Page 113 of Anyone But the Superstar

Lowering the plastic teapot to the table, Mary straightens her helmet. ‘Why don’t you just talk to Elizabeth?’

Wide, brown eyes have never made me feel so small or so dumb.

And I can’t help but think about what my mother said to me on our last phone call, and the advice she always gave me, whether it was in reference to cooking, acting or life – ‘Simple is best.’

‘But simple is boring,’ Chase complains.

Ignoring him, I continue to think out loud. ‘Elizabeth doesn’t like flash.’

Alice and Bell nod in tandem.

‘She is completely unimpressed by materialistic things.’

Thomas and Chase join their wives in nonverbal agreement, if grudgingly.

‘And above all,’ I think back to the letter she wrote me, ‘with everything Elizabeth’s been through, she just wants to know she’s loved.’

Mary raises her teacup to me and I hurry over to grab the extra fourth cup. Lifting it, pinky out, I clink it to hers. ‘You’re a genius.’

Looking very much like her father, one eyebrow disappears behind the top of her helmet. ‘Yes. I am.’

I’m about to get up and go do what I should’ve done much, much earlier, when Mike’s meow pauses me in my tracks.

Placing my teacup back on its plastic and heart-stickered saucer, I stretch my fist out towards Mike. He stares at me, as if assessing my worthiness, before touching his paw to it.

‘I’ll be damned,’ Chase breathes.

You know you’re stupidly in love when you find hope inadvice from a nine-year-old dressed as an astronaut ballerina and reassurance in a fist-bump from a hairless pussy.

Liz

Fuck a duck.

I forgot how hard this stuff is to get off. Scrubbing harder, I rub the make-up remover wipe across my face, my skin feeling both abused and rejuvenated with each pass.

Back at home, my skin isn’t the only thing feeling rejuvenated. While I really wanted to give Camilla the benefit of the doubt, I wasn’t all that surprised when she laughed at my offer to let her choose to be a better person.

Tossing the completely covered wipe into the trash, I reach for another. There’s probably some metaphor to be found in my appearance—half my face make-up-free, half looking airbrushed and contoured to perfection, dressed in a plain white robe. Maybe something about the year I spent trying to decide between my past and present selves.

Laughing at myself, I attack the eye still caked with make-up, pausing when it hits me that my metaphorical thought wasn’t followed by Stanley’s voice in my head, berating me for having such new-age, hippie-like thoughts.

Progress.

Knock. Knock.

I start, poking my eye with my make-up-wipe-covered finger. ‘Jesus, fuck, my eye!’

‘Merde.’

A hand touches my arm and I slap it away.

‘Desculpa, meu amor.’

‘Who the hell?’ Squeezing my injured eye shut, I try seeing out of my other eye, watering from the sting of smeared make-up.

‘It’s me, Felix.’

Even though his voice, language and blurry shape all add up to that being true, my brain is having trouble acknowledging that the man reaching for me is, in fact, Felix Jones.