As the phone rang, Buck went over in his head what he had rehearsed all night. Unfortunately, as soon as Lizzie answered the phone, he lost his train of thought and nothing came out right. Instead of the connection he had envisioned, where he said, “Lizzie, this is Buck Platner,” and she said, “Oh, Buck, it’s been way too long,” he once again fumbled his way poorly into “professional lawyer” speak and screwed up the whole thing. Like an idiot, he pronounced Charla’s last name wrong, again, then Lizzie—Elizabeth now—seemed confused about the whole guardian thing, causing him to get impatient, and finally—the cherry on top—he agreed to send the guardianship papers to her on Monday rather than arranging to see her today with Tiffany. The whole thing could not have gone worse—he didn’t do his job right and he didn’t handle his grand reunion with Lizzie/Elizabeth well either.
Things actually went even worse than Buck realized because Tiffany was standing silently in the hall outside his room the entire time, listening to the conversation. Although she heard only one side, she heard enough to know that her “Aunt Lizzie,” as her mom had always referred to her, wasn’t running to her rescue. In fact, from Buck’s end of the conversation, it didn’t sound as if she wanted anything to do with Tiffany at all. It was clear that the call didn’t go as Buck had intended, since upon setting the receiver down he quietly said “Shit” under his breath while shaking his head.
6
“Shit” I say as I set the phone back in its cradle. I quickly snatch it back up again and dial Dan’s cell phone number, pressing each digit as hard as I can and holding it down as if this will impart that this is an emergency and prompt him to answer the call. For the third time this morning, it goes straight to voice mail. I consider leaving a message, but what would I say?
“Dan, my childhood best friend who I haven’t had anything to do with in the entire time we’ve been together has sent us an early wedding present!” That doesn’t really explain things. “Dan, great news! We aren’t even married yet and we already have a teenager!” That would be ridiculous. “Dan, apparently my friend Charla doesn’t update her will very often because she named ME as the guardian of her daughter!” The truth sounds just as absurd.
“Oh, God,” I say as I set the phone down on the cradle and mindlessly return to the half-made peanut butter sandwich on the kitchen counter. I feel like vomiting, but I don’t know what else to do, so I complete the sandwich and stuff it in my face and then meticulously clean the entire kitchen, leaving no signs that the room has even been entered let alone used for food preparation and consumption. As I clean the knife, I consider taking my own life as an out but realize that it really isn’t feasible with a butter knife. This cannot be happening to me.
I had a plan. Getting out of Victory was step number one, but it wasn’t the entire plan. During the four-hour drive from Victory to Los Angeles the summer before my freshman year, I laid it all out in my head. It included graduating in four years, pursuing a successful career in broadcasting, marrying an attorney (or a doctor), having first a daughter and then an adorable son. There isn’t any room in the plan for a fifteen-year-old girl at this time in my life and there isn’t a contingency for something like this.
Still feeling like I’ve been socked in the chest, I wander around my apartment; my mind is racing around looking for an exit. As I pace, I straighten. I align the picture frames on my mantel, I confirm that my CDs are in alphabetical order, and I fluff the pillows on my Pottery Barn couch. I like things to be perfect. I thrive on perfection…that’s why I’m so good at my job as a fact checker on The Renee Foster Show!. Okay, I admit that putting my degree in journalism to use confirming what color underwear Jennifer Aniston wears (white) and how John Travolta orders a steak (rare) isn’t exactly what I’d planned on, but it includes a brief (sixty-second) on-air segment every single day (Monday–Friday), and being on air really is my dream. Plus it’s a whole lot closer to perfection than a fifteen-year-old Victory teenager under my guardianship. I look at the photo exactly centered on my mantel; it’s a shot of Dan and me at his parents’ house last Christmas. I love this picture because we look like the ideal couple—faces squished together, smiling broadly in front of his mother’s uniformly decorated tree.
The first Christmas I spent with Dan’s family, I felt as if I’d died and gone to holiday heaven. Unlike the dusty, hot Victory Christmases I’d grown up with—the ones where my mother had brought the fake, color-not-found-in-nature-green tree in from the garage and not bothered to remove all the cobwebs before hanging mismatched glass balls and plastic Baby Jesuses all over it and plopping a supermarket ham on our regular dinner table—the McCafferty family Christmas was like a postcard. From their long mahogany dining room table, you can see the twelve-foot Douglas fir, decorated with matching gold balls and red bows on one side, and the front yard covered in a flawless blanket of snow on the other. Their mouthwatering homemade dinner is served on Wedgwood china, and everyone gathers around a baby grand to sing carols after dessert. Like I said, Holiday Heaven.
“Oh, God,” I moan to the perfect couple in the picture. I pick up the phone and dial Courtney’s cell phone. Debra Messing will have to understand—this is an emergency.
“Hello!” Courtney booms into my phone and her voice is so upbeat it almost makes me feel better…almost. I can picture her sitting in Debra Messing’s backyard, surrounded by Hollywood’s elite and talking on her perfectly rhinestoned flip phone.
Courtney is gorgeous. Way back when we first met, I was pretty sure that somebody like her would never want to be friends with a Victory girl like me. Courtney’s father is Bennett Cambridge, the head of the Watson Bros. movie studio, and her mother is Alana Russo Cambridge, a former movie star turned executive housewife. Executive housewife is a term Courtney penned for her mother, since she doesn’t actually do anything that a housewife does. She simply overseas the staff that does it in their Bel Air mansion, which is so big that it has its own bowling alley—which, Courtney often boasts, has two more lanes than the Spellings’.
Courtney is the spitting image of her glamorous mother, and the two are featured in every single Hollywood mother-daughter photo shoot alongside duos like Blythe and Gwyneth and Goldie and Kate. She is tall and slender, with curves in all the right places. Her curly blonde hair is always just on the complimentary side of bed head and her brown eyes are so dark that they look almost black. You never know from one day to the next if she’ll be in a tailored Armani suit or a sari that she actually got in India while chasing down the “love of her life,” of which there have been quite a few.
She is the most dramatic and impulsive person I know, the type of girl who can turn lemons into lemonade effortlessly and even make you forget you had lemons to begin with. Prime example: following Ajay Dhir all the way to India, determined to show him that they were meant to be together. When he finally was able to convince her that they were not (something, in Ajay’s defense, he had been trying to do for three months in Los Angeles before traveling home for his grandmother’s funeral), Courtney turned it around and made the trip one of the most fabulous shopping sprees I’ve ever heard of. If anyone can prevent me from becoming suicidal over this, it’s Courtney. Plus even though she’s not practicing, she did graduate from law school and pass the bar, so she should be able to figure out how to get me out of this mess from a legal standpoint.
“Court,” I say, feeling both relieved to have connected with her and terrified that by speaking the words aloud my situation will somehow become more real than it already is. “Something awful has happened.”
“What’s wrong?” she asks, and I know that even surrounded by a designer lunch and countless celebrities, she is giving me her undivided attention.
“Remember I told you about Charla?” I confirm, because while Courtney is brilliant and wonderful, she is known to have her share of “blonde moments.”
“Right, the dead girl,” she says in the same tone a person might confirm a girl had brown hair or was in dental school.
“She left me her daughter,” I spit it out. I don’t know how to sugarcoat it and there is no point beating around the bush.
“Oh