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  For our dads, whom we love very much

  one

  “YOU WERE SO GOOD in that movie. Talking dogs are my favorite.”

  Max McCormack felt a snicker bubbling up, like a secret, and willed it to die. Famous people—or in this case, a famous person’s groupie wearing a top so small it would embarrass a bikini—were so reliably, deliciously dim.

  “What was your line again?” the blonde asked, scooting so close to the guy that she was practically in his lap.

  “Bow-wow-wowza,” he boomed.

  Molly Dix’s foot found Max’s underneath the table and began applying pressure, trying to shatter her focus. Max barely blinked. Molly, you amateur. They’d been friends for six months now; she should know Max’s boots would be steel-toed.

  Max refocused her eyes on an empty space across the L.A. eatery’s sprawling patio and took a steadying breath. The rules of the game were simple: First to break paid the breakfast check. Max never broke—which was convenient, since she was broke—and she certainly wasn’t going to start now. She assumed an expression of supremely blithe indifference and saw Molly’s shoulders start to shake. Victory is mine, she thought triumphantly.

  “Hahahaha! That’s, like, the best catchphrase!” gushed the girl. “It’s better than, like… what’s that one part from that thing with the guy?”

  “ ‘You talkin’ to me?’ ” the guy crowed in a terrible Robert De Niro impression.

  “Right!” the girl trilled. “You’re totally the Al Pacino of dogs!”

  Molly’s laugh caught in her throat, but she managed to turn it into an outrageous coughing fit. The lovebirds in question shot them both a dirty look, then moved a whopping one table away, as if to say, Stop watching. Except, please don’t.

  Max sat back in her chair and grinned at Molly. “Still undefeated,” she said in a low voice. “Too bad for you that you’re the only person I know who gets up early enough to eat with me.”

  Molly shook her head, amazed, and propped a Nike-clad foot on the chair to her left. “That one was impossible. I don’t know how you didn’t lose it.”

  “Years of practice,” Max said. “Have you noticed the people at our school?”

  That Max wholeheartedly approved of gawking at the rich and famous would have surprised her classmates at posh Colby-Randall Preparatory School, the majority of whom were children of celebrities, celebrities’ agents, or celebrities’ agents’ cousins (or, at the very least, deludinoids who thought they were one miniskirt at the supermarket away from being discovered). Most of them knew Max only as the snarky green-haired girl who lived in their peripheral vision. But to Max, people-watching was the city’s best free entertainment, and giving L.A.’s celebrities what they clearly wanted—attention—was a deliciously perverse way of paying it forward: Be careful what you wish for, fools.

  Curling herself into a little ball on the chair—at five-two, this wasn’t hard—Max mused to Molly, “I figured that living with a guy as famous as Brick Berlin would give you an ironclad poker face.”

  “Yeah, but my dad doesn’t usually woo people at the breakfast table. Thank God,” Molly said, pulling her hair into a ponytail. “But I’m still totally awkward whenever somebody famous comes for dinner. You saw me after Robert Downey Jr. brought over that Iron Man Bundt cake. I went catatonic.”

  Complicating Max’s pro-gawking worldview was the fact that Molly, Max’s best friend since the fall, was the until-recently secret daughter of the world’s biggest movie star (both professionally and physically: Brick’s biceps were like pythons). But Molly was different. She hadn’t even known about Brick until last summer, right before she moved to California from Indiana; even then, she never courted notoriety, and so—other than a few accidental incidents after she’d arrived—for the most part, it didn’t court her. Whereas people like the Pacino of Pooches over there went begging. It was a clear distinction.

  “We might have to make this harder—like, force you to keep a straight face while standing on your head or something,” Molly said, watching the couple take photos of themselves sipping from the same latte. “What is this, fifteen straight wins?”

  “Sixteen,” Max corrected her. “If this were an Olympic sport, I’d be on a Wheaties box.”

  “Yes! You’d be the Michael Phelps of eavesdropping.”

  “The endorsement deals would definitely solve some of my problems.” Max sighed.

  Sometimes Max thought Molly had invented this game as a way of springing for breakfast without getting Max up in arms about accepting charity. Max appreciated the gesture too much to fight it. Plus, Molly’s Brick Berlin–funded black Amex was easily up to the task of weekly eleven-dollar coffee-and-pastry jaunts, whereas Max’s bank account contained a whopping $86 and change. L.A. was not the best city to live in with parents who believed in self-sufficiency and the value of menial labor.

  But what Max never told Molly was that their game mostly functioned for her as a small daily affirmation. It was exhausting, and a tad demoralizing, living in a place where every third person thought he or she was the next big talent, and thus ignored you if you didn’t look like you could buy a screenplay, buy their screenplay, and/or make them a star. (Nobody ever confused Max McCormack, with her neon bob and wardrobe occasionally held together by safety pins, for a Somebody.) So these eavesdropping sessions were a pleasant reminder that no matter how bored or poor Max was—or how much she dreaded going to school and hearing her classmates weep that life without the latest Louis Vuitton simply wasn’t worth living—things could always be worse: She could be that girl, writhing on some guy’s lap just because he had three platinum records. Seeing the stereotype in action was so unappealing that Max felt like the universe was validating her efforts to remain as disengaged from her schoolmates and surroundings as possible.

  The prospect of an entire summer away from the ridiculousness of Los Angeles was the only thing keeping Max sane. NYU, NYU, NYU, she repeated to herself, like a mantra.

  “You’re going to shred that thing before you even fill it out,” Molly said, interrupting her train of thought. Max looked down at the notebook propped up on her lap. The corner of a loose page was poking out, and she’d been absentmindedly fiddling with it so intently that it had practically disintegrated.

  “If I ever fill it out,” Max said, sighing. “My writing sample is currently a three-word essay that says, ‘NYU Writing Sample.’ ”

  “Give it time,” Molly said, looking sympathetic. “Writer’s block can’t last forever, right?”

  “I guess we’ll find out.” Max fished around in her bag for a pen, then wrote

  McCORMACK, MAXINE E.

  “There. If this were the SATs I’d be halfway to a passing grade.”

  Molly chuckled and checked her watch. “We need to jet,” she said. “You’re going to be late, and I have a meet in half an hour in Santa Monica.”

  “Ugh. I would seriously rather run twenty miles with your cross-country team than deal with Dennis today,” Max said, quickly shoving her notebook into her bag. “I think he invented something new last night. The kitchen smelled like evil.”

  Max sometimes wished she could borrow Molly’s old life in Indiana, where everyone had part-time jobs at
nice, normal places like Barnes & Noble or Baskin-Robbins. Instead, she was working for a man whose vocation, as he loftily called it, was making artisanal meat substitutes, which he believed would save the world’s animal population and win him a Nobel Prize (Max caught him practicing an acceptance speech in the employee lounge—aka the utility closet he’d outfitted with a futon and a sink). When his restaurant, Fu’d, first opened a few months ago, Dennis’s “tofu arts” were confined to basic tofurkey and veggie patties, but after some success with something he called Fauxrk Chops, he’d morphed into a mad fake-meat scientist. The smell associated with his calling was less intoxicating than simply toxic; Max was pretty sure it was only a matter of time before Dennis’s fifteen minutes of fame ran out and the FDA quarantined the place.

  “Good luck,” Molly said. “I’ll be thinking of you when Coach Petit is screaming at me to feel the burn.”

  Max gave Molly a half-salute farewell and jaywalked across the street, bursting through the front door just as her boss was slinking out of the back to give his speech about the day’s specials.

  “Thank you for joining us,” Dennis sneered, rolling up his stained white sleeves over an arm tattoo that read FERGALICIOUS in cursive. His three-inch-tall bleached Mohawk looked limp and sticky. “So the soup today is Hearty of Lentil with Faux-cetta, and we have a new sandwich that I want you to push-push-push. It’s a croque-monsieur.” He paused for what he thought was dramatic effect, but which actually was just irritating. “And it’s made with real toe ham.”

  All of Dennis’s nonmeats had asinine mashed-up names. But even though Max’s head knew he’d said toham, her ears (and churning stomach) heard only toe ham, and the stuff Dennis was waving around certainly smelled like his feet had something to do with its origins.

  Dennis narrowed his beady brown eyes. “I take it from your face that you have thoughts, Max?” he said.

  You need the money. NYU. NYU. NYU.

  “Um, no. No thoughts. Just daydreams, sir,” she finally said. “I was, uh, imagining whether the toham croque would be more divine with veganeddar or notzarella.”

  Dennis snorted. “Cute. Watch the attitude,” he said, flipping the slice of toham at her. It landed with a smack against her bare forearm. “It scares the customers. Now get this place ready to go—we open in five.”

  The meat slithered off Max and onto the floor with a squish, like reptilian bologna. Max’s skin crawled so fast she thought it might escape.

  “Right, like you’re the scary one,” whispered her coworker Pete as they watched Dennis storm back out behind the café’s counter.

  “Don’t speak too soon,” Max said, swiping the toham off the floor and dangling it in front of Pete’s nose. “I’m holding weaponized lunch meat, and now I know how to use it.”

  Pete fiddled nervously with the ring on his pointer finger. “At least you don’t have to make the sandwiches.” He made a mournful sound. “This is not what I moved to L.A. for. I am totally wasting my face back here.”

  He disappeared into the kitchen with a sigh. Max took her post behind the sandwich counter, rested her chin on her fist, and gazed at the café’s black-and-white checkered floor, the charming wicker chairs parked at gleaming glass tables, and the painted script above the door that read ALL FU’D IS GOOD FOOD. This isn’t what Hell had looked like in her imagination. In fact, when she’d read on Eater LA that a new meatless restaurant was opening up on trendy Third Street, it had sounded like an excellent place to make a few bucks. Max had been a vegetarian most of her life, and apart from being one of the only places hiring, Fu’d was conveniently just far enough south of Colby-Randall to feel removed from its social orbit. But within three weeks of being hired, two things happened to dampen her outlook: Dennis made her eat “twicken”—a tofu-wheat chicken substitute that tasted even worse than it sounded—and two actresses from the new 90210 got photographed snacking on the bacon-flavored yam jerky (which, admittedly, was delicious; Dennis was way better with vegetables). Within days, Fu’d was on the map, full of both celebs who wanted to look socially conscious and their pseudostalkers with very nosy cell-phone cameras. But the café’s newfound notoriety also piqued the interest of Max’s trend-obsessed classmates, most of whom regarded her with a blend of confusion and horror—to them, “having a job” was slang for getting their noses done.

  “Yo!”

  Great. Here they come now.

  Chaz Kelly and four of his burly Colby-Randall football teammates loped up to the counter, the chains clipped to their low-riding jeans rattling like spooked snakes.

  “What up, Kermit! Got any steak up in here?” Chaz boomed.

  Max placed her palms flat on the mint-green Formica, as if summoning whatever Zen it might possess. “Brilliant, Chaz,” she said, tipping up her head so that she could see his face, which was a good six feet, five inches off the ground, as round as a soccer ball and about as empty. “Your wit is matched only by your literacy.”

  Chaz frowned. “You’re so queer, Kermit,” he said, flicking her hair. “Gimme a Coke. And don’t get any of your head mold in it.”

  Chaz’s football buddies all started chortling and punching his extensive biceps, onto which were tattooed smaller replicas of those exact biceps. Max gritted her teeth and turned to face the guy who stepped ahead of them in line. Her amber-flecked eyes met a warm pair of deep blue ones. Max’s breath caught in her throat a little bit, just like it did every day, just like it had when she was in eighth grade and Jake Donovan had glanced at her while giving a book report on Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. She’d been so hypnotized by his beauty that she barely heard him saying how bummed he was to learn the title didn’t refer to a bunch of underwater sports teams.

  “Sorry about Chaz,” Jake said. “He’s my best offensive lineman, but he’s kind of…”

  “Offensive?” Max finished for him. “No kidding. It’s a miracle that he’s mentally capable of recognizing the color green.”

  Jake seemed apologetic. “His helmet breaks a lot,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’re not going to be here very long. Chaz is obsessed with Selena Gomez, and he read that she eats here sometimes, so he’s scoping it out.”

  “How romantic,” Max said, peering around at Chaz trying to use his car key to slice a hole in the knee of his two-hundred-dollar True Religions. “What should I get for them? We only serve locally sourced organic teas and tisanes.”

  “What’s a tisane?” Jake asked.

  “I have no idea,” Max confessed.

  “I’ll just tell Chaz it’s organic Gatorade,” he said, slapping some bills onto the counter. “Keep the change.”

  As Jake headed off to join his teammates, Max allowed herself a tiny smile. Despite the fact that she’d been crushing on him for years, Jake hadn’t even learned her name until after she’d given him a pep talk before last fall’s school production of My Fair Lady. Now, if they weren’t quite friends, they were definitely friends-adjacent. Which made Max feel slightly less pathetic. There was nothing more obvious than the spunky, unpopular girl having the hots for the quarterback. But secretly liking one of your friends (adjacent)? Way less like the plot of an old Freddie Prinze Jr. movie.

  Max rang Jake’s purchase through the register and put his change in the tip jar. She let her hand linger a second, wishing she could stuff the generous twelve-dollar surplus in her pocket. Despite working nearly every day after school and every Saturday for the last four months, she was still well short of what she needed for NYU. But everyone at Fu’d split tips—well, unless you were Dennis. Last week, when that bony girl from Frigid Valley had come in, Max sold her a plate of carrots and then watched as the girl did nothing but stare at it for ten minutes before slapping a Benjamin on the table and announcing that she was stuffed. Dennis had swiped the bill without a word. Two hours later, Max was at the In-N-Out drive-thru sinking her teeth into her first cheeseburger in six years. It was delicious. It tasted like spite.

  “Kermit!” Chaz yelled
. “What’s taking so long? It’s just a Coke, dude.”

  Dennis burst out of the kitchen and poked Max hard in the back.

  “What did you do?” he demanded. “Never mind—I don’t want to hear it. Just go clean out the grease traps in the tofunnator. Now.”

  Chaz made the “Oooooh” sound universal to high school boys who liked getting people in trouble. Max wanted to protest, but fighting with Dennis was always a losing battle. With a deep breath, she shoved her way into the kitchen. The smell of body odor, stale tofu, and lemon Pine-Sol hit her in the face so hard she broke into a coughing fit.

  NYU. NYU. NYU.

  It wasn’t working.

  two

  The warm gun lay next to her body. Blood streaked toward the front door, which was locked from the inside. As Ileana struggled to sit up, she realized two things: She hadn’t shot the gun, and she wasn’t bleeding. And she was in a story I don’t know how to finish. So, three things.

  Max smacked the delete key and leaned back in her chair, picking at the stud in her upper ear.

  “Ooooh, I like this one. It’s for a ‘bookeeper’ with great communication skills,” said Molly with a snicker from across the room. (After the day’s disastrous shift, Max had called her over for an emergency job-hunting session.) “What this woman actually needs is a proofreader, although I love the idea of you running around locking up all her old boyfriends.”

  Max grunted.

  Mack Duncan stared at the spleen on the floor. It looked like a giant slug and smelled like it had been cooking in the heavy South Florida heat for about a week and oh my God this was on CSI: Miami last week and it ended with him saying “a murder most ob-spleen” aaaaaaaaaaargh

  The application wasn’t due until May—the program’s founder was a Colby-Randall alum who mandated that a spot be held each year for a student of his alma mater’s choosing—but Max had been trying for weeks now to churn out a good writing sample. Applicants for New York University’s creative writing apprenticeship program will submit an original work or essay of no fewer than three thousand words, demonstrating the ability to develop compelling characters, plot, and tone, the instructions read. So far, Max had started, and erased, about thirteen stories whose characters, plot, and tone made her want to puke all over her keyboard. It was so much easier writing stuff for school or scribbling bits and pieces in her spiral-bound notebooks, piles of which were shoved under her bed for posterity (or to give everyone something really amusing to do at her funeral, when she was too dead to be mortified). But this was the first thing she’d ever written that actually counted for something, beyond a letter grade scrawled on the corner of the page next to another one of Ms. Perkins’s stains of dubious origin. The last one smelled like Thai curry.