Free Famous in Love by Rebecca Serle

I realized the supreme unfairness of life. I didn’t get upset about it or anything. I don’t think I felt it at all. It’s more that I
thought
it, realized it. Like a date in a history book or a number on a math test. It was a fact. No matter what I did. No matter how many stage roles I got or how good I was in school or how well behaved, they’d never really worry about me like they worried about her.
    Jake hung around for a little while after the commotion calmed down, a tearful Joanna going up to her room unpunished and laden with water and coffee. I watched the whole thing from the living room, and when it was over I remember Jake taking my hand in his and sliding the pencil out from under my knuckles. There were large red dents on my index finger.
    “Are you okay?” he asked me.
    I don’t remember what I said, or what he said after that, but I do know that when he put his hand on my cheek and then his lips on mine, I let him. And it felt good. Because I knew Jake was on my side. Whatever side that was, he was on it. And I guess that was Cassandra’s problem. There was a side after that.
    She didn’t talk to us for a month afterward, and we never called ourselves the three musketeers again. Not even jokingly.
    That was almost two years ago.
    “He’s good,” she says now. “Busy. We both are.” Cassandra is silent for a moment, and I wonder if she hasn’t seen much of him since I’ve been gone. A wave of guilt hits me—what if I was their glue? “Have you spoken to him?” she asks.
    “Just a few e-mails,” I say. “But you know Jake and the phone.”
    Cassandra laughs. “Ugh. Totally. So when are you coming home?”
    I spin around on my stool. The sunshine and ocean greet me. “Isn’t a better question when are you coming to visit? You do know I’m in Hawaii, right? And your favorite movie star is here?”
    She laughs. Cassandra’s laugh reminds me of twinkle lights at Christmas: bright and soft and a little bit magical.
    “Clearly Rainer is more interested in you than me,” she says.
    “I was talking about me.”
    I’m almost sure I can hear her smile. “So you’re calling yourself a movie star now, huh?”
    “Only to you,” I say, and when I do, I’m hit with just how much I miss her. Like the emotion is a stone thrown hard into a pond. It sinks, but the ripples keep on spreading. I wish she were here. Pulling at her long blond curlsand wearing some crazy, colorful ensemble and making us dance around the living room to Madonna.
    “Come visit,” I say. “You and Jake. Next weekend. What do you say?”
    “I don’t know,” she says. “There’s school stuff. And I spent all my babysitting money on those new ocean underworld DVDs.”
    “I’d pay,” I tell her.
    “Oh.”
    “It’s not a big deal,” I say, all at once, the words knocking into one another. “It would mean a lot to me. You could see what the set is like, and we could spend some time together. The three of us.”
    Cassandra’s tone brightens. “Yeah, good luck getting Jake on a plane.”
    “Please,” I say, because all of a sudden I need her here. Both of them. It’s like if they visit, if they see this, maybe I will feel more like myself. Maybe this will become real.
    “All right,” she says. “I’ll talk to him about it. And in the meantime try to keep your affairs out of the international press.”
    I laugh. “It’s crazy, right?”
    “Crazy,” she says. “Totally bat shit. But I kind of love it.”
    “That makes one of us,” I say.
    I hear her sigh, and the pop of her lips. “You’ll come around,” she says. “You always do.”
    We hang up, and I keep looking out my huge floor-to-ceiling windows. They’re the one thing in this condo that reminds me a little bit of home. My bedroom has one window that looks out into the backyard. I used to like to pull my desk chair up to it on the weekends and sit with a huge mug of hot chocolate and a good script. But now my sister lives in that room, and