fiction: Rum & Cocaine

Charlotte, CeCe and I sat in the car parked just off Sunset, waiting to sober up. I had always marveled at the way Sunset Boulevard gleamed with a soft, vulgar elegance at night. During the day, it was a tacky glob of yellow sunlight and dull fluorescence. But after the sun went down, the constant stream of bright passing headlights made my eyes open wide, like I was hopeful for something; the vividness of the neon signs against the starless sky made me feel like I was somewhere important, maybe even doing something important.

“You shouldn’t be anywhere near a driver’s seat right now,” I said, burying my face into the fully reclined passenger seat. Charlotte was behind the wheel of her BMW, lazily swiping at Tinder matches, while CeCe sprawled out in the back seat, contributing to the conversation with a violent coughing fit every few minutes.

“The car isn’t even on, Nat,” Charlotte said. “Let’s just wait until 2:05. I’m not waiting any longer than that.” I looked at her through a blurry haze and saw her fidgeting impatiently. “Okay, 2:10. I have to pee so bad it’s literally sobering me up.”

I pressed the home button on my phone, which had been attempting to wake back up in Charlotte’s car charger for what seemed like hours. I closed my eyes and the black world spun in slow, nauseating waves.

“I can’t go to Tree House tonight,” I said.

“Ugh, fuck you, you always say that.” I opened my eyes and tried really hard to focus on her face.

“No, I always say I don’t want to go to Tree House. I really can’t go tonight. I’m waiting on a call from my agent.” I heard Charlotte’s scoff before I saw it, a throaty and intentionally unpleasant noise she made every time I brought up anything having to do with my admittedly very dry, pathetic excuse for an acting career. A noise that made my stomach churn, even when sober. “I might have an audition tomorrow. At Sony.”

“Yeah, we’ll see if the fuckin’ Hollywood powerhouse Gordon Greenwald can set that up for you,” Charlotte said. I raised my head off the seat then, half to glare at her, which she didn’t notice, and half to will my phone back to life, which didn’t work.

 “Come on, Charlotte,” CeCe said, finally. “Natalia has to get some sleep. Just take us home.”

“We have to go,” Charlotte said. “I’m out.”

CeCe and I both knew better than to fight her on this. Not to mention, Charlotte had a lot of practice driving under the influence.

“If you get a DUI your parents are going to murder you,” I slurred as I heard her turn the key in the ignition.

“And I bet they’d enjoy doing it,” she said. A deafening, trancelike music blared through her speakers. CeCe coughed again, and I heard the cigarette-y phlegm snarling through her throat. My whole torso vibrated against the leather seat in sickening pulses.

Charlotte’s parents, the meticulously maintained Beverly Hills automatons known as the van Valkenbergs, forced her to move out of their twelve-bedroom mansion six months ago, the day after her 21st birthday. She was way too far gone the night before to hide or even close her Altoids box, and their housekeeper Marina, while not exactly fluent in English, knew what cocaine looked like, as well as how to rat Charlotte out to her parents.

“Jesus, I thought at least Marina would be on my side,” Charlotte said at the time. I had no idea where Charlotte got this idea. She would call Marina to come pick her up on the opposite side of town at three in the morning, often left vomit-stained $700 dresses in piles outside Marina’s tiny basement room for her to dry clean, and once brought home a stray cat that Marina ended up taking care of for the next ten years. I think Marina was allergic to cats.

“She probably just didn’t know what it was,” I lied. Marina had most likely been waiting for this opportunity for years.

            Contrary to my and CeCe’s assumption, being “kicked out” did not mean “cut off.” Charlotte’s parents set her up in a cushy Hollywood apartment with a fat allowance, as if taking her out of gated-community parental supervision but maintaining a steady cash flow would be the key to kicking her coke habit.

            “They’re going to make me do drug tests, though,” she claimed, which I knew was bullshit. Charlotte barely saw her parents when they lived under the same roof, what with her dad so busy green-lighting sequels to the previous sequel about the next big comic book superhero, and her mom all tied up with Garden Club and caviar extract facials that made her glow with a simple elegance, the way only astoundingly wealthy people do.

Maybe it was her glowy-skin sophistication, or maybe it was just insanely lucky genes, but Charlotte was the kind of girl who was so beautiful it made you feel ugly just to be in the same room as her, the kind of girl who got stopped on the street to have her picture taken by fashion bloggers when she was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt because they loved her “effortless, understated look.” She’s the kind of girl that got into VIP simply by asking, and thought this was just how the world worked.

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When I was eight years old, my mother moved me to LA from Minnesota, which people thought was very quaint. “Minnesooooota,” the Angelenos crooned, and since my Minnesota accent never got any better than theirs, I smiled and nodded. People from LA loved to share the one thing they know about Minnesota, which is that it’s cold. It is an inane conversation starter, but at least it’s something. At least I’m not from North Dakota or Kansas. Nobody in California knows shit about North Dakota or Kansas.

Still, the January after my eighth Christmas, I was one of what seemed like thousands of little wide-eyed kids descending upon the Oakwood Apartments from various regions of Flyover Country. A lot people thought the Oakwood Child Actor Program Show Moms were living vicariously through their children, actresses who never made it shoving their kids into stardom so they, too, could have their fifteen seconds of fame. And a couple of parents did even fabricate their own acting resumes with made-up TV shows so they could go on auditions with their children. But most kids at Oakwood, including myself, were the ones who begged their parents to move out here. Like thousands of other little girls, one day I decided I wanted to be an actress—a Hollywood actress, but unlike normal parents who courteously ignore such illogical dreams, my mother packed up and moved us to Hollywood before I had a chance to change my mind. After all, my mother named me Natalia to give me some kind of racial ambiguity that my Swedish and German ancestors failed to provide genetically. She always wanted more for me than maybe even I did for myself, and I guess this was her way of showing it. I proudly defended my mother’s decision to anyone who might have questioned it. Acting was something I was actually kind of good at, not like sports, which terrified me, or school, which bored me.

The Oakwood Apartments at Toluca Hills are conveniently nestled between all the major studio lots, on the off chance you actually get an audition there, and surrounded by unbelievably expensive acting schools and voice coaches. On the hallowed grounds, there is a more than one pool, a dance floor, and multiple playgrounds for the kids; a dry cleaners, and two fitness centers with private trainers for the parents. If Hollywood is the city of dreams, Oakwood is where those dreams come to fight to the death. And most of them do usually die a slow and painful one.

It’s not that we were all a bunch of talentless freaks. In the lobbies and conference rooms, some invisible staff member regularly put up signed photos or recent press releases of child actors who “made it,” kids who got to move out of Oakwood while they were still technically young enough to keep living there. Miley Cyrus lived there, as did Josh Hutcherson, Jessica Biel, and Neil Patrick Harris. These are the names mothers like mine dropped when questioned about their decision to uproot our entire young lives and submit our tiny souls to the whims and wishes of greedy agents and shallow casting directors. Hillary Duff was an Oakwood Namedropper favorite, citing her seven years in Oakwood as proof that persistence pays off. I learned later she only lived there for two.

Casting directors and managers constantly gave me the backhanded compliment of having a great “character look,” meaning that I wasn’t pretty or cute in the traditional or symmetrical sense, but I was blonde and had a quirky enough face to play the main character’s weird stepdaughter or eccentric classmate. My third pilot season, I finally landed a national commercial for a princess-themed board game, for which I was rewarded with weeks of scowls from Oakwood mothers. Commercials are, after all, where the money is.

I was a hopelessly naïve little Minnesotan, lured in by the fame and the wealth, but stuck around for the job itself, because I found out that acting is actually pretty cool gig. You get to try on different versions of humanity, just wake up one day and adopt the habits and quirks of an entirely new person. This appealed to immensely, and I was ready to put in the work, to really do it, to make it a career, not for my mom, but for myself. That is, until I met another little blonde girl at an audition, a girl named Charlotte van Valkenberg.

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Charlotte managed to get us to Tree House alive, and in record time. Tree House was a bar owned by a bunch of “burnouts” as my mother would call them, which would not be completely unfair, as one of them was Charlotte’s dealer, known to us only as Mittens. Charlotte called him “dirty,” which was meant to be positive. It was a somewhat-operational bar, as well as the dirty guys’ home, meaning that people would come and drink cheap beer on the first floor and the owners/bartenders lived in disgusting messes of bedrooms on the second floor. Since it would never pass any version of basic health code standards, it was a “secret” bar, the kind of secret that people like Charlotte knew. Tree House found its home in the only LA neighborhood that something as simultaneously gross but kind of cool could potentially exist, Echo Park. It was our favorite bar, and by “our,” I of course mean Charlotte’s.

Every time we went to Tree House, after the lights came on at The Den but the coke was far from wearing off, I worried for a split-second that we were in the wrong place. A halfway house, maybe.

But sure enough, past the maze of hallways and pressed against the back corner of the darkest room, was a beat up wooden table, held up by a couple of those tacky blue Rubbermaid tubs, which sufficed as the “bar.” The wall behind held a chalkboard menu of three items: Pabst Blue Ribbon, Stoli soda, and Jack and Coke. They even had gendered bathrooms, and for reasons never explained to me, there was giant red octopus painted on the wall of the girl’s bathroom, right over the bathtub. It looked like someone had started an “under the sea” theme for their five-year-olds bathroom, but never got around to buying the dolphin shower curtain or the clownfish toilet seat.

According to Charlotte, the bar was open twenty-four hours to those invited (Charlotte), but we rarely went to Tree House before two am. I’m not sure what happened in the daylight hours, but Tree House became an absolute dreamland—or an absolute nightmare, depending on your scene—in the predawn hours. Men with Salvador Dali mustaches talked to you convincingly about international politics, women in long skirts and unkempt hair strummed out-of-tune guitars and screeched something between a chant and a song. Scruffy men got into scuffles, and once even crashed the small, dimly lit platform that sufficed the “live music stage.” One time I saw girl’s eyes roll completely back into her head, the whites of her shaking eyes showing as her head fell backwards and hit the floor’s wooden planks.

“This feels like house party,” CeCe yelled as we followed Charlotte past circles of hippies (or possibly just hipsters) sitting cross-legged on the floor, stepping in between knobby knees and narrowly avoiding lit joints. CeCe despised Tree House, as she hated most things that were not clean.

CeCe, was originally Cvetja, a name Charlotte and I had never even attempted. Her family moved to LA from Serbia when she was sixteen because of her dad’s job, but also because her parents wanted her to be fluent in English and get an American college education. CeCe had been “fascinating” to Charlotte from day one, because nothing was ever “cool” or even “great” to Charlotte; it was either “fascinating” or “legitimately unbelievable,” and because CeCe was pretty fascinating. The night we met her, she regaled us with tales of about working at a bar at age twelve, about clubbing with her friends until eight in the morning, about her grandmother who taught her that if she sat on the cold ground for too long, she would never be able to have children. “American boys do not know how to fuck,” was one of her favorite things to say, as well as “American girls do not shave their vaginas.” CeCe was the one person Charlotte dragged into our decade-long party of two who didn’t flee after one night or even a week or a month, probably because she didn’t really have any other friends, and because she was one of the few people in the world who wasn’t intimidated by Charlotte.

CeCe made some snide comment about the sticky floor, as if this were novel to Tree House. I nodded absentmindedly, looking at my finally-charged phone for the first time all night, and spotting a rare notification: a voicemail from my Gordon Greenwald, my agent.

“Hi Natalia, Della from Gordon’s.”

“Char, it’s Della!” I yelled. I had never actually bothered to learn Gordon’s assistant’s name, but I recognized the chirpiness in her voice that pierced through my ear, and I knew how infrequently she called. My head made a lazy figure eight around the room in search of Charlotte’s shiny blonde head. A couple of glossy eyed twenty-something’s looked at me with blank expressions.

            “Just really quick,” Della continued. “I wanted to let you know you got an audition for the Untitled Sony Pictures Michael Bay project!” She sounded as surprised as I was. She must have told me the parking instructions, probably what I was supposed to wear, but I didn’t hear anything else she said, as I watched Charlotte slink down the staircase to the second floor. She tapped out a line for me on the arm of a wooden lawn chair.

 I always tasted the syrupy bitterness in the back of my throat first. That’s how you knew it was working—if it tasted like you just threw up in your mouth a little bit. For a few minutes afterwards, I always felt an intense anxiety that it wouldn’t work this time, terrified that I had snorted it wrong somehow, and that the entire line of precious white powder had gone to waste. But soon enough, the milky bile came creeping up the back of my throat. I swallowed this acidic affirmation back down and was ready to conquer the fucking world.

“Oh my god, this is literally unbelievable!” Charlotte shrieked. “When’s the last time you even had an audition?”

“Um, I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it’s been a while.”

“Oo! Let’s go to brunch tomorrow before your audition.”

“It’s at one,” I said, which I thought would put that idea to rest, considering Charlotte usually woke up just in time to catch Ellen.

“Oh,” she said, but immediately changed her mind again. “No, this so big for you, thought! Let’s go to brunch at like eleven so we have plenty of time, and we’ll like, run lines and really you know, get into character, and stuff.”

After Charlotte once again disappeared into the depths of Tree House with Mittens, I forced CeCe to dance around the splintered floors with me, making us the only two people in the room on enough uppers to even be standing.

“You should really go home,” CeCe shouted in my ear, her thick accent punctuating every consonant. “You need sleep.” The idea of sleep in and of itself was outrageous to me; I thought I might never need to sleep again.

“Come on C, it’s not till one!” I pulled on her hands, spinning her around me, leaving little purple bruises on my knees when our dizzying circles crashed us straight into a wall. I laughed so hard I cried; I couldn’t even feel the pain yet.

I still remember the first time Charlotte asked me if I wanted to do coke. She leaned over to me in a crowded bar, half-yelling over the music as if she were offering to grab me another beer. The first few times she asked, I politely declined, because that’s what you’re supposed to do. I don’t remember why I eventually said yes, but I think it had something to do with the way Charlotte offered it to me, sincere and devoid of mischievousness. Like cocaine was something she wanted me to try because she truly thought it would benefit me in some way. She grabbed my arm without a moment’s hesitation and drag me to the front of the bathroom line.

“I’m so sorry, it’s an emergency,” she yelled back at the line, her eyes completely earnest. I watched stunned, as the entire line of women believed her, some of them even nodding us onward. In slimy bathrooms across Los Angeles, we huddled together in graffitied stalls and crouched over toilet seats. Out of her purse came an Altoids box, her old middle school ID, and a platinum credit card with a man’s name on it. She would pop open the little tin box to reveal the translucent-orange capsules, filled to the brim with white powder, and a light blue tube, the top half of an unused tampon applicator, that worked a hell of a lot better than rolled $100 bills. In dingy bathroom stalls, we operated our own poorly funded science experiment.

Nights that began like this seemed to never end. I would tap my fingertips against the pad of my thumb, middle finger then index finger, then over to ring finger, and back and forth in endless patterns. 1-2-3, 3-1-2. Never the pinky. The pattern followed the rhythm of the voices, of Charlotte and sometimes CeCe and whomever else Charlotte had picked up along the way that night. I would track the conversation with determined focus until it was too unbearable not to talk anymore. For two people with essentially nothing going on in our lives, we sure found a lot to talk about. Charlotte and I talked over and under each other, in circles. One thing would remind of us of something and we’d be down the rabbit hole of endless, mindless ranting, until something else would remind us that twenty minutes ago, we were making plans to go kayaking at the Channel islands.

“Oh my god!” I would yell. “We should fucking go kayaking, though. Seriously. I love kayaking.”

“Wait,” Charlotte would say, suddenly dead serious. “What are you doing tomorrow, actually, like I have no plans.”

“I’m not doing anything tomorrow. We’re going kayaking. It’s settled.” The next day, without fail, we would wake up at two in the afternoon, and not remember that kayaking in the Channel was something that people even did.

CeCe would never do it, bored by our overlapping yelps back and forth. She never did a single drug as a matter of principle, content to get completely shitfaced on rum and Coke and chain smoke, watching us with eyes buried under layers of black eye shadow.

Charlotte was always way too out of it to care, but this just made me more anxious, and my eyes would flit back to CeCe constantly, anxious that she was being left out of the conversation.

It was a rare feat, balancing the two. For Charlotte, I was a fellow recruit of her lifestyle; she always held the upper hand of being the one who introduced me to a new club where she knew the manager, an art exhibit held inside of an out-of-use school bus, and of course, anything that altered our state of consciousness. For CeCe, I was another lost soul of Lost Angeles, sucked in by Hollywood’s underworld, which was grimier than she had ever imagined. The shinier the surface, the darker the depths that lay below.

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The next morning at exactly 10:55, I paid seven dollars for parking, then waited for Charlotte at the diner table. I felt like my head had been smacked against a brick wall, and my hand was shaking when I reached for my glass of water, but I figured coffee and carbohydrates would fix that.

Ten minutes passed, then twenty, and Charlotte’s phone was going straight to voicemail. She finally called after the waitress had asked me three times if I wanted to just go ahead and order something, or maybe if my friend just wasn’t coming, because there were a lot of people waiting for a table, ma’am.

“I’m so sorry, I just woke up!” which sounded genuine enough. “Making plans before noon was just a terrible idea. Sorry, girl. Coke Plans, amirite.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I mean I still have like, forever until my audition, you could still make it if you leave now.”

 “Oh dude, I can’t, I’m going to this silent dance party in Silver Lake with Mittens,” she said.

“You’re going to a party with your dealer?” I said.

“Nat, whatever. He’s chill.” Which wasn’t really my concern. “Hey, you should come after your thing, it’ll be fun. I’ll text you the address.”

After I hung up she sent me a text that read GOOD LUCK AT YOUR AUDITION NAT!!!!!! YOUR GONNA KILL IT!!!!!!! followed by a string of unrelated emojis.

I let my phone slip out of my hands and clatter on the ground, so my fingers could dig into the tablecloth. Charlotte had flaked out on me about a thousand times since we had become friends, but for some reason this time felt different. My headache raged on while my face got worryingly hot, a mix of humiliation and long-overdue anger. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt anything so strongly, rage or any other emotion, and it was like waking up from a long, dimly lit dream.

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I saw Charlotte for the first time at an audition for Melissa, Marissa, Alyssa, and May, one of the many Disney series with a rhyming title that got axed before the pilot even aired. Charlotte and I were both twelve and therefore old enough to be insecure about our unreasonably proportional bodies. I looked at her the way every pretty girl looks at an even prettier girl; with pure spite. But after my “character” facial features started developing into softer, close-up friendly lines, Charlotte and I got callbacks for a lot of the same parts, and it was awkward not to at least acknowledge each other.

Charlotte didn’t live at Oakwood; her family was actually from LA, and because her dad was someone important at Paramount, she didn’t have to go to any bullshit acting classes or pay six different photographers for essentially the same headshot in order to get an agent. She was the girl every Oakwood wannabe, including myself, literally wanted to be.

Charlotte should have been the most popular girl at her posh Beverly Hills private school, but she “hated those snotty bitches” and for whatever reason, chose the quirky-looking girl from Minnesota as her best friend. In return, I threw auditions that we were both up for, so she wouldn’t see me as a threat. I helped her spread false rumors about the Oakwood kids we didn’t like, and cackled at the flipped-out stage moms. At thirteen, Charlotte was the one who showed me the website on which we were both featured, a foot fetish site dedicated solely to child actresses. At the time, we thought this inventive take on child pornography was hilarious. At fourteen, Charlotte was the one who introduced me to the Grapefruit Diet, in which you eat a grapefruit and one other food item for every meal. We each lost nine pounds in three weeks, and then gained it all back in two. At sixteen, Charlotte got me my first fake ID, which was delivered to me in a box of knives from somewhere in China. At seventeen, Charlotte introduced me to the LA young adult rite of passage known as “doing shrooms at J-tree.” At eighteen, Charlotte swore off all hallucinogens, and acting.

“I’m so done,” she said. “I’m just done. I’m over all the nonsense.”

Neither of us brought up the fact that she hadn’t gotten any auditions in ages. Maybe it was because she got to skip all those acting classes when we were little. Sometimes I wondered if it was because she was literally too beautiful for television; real people just didn’t look like Charlotte. But it was most likely because she couldn’t have given less of a fuck about acting. She started showing up hungover to table reads and sleeping through morning shoots, earning her a reputation of “difficult to work with,” which is only excusable if you’re already Jennifer Aniston or something.

            Not that I was doing much better. I was repped by an agency on the top floor of the most irrelevant building on Wilshire that called me in mainly for Colgate and Wells Fargo spots. At sixteen I landed my first recurring role on The Young and the Restless—Clarisse, a mysterious girl with a dark secret—which is what could have been my big break had I actually broken into something. My mom took it as her sign that she’d done her job and moved back home to Minnesota, and for the next four years, my face was broadcast across the nation every weekday to nursing home residents and kids home sick from school. Until, of course, I was written out for reasons unbeknownst to me. Gordon Greenwald told me “not to take it personally.” The show still occasionally brought me back (yes, once from the dead) for guest spots, but sporadic extra work on commercials paid most of my bills.  

            I often considered going back to Minnesota, but I had a fairly shady and consistently interrupted formal education that probably wouldn’t even have gotten me a passing score on the GED. I was wholly unfit for any and all paying jobs that didn’t require hitting my marks and reciting someone else’s words in contrived emotion.

I was supposed to be one of the success stories that fresh-faced showbiz moms pointed to; for a few weeks after I landed YATR, I was one of the headshots taped on the Oakwood conference room bulletin boards. But my wave of success wasn’t followed by another.

Charlotte was constantly hinting, sometimes not so subtly, that I give it all up, like she did, and look how much happier she was now, it was “literally unbelievable.” She was pulling me away from it; I was letting her do it.

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            After showing up at the Sony lot embarrassingly early, I fought with the parking attendant about having the wrong drive-on time. He finally opened the gate, but only after I gave him a signed headshot. I guess his mom was a big The Young and the Restless fan.

            I hadn’t landed an audition with Sony since I was maybe twelve, but it looked exactly the same as I remembered, a little village with its bizarrely clean beige buildings lined with too-short and repulsively green artificial grass, all operating efficiently under a giant metal rainbow. I still felt like hell was brewing inside my body, but the nervousness setting in made me too nauseous to eat or drink. I sat inside the Sony Coffee Bean, watching out-of-breath unpaid interns order incredibly complicated drinks for their bosses and skimming over my lines for the eight-hundredth time.

            By the time my audition rolled around, I realized I had forgotten to consult my handy Sony Pictures map, and I showed up late anyways.

            The casting directors were too trendy to even care, one with ombréd hair and the chicest glasses on Rodeo Drive, the other rocking a finely groomed Hitler Youth cut, a pinstripe suit, and shiny shoes with no socks.

            I read the scene with an enlightened ardor, a genuine emotional connection to the script’s blonde, vacant character. The sockless guy read lines together, and it could have been a successful chemistry read.

            “It’s not fair, Jason!” I looked directly into his eyes.

            “Nothing is fair in this world, Lily.”

I wandered through the little Sony village, slower this time. The pounding in my head had subsided to a dull throb, and for the first time since I could remember, I initiated contact with my mom.

            I listened to the phone ring in my ear and wondered what my mom would be doing today, a lifelong show mom who had no one to show me off to anymore. After one more ring than I expected, she answered, out of breath.

            “What’s wrong?” I laughed.

            “Nothing, Mom.”

            “Oh, it’s that you never—do you need something?”

            “No, God, I wanted to tell you I had an audition just now. It went really well.”

            “An audition? For what?”

            “A feature, a lead role. Some Michael Bay thing.”

            At first she said nothing, and I thought she must have assumed I was lying, that this was some kind of practical joke on her poor mother’s nerves. But then I heard it—a little high-pitched squeak, that turned into a series of words that barely passed for a sentence. Tears of joy, I believe is what they call this.

            “Natalia, just think, this will be your big break! Everyone will want to hire you after this.” I thought about stopping her, about not letting myself get my hopes up, but it felt too good. “Your face will be everywhere,” she continued. Everyone from home, they’ll be so proud.” She meant, of course, that she would get to brag to all of our neighbors and acquaintances, and anyone she might happen upon in the Super Wal-Mart would get a full rundown of her daughter’s newfound film career. She meant that she would make them jealous. But that was okay too.

            “I haven’t gotten the part yet,” I said.

            “Oh nonsense, of course you’ll get it!” Of all the things my mother had told me throughout my acting career, to get me to practice lines, or cry on cue, or manipulate a casting agent into signing me, this one I really believed.

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Charlotte wasn’t crying, she was sobbing. Next to a broken suitcase on a street corner somewhere in Echo Park. I had been sitting in a Starbucks in North Hollywood, reviewing and dissecting every little moment of my audition, when Char called me. She was so hysterical she could barely speak; she had to text me the cross streets. We could see her from a block away, losing her goddamn mind on the side of the road.

It dawned on me how few times I’d seen her cry, the last time being during one of those excruciating live music nights at Tree House. That night, single tears fell out of each eye, as she whispered, “This is exactly where I want to be.” I marveled at her mastery of the silent cry, two skinny streaks that didn’t even catch the black of her mascara. But now tears were streaming down in dark gray rivers, accelerated by the white powder that was very obviously coursing through her veins.

I parked and left the car unlocked, and started running towards her. CeCe stayed at a saunter. I turned back to her, incredulous.

“CeCe, come on.” She shrugged, maintaining her pace.

“She is not going anywhere.” CeCe said. I ran up to Charlotte, already sweating in the hellish sun.

“Charlotte, what’s wrong?”

She still couldn’t speak through the sobs, and by the time CeCe caught up to us, she still hadn’t eked out the words. They were caught in her throat, trapped in high-pitched squeaks and blubbery coughing fits. CeCe and I waited as the sun burned the back of our necks, nothing to do but stare at this human mess and imagine the worst.

Finally, her knees buckled and she landed on the sidewalk with an exhale that suddenly shut down her shuddering cries, as if her body just gave up on crying because it wasn’t getting her anywhere.

“They closed Tree House,” she said, her voice pained and shaky. I opened my mouth and closed it again. Minutes—never ending sluggishly hot sixty second-intervals of waiting for the explanation for this complete and utter breakdown. Given hours to guess the reason, this never would have crossed my mind.

“Why?” was all I could manage.

“Why the fuck do you think? Do you think those idiots got approved for a fucking liquor license? And that place, was like, stacked with drugs. The police came and just...kicked everyone out. Anonymous tip or something.”

To any reasonably intelligent person familiar with the law, it was only a matter of time before this kind of thing happened, but I guess Charlotte didn’t see it that way.

“It’s—over. It’s gone.” She wiped her face, which did nothing but smear the black eyeliner into a new streak of tear and sweat. I’d never seen her look so ugly.

I looked to CeCe to help. She was smoking and watching the cars pass. Completely alone, I knelt down next to Charlotte and feigned my best sympathy. I put my hand on her back and said, “Wow, I can’t believe that.” For a soap actress, I was pretty rough with the emotional scenes. She shook her head furiously. “No, you don’t get it.” The sobs started up again. “You don’t get it, you don’t get it.” Her head fell in between her legs.

“It’s just a bar, Char.” I said softly, and even before the last word escaped my lips, I knew it was a mistake. Her face whipped back to me, and her eyes said, in words as plain as day, and hell is just a sauna.  “Sorry—I mean, you’ll find another dealer.” She threw her hands in the air, exactly the kind of overdramatic gesture they tell you not to do in acting classes.

“I don’t need a new fucking dealer, I need somewhere to live!”

I looked up at CeCe again, desperate. Without breaking her gaze from the passing cars, she ever so slightly tilted her head in the direction of the suitcase, which was overflowing with designer clothes, as smoke floated out of her mouth.

 “What?” I asked, too hot and tired to form a real sentence. The question was for CeCe, but Charlotte answered.

“I’m living at Tree House,” she sobbed. CeCe didn’t blink.

“You—you’re living with Mittens?”

“Jesus Christ, no.” She sighed like she was about to recite a novel to me. “I failed two drug tests in a row. My parents kicked me out of the apartment a month ago. I had nowhere else to go.”

“Why didn’t you—I mean, you could’ve—“ I stopped before we could broach this. She couldn’t have moved in with me or CeCe; her thing was that she was better than us, always above us in every way. Asking to crash with us would be admitting she was broke, admitting failure.

I stood up and took a drag of CeCe’s cigarette. The sweat was pooling in my lower back, where the cotton stuck to me like a bathing suit.

I looked down at Charlotte. She was a sweaty splotch of eyeliner and cocaine, melting into the cracks of the scorching sidewalk.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get out of this fucking inferno.”

Sitting at my kitchen table the next day, CeCe told me that it was she who put in the anonymous tip. She revealed it like she was telling me she thought her fingernails were getting a little long. I stared at her, wondering where the hell she got off.

“What,” I said. “Why the fuck would you do that, CeCe?”

CeCe shrugged. “That place was disgusting.” CeCe always hit her c’s and g’s hard, but now they sounded harsher, guttural even.

“Charlotte was living there.”

“I know,” she said.

“You knew? Did you know all along?”

“Yes,” she said. “It was pretty obvious, I mean when we left Tree House, Charlotte always stayed.” I paused. I had never picked up on this.

“But…but why would you report it to the police?” CeCe shrugged.

 “She is cocaine addict.”

“No—no… you don’t know anything about that. You don’t know Charlotte like I do.” I don’t know why I was defending Charlotte. Obviously she was a complete disaster, but we never had admitted it so openly.

“She needs help,” CeCe said. I couldn’t deny this. I looked at CeCe, and for the first time I questioned my unfettered and undying allegiance to my best friend of ten years. Why was I still friends with Charlotte? Was it because I actually cared about her, because we had something in common (other than coke)? Or because she was the only one who had stuck around after all this time, one of the few who hadn’t migrated back to the Middle West? Maybe the one girl I dreamed would be my friend at age thirteen was still around simply out of convenience. CeCe could see this thought process running through my head, and for a second I could tell she thought I would come around.

I looked at Charlotte in the next room, in a fitful sleep on my slowly dying futon.

“Get the fuck out of my apartment,” I said.

We didn’t see CeCe again after the Tree House incident, never even ran into her at The Den or anything. I gave CeCe all of her nail polish back and deleted her number from my phone, but I didn’t have the heart to tell Charlotte that CeCe had been the one to fuck up her entire life, so I started coming up with some excuse to explain why CeCe wasn’t going out with us. After a few weeks, I told Charlotte that she had found other friends—other Serbians who had moved out to LA, too. It was probably true.

“She was never really…down,” Charlotte said, nodding. It was truly a giant cosmic mistake that Charlotte and CeCe even met each other, let alone spent months of their early twenties hanging out. It was better this way, in theory, but I still felt like something was off. For Charlotte, it was the loss of Tree House.

“Where the fuck are we supposed to go now?” she asked one night at three in the morning, after we’d loitered around 1 Oak for almost an hour.

I shrugged and said, “Let’s just go home.”

“Oh my God, Nat, you’re so boring. Let’s go ask the bouncer what he’s doing.” She did. He was going home.

“Why is everyone in this city so fucking boring?” she yelled across the street, at no one in particular. A homeless man muttered back something unintelligible.

            Eventually, I had to tell Charlotte what CeCe did. I mean, I didn’t have to, but drunk and coked-out me at two in the morning in Charlotte’s new bedroom (my living room) had to.

            In her fervent attempts to throw or break something, she picked up a leftover mason jar half full of red wine, suddenly realized she probably shouldn’t smash it against a wall, and instead threw the contents on my futon and slammed it down on the coffee table.

            She apologized immediately, and continually, until I told her to stop.

            “It’s black fabric,” I said. “You can’t even see it.”

            I soaked the stale Malbec out of the futon cover with paper towels while Charlotte paced and shrieked into CeCe’s voicemail box.

            “I fucking knew it was you, you fucking psychopath,” was a common theme until I stopped listening.

            “Did you really know it was her?” I asked between voicemails.

            “I mean, no, but I kinda did at the same time, you know?”

            She picked her phone to call again.

            “Char, stop,” I said, placing a pile of wet pink paper towels on the floor. “You know what she told me?”

            “What?” Charlotte stopped pacing.

            “She told me she was worried about you,” I said. “That she did it because she thought you might, you know…have a problem…?” My voice trailed upwards like it used to do in rapidly deteriorating auditions. Up-voice, a sign of lack of confidence. Charlotte’s eyes narrowed.

            “When did she tell you this?” I shrugged. The coke was wearing off and I was losing my confidence.

            “A couple of weeks ago.”

            “A couple of weeks ago?” Charlotte released the phone from her hand onto my yoga mat, a classically calculated move. Drop the phone for dramatic effect, but on a surface where it won’t crack.

            “Charlotte, I didn’t want to tell you. You were so upset.” I paused, and Charlotte stood unmoving. It was terrifying. “That’s why we don’t see her anymore. I told her to fuck off, and she did.”

            Her voice climbed to a wavering octave I hadn’t heard in years, not since Marina brought back a dress from the dry-cleaners with holes down the backside.

            “Do you think I have a problem?” she asked me. So here it was. My chance, my big shot. For a heart to heart, for an intervention, for pre-written letters, for “we love you like crazy.” Maybe I should’ve called her parents.

            “I don’t know…” I started. “CeCe would sometimes talk about it—“

            “I don’t care if CeCe thinks I have a problem. She’s a stupid troll. Do you think I have a problem?”

            I had to choose my words so, so carefully. But my thoughts were moving through my brain too fast for me to hear them, for me to organize them, or even understand them. I guess my silence was answer enough.

            “Okay, Nat,” she whispered. “Okay.” She stalked off into my bedroom for several minutes; I thought she might’ve gone to sleep in my bed, or called CeCe again. But I guess she was doing a few more lines, because soon enough she was back in my face, her normally impossibly even skin revealing veins attempting to burst out of their unblemished surface.

            “Do you know what my mom used to say about you? About you and your mom? That you were bottom-feeders. That you exist to live off the work and money of wealthy people like us.”I could smell the red wine wafting through the room, exhaled from the fabric I swear it could have suffocated me.

            “I told her she was wrong,” she continued. “I told her she didn’t know you. I can’t believe I didn’t see it.”

            “Charlotte—“

            “The only reason you’re anything is because of me.” She paused, as if she were deciding whether or not to tell me something. She did. “Do you know how you even got Young and the Restless? My dad got you that audition. Yeah, I never told you that.  He made a few calls after you royally fucked up the first audition.”

            My face burned, then my chest, and flickered down my arms. I had always wondered why I got a callback; I absolutely bombed that audition.

“He literally put his ass on the line for you for a fucking soap opera.” She didn’t stop there. “I’m the only reason you…go out…or do…anything.” She started to stumble, as one does in referencing their own enabling.

            “Yeah thank you, Char, for introducing to me to cocaine.”  

            “I don’t see you complaining.”

            It was a fair point.

            I broke another several-minute silence, as she flipped angrily through whatever was on her phone.

            “I didn’t get the part,” I lied. I hadn’t even heard back about the part yet, and it just confirmed everything she had said, but I said it anyways, because I wanted her to feel like shit.

            “What part?” She went back to her phone.

            “Jesus, the only part I’ve been up for in years. The Sony thing. You know when we were gonna to go to brunch? Before the audition?”

            “Oh. Sorry.”

            “Yeah, we were gonna run lines and stuff. At brunch, you know?” She looked up with squinty red eyes. “You went to that thing with Mittens instead.”

            “You’re not actually blaming me for you fucking up that audition, right? Like, you’re not.”         

            “I’m not blaming you for anything,” I said, even though I was. “It’s just a shitty thing to do, you know, to make plans with someone and uh, flake out.”

            “Oh please, Nat. We do that literally every night. When have we ever followed through on plans we make when we go out?”

            “I’m not talking about fucking…going to LACMA for free museum day or whatever. This wasn’t coke plans. This was important to me. It was a big deal to me.”

            “Oh my god, you are so dramatic. Let’s all give a biiiig round of applause for the young and the very restless Clarisse.”

            I waited for her to turn her attention away from me, back to her phone, before I said, quietly but assuredly, “Yeah, Charlotte, you do have a problem.”

            “That’s fucking great, coming from you,” she said, not even looking up this time. “How many lines did you do tonight?”

            “Not as many as you.”

            This is the point in the conversation, a conversation unlike one I’d ever had with her, that I assumed she’d leave, storm out like the coked-out child actress she was. Until I remembered she had nowhere to go.

            So I said, “I think you should go.” The look on her face was one I’d seen multiple times from her and other girls she used to hang out with in her private school days, the girl who was simultaneously very aware of her own status in this world, and desperately eager to play the victim. Not so much puppy dog eyes, as privileged little girl eyes.

            “You’re kicking me out?” she said, and her eyes might have been glossy with tears, I couldn’t be sure.

            “Well, you can’t sleep on the futon, it reeks of wine.” I looked at this girl, who I had known for half my life, known better than anyone else including my own mother, this girl who had everything, and in this moment, absolutely nothing, to call her own. I almost felt sorry for her.

            “You’re such a cliché,” she said, shaking her head. “The little girl who moves from the Midwest to be a big star. Do you really still think you’re going to ‘make it’, Natalia?” She never called me Natalia.

            “I don’t know,” I said, because it was the only thing I had the energy to say.

            “Well, send me a postcard when you go crawling back to Bumfuck, Minnesota.”

            “Yeah, send me one from rehab,” I said, and I shut the door behind her.

            I have no idea where Charlotte went that night. Maybe she found Mittens; maybe she went home to her parents. I thought I would be up for hours, tracing the skin on my neck and the events of the night in my head, frantically checking my phone to see if she might call, but I barely even remember pulling the sheets over my body; I slept earlier and deeper that night than I had in months, or years maybe.

__________________________________________________________________________________

I saw Charlotte once more, a few months later, outside the Den on Sunset Blvd. We made eye contact briefly once, then again, then made the mutual mental decision not to say something to each other. But in that moment, Char’s eyes didn’t look as glassy as usual; they looked almost clear.

I watched as Charlotte disappeared into the crowd; I turned back the street, and I watched Sunset glow.