Take Two, Birdie Maxwell

1

BIRDIE

Birdie Robinson arrived on her childhood street much like she had left: unceremoniously, with little fanfare, and certainly with no red carpet. She dropped her leather duffel, stuffed only with clothes designed for a wellness retreat (she had in fact packed for a wellness retreat), and spun toward the stop sign on the corner. But her driver and his Escalade were long out of view, and she suspected sending him away was the first of many regrets she'd have about coming home. She dipped her head back and stared up toward the cloud-covered night sky. The air smelled just as she remembered her hometown's night air smelling: like threatening snow, like chopped firewood, but also like the neighbors had left out rotting garbage. Barton was complicated in that way, and certainly, it was complicated for Birdie.

She squeezed her eyes shut and groaned aloud. She hadn't meant to end up here, both in this moment and, well, ever again. She had fled New York earlier that morning, having booked a last-minute trip to the private, exclusive spa outside Los Angeles, the privacy being the most critical criterion for her choice. But as she ran from the paparazzi who greeted her at LAX and threw herself into the waiting car, she found herself directing the driver here. To Barton. A speck in the middle of California. She hadn't been home in four years, hadn't thought to call her father and stepmother, hadn't thought to text her younger sister, Andie, or DM her best friend, Mona, whose house Birdie could see from her spot on the sidewalk if she were to open her eyes.

So now she was moored to the sidewalk in front of her parents' bilevel home as the temperature dipped into the thirties, dressed in a caftan meant for a day spa, and talking herself into ringing the doorbell.

She heard her phone vibrate in her bag. Sydney, her agent, or Imani, her publicist. She should tell them she bolted, that she would miss their lunch tomorrow at the spa to "remaneuver" their next steps. That was Imani's word. "Well, the apology video didn't go exactly as planned, so let's meet up and discuss a remaneuver." Birdie was relieved Imani had found a new word for it. She'd heard her publicist say pivot at least several hundred times in the past few weeks, and it was all Birdie could do to stop herself from proposing a drinking game. Every time Imani says pivot, we take a shot.

Needless to say, she'd be hospitalized for alcohol poisoning.

Birdie was tired of the news alerts on her phone blaring about the downfall of America's Sweetheart. She was tired of being a piñata for gossip sites, tired of getting dragged over hot coals because she couldn't take Sebastian Carol's on-set bad behavior for even one more second, which was the only reason she threw a fit in the first place. Sebastian Carol, of the famed Carol brothers duo, spawn of the famous director Milo Carol, was known to be handsy. He was known to leer at breasts and to entice actresses back to his trailer, all under the guise of bolstered parts, better lighting, future roles in blockbusters. Birdie knew this when she signed on. She also knew that Sebastian was complicated for her for plenty of other reasons: namely, the long-secret and very doomed relationship she'd had for five years with his brother. But the studio insisted on Sebastian for the sequel to Birdie's biggest box office hit. Frankly, the industry's biggest rom-com box office hit of the decade. The only thing that trumped Birdie's star power was the Carol brothers' star power, so she said yes. And then, when she watched him massaging one more day player's shoulders, she lost it.

How was she to know that someone was filming? How was she to know that while she was defending the honor of women everywhere, the public would choose to side with Sebastian? (This she really should have known.) How was she to know that the day player might give an interview to TMZ saying it was a perfectly innocuous massage? Or that Sebastian would threaten to quit if Birdie wasn't fired. Since Love Grenade couldn't work without Birdie or without Sebastian (according to the studio), they shuttered the film entirely. Rumors grew into legend and legends became truths, and soon, so, so quickly, Birdie Robinson, star extraordinaire, was hurtling toward her downfall. A dickhead director and a misogynistic media and a publicist who couldn't stop saying pivot: a toxic unexpected combination that led Birdie to the rash decision to flee to Barton after so many years away.

Birdie steeled herself again to ring the doorbell. She could probably swipe the key that was always under the doormat, because Barton was not the type of place where you worried about your neighbors stealing keys and then stealing your television, but she didn't want to startle her parents. Walking in unannounced after four years. Her father and Susana were professors at the state university about twenty miles south. Two brainy peas in a pod, Susana used to say, and Birdie, too young to understand that she didn't mean this literally, always envisioned them as green and round and pressing up against each other, which at the time she found disgusting. Birdie didn't want to stride in the door after so much time away and find them naked, which had happened when she was thirteen after she told them she was sleeping over at Mona and Elliot's-Mona's twin brother-three houses down, but forgot her toothbrush and returned home to retrieve it.

So the doorbell it was.

She bounced her head and talked herself up the stoop. Birdie the actor could talk herself into anything, become just about anyone. It was the only thing she was truly excellent at in life: assuming a role and inhabiting it until the director yelled cut. Sometimes long after that too. So now, how difficult could it be? It had to be better than being chased by photographers whenever she left her loft in Tribeca for the past three weeks. It had to be better than reading about the rumors that Page Six was inventing that were more fictional than half the scripts she read. Birdie Robinson hates her neighbor's pugs! Birdie Robinson doesn't tip her barista! Birdie Robinson is America's Sweetheart no longer! For the record, Birdie loved pugs, tipped well, and, if Sydney and Imani had anything to do with it, would be America's Sweetheart until she hit menopause, possibly longer, because then they'd issue a press release about ageism and shame the audience until they relented. Pivot. Birdie truly loathed the word, but it was hard not to admit that her team was good at it, right up until they were fucking awful at it. She knew the apology video was a mistake. She knew she didn't sound sincere, couldn't bring herself to sound sincere, but Imani snapped her fingers and told her it was handled. She trusted them that it was. It was not.

Birdie's hand was shaking as she pressed her finger to the doorbell. She heard it chime in the house and waited for the thunder of footsteps, imagining her father, probably in some professorial tweed blazer, swinging it open and bear-hugging her in delight. She tilted her ear toward the door. She heard no thundering footsteps.

Birdie would explain that she just needed a place to hide out for a week, until everyone realized that they'd gotten the whole situation wrong.

She pressed the doorbell again.

Finally, there were footsteps behind the door, and then Birdie heard the bolt unlock, then the latch. She calmed and told herself that of course she could return home after so long. Of course everyone would be more or less mostly happy to see her.

The door swung open, and it took Birdie at least two solid seconds to see that it was not her father and not Susana in front of her. It was her sister, Andie, who had a pageboy haircut that rendered her unrecognizable from the last time Birdie had seen her, but still made her no less beautiful. The type of beauty that Birdie had to work for, had to be lasered over, toned down, shaved to the quick and tortured with daily personal training sessions for.

Andie's jaw dropped, and then her eyes narrowed.

Birdie started to speak but Andie was faster.

"Oh my god," she said. "Oh. My. Fucking. God."

And then she slammed the door right in Birdie's face.

2


BIRDIE

Birdie knew this was a minor setback. She and Andie were not on the best of terms, it was true, but she didn't think that she deserved to have the door slammed right in her face and then dead-bolted.

She crouched down and lifted the welcome mat. She patted around on the cold stoop, but the key, the reliably ever-present key, was gone. Birdie wondered if Andie could have planned this, but then she knew that was impossible. Even though it felt very much like Andie had planned this.

Fine, she huffed. No matter.

In high school, Birdie had become an expert at scaling the side wall of her house, which led directly into her bedroom window, which had a broken lock and could easily be shimmied open. Birdie wasn't getting into the sort of trouble that true delinquents stirred up-more like losing track of time listening to show tunes with her drama friends while drinking wine coolers or breaking into the wardrobe room at school and holding a photo shoot while drinking wine coolers. But it was the sort of trouble that was endlessly frustrating to her parents, who spent loads of time blathering about her wasted potential, her untapped intelligence. Still, neither one of them had the stamina to stay up until Birdie's curfew, much less later, so she became an expert at scaling the wall under her bedroom and slipping in undetected. She imagined it as practice for when she was cast as the lead in a Mission: Impossible film.

Birdie unlatched the side gate and reached for the trellis, which wobbled and groaned under her weight but held. She was in better shape now than she was back in high school, though her caftan was not prepared for her scramble, nor were her open-toed shoes, but she quickly ascended to the second floor. For a brief moment, she was concerned that a paparazzi camera might catch her, but then just as quickly she remembered that almost no one knew she was from Barton. Which was precisely why it was the only place she could return to in her moment of calamity.

She had lied about her childhood in all her early interviews, and thus her Wikipedia page and IMDb profile and even her two People magazine cover stories cited Medford, Oregon, as her hometown, not Barton, California. It had started out with a simple untruth: she'd been young and hungry and auditioning for the part of a lonely lighthouse owner on the coast and had told Sydney, who was only working with her on a trial basis, that she knew Oregon like a second skin. The fog and the clouds and the way the mist rolled in from the ocean every day by sunset. The flannel and the fleece and the hybrid cars, which, fifteen years ago, almost no one was doing like they did now. Her mom had lived in Portland for a year, so was it even a lie? Regardless, Birdie inhabited a Pacific Northwesterner like a pro. Sydney told casting, and casting told the producers, and the producers told the director, and then, once she landed the role, she found it easier not to correct anyone. As work became more steady and her fame snowballed, she realized she liked that part of her make-believe biography: a crunchy granola who was homeschooled near the salty beach of the Pacific Ocean. And so Medford stuck.

Her hand made its way to the window latch, and she heard it pop, exactly as she remembered it would, then she shimmied it open and tilted forward, knowing the love seat below would break her fall. She somersaulted inside and instead of being greeted by a cushion, she landed flat on her back, with an ache radiating up from both hips, and staring at the ceiling. She looked to her left. The love seat was no longer there. She looked to her right. A stack of moving boxes greeted her, and her bed had been stripped bare. She wondered if she'd gotten the room wrong-it had been more than fifteen years since she'd scaled that wall-but the door flung open, and Andie stormed in like a paratrooper. No, she'd gotten it right.

"Oh no, you don't," Andie said, a little out of breath, like she'd been racing to beat Birdie here. "You don't get to backdoor your way into this either."

"Technically, not the back door," Birdie said from the floor. "Technically, a window." She winced. "Where is my couch? Did you do this on purpose?"

"Where is your couch? Seriously?"

Birdie rolled to her side and pressed herself toward sitting like she would do at the end of one of her yoga classes. She was pretty sure she had bruised her pelvis. They always had mats on set if she was going to do a stunt like this herself.

"Why is my room packed up?" she asked.

"Why is your room packed up?" Andie parroted.

"Are you just going to repeat everything I say back to me or are you going to explain?"

"Do you ever check your email?" Andie snapped.

No. Birdie really did not check her email. She had an assistant, Miranda, for that. If anyone truly needed to reach her urgently, they had her cell. Also, once the shit hit the fan with Sebastian and the studio and the public, Birdie certainly never checked her email.

"Yes," Birdie said. "Of course I check my email."

"Then you would know that I have sent you several messages asking what you wanted to keep and what you wanted to trash."

"Are they finally turning my room into that library they always threatened to?" Birdie asked. She thought her parents found this ironic and/or hilarious, that they'd stuff the room from floor to ceiling with books and first editions. "Possibly the first time a book made it across the threshold," her dad had joked, but it pricked Birdie all the same. She wanted to point out that she'd read The Lord of the Rings for pleasure when she was twelve, but that she could so clearly cite one book, one time, probably proved his thesis.

"Because they just left on sabbatical," Andie said. "Seriously? Do you never read your email?"

Now that she mentioned it, it did sound familiar. Birdie had glanced at something about her dad and Susana spending a year in Spain, but it was shortly before the dustup with Sebastian and then she was watching her entire career unravel, so she didn't think she should be blamed for forgetting.