Everything Leads to You (7 page)

“This is gorgeous,” I say, because it is. The paper is the pattern of a night sky, panel after panel, with glowing stars forming constellations. It’s perfect for the little boy, who has an interest in science and whose room is shot primarily in night scenes.

She steps away and smiles at me. I allow myself to notice how good her arms look in her tank top, tan and strong but still unmistakably
girl
arms. And because the music room is finished and I knew that I wouldn’t be doing anything too hands-on today, I wore a skirt and a skimpy shirt to show off my girlishness, too.

“I’m mostly running errands today,” I tell her. “But I wanted to check it out. Since I couldn’t, you know, on Saturday.”

“That’s right,” she says. “You and Charlotte had a library party to attend.”

“We were actually doing something pretty interesting,” I say.

“I can imagine.” She turns back to her work and I watch her hands as they smooth down swirls and stars.

To the right is a bunk bed built out of light-colored wood.

“You built this?” I ask her, and she nods.

I climb the little ladder and sit on the top bunk. It would be so easy to forget that all around us people are working, moving planter boxes of trees to go on the opposite sides of windows, painting sets and assembling furniture, supervising and surveying and engaging in conversations. So easy, because here is a bunk bed and rumpled sheets, here is a model of a hot-air balloon floating from the ceiling, here is a white wall steadily becoming less white as Morgan applies panel after panel of deep blue wallpaper. It’s all a fantasy, so it’s easy, for a few minutes, to get lost in it.

“I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be on the top bunk,” I say, even though the idea has never occurred to me.

“And?”

“It’s great,” I say. “So cozy. You haven’t been up here?”

“Not since I finished building it.”

“Why don’t you join me?”

She smiles and shakes her head.

“Hey, what are you doing later?” I ask, trying to ignore Charlotte’s inevitable disapproval. I already had to explain myself about Saturday morning’s encounter.

“I have plans,” Morgan says.

“What kind of plans?”

“Mmm,” she says. “I don’t know if you want to hear about them.”

“Oh,” I say, and the glorious world of little boy’s bunk beds and hands smoothing stars and beautiful arms and short skirts disintegrates. I skip the ladder and hop down instead.

“Well, have fun.”

“Em,” she says. “I’m sorry if this is hard.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“No, really.” She sets down her sponge and leans against the bed, looking at me. “I really like you; I just can’t be tied down right now.”

“That’s such a cliché thing to say,” I tell her. “If I saw that in a script I would laugh.”

She shrugs. “It’s how I feel right now. When you’re ready to hang out as friends I would love that.”

My phone buzzes and I check the screen. It’s Charlotte texting,
I thought your sofa was green?

“Charlotte’s here,” I say. “I have to go.”

“Okay,” Morgan says. “Thanks for coming by. And my friend Rebecca might want to talk to you. I gave her your number. It’s about good things.”

“Sure,” I mutter, and head to the music room.

I see Charlotte as soon as I round the corner.

“Of course it’s green,” I say. “I’d call it, like, a cross between forest green and kelly green. What would you call it?”

“Um,” she says, “light gray?” And then she turns to look into the room and I turn with her.

My sofa is gone.

I spin away from her and out of the building until I’m in the bright sunshine of the lot with Charlotte behind me saying, “Emi, let’s just talk about this for a second. Let’s just take a moment to calm down.”

But all I can say is “Clyde fucking Jones,” because it’s
his
sofa in the place of my perfect one.

I storm through groups of smiling people and stern people and people talking on cell phones and carrying Starbucks cups and into Ginger’s building and past her secretary and into her office. She’s on the phone and holds up a finger for me to wait. So I stand there, in her perfectly decorated room, adorned with posters from all the famous movies she’s worked on, until she hangs up and says, “This must be about the music room.”

“What happened to my sofa? Did you see it? Wasn’t it perfect?”

She says, “It was a nice sofa. But we got so many amazing things that day,
together
, remember? You and me and Charlotte.”

“Of course I remember that day,” I say. “What does it have to do with my music room?”

She sighs as if she’s just so busy and I am so unreasonable.

“Emi, first, it isn’t
your
music room. You’ve done a really lovely job, but you are an intern and I am the production designer.”

“Yes,” I say. “I’m aware of our respective positions.”

“
Okay
,” Charlotte says, sweeping into the office, having apparently been hovering right outside the door. “I think it would be a good idea for Emi and me to take the afternoon off if that would be all right with you, Ginger. She’s been working really hard and didn’t get much sleep last night and, you know, things with Morgan are still a little rocky, so—”

“Fine,” Ginger says. “Go. Emi, tomorrow you’ll see that the couch complements your efforts beautifully.” But she says it coldly, with more edge than I’ve ever heard in her voice, and I start to worry about everything, because she’ll be my boss on
The Agency
, too, and I know that I’m just an intern. I’m easily replaceable. Maybe there are hundreds of geniuses of teenage decor. Maybe my niche isn’t even that special.

I follow Charlotte out of the office and the building and toward her car. She opens the passenger side for me and I tumble in.

“I just have to wrap up a couple things,” she says. “And then I’ll come back. Don’t go
anywhere
, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I can’t believe you talked to her that way.”

“I know. Me neither.”

She nods, satisfied, and shuts my door.

I get out my phone and try Toby.

A moment later, his voice rises above many other voices and music in the background.

“Hey, little sister.”

“Hey. Where are you?”

His face appears on my screen but the image is dark and grainy and I can barely see the curves of his face.

“Café,” he says. “London.”

“London. That’s far away.”

“Yeah,” he says. He leans closer to the camera; his face gets bigger and I can see him better. “They talk funny here.” He grins, leans back.

“Come back,” I say. “Come closer.”

He does.

“Hey, is something wrong?”

I nod and I feel my eyes well up and I wish so much that they wouldn’t. But it’s Toby and I know that if anyone will understand it will be him.

“My sofa,” I start, and shake my head because I need to pull myself together.

He waits. If I could see his face better I know that I would see concern, and I hate that he is so far away, and I hate that Morgan is going on a date tonight, and I hate that Los Angeles is full of so many miles and so many bars and so many people for her to be with instead of me.

“Oh, man,” he says before I’ve had to explain. “They went with something else?”

“It’s terrible,” I say. “It’s modern. And
gray
.”

“But, Em, you love modern.”

“Not for this. It isn’t right.”

“Gray,” he says. “Okay. Could be worse. What about throwing some pillows on it?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t want to
throw pillows on it
. I understand this scene. I understand why it’s important and what it should feel like, and I know what should be in the shot to make it feel the way it’s supposed to. And I found it. I looked so hard. I found it.”

“You still have the rest of the room, right? That Neutral Milk Hotel poster? You still have that, right? And the trophies. Those are classic.”

“I don’t want you to try to make me feel better,” I tell him. “I just want you to listen.”

I can see people getting up from a table behind him, people everywhere, moving around in the dark.

“Toby,” I say. “I don’t know if I want to do
The Agency
anymore.”

“What? No, wait a second. You’re really bummed right now. I totally get that. But just let yourself feel like that for a while and then let it go. Do you know how many times I’ve found locations I’ve known were perfect only to have the location manager say he wants something different? It sucks. I know it does. But it’s the way it works.”

“It’s Ginger,” I say. “She tells me she trusts me and that I can do whatever I want, and then when I’m not even there, without even talking to me about it, she just makes this change and ruins everything.”

“Not
everything
.”

“I don’t want to keep working with her. I want to work for myself.”

Toby clears his throat. He leans back in his chair.

Finally, he says, “This is how it works. You bust your ass. Not everything goes your way, and then, after a while, you get to that point. You get to make your own decisions and people look to you for approval on
their
work.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”

“You will move up in the studio,” he says. “I know you can do it. You just have to bite that tongue of yours and not let her see you so upset.”

“She already has.”

“Well, show her you’re over it.”

I nod.

“See this project through. See
The Agency
through. Then see where you are.”

“Okay,” I say, but my heart isn’t in it. There is this distance between us, and I can’t tell him everything I’m thinking, which is that I don’t know that I
want
to move up in the studio if working for the studio is going to be like this. If I can search for months and months in so many places, and then have all that work undone in a moment.

Charlotte appears by the driver’s side window.

“Charlotte’s escorting me off the lot,” I say.

“That bad?”

“Yeah,” Charlotte says, buckling her seat belt. “She told Ginger that she was ‘aware of their respective positions.’”

“Damn,” Toby says with a half smile, half grimace. “Go cheer her up, okay?”

“I’ll do my best,” Charlotte says.

~

As Charlotte drives us off the lot, she says, “I’m taking you to the canals.”

“That’s a good idea,” I tell her. “I love the canals.”

The canals are why Venice is called Venice, but not that many people know about them. Most people who don’t live here just head to Abbot Kinney for food and shopping, or the beach for the beach. But the canals are beautiful. They were designed by Abbot Kinney himself, and they are lined with houses, so when you walk along the canals, you’re basically walking through people’s front yards.

We park and cross over a footbridge and begin our mazelike stroll.

To our left is water; to our right are the illuminated living rooms and kitchens of the insanely wealthy and stylish.

“I couldn’t live here,” Charlotte says. “These people are so unselfconscious.”

That’s where Charlotte and I diverge, because I could totally live here. What’s the point of decorating your home if nobody gets to see it? But on a night like tonight I understand where Charlotte’s coming from, because I wish more than anything I could find someplace dark and quiet and away from civilization.

“Clyde fucking Jones,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m so sorry I didn’t get to see the room the way you planned it.”

“I didn’t even get pictures!” I moan. “It looks so stupid with that couch.”

“It doesn’t look stupid—it’s a really nice couch—but it also doesn’t look like a cast-off piece of furniture.”

“No,” I say, “it doesn’t. It looks like a four-thousand-dollar Adrian Pearsall sofa, because that’s what it is. I thought this movie was supposed to be about a normal middle-class family.”

“At least Kira gets to lose her virginity on a really nice piece of furniture.”

“It doesn’t even matter,” I say. “It changes the whole mood of everything. Ginger can have her mid-century-modern teen sex scene. I was going to give her a fairy tale.”

We cross another bridge and I have to pause to stare into the house in front of us because it’s just so amazing. The entire side is glass. A spiral staircase rises from the living room to a lofted bedroom. In the gleaming, silver kitchen, just a few feet from us, a man is cooking dinner.

“I’m really hungry,” I say.

“Me, too,” Charlotte says.

We wander farther.

“Morgan’s going on a date tonight.”

Charlotte sighs. “And
how
do you know this?”

“I kind of ran into her today. I think my life might be falling apart.”

“A little.”

“She keeps flirting with me.”

“She’s a terrible person.”

“I don’t think so.”

“That’s the problem.”

“So what are you going to do about my brother?”

I swear, she stumbles a little when I say it.

“What do you mean?”

“You should just tell him how you feel.”

“Em,” she says. “That was a long time ago.”

“Nice try,” I tell her.

She’s referring to this time in sixth grade when she wrote me a note during third period telling me she had a crush on an older boy. She was trying to be subtle but I already knew. Everything Charlotte feels is obvious to everyone. I wrote her a note back that said,
Does he happen to be in 10th grade? Does he happen to share my DNA?
which I thought was clever, considering we were in science class at the time.

She blushed and never wrote me back.

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately,” I say. “Life is short. People die. I mean, think of all those obituaries we read. Think of Clyde and Caroline. You should talk to Toby. He hasn’t had a girlfriend in a while. He’s probably just waiting for you to graduate and now you’ve graduated.”

“I’m really hungry.”

“Just think about it,” I say.

“I’m out of money or else I would want tacos.”

“I wouldn’t mind, you know,” I say. “It wouldn’t make things weird between us. I’ve had, like, six
years
to get used to the idea.”