Chapter 47: Home, Sweet Home

Friday, December 28, 1984

We were on the road by nine-thirty, even with having to pick up Jess, Angie, and Paige. Cammie and Jess were the only ones with luggage. Cammie, of course, brought back everything she’d brought, plus presents, and Jess had an overnight bag. The rest of us had most of our presents along, too, except for things we might use in Houston.

Before heading out of town, we stopped at Kyle’s office to sign the updated LLC profit structure documents. Cammie and Jess waited in the car while the rest of us took care of the paperwork. The whole thing took under five minutes. We would still need to move assets around, but we could do that easily enough.

The conversation during the drive mostly revolved around classes and what it was like living at the two campuses. There were a few questions about Jess’s show, but none of us wanted to dig for clues, and Jess was good at not giving them.

Jess hadn’t been to College Station in a long time and enjoyed the drive for the sightseeing, too. It was, of course, vastly different than traveling around Los Angeles.

When we got to the house, she said, “The photos don’t do it justice! It’s lovely!”

“Thanks!” I said.

She giggled a bit.

“Stands to reason, considering what I know about it. The owners are pretty invested in making you happy, after all.”

Cammie grinned, and said, “Yeah. I had no idea they owned it over the summer! It makes much more sense now.”

We parked out front.

“I’ll check for unwanted messages!” Paige said.

“Unwanted messages?” Jess said.

“I guess we missed telling you about that,” Angie said. “Some people spray-painted anti-gay slurs on the house.”

“Well, that sucks!” Jess said.

“We thought it was some neighbors,” Cammie said, pointing towards their house. “They’re lousy, but now we think maybe it was someone else.”

“Though maybe the neighbors told them about us,” Angie said.

Jess said, “We’re kinda advised not to go off campus just walking around. It gets a little problematic before you get too far away.”

“It’s very safe here,” Jas said. “We carry our bear spray, though.”

Jess grinned and pulled out a can from her purse.

“Never leave home without it!” she said.

Paige came back around.

“All good!” she said. “Nothing new, wanted or unwanted.”

“Hurrah!” Angie said.

I got Jess’s bag, then unlocked the front door and waved her on in.

“Thank you, kind sir,” Jess said, giving me a kiss on the cheek.

Cammie said, “Let’s all show Jess our spaces.”

“Sounds good to me!” Angie said.

“We’ll start at Mel’s and my apartment,” Cammie said. “It’s all the way upstairs.”

I headed upstairs with the tour. I seldom went to the second floor or attic — it’d been weeks since I’d been up here. The last time was to put a couple of things in the storage area Jas and I used.

Cammie showed off her living space, which was very neat and orderly. I noticed Paige was not along and guessed perhaps her and Angie’s apartment was a bit less orderly.

When we came down, Angie said, “Here’s the empty apartment,” which tended to confirm Paige was tidying up.

She opened the door and Jess went in, followed by the rest of us. It felt very out of place, now, with the rest of the house so lived in. I wondered if it might not stay this way until we moved out. Maybe we’d find someone ‘worthy,’ though. It would change a lot of things for us. We’d have to be much more circumspect about some conversations, for one thing.

Still, the right person — or people — might make it worth it.

Jess looked around and said, “This is one heck of a lot better than my dorm room!”

Cammie grinned, and said, “Well, yeah. I’ve been in some of the rooms here, and there’s no comparison.”

I said, “It’s much nicer than my dorm room at UT.”

Jas elbowed me and said, sweetly, “Which you never had!”

“Yes, dear!” I said, which got me another elbowing. Fortunately, Jas was giggling, too.

So was Jess, who said, “Funny! It would have to be better than a dorm room you never had!”

That got everyone chuckling.

Angie shifted the mood (more than she intended to, I think) by saying, “It’s much nicer than the apartment I lived in during college, too.”

Jas said, “Aw, honey!” and hugged Angie.

I joined in.

Paige saw the hugs as she stepped into the doorway and immediately said, “What’s up?”

“Angie was reminding us that her college apartment sucked,” Jas said.

Paige hugged Angie right away.

“To be fair,” Angie said, smiling a bit, “it was the company who truly made it suck. Present company is so much better!”

We all hugged Angie again once Paige made room.

After a second, she said, “Okay! That was unnecessarily maudlin. Plus, as Jas pointed out, I never had that apartment, either. So, it’s all good!”

There was little else to say, so we didn’t. Instead, the tour moved to Angie and Paige’s room. However messy it might have been, by now it was mostly orderly. Not as neat as Cammie and Mel’s room, but then neither was Jas’s and my room, and we weren’t scooting off to tidy up.

Our room was next on the tour, and we survived major embarrassment. Cammie made us show off the safe, in which I had about $20,000 in cash in case of emergencies. I didn’t actually open it, though, just showed it off. Jess loved the design. It truly would be hard for anyone to guess there was a safe at all.

We showed off the rest of the first floor next and finished in the basement. It turned out Jess had never even been in a residential basement, and she found the whole thing ‘cool’ and ‘fascinating.’ She loved the separate entrance and the reconfigurable apartment.

If USC didn’t work out, I could certainly see Jess living here. On the other hand, the odds of that were infinitesimal. Even if acting didn’t work out, Jess was going to conquer USC without breaking a sweat. I was sure of that!

In fact, the biggest threat to her USC career would be her acting career taking off. If she was missing entire semesters to film something or other, it’d be hard to finish a degree in anywhere near the usual amount of time.

We all agreed on Jose’s as the perfect choice. There was food in the house, but not much food, and we could stop at a grocery store on the way back.

Instead of heading right there, I instead gave Jess a tour of the campus. With things so quiet over break, we could drive to places where I’d hesitate to go on a busy day. That let us point out most of the buildings where we’d had classes. We promised to take her to the MSC before we left town, too.

The campus was huge compared to USC’s, as I’d expected, and Jess couldn’t get over how much space it took up.

“I can see why you’re staying fit!” she said. “It’d wear me out walking all over this place!”

Cammie snorted.

“You’re the fittest of us all!” she said.

“I’m not a cheerleader anymore!” Jess replied. “This takes work now! I’m burning around three thousand fewer calories a day!”

“You’re managing it well,” Angie said.

“Very well!” Jas said.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Jess said, grinning. “Seriously, I have to. Not just because no one’s going to hire me if I get fat — which, honestly, is defined by ridiculous standards in Hollywood — but also because I’ll be mad at myself.”

“Just don’t turn into Karen Carpenter,” Angie said, sounding serious.

Jess shivered.

“That was a mental illness, but yeah. Some of it was those same stresses. Ugh! No, thank you!”

We shifted to happier subjects on the drive. Jess had kept up with only a few of the other cheerleaders. She found it surprising how quickly people you’d known for a decade or more were set aside. I’d been through it before and, if anything, I found it even more fascinating the second time around.

When we got to Jose’s, Jess loved it, proclaiming it a perfect replacement for Brennerman’s. She hadn’t been out to many ‘nice’ places in LA yet, and most of those were with her parents. Work was work, and the studio was the studio. Her agent had taken her to a couple ‘see and be seen’ places, but that was a work in progress so far. Since she hadn’t dated anyone at USC, no guys had had the chance to impress her with lobster (nor had she had occasion to pretend out-of-date dog food was perfectly delicious).

She made the point herself during lunch, saying, “Partly it’s being picky, and partly it’s ... I have to be careful. Not with the students, I mean. I don’t think any more of them are ... ill-intentioned ... than anywhere else. It’s more, if I met someone acting, right now I’d be in the tabloids in ten seconds with ‘Mystery Girl Steals X’s Heart!’ headlines. The storyline would become my ‘sleeping my way to success.’”

“That sucks,” Paige said.

“It’s less unusual than you think,” Angie said.

“Huh?” Paige said.

“It’s being in the spotlight. You and I are in the spotlight just a bit. If either of us were spotted with someone else, and someone inferred we were cheating...”

“Oh!” Paige said, nodding. “I see what you mean. It’s weird thinking of myself as being ‘in the spotlight,’ but...”

“You’re under the radar because you’re not big names and you’re at a big school,” Jess said. “I’m not a big name, either, but in Hollywood people sometimes become big names overnight. This spring, there’s a 50/50 chance things will change significantly for me when my episode airs. If even a few of my classmates pick up on it, suddenly I’ll be ‘that girl on TV!’ There aren’t many working actors at USC right now, or at least I think there aren’t. Once people know I am, I’ll get a flock of people wanting me to ‘introduce’ them to my ‘friends.’”