One of the things Arrow could not ever say to her mother was that she liked Ohio, never mind that she wouldn’t mind going back there. That was a wrong thing to say on almost every level. She folded her hands on the table in front of her.
That reminded her of real home too. It reminded her of school, where they would be told to fold their hands on their desks whenever the teacher thought they were getting too rowdy.
“Listen,” Arrow’s mother said, raking her long, thin fin-gers with their even longer, thinner nails through her thick hair, “they’ve brought this man out here, this Gregor Demarkian. I want you to talk to him.”
2
Marcey Mandret knew that it was not okay to get drunk and stay drunk, even in an emergency, but her problem was this: in an emergency, she often couldn’t think of anything else to do. At the moment, she was in the biggest emergency of her life, in spite of the fact that she was still part of the inner circle. That was very important. Being part of the inner circle meant you were protected, and being protected meant that nothing really awful could happen to you. Or something. It was hard to work out. Marcey found most things hard to work out. Mark Anderman had been part of the inner circle, at least on the night he died, and what had happened to him?
Marcey was lying on a bed in the emergency room, and she knew that if she started thinking about Mark Anderman, she would start to shake. It was dangerous to show emotion if it was real emotion. Camera emotions were all right because that was your job. That was why the paparazzi took pictures of you. People thought they took pictures of you because you were famous, but that wasn’t true. There were a lot of famous people who never got their pictures taken. They never appeared in the newspapers. They never saw their lives covered on CNN. Every once in a while you would see them, on a talk show or on that silly Inside the Actors Studio thing, and realize you knew nothing about them. They weren’t really famous anymore. You only said they were out of politeness.
No, what the paparazzi wanted—whateveryone wanted—was acting. These people had to make a living. The money was in the drama, the breakups and meltdowns, the blood feuds, the disasters. It was as if the whole world were your own personal high school, and you were part of the popular crowd. Everybody wanted to talk about the popular crowd. Everybody wanted to gossip about interesting people, and people became interesting when they became popular. At least, that was what Kendra had told her. She might be mixing it up. She was very tired, and beyond being tired she was scared to death. Still.
Marcey thought about Stewart Gordon for a minute, but only for a minute. He had come in here and given her his usual advice, and she was glad of that. That was what she had called him in for. But she hadn’t actually intended to take his advice. His advice was always wrong because he didn’t understand how things were supposed to be. He was old, and he had been to college for years and years, and he read books. He was content to be only sort of famous. People recognized him from television, but they didn’t follow him around to stores or try to sit at his table in restaurants. Marcey wondered what that was like. It wasn’t like being invisible, or nonexistent, or whatever it was nonfamous people were. She didn’t think about those people much, because there didn’t seem to be a point. Their existence was hypothetical, as Kendra put it. Marcey had had to look up “hypothetical,” and then it had taken her forever because it didn’t occur to her it was spelled with a y. Sometimes she thought Stewart Gordon might have a point, if only a very little one, about education. It was embarrassing to get into things like that. It made you look like a rube.
She tried sitting up in the bed, and it worked. She had no idea how long she’d been lying in it, but she thought it was a long time, long enough so that they should already have found her a bed in the regular hospital. Unless they didn’t mean to admit her to the regular hospital. In L.A., it would have been automatic. She’d have passed out dead drunk and had her stomach pumped for alcohol and then they would have put her in a room and kept everybody in the world out except the people she wanted to see. Maybe this was not the way they did things in Margaret’s Harbor. If it wasn’t, she would have to insist. She couldn’t go walking out the hospital’s front door into the waiting flashbulbs of the press, not when she was looking like this, and didn’t have a chance in hell of looking any better anytime soon.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed. The sudden movement made her heave. She sat very still until her stomach settled. Her head did not settle. She was very dizzy. She pushed herself forward and slid slowly toward the floor. For a split second, she thought she wasn’t going to get it done. She thought her legs were going to collapse in front of her and the nurse was going to find her in a puddle on the linoleum. That would be an interesting headline: “Marcey Mandret Hospital Collapse!” Or however they would put it. Everything that happened to her seemed to come with exclamation points. She wondered why that was. Kendra said that it was very important to stay in the public eye all the time. It wasn’t success that brought fame. It was fame that brought success. People would pay to see famous people even if the famous people had done nothing at all.