Larissa shushed her again, raising an eyebrow as she gave the wall of her son’s room the fisheye. She knew Tessa was kidding but said, “No way. Been there, done that. Not my thing.”
“Well, it might be mine! So what happened? I mean, are you, like, seeing each other? Are you all, like, seeing each other?”
“No! She fucking fired me!” said Larissa with a forced laugh.
“What!”
“The day after, she totally ghosted me.”
“Dusty? Or wifey?”
“Dusty. When we wrapped, she made it very clear.”
“Oh my God.”
“Can you please stop saying ‘Oh my God’?”
“You mean, you guys fooled around the night before she wrapped?”
“Yep.”
“I totally think I remember that! I mean, that there was something — I think I totally actually think I saw that happen—she walked right past you, right? At the cemetery?”
“It was totally kinda creepy. It was, like, mean.”
“Rissa, fuck her. Again, if you can hahaha! No, but seriously. Okay. Do you know what you have to do? Do you know what you totally have to do? You have to, like, blog about it. Or go on Twitter or Reddit, whatever the fuck that is. Payback’s a motherfucker.”
“Tessa, I can’t.”
“If for no other reason than to fuck with Derek.”
“That’s not really me.”
“But why not? It could be you, why can’t you? You have to!”
She adamantly shook her head. “I’d never work in this town again.”
“Who are you, Jennifer Aniston? It’s not like you’re working now, my friend. And this could lead to work — I mean, if you put it out there in the social media. Fucking Instagram and Meerkat it! Periscope it or whatever; my daughter’ll totally help you! Larissa, I am so serious. Or, like, all you need to do is write one of those, like, little essays—like an op-ed for Huff/Post50! Or Jezebel or wherever.”
“You read Huff/Post50?”
“Fuck yeah. And the AARP magazine too, all that shit.”
“You’re insane.”
“Just do it!”
“And what about Rafaela?”
“What about her?”
“There’s, like, a shame factor. You know, that her mom…”
“Oh please. Kids are totally fucking blasé about that shit. I have two words: Kendall and Kylie. I rest my case.”
“Well, if I do write something, I’d have to wait. Her mom just died.”
“Probably in a threesome with that cunt and Allegra.”
“Tessa, that’s terrible!”
“You fucking have to, Riss. It’s not like it’s going to hurt her career. No one’s going to be shocked—”
“If no one’s going to be shocked, then why should I do it?”
“For you. She wants everyone to believe she’s a dyke saint, that she’s so fucking above it all, but in the end she’s just a user and a typical Hollywood bullshit power-tripper. Do it for you! And oh my God, don’t you know how fucking hot it would be? You’d get so much attention. It’s total reality-show shit! I’ll tell Mister Billion to talk it up to Lisa Vanderpump!”
“Don’t you dare!”
“Fuck Derek and fuck Dusty Wilding—”
“Already did.”
“What was it like!”—in a flash, she went from rage to naked need to know, and they both thought that was the most hilarious thing. “I’m totally serious. I totally want details! I want to know how it fucking smelled and who came when and how many hundreds of times!” Larissa couldn’t stop laughing. Tessa, sobered by her devilish curiosity, clasped her friend’s hands and stared into her eyes like a woman about to ask a psychic the burning question of her life.
“Tell me! How. Was. It?”
“Pretty fuckin’ great,” said Larissa, with a seraphic grin. “Like, off the charts, major earthquake great. Like, insane.”
“Oh my God.”
—
Driving over to Hollywood to see his dad, Tristen was all nerves.
There’d been so much drama around the divorce. Derek tried to hide the existence of the twenty-three-year-old slut from Rafaela but she found out by overhearing one of their mom’s phone rants. The old man went ballistic, even though he knew he was officially fucked. Locked in a perennial war with his father — a war whose origin mystified him — Tristen lately adopted the strategy of vibing to Derek that he was judgment-free, thereby forging a truce, or at least waving the white flag of ceasefire. It wasn’t in Tristen’s nature to take a moral position anyway, even if he hadn’t been involved in a relationship mirroring that of his dad and the ho who practically shared his birthday.
Anyhow, he didn’t give a shit who Derek climbed in bed with. (He’d called him by his name since middle school, when he’d been ordered to — which creeped his little sister out, inspiring Rafaela’s contempt for Tristen, not their father.) He’d only seen him a few times since the breakup; Derek would get in touch if he had a particularly thorny PC or coding issue. Tristen felt warm and fuzzy that his dad seemed to trust him with his personal shit, in that Derek was well aware of his son’s malevolent online history.
One of the puzzles of his life was determining the exact moment Derek began to hate him. There had been good times, though it felt like a hundred years ago. In Hawaii once, when he was nine, he remembered how they both started laughing, and when his mom asked what was so funny, he and Derek just looked at each other and kept busting up and Tristen could tell it delighted her, like she thought it was a good thing, a nice thing that she was being excluded from the sacred, mischievous fellowship of fathers and sons. And it was a good thing; it was good and it was new. A good, new, special thing… Then there was that time in the hospital — was he six? — when some weird infection swelled up one of his balls to the size of a mini watermelon and Derek sat bedside, feeding him grapes he’d put in the freezer the night before. They got warm in his mouth really fast, like sweet frozen marbles, and his dad kept them coming. All had been well with the world…
The receptionist told him to wait.
The editing bay of the YouTube reality show Mental Real Estate (featuring eccentric houses) was in a suite of post-production offices on Gower.
Derek was a Tesla freak and Tristen wanted to show him the hybrid. Not that one had much to do with the other. Anyhow. He knew he shouldn’t have come without a heads-up but hoped the nature of the surprise would short-circuit his dad’s knee-jerk pissed-offedness. When he finally emerged, he looked like some sick, emaciated bull entering the ring. It was pantshit scary.