Parallel

flights from the lobby to my floor constitute the entirety of my cardiovascular exercise, so I try to make it count. I used to run six miles a day (always outside, even in December); now I’m lucky if I walk six blocks. Alain doesn’t want his female assassins to get too thin, so our trainers have been told to lay off the cardio. Not running has been brutal for me.
    “Hey, honey! How’s it going? Having fun?”
    “Yep!” I enthuse, trying to sound upbeat. The only thing worse than admitting to yourself that you made a colossal mistake is admitting to your parents that you did. Especially when the thing you’re regretting doing is something they were lukewarm about from the beginning. It wasn’t the acting thing that made mine wary, but the fact that the movie I’d been cast in lacked a coherent plot.
    “Learning a lot?” Mom asks. Her standard question.
    “Oh, yeah. Definitely.” Today’s lesson: how to pick a Lycra wedgie with the corner of a kitchen stool. “How are things with you guys?”
    “Well, we miss you, of course,” Mom replies. “But otherwise, things are fine. Your dad starts trial on Monday, so he’s been working like crazy.” In my seventeen-almost-eighteen years of life, only five of my dad’s cases have ever made it to trial, which is sad, because being in the courtroom is pretty much the only thing he likes about the practice of law. Dad was a painter when he met my mom. In fact, art was what brought them together. They were standing side by side in front of Dali’s The Persistence of Memory at a surrealist exhibition at MoMA, when he looked over at my mom and said (in what my mom insists was a non-cheesy fashion), “The trouble with Dali is that it’s hard to look at his work without thinking that you could live a whole life and not feel anything as deeply as he felt everything.” They were married less than a year later, the day after my mom graduated from Barnard. After struggling as a painter for a few more years, my dad finally gave in and applied to law school, mostly because my grandparents said they’d pay for it. The plan was to practice for a couple of years to save some money. Twenty years later, he’s the head of the litigation department at a big Atlanta law firm, working sixty-plus hours a week. And most of the time, he’s bored senseless.
    “How are things at the museum?” I ask. “Did the Picasso exhibit open?” My mom is the head curator at the High Museum, a job she absolutely adores. Last fall, a Seurat exhibit she put together made a big splash in the art world, and other, bigger museums started courting her, but Mom told them she had no interest in leaving the collection she’d spent the last ten years trying to build. Instead, she used her new reputation to bring a string of really stellar exhibits to Atlanta.
    “Not until tomorrow,” she replies. I can hear her smile. “Speaking of things happening tomorrow . . .”
    “I meant to tell you,” I say quickly, knowing where this is going. “Some of my cast mates are taking me out to dinner tomorrow night. Some trendy place in Hollywood.” Not true, but I know how much my mom hates the idea of my being alone on my eighteenth birthday with no one to celebrate with. I also know she can’t afford to be away from the museum right now.
    “That’s great, honey.” She sounds relieved. “I wish your dad and I were going to be there, too. Eighteen! Good grief, I feel old.”
    The line beeps as I’m unlocking my door. “Hey, Mom, that’s Caitlin. We’ve been playing phone tag all week, so I should probably . . .”
    “Oh, of course, honey. Say hi to her for me.”
    We hang up, and I switch over to my best friend.
    “Thank God. I thought I was going to have to leave hate voicemail to get you to call me back.”
    “Sorry. I’ve been on set all day. What’s up? Everything okay?”
    “Better than okay,” Caitlin replies. “The geek in me can barely contain herself.” My best friend is, for sure, a raging geek—at least when it comes to science. Her inner nerd just happens to live in a supermodel’s body. She gets her looks from her mom, an ex-model turned handbag designer. Her brain, on the other hand, she gets from her dad, a structural engineer and quite possibly the dorkiest man I’ve ever met. Although she didn’t inherit his affinity for Velcro sandals, Caitlin did get her father’s left-brained love of the excessively detailed and mind-numbingly complicated. In high school, she