Once Friends Page 3

  “Okay,” Sonja said if her mind was a million miles away.

  She did exactly as the receptionist instructed and took the elevators to the twenty-eighth floor, where she sat in the waiting room to the right. The space looked the same as it had four years ago. The carpet was still red. The chairs were still black leather with metal frames. All that changed was the artwork on the walls. Each picture was a black-and-white still of old Hollywood studios. They used to be portraits of the oldest and newest premium clients. She remembered Jay’s picture hanging on the wall and how she’d successfully avoided looking at him.

  Sonja stopped shaking her foot nervously as soon as she realized she was doing it. Deep down, she really didn’t want to be there. She stared at the iconic picture of the Hollywood sign as she remembered how hard it was to make her dream of being a screenwriter a reality.

  After graduating from film school, Sonja had spent about four and half years bouncing around from job to job as an assistant before throwing in the towel. There was the production executive who rarely bathed and was mean as hell, so no one could tell her how bad she smelled without getting fired. There was the crazy producer who barked at everyone, including her tiny designer puppy that she brought to the office every day. Then there was the average big-bellied, balding, aging creep who would let inappropriate propositions slip out of his mouth. If she went to his house, then he would probably get her a meeting with someone big, very big. If she went to dinner with him, then they could talk about her future. But most of them had had a way of testing the waters first, just to see how far they could go and what she was willing to do to make it to the big time. There had been too many of those guys to count.

  Thinking about her previous encounters with Hollywood cast a dark cloud over Sonja’s head, and she whipped her face around to get a look at the way out of the waiting room.

  “Sonja Hester?” a girl with a high-pitched voice asked.

  She jumped and quickly turned to face the speaker. “Yes.”

  The girl, who looked like the receptionist but blond, smiled. “Could you please follow me?”

  Sonja stood so fast her head felt dizzy. “Sure.”

  She followed the girl down the carpeted hallway and through a wide open floor filled mostly with unoccupied cubicles. From what she remembered, the scene usually picked up around nine o’clock. She wondered why the meeting had started so early.

  The girl continued her brisk pace but turned to ask, “How was your drive?”

  Sonja wanted to make a cynical reply that would truthfully reflect how anxious she felt, but instead she put on a fake smile and said, “Fine.”

  “Good,” the girl sang as though it was the best news she’d heard in a long time.

  They walked up a spiral staircase with shiny silver handrails then down a hallway. The closer they got to an open door, the more Sonja could hear multiple voices coming from inside the room. Fear spoke to her again, telling her to turn tail and run like the wind. She took one deep breath then another.

  The assistant turned and held out her hand. “By the way, I’m Katie. It was my pleasure to meet you.”

  Sonja ruffled her brows, then after a few moments, shook Katie’s hand. It felt all too much, as though Katie had taken a moment to suck up to her. “Thank you.”

  Katie pressed her lips into a tight smile then raised her eyebrows as if to say, “And now it’s game time.”

  Sonja followed Katie into the room and was instantly caught off guard by all the attendees sitting around a large oval table. They were all men except for one woman. Sonja attempted to count the number of people present, but her mind kept botching the number.

  Then the one woman, who was petite and wore a short blond bob haircut, stood and walked toward her with an outstretched hand. “Sonja Hester?”

  “Yes,” Sonja barely said as her narrowed eyes fell on one face in particular.

  “I’m Fiona Meadows. We’re happy you could make it.”

  Fiona’s grip was weak, but Sonja shook her hand anyway.

  The guy. Was it…? There was no doubt it was him. Sure, he had grown quite a bit older, but he still had the same floppy blond hair and sky-blue eyes. Scraggly hair painted the lower part of his face, and he was sitting back in his chair as if he were leaning away from the sight of her while watching her with an incredulous expression.

  Suddenly it was as if everyone else in the room had vanished.

  “Jay?” she said.

  He nodded slowly. “Good morning, Sonja.” His tone was formal, as though they had never once been the most important person in each other’s life.

  Sonja could hardly breathe. Her feet felt planted securely on the carpet. She glanced over her shoulder, wanting to make a mad dash out of his presence. When she looked at him again, he was still watching her with the same dubious expression. And that’s when all the ill feelings she had for Jay West came rushing back like a tsunami.

  Chapter 4

  July 1998

  The front door flew open.

  “Ouch!” Sonja shook her hand then sucked on the finger she had just pricked with the tip of a needle.

  She was sewing the torso to the legs she had already stuffed with cotton. Even though she was anxious to be done, she had taken care to ensure each stitch was straight and strong enough to withstand some intense performances.

  “Play with him,” her sister Elaine ordered and then zipped upstairs with Riley West on her heels.

  Riley was the odd-looking girl whose hair was so blond it looked white. She lived six houses down the street, and before three weeks ago, she and Laney had been mortal enemies. Now they were self-absorbed, superficial, and inseparable best friends.

  Earlier that day, Laney and Riley had taken the city bus from Hancock Park all the way to the Santa Monica Pier. Sonja’s grandmother had wanted Sonja to go with them so that she could get some air, but last weekend, Sonja actually had accompanied them. It was a harrowing experience. Laney and Riley wore bikinis under short, see-through white dresses. They walked funny, swinging their tiny hips in order to attract male attention. And it worked! Only it wasn’t the boys their age who were losing their minds over them—it was grown men who were old enough to be their fathers. Sonja found it all so gross. Plus, she knew her grandmother wanted her to shadow Elaine just so she could keep an eye on her older sister. Sonja had no problems reporting back to Gran anything Elaine did wrong, but that morning she had refused to be Gran’s snitch. Nothing would change anyway if she went. Just like last weekend, and all those before it, Elaine and Riley would walk out the door half-naked and looking to make anyone of the opposite sex fawn over them like dogs in heat. So Sonja had insisted on staying home and doing what she thought was fun instead.

  Sonja and the boy who had been dumped into her lap locked eyes. He looked an awful lot like Riley, only younger. He even had the same shaggy blond hair, except his was shoulder-length. She actually would’ve thought he was a girl if Laney hadn’t told her to play with “him.”

  Both of them seemed trapped in a moment they wished didn’t exist.

  “Hi,” she said timidly.

  “Hi.” His tone was similar to hers.

  Getting him to respond was easier than she thought, but she wondered if they had anything in common. “Are you my age?”

  He wrinkled his forehead. “I don’t know. I’m eleven.”

  Sonja smiled. “Me too. I mean, I’ll turn eleven in September. What’s your name?”

  “Jay.” He lifted his chin to get a better look at what was in her hands. “What are you doing?”

  Sonja glanced at the needle pinched between her fingers. She’d forgotten she was holding it. “I’m making another puppet.”

  “Another puppet?”

  She nodded. “I make them for my shows.”

  “Oh?” He sounded intrigued. The boy didn’t move a muscle though. He stood there as if he was caught between running out the door and staying put.

  She scrunched up her nose. “
Did you have to go to the beach with those two?” She thought maybe that was why he seemed so weird. Spending all day with Laney and Riley was enough to make anyone feel skittish.

  “Yeah,” he said with a sigh of dread.

  “They like boys a lot,” she said.

  “All girls do.”

  She shook her head vigorously. “Not me. I like doing constructive things.”

  “Oh yeah?” He sounded intrigued.

  Her head bounced as she nodded.

  “Then you don’t like boys?”

  She shook her head. “Not like Laney and Riley. Sometimes boys can be fun, as long as we’re doing something constructive.”

  “What do you mean by constructive?”

  “My gran said it’s doing something that makes me smarter and helps me fulfill my purpose in life.”

  He crossed his arms. “Jeez, that’s heavy.”

  “I know. Plus, we’re cursed anyway,” she said, repeating what her cousin Theresa, who was fifteen years old just like Laney, often said. Basically, hunting boys was a lost cause because the Hester girls were cursed to never get married. That’s why their mothers were never around. They were always chasing bad men, trying to get the men to love them in order to break an unbreakable spell.

  Jay uncrossed his arms and walked toward her. “But curses aren’t real.”

  “Ours is,” she said as he sat beside her. He smelled like the ocean and corndogs. Laney and Riley must’ve spent most of their day at Hot Dogs on a Stick, trying to get the attention of the boys they liked who worked there.

  “Curses are only real if you believe them. Just stop believing them.”

  She beamed. “But I like the curse. I get to live here with my gran because of it.”

  He grimaced. “Why’s that?”

  Sonja shrugged because she didn’t want to say that her mom liked being with men more than she liked taking care of her and Laney. “I don’t know. I just like living here.”

  “I guess that’s cool.” He pointed at the puppet in Sonja’s hand. “What kind of puppet are you making?”

  She raised the puppet higher. “She’s called Skinny Pig.”

  He laughed, and she could tell it was because he liked the name.

  “You want to help me? After I make her, I’m going to put on a show.”

  He tilted his head curiously. “Do you have a script?”

  She frowned. “A script?”

  “Like a movie script or a TV script?”

  Sonja had never heard of a script, but she sort of guessed what he was referring to. “Do you mean like a play?”

  He shot his finger toward her. “Yes. Like a play.”

  “I wrote a play. I always write them.” She waited for Jay to laugh at her. Laney always said her plays were stupid and not at all interesting because she was only ten years old and people her age didn’t know anything about how the world worked.

  “Do you need an actor?” Jay asked. “I’ve done sixteen commercials and I’m up for a part in a movie called Space Vermin.”

  Sonja scooted to the edge of the sofa. “Cool! Yeah, I do need an actor!”

  She was so excited to hear that. Jay was exactly what she needed—a real actor who could bring her stories to life. She was never any good at performing the lines herself.

  They smiled at each other again. It was strange, but Sonja felt as if she had known Jay all of her life and that they would be friends forever.

  They spent the rest of the afternoon finishing Skinny Pig, then they built a new stage for the puppet show. They rehearsed the lines Sonja had written and rewrote them until Jay made sure that when he spoke the words, they sounded natural. By nightfall, they had used her grandmother’s video camera to record a full production of Skinny Pig Finds New Friends. She had never seen her plays on video until then, and instantly she became hooked on recording all of her shows and watching them like she would a TV program.

  Jay came back to Sonja’s house the next day and the next. Soon they had become inseparable and remained so even after the many times Laney and Riley’s friendship crumbled to shreds, re-erected, and collapsed again.

  It didn’t take long for their puppet shows to become one-man plays starring Jay West. Their productions turned into the talk of the neighborhood, and soon they began to charge local kids three dollars per seat to view Jay’s Saturday afternoon performance. The audience was mostly made up of girls who thought Jay was cute and the boys who liked the girls who were infatuated by Jay.

  Sonja and Jay also rode their bikes to school together. Whenever Jay’s caretaker would let her, Sonja accompanied them to Jay’s tapings for a commercial or a guest role on a television show. Since Jay’s parents, Carla and Jason, were rarely home, Jay slept over at her house most nights.

  Sonja and Jay became very close, like family. He knew how much it hurt Sonja whenever her mother landed a new boyfriend and ran off with him not too long after. And she knew how very lonely it was to live in Jay’s home.

  “It’s okay,” Jay would say. “My parents didn’t want us, and you know what? I don’t want them either.”

  As one year faded into the next, the girls who liked Jay and the ones he liked back never approved of their special friendship. After all, Sonja had boobs and the kind of body Laney insisted she show off more so that she could land a real boyfriend.

  But on September 7, 2001, everything changed. It was Sonja’s fifteenth birthday, and they hadn’t seen each other or talked for weeks. However, Jay had finally picked up one of the many calls she made to him and agreed to join her for a birthday night movie-a-thon. The movie-a-thon was something they had done on special occasions, like the first day of summer or Christmas break or Halloween night, since neither one of them liked candy enough to go trick-or-treating for it. They would start watching movies at ten o’clock at night and keep going until ten o’clock the next morning.

  Admittedly, she was surprised and relieved when he showed up in his plaid pajamas. She figured he had been avoiding her because Ginger, his pretty new girlfriend, didn’t like that they were such good friends. Once they settled in in the basement, Sonja sneaked a peek at him while curled up on the other end of the long sofa. Jay, who had been distant ever since he arrived, had the blanket pulled up to his neck. Nevertheless, she was glad he was there.

  The movie Memento was on, the lights were off, and one large pizza was sitting on the coffee table, untouched. With every passing second, Sonja wondered if she had to fall on her knees and beg Jay to remain her best friend. Finally he shifted abruptly. She thought he was going in for a piece of pizza, but instead he snatched up the remote control and put the movie on pause.

  “What’s going on between us?” he asked.

  Sonja jerked her head back. “I don’t know. You’re the one who’s acting strange.”

  He floated back against the sofa and squeezed his eyes shut. “I am?”

  “Yeah, actually, and it’s awful the way you’re shitting on our night.”

  Jay reached out to touch her but then pulled back. “I’m sorry, Son. I don’t want to do that.”

  She smiled tightly as she nodded. There was the thoughtful friend she had grown to adore. “That’s okay. I just figured Ginger doesn’t want you here but you came anyway and now you’re feeling guilty about it.”

  Jay stared into her eyes for a few moments and then moistened his lips. “Nah, that’s not it.”

  Sonja’s lips parted. She wanted to ask him what was it then, but more importantly she wondered why he was looking at her in that way. Finally she swallowed. “Then Ginger’s okay with you being here?”

  “No, she isn’t okay with it, but I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I don’t think I like her anymore.”

  “Oh.” She struggled to speak because she had become breathless. Perhaps because she was so darn thankful and hopeful that she was going to get her friend back.

  Jay continued to look her steadily in the eyes as he nodded continuously.

  Sonja crossed
and uncrossed her legs. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  It was strange, because Jay had often gazed at her in that way and until now, she had ignored it.

  “What about us?” he asked.

  She quickly turned away from his hypnotizing stare and her eyes landed on the TV screen. “We’re friends, right?” Her heart fluttered and nervous breaths wafted across her lower lip as she waited for his answer.

  “When I first saw you…” he finally said.

  She turned to regard him. Even though he was close, he seemed many miles away.

  Jay cleared his throat. “I thought you were the prettiest girl I’d ever seen.”

  That sounded nonsensical to Sonja. She threw her hands up. “But I was only ten, and you were eleven.”

  “I know. And you told me you weren’t interested in boys.”

  “And you told me you weren’t interested girls.”

  “I never said that.”

  Sonja pressed her hand over her heart as she tried to remember a conversation that had happened four years earlier. She couldn’t.

  “I like you, but you don’t like me back, and that’s okay. But that’s all I ever wanted to tell you.” He cracked a tiny smile, but Sonja didn’t think it was a smiling moment.

  Suddenly she became hyper-aware of everything around them. She noticed the man on the television screen sitting at the diner’s bar with a cup of coffee in front of him. She turned, and there was the long set of steps leading up out of the basement. Then there were Jay’s eyes, the ones she had looked into a million times and for a trillion reasons.

  Could she like Jay in that way? Was she supposed to like him, or any boy, romantically? They had never spoken about sex, but she knew Jay was doing it with all of his girlfriends. She’d never told him what she thought about that. He was way too young to do such adult things, but Jay had always been more mature than she was. At times, him having sex with his girlfriends made her jealous, but then she pictured herself beneath him and those feelings dissipated. She was far from ready to engage in anything like that.