“Yeah,” Will says. “I like it about them, too.”
They’re quiet for a minute, both of them eating their bagels, the birds chittering wildly in the bushes around the pool. “You know, we never really talked about the thing with me and Nick,” Georgia says cautiously. “I kind of feel like there are a lot of things we’ve never really talked about.”
Will bristles, she can see it, the way his back visibly straightens inside his shirt. “Uh-uh,” he protests. “You explicitly told me you didn’t want to talk about Nick. That wasn’t some fucked-up thing where you were, like, dying to confide in me and I—”
“I explicitly told you I didn’t want you to lecture me,” Georgia counters immediately. “There’s a difference.”
“Semantic.”
“Hardly.” She blows a breath out. “You’re my brother, Will,” she tells him, setting her bagel down on her plate, “and I know that your instinct is to stutter and bluster and immediately bail when things get weird or awkward or feelings-y, but I gotta tell you, it’s not exactly a recipe for lasting relationships and robust emotional health. Actually, not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s how you wind up passed out alone on your bathroom floor with an empty bottle of sleeping pills on the counter.”
Will doesn’t answer for a moment, his jaw set and stubborn. He fidgets with the edge of the butter knife beside his plate. “Okay,” he says finally, and it sounds like a challenge. “Well. Let’s talk, then.”
“Okay,” Georgia agrees. “Let’s talk.”
So, they talk: about Nick and about Caroline and about theyears they lived with Marcy; about what they’re reading and watching and the woman Georgia’s dating back in New York. She stays for the better part of a week, the two of them strolling the grounds of the Getty and staying up late playing a battered game of Scrabble she picks up at the Rose Bowl flea market. She hasn’t been back to LA since her parents died and being here is sort of wild, like walking around in a dream from when she was a little girl: They drive by the breakfast place their parents used to take them to on Saturday mornings. They drive by their old house in Toluca Lake.
“Do you think he did it on purpose?” Georgia asks.
“Yes,” Will says immediately. They’re idling in the car a little ways down the block, the engine humming. He doesn’t bother to ask what she means. “I think he probably did it on purpose.”
Georgia nods, gazing out the windshield: rusty red roof and bright white stucco, a trio of kids playing freeze tag in the yard. “Yeah,” she says, reaching for Will’s hand across the gearshift and squeezing. Letting go. “I think he probably did, too.”
On her last night in town they pick up dinner from the Meatball King: a pepperoni pizza and an order of garlic knots, Will pulling a couple of beers from the fridge. He looks better since she got here, Georgia notices with some satisfaction. At the very least he’s showered and shaved.
“You think you’ll see her again?” she asks, a cloud of steam rising around her face as she slides a couple of slices onto a plate and hands them over. “Lilly Benedetto, I mean.”
Right away, Will shakes his head. “Nah,” he says, no hesitation. “She doesn’t want to hear from me.”
Georgia bites her lip. He makes her so sad sometimes, her brother, his stubbornness and his solitude and his pride. He breaksher fucking heart. Still, she’s supposed to fly out first thing in the morning, and she doesn’t want to fight with him right before she leaves, after everything that’s happened, so in the end she just shrugs and lifts her slice in a cheesy salute. “Well,” she says, “at the very least you should tell her this pizza is a revelation. Like, say what you will about these people, but they make a delicious fucking pie.”
Will smiles at that, a breeze rustling the leaves of the trees high above them. “Yeah,” he agrees quietly. “You wouldn’t expect it, probably. But the pizza’s the real deal.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Lilly
The coverage is... not great. “Benedetto Bares All,” proclaims the headline on the Sinclair, with a link to the video itself plus a slideshow of Olivia’s most revealing outfits. “Liv’s Festival Fiasco,”Us Weeklyreports.In Touchis blunter about it: “Olivia’s Moon Landing Sex Tape Scandal,” they promise, in a font bright enough to hurt Lilly’s eyes.
“Where’s all the feminist outrage?” she fumes, stomping down to the kitchen for a bag of pretzel rods, though of course she already knows the answer, which is that she and her sisters are not exactly the kind of women most feminists particularly care about. Though no one has said it explicitly—well, no one outside of theMeet the Benedettossubreddit—the general consensus seems to be that Olivia had this coming. Lilly remembers that feeling from after Joe died: the creeping suspicion that she lived a kind of life that invited spectacular calamity and so had no right to be anything but unsurprised when it came calling. It doesn’t feel any better this time around.
Days pass. Lilly walks the neighborhood, committing the curve of the road to memory. She finishes her draft, sends a dozen hopeful emails to literary agents. Gets a dozen form rejections almost as fast. She takes a deep breath, reopens the document. Takes a second look and tries again.
On Saturday morning she finds her dad up in the gym, where he’s lying on the bench joylessly pressing two hundred pounds over and over. “Need a spotter?” she asks.
Dominic shakes his head, jaw clenched. “Finishing up,” he grinds out, setting the weight back on the rack with a noisy clank before sitting up and reaching for his towel. “How’s your sister doing?”
Lilly hesitates.Which one?she wants to ask him.The one with the sex tape, the one with the eating disorder, the one with all the talent nobody cares about, or the one who doesn’t want anything to do with the rest of us?“I think she’s been better in her life,” she finally allows.
“Yeah.” He rubs the towel over the top of his head before draping it around his neck. “Did you come up here to say ‘I told you so’?”
“What? No,” Lilly says, stung. “When have I ever said anything like that to you?”
“Well, maybe you should,” her father says. “You did tell me so. Or you tried, at least.”
Lilly opens her mouth, closes it again. It’s her instinct to make him feel better—to tell him it’s not his fault, he tried his best, that Olivia’s a grown woman—but in the end she doesn’t say anything, and after a moment her father continues.
“I wanted to give you girls more than I had,” he says quietly. “The house, the pool. That’s what every father wants, right? That’s American. But now that it’s all said and done... I don’t know if it was the right thing.”
