinking games you were telling me about. Do you think I can get away with wearing my tennis whites for beer pong?”

“Isn’t that the only socially acceptable thing to do?” Molly teased. “And I didn’t mean he needs to visit right away, I meant more… I just want to talk to him, but it’s been so hard. Like, last night, we had an appointment to Skype. But he never showed. So I call him, and he’s in bed and he says he thought I meant eight his time, which… seriously, they’re time zones, not instructions for building a particle accelerator. He felt really bad, though. And then I felt guilty for being so annoyed.”

Brooke leaned back in her chair and stared up at the blue sky thoughtfully. Tyra would cope with this by telling a story about how modeling in Paris when she was fifteen was much harder than anyone else’s pain. But the closest Brooke had gotten to Paris was using plaster-of to make a mold of her own face in art. It had taken two days to get it out of her hair. Although come to think of it, that had required great strength of character.

“And then of course there’s the Slurpee,” Molly continued before Brooke could share her life lesson. “It was so sweet. And so Danny. But if I had to choose, I would pick the phone call over the gesture, you know?”

“Hmmm,” Brooke said, nodding in what she was pretty sure was a supportive and sisterly way. “I’m sure the Teddy McCormack situation isn’t helping, either.”

“Brooke, I told you—”

“Please,” Brooke said, holding up a silencing hand. “He friended you on Facebook, like, practically the first day of school. He’s into you.”

Molly scrunched up her face. “You’re basing this whole theory on Facebook?”

“No,” Brooke said. “He also gets all moony-eyed around you when he thinks you’re not looking, and he brought you a cupcake the other day at lunch. Boys don’t just bring girls baked goods for no reason.”

And also, Arugula gave me that picture of you guys hugging, but I can’t tell you that.

“Hmm,” Molly said, leaning forward in her chair and resting her elbows on her knees. Brooke detected the faintest flush on her fair skin.

“And, if I may be blunt,” Brooke continued, “you’re not doing Farm Boy any favors, tying him down to a girl thousands of miles away who keeps looking at another boy’s arms like she wants to floss her teeth with them.”

She punctuated this advice with a flourish of her hands, a move she’d picked up from Brick when he played the deputy district attorney in Trial by Fury.

This time there was no doubt that Molly was blushing. “I do not,” she insisted. She sat back in her chair and began chewing on her thumbnail.

Brooke rolled her eyes. “Okay, if you say so. But there are at least a couple other girls at Colby-Randall who do. So, obviously, I’m not telling you what to do with What’s-His-Nuts, but I think it’s my duty as your sister to warn you that if you do like Teddy McCormack, the clock is ticking.”

Brooke felt bad that she was, in essence, telling Molly to swoop before Arugula got there. But blood was thicker than smartwater, wasn’t it? Plus, Brooke had long ago made a vow never to stand in the way of true love if she could help it, and Grass-fed Half Orphan Makes Painful Choice to Leave Hayseed for Adequate Guitarist was much more romantic than Popular Genius Seduces Lab Partner for Fun.

Molly looked thoughtful. She drained the last of her coffee. And then she said the one thing Brooke wasn’t anticipating.

“Can we just go shopping now?”

Brooke jumped up, delighted. “We are related!” she crowed.

Besides nostalgia, one of the reasons Brooke liked the Farmers Market so much was because it was attached to The Grove, an outdoor shopping mall as artificial as the Farmers Market was authentic—it had fountains that exploded in Vegas-style choreographed routines set to pop music, and a tram that ran from one end of the shopping center to the other, like it was too hard for car-dependent Los Angelenos to walk more than a hundred feet. But the store selection was good and it was the best place in town for celebrity sightings. Brooke once saw Sean Devlin from Lust for Life at the Crate & Barrel and he was so cute in person that she’d had to sit on a Blake leather lounge chair for twenty minutes before she felt strong enough to walk. (She also bought the chair.)

In fact, as Molly and Brooke crossed the street toward the Banana Republic, there was a whole cluster of paparazzi shooting someone coming out of Barnes & Noble.

“Is that Rosario Dawson?” Molly wondered, pointing at the melee.

The clump of photographers surged toward them as Rosario fought her way to the parking garage. Brooke and Molly barely had time to leap out of the way before the shouting mob trampled them.

“It’s just Rosario Dawson, people,” Brooke grumbled at them. “Name one good movie she’s even made.”

A paparazzo stopped to laugh at this and promptly got bowled over by one of his colleagues. His camera went flying. Brooke deftly reached out and caught it by the strap, rescuing it from smashing on the sidewalk.

“Hey, thanks,” he said, retrieving it from Brooke’s outstretched arm. Then he peered at them both. “Wait a second, I know you two. You’re Brick Berlin’s kids. You hate each other.”

He whipped up his camera and snapped a picture. Brooke stared at him, dumbfounded.

“Come on, give me a smile,” he shouted. A few of his buddies at the tail end of the Rosario scrum stopped trotting along and looked over at them.

“What happened?” the first guy called out. “Didja kiss and make up?”

“How does it feel to have a sister?” another guy shouted as he jogged over to them. “What are you up to? Talk to us!”

Brooke froze on the spot. This had never happened to her before—at least, not without being elbowed out of the way for Molly. She’d imagined this exact situation a million times, but now it was here and all she could do was gape.

Molly pinched her arm.

“We just came from yoga,” Molly announced. “And now we’re shopping.”

Several more photographers abandoned Rosario’s trek to the parking garage and came over, cameras held aloft. Brooke turned her head toward Molly, then felt a surge of wild joy.

Thank God I did my hair for yoga this morning.

“Are you two getting along now?” someone in the back of the pack yelled.

Brooke pulled Molly closer to her, then angled herself slightly to the side, flipped her hair over her shoulder, and flashed a blinding smile.

“Having a sister is the best.” Brooke beamed. “I’ve wanted one my whole life.”

“Over here! To the right, Brooke! Molly, smile!”

“Brooke, over here! Give us one alone!”

She squeezed Molly and shook her hair out one more time, then stepped away. As Brooke ran through all the poses she’d seen other people do in magazines, she could see Molly grinning in her peripheral vision.

“Back together now! You girls look great!” the photographers yelled.

“Everything is great!” Brooke shouted at the crowd.

And, actually, it really was.