Max couldn’t hear her, on account of the earbuds. She pulled one of them loose. Then she reached around to the refrigerator without even getting up and retrieved a spray bottle of low-fat dressing, as promised.

“Your brother went to the High School of Performing Arts, right?” Chelsea asked.

“Right.”

“But you don’t have the acting bug?”

“No,” Scarlett said.

“So what do you do?”

Max was clearly paying some kind of attention, because Scarlett saw him looking over at her at this.

“I…go to school…”

She was answering this question like a five-year-old. I go to school. Genius. What else did she do? She tied her shoes. She liked kittens.

“Yeah,” Chelsea said sympathetically, as if she knew this answer was exactly as pathetic as Scarlett feared. “You have to feel it. It has to be in you. And, you’re, you know, an agent. Or something.”

Max let out an audible sigh, grabbed the salad dressing, and sprayed everything on his plate until it had a high sheen.

“You need to be a special kind of person to be a star,” Mrs. Biggs said, slicing her chicken breast with a vigor usually reserved for the severing of human heads from still-struggling bodies. “It doesn’t just happen. It’s about talent, and it’s about focus. Chelsea’s been working toward her goal all her life. Sure, there are people who work just as hard, but if they don’t have the special something, then they aren’t going to make it. Chelsea has both.”

Max’s eyes fluttered slightly closed.

“Max is the academic one,” Mrs. Biggs said, remembering her other child at the table. “He gets by on just brains.”

“And the blood of virgins…” he said, drifting into the conversation.

“Don’t use that language at the table,” Mrs. Biggs snapped.

“English?”

Mrs. Biggs just looked up tiredly.

“That’s not what Max gets by on,” Chelsea said under her breath.

It was so strange being the outsider to all these little barbs and understandings. Scarlett suddenly had a lot of sympathy for people like…well, Eric and Chip…who had sat in the middle of six Martins at the dinner table and tried to keep up.

“I have to get home,” she said, the moment Mrs. Biggs stood to yank the plates away. “But thanks…”

“You should come again!” Chelsea said. “Anytime you want.”

Just when Scarlett thought she’d made her escape and was halfway down the steps, she heard a creak above her. Max was following her down.

“So,” he called down the stairwell, “you’re dating my sister now, huh? Or was that just you being a good lackey?”

“My boss gave me fifty bucks,” Scarlett answered honestly. “Next time? I’m going to ask her for double.”