Emanating such a glow that if the dentists were not groping her with their eyes, I’d think I was hallucinating.
But she’s real.
She raises her hand at me and waves.
She looks terrified.
My heart turns over.
Whatever happened between us, I don’t ever want to see Molly Marks looking scared.
I wave back and walk toward her.
Time slows down, just like in the movies.
One of her movies.
“Seth,” she mouths.
“Molls,” I mouth back.
And just as I’m close enough to take her hand—
I trip over an umbrella stand and fall directly into the hot tub.
Like, with my entire body. Kablam. Neck-deep in the stew.
I catch myself just in time to avoid smashing my skull onto a Baja shelf. A scrum of sixty-somethings converges around me, screeching in alarm.
Molly’s face looks like a very beautiful, heavily made-up version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
She runs toward me, elbowing her way through the retirees, and kneels at the side of the tub, to which I am clinging for dear life.
“Oh my God, Seth!” she cries. “Are you okay?”
“I’m calling 911,” Dr. Yun shouts over the din.
“No, no, I’m fine,” I rasp at him. My voice is hoarse from emotion and the hot, chlorinated water that went down my windpipe. “Just wet. And embarrassed.”
Molly offers me her hands and I take them and she helps pull me up.
But I’m chest-deep in burbling water, and the incredibly goyish salmon-colored chinos my mother insisted I wear to this party weigh me down, making me clumsy.
I slip again, and this time I take Molly down with me.
Her sparkly body flies forward, knees first, and she topples into the water with a scream and a huge, 104-degree Fahrenheit splash.
We both clamber for the sides of the spa, limbs twisted, trying not to drown each other. My baggy pants are getting caught on her spiky heels. Her sequins are scratching my bare forearms.
“Are you okay?” Molly gasps, once she’s gotten herself somewhat righted.
“Fuck,” I say sharply, though my mother would not approve of me cursing in front of her friends. “I think I just sprained my ankle.”
“At least hot water is good for injuries?” she offers feebly, her hair tangling around her shoulders as it ripples in the jets.
She wipes water out of her eye, and a false eyelash lands on her cheek.
I delicately remove it and hold it up to the light cast by the tiki torch. “Make a wish.”
She starts to cry. “I already did.”
And I hope, I hope, that she means the wish is me.
“What are you doing here, Molls?” I ask softly. “Or, should I call you … Nina?”
She sucks in a breath through clenched teeth. “You read the script.”
I nod. “Are you here for notes on the ending?”
The pink of the hot tub lights shines against her sequins, turning them rose gold. “Well, falling into a hot tub would be a good set piece to punch up the draft,” she says.
“I like your script the way it is.”
She shakes her head. “I’m so sorry, Seth. I wrote it for you, not to sell. I was going to give it to you to say that I’m sorry.”
My shoulders relax at these words. I knew it. I knew she wrote it for us.
I pull her into my arms. It is very painful to move, but this is the best I’ve felt in a month.
