twenty-four

DRIVING HOME FROM THE GROVE, it took superhuman willpower for Molly not to laugh at Brooke, who was reacting to getting papped the way someone else might react to getting a MacArthur genius grant.

“It was just so thrilling!” Brooke bubbled. “I’m so honored to be representing our family like that! Daddy will be proud, right? Because we’re all bonded now? Besides, what were we supposed to do? Run? We really didn’t have a choice. We had to pose for them. I just hope I didn’t look too bedraggled after all that yoga. And four doughnuts. Oh, my God, do I look bloated?”

She turned to Molly with such a stricken expression, Molly couldn’t hold in her giggles any longer.

“You look beautiful,” she said, through her laughter. “I promise.”

Brooke started giggling, too. “Stop laughing at me!” she protested. “It was just so exciting. And so unexpected! I felt so powerful. And then Nordstorm was having that shoe sale? My horoscope was right. Today was a lucky day.”

Brooke chattered about her shoe purchases all the way home and up into their room, where she busied herself snapping Polaroids of them, then taping the pictures to the shoe boxes and filing them in the appropriate place in the closet.

Molly flung herself down on her bed. If shopping were an Olympic sport, Brooke would have been headed for the front of a Wheaties box. It was great fun to watch—Brooke could size up any store in ten seconds and blaze through it for the best stuff in under twenty minutes—and had made for a really entertaining Saturday. Even yoga class had been amusing. And, weirdest of all, being snapped by the paparazzi hadn’t been nearly as awkward as Molly’s first time—or second, or even third or fourth. Seeing Brooke so excited somehow made Molly feel less exposed. It was almost enjoyable.

This was a good day, Molly thought, folding her pillow underneath her neck. She couldn’t wait to tell Charmaine that Matthew McConaughey was just as freakishly bendy in person as when the paparazzi “accidentally” caught him doing shirtless yoga on the beach.

Brooke popped out of the closet and snapped a Polaroid of Molly.

“That picture is going to make some stellar blackmail material,” Molly laughed. “I think my eyes were crossed.”

“Constant vigilance,” Brooke chirped. “Now that we’re being papped, you’ll need it. I wonder when those pictures will show up on the Internet.”

Molly yawned and rolled over to look out the window. It was another gorgeous, cloudless day. “Do you want to go in the hot tub?” she asked. “I bet we can talk Stan into making us his famous virgin margaritas.”

“I can’t right now. I have to proofread the programs for the play,” Brooke said, all the pep seeming to drain right out of her. “I still have so much work to do on that thing. I think it’s finally coming together, though. Julie Newman’s accent sounds Welsh, but at least that’s better than having to explain why her character is from Moscow.”

Brooke braided and unbraided the same piece of hair three times. It didn’t take tarot cards and a BeDazzled turban for Molly to divine why she was suddenly so fidgety.

“It’s going to be great. Brick will be so proud of you,” Molly assured her. “You pulled this together in, like, no time at all.”

“Yeah, well, I just hope the studio doesn’t make him go scout the Titanic wreckage to see if they can use it in Avalanche! or something,” Brooke grumbled. “It’s the first lead role I’ve ever had, and it’d be nice to have a parent there.”

Molly chewed on the inside of her cheek for a second and then decided to go ahead and pick the scab.

“What about your mother?” she asked gingerly.

Brooke glared at her. “Are you new?” she asked. “I don’t even know where she is.”

“So send her an e-mail,” Molly said. “Send her all the e-mails. Let her have it and then tell her to be there for you. For once.”

“I can’t do that,” Brooke said.

“Why not?”

“Because…” Brooke’s voice trailed off. Molly could tell she was racking her brain. “Because there are limited tickets and I don’t have any extras.”

“Weak sauce,” Molly said, shaking her head. “I was sure you’d come up with something better than that—shopping-induced amnesia, at least.”

“Don’t push me,” Brooke said, sounding both defensive and a little worn out, a combination Molly was unfamiliar with hearing from her. “I’ll e-mail her when I’m ready.”

“And when will that be?” Molly asked. “When you’re thirty-five?”

“Please. By then I’ll have faked my own death to escape my enormous fame. She will be desperate to find me.”

“Joke all you want, but I’m serious,” Molly said. “There are a hundred things I wish I could say to my mother, but I can’t. You still can.”

“I can’t believe you’re playing the dead mother card,” Brooke said, sitting down on her bed with a thump. “This is so unfair. I am telling you right now that it will eventually stop working.”

“Fine. Instead of me going on and on about how you need to get everything off your chest before every opportunity is lost to the winds of time—”

“Boring.”

“—then how about we make a deal,” Molly finished. “You pull the trigger with your mother, and I’ll face this thing with Danny.”

Brooke sat up on her bed, intrigued. “I knew it! You want to dump Danny for Teddy. I’m so good. I called Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes way before the couch jumping.”

“Teddy has nothing to do with it,” Molly insisted, pretty sure that was true. “And it might not even be a dumping. But you were right, it’s not fair to Danny to pretend everything’s fine if I’m feeling ambivalent about whether this can work.”

“Wait, this is a terrible deal,” Brooke said, starting to sound vaguely panicky. “You’re doing something you have to do anyway, and I’ll get nothing but puffy eyes. I hate this plan.”

“You don’t know that,” Molly said gently. “Maybe you’ll get a mom. Whereas there’s no way I’m going to come out of my end of the bargain without things getting awkward.”

Brooke stared over at her laptop as if it had teeth and wanted to use them to drain her blood.

“I can’t,” she whispered.

Molly made a mental note to give Kelly Berlin a piece of her mind when the time came for them to meet—which at this rate seemed like it’d be the tenth of Never, so it was a pretty easy promise to make. Brick wasn’t perfect, but at least he hadn’t left and never looked back. Kelly’s selfishness was totally antithetical to the way Laurel had been, and it upset Molly on Brooke’s behalf. In this arena, at least, her sister needed a wingman.

“Do it, Brooke,” pressed Molly. “Send them. Tell her everything you’ve ever wanted to tell her. No regrets.”

“What if she never writes back?”

“Then you’ll have done everything you can do, and we’ll steal a bottle of Brick’s Champagne and plan a serious jihad.”

Silence. Molly decided to give Brooke some breathing room and went into the bathroom under the pretense of tweezing her eyebrows. Another lesson from being raised by two opinionated women like Laurel and her grandmother Ginger was that sometimes you just needed to stop yammering and let the other person process things. (She’d learned that because neither of them had ever stopped yammering.)

Molly killed time examining a pimple on her chin, which appeared to be running up the white flag of surrender, until she realized her hands were shaking a little. So she gave up and just stared at herself in the mirror. She still looked the same. But in just a month, everything about her had changed: bedroom, friends, school, Danny.

She felt like such a stereotype—the girl who gets a bit of distance from her boyfriend and suddenly decides she needs even more space. Especially because, if she was being honest, she liked the idea of being able to hang out with Teddy without feeling guilty when their skin accidentally grazed and it sent tingles down her spine. But Teddy really wasn’t the issue. Danny sending her a Slurpee and a note only made him her boyfriend on a technicality; the two of them avoiding conversations the way they had been lately, like they were afraid of what they might say, was getting unbearable. Molly wondered if, that night on her front stoop, they’d both subconsciously known they’d look back someday on her last night in Indiana and realize that was supposed to be their ending. It was dumb to move away for a fresh start if you didn’t actually give yourself one.

Of course, unless Brooke worked up the guts to send those e-mails—which didn’t seem terribly likely—Molly might be able to mull it over a little while longer. She could hear Laurel telling her to suck it up and stop it with the dithering, but Molly was more in a mood to give sensible advice than receive it.

She emerged from the bathroom and stopped short when she saw Brooke, ghostly pale, sitting at her computer. She looked like a scared little girl.

“I did it,” she said, her voice hollow. “I did it.”

Brooke stared at her Drafts folder. It hadn’t been empty in almost four years, and now there it was, terrifyingly blank. She hadn’t reread any of her e-mails, hadn’t changed a thing. She’d just hit Select All and then Send All.

It had been easy. That was the kicker. For years, she’d convinced herself that sending them was an impossible act that would push her mother away for good. But suddenly, after one deep breath and a brisk figurative shove from Molly, Kelly Berlin was about to get more than two hundred e-mails—a digital time capsule of Brooke’s life without her.

Molly looked just as stunned as Brooke felt.

“I called your bluff, didn’t I?” Brooke asked.

“Yep.” Molly grinned. “I’m so screwed. How do you feel?”

Brooke rested her elbow on the desk and cradled her chin in her palm. How did she feel? Jittery. Relieved. One of the toes in her right foot was numb from being crammed into four-inch heels most of last week.

“Free,” she finally said. “All these years I thought writing those lightened my load, but now I realize how heavy they really were.”

“That’s so Brick Berlin,” Molly said. “Quick, get out your BlackBerry and write it down.”

“Yes, it’d make a perfect Lifetime movie,” Brooke agreed. “I can hear the preview dude now: ‘Her secret burden… was ruining her posture.’ ”

“Well, I think it’s great,” Molly said. “And you never know—she might even write back.”

Brooke snorted. “I’m not holding my breath.” She paused. “Molly… thanks,” she said. “I think… whatever happens, I think it’s better that I did it.”

Molly just smiled and flipped open her biology textbook, turned on the TV, and cued up that day’s Lust for Life.

Brooke unplugged her laptop to carry it to her bed, the better to get a good viewing angle of the wedding of fashion magnate turned bar owner Klaus Wiggins and his loyal college roommate, Bucky. According to Soap Opera Digest, there would be elephants. But before she scooped up the computer, a new message popped into her in-box.

No way. She did not write back that fast.

Brooke crossed her fingers for luck, then loaded the mail screen.

The message was from Ginevra McElroy, that Hey! reporter itching for a story. But Brooke was done with all that now. She made a move to delete the message without even reading it, but then she noticed the subject line. It read, “RE: Molly Update.”

Brooke frowned. She hadn’t sent Ginevra anything since right after the party, and it definitely didn’t have that subject line.

She clicked on it.

Brooke’s heart froze.

Oh, shit.

As if floating above herself, she watched her finger click over to her Sent Mail folder and scroll down to the newer stuff. There it was, nestled between her “Dear Kelly” letters: a note to Ginevra McElroy, titled “Molly Update,” all about Danny, the sunflowers, and Teddy. With Arugula’s stealth photo attached.

Double shit.

“What’s wrong?” Molly asked. “Don’t you want to watch this? Klaus and Bucky are wearing matching fur turbans.”

“Oh, just… Jake and Jennifer, you know,” lied Brooke. “Be right there.”

But for the first time ever, fur turbans didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except how the hell she was going to get out of this one.