Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [68]
Stephanie smiles but looks at me somewhat quizzically. “Okay, who are you and what have you done with Amelia?” she asks and we both laugh.
“Hey, congratulations,” I hear as I walk back to my folding chair. It’s a few hours after my walk with Stephanie and I’ve just taken a sixty days sober chip at Pledges. “That’s quite an accomplishment.” As other people take their chips, I glance at the person talking and realize I’m staring into the face of Damian McHugh, the boy-next-door sitcom star with a drinking problem that’s gotten more ink than his career. He’d been going through his very public battle with the bottle—throwing up in bars and licking the faces of reporters—while I’d been an inpatient at Pledges and though we’d all jokingly talked about “saving a seat” for him there, I hadn’t expected him to simply show up one day to shake my hand for getting a chip.
“I’m Damian,” he says, holding out his hand.
I’m about to say “I know” before remembering how uncool that is. “I’m Amelia.” I smile and shake but he doesn’t let go of my hand. “Nice to meet you,” I add, taking my hand away.
Just then, the meeting starts breaking up and people begin their rush outside in order to get as much nicotine as possible into their systems as soon as humanly possible.
“Want to go smoke?” he asks. I nod and follow him outside as I marvel at how surreal my life has become—writing about celebrities going to rehab one month and smoking with them the next. Damian walks past the clusters of people smoking right outside the meeting doors and toward the basketball hoop, lighting a cigarette and holding the lighter out for me.
“You know how when some people get sober, they start glowing and shit?” he says suddenly. “You really seem to have that.”
“Thanks,” I respond, taken aback. Is this a special sober pick-up line? I wonder, deciding that if it’s not, it should be. It seems like the polite thing would be to tell him that he’s glowing, too, but it would be an outright lie and outright lies aren’t escaping from my lips with ease anymore. “So did you just finish up the thirty-day program?” I ask.
He nods. “Yeah, at the Malibu Pledges. But I like the meetings better here.” He stares at his cigarette as if it, and not me, asked him the question.
“And?” I ask. “How did you like it?”
He blows smoke rings. “About as much as I figure I’d like open-heart surgery,” he says.
I can’t help but laugh. It’s actually an appropriate analogy if you thought about it, but I got the feeling Damian hadn’t. “Really? That much?” I ask.
“If I needed the open-heart surgery in order to survive,” he adds, grimacing.
“I see,” I conclude. “Miserable but necessary.”
“Something like that,” he says, eyeing me as he tosses his cigarette butt on the ground and smashes it out with his Nike Airmax–encased foot. “You?”
“Actually,” I say, “I loved it. I feel like I’ve been given a whole new life.” I know I sound like a walking cliché when I say things like this but I don’t know how else to explain how different everything has become.
“Really?” Damian asks, looking at me skeptically. He gestures his head toward the meeting room. “Don’t you feel a little like all of this is…I don’t know…sort of cultlike? Like they’re trying to brainwash us or something?”
I shrug. Of course, I’d heard people say this kind of thing before—to the point where I pretty much had a standard response. “I guess,” I say, “but my brain really needed some washing.” I smile to try to alleviate how annoying my response must sound to him but at the same time realize that talking to this guy who’s paid, like, $10,000 for every second he’s on camera is about as stimulating as examining an ant farm—and having the ants crawl up your arm.
He smiles and takes a step closer to me. “Say the word and we could be naked and in my pool in ten minutes,” he