As far as I'm concerned, it wasn't Lisa's strong will to live that kept her alive, but rather her propensity for run-on sentences.
As she slowly pulled the trigger back, tears streaming down her face, it occurred to her that she was still leaving Robby dangling in the wind of suspicion. If she wasn't going to clear him, she might as well stay alive and reap the benefits of her sudden popularity. No, killing herself only made sense if she was going to clear him first. So she took the gun with her to the kitchen where she began to write her suicide note.
The thing about Lisa was that, sanity aside, she was very bright and articulate. So once she started writing, she couldn't stop herself. She cleared Robby of all wrong-doings and wrote about how wonderful a man he truly was. Of course, her opinion was entirely based on his TV show, but she didn't bother to mention that. She told the full truth about what Mitch had tried to do to her. She thanked her new friends for embracing her the way they did that day and apologized for lying to them. She told her parents to be happy for her and that she would meet them in Heaven, and specifically told her dad that his special treatment of her that day made it the best day of her life. She suggested he treat everyone like that all the time because it would make the world a better place for everyone. She had much, much more to say, but the five Valiums she had swallowed were starting to kick in. Before she knew it, she was fast asleep with the pen in her hand and her head on the kitchen table, roughly an inch away from the black steel revolver.
When Janice Docks entered the kitchen at six-thirty that morning to find her daughter passed out next to a gun, all she could do was scream. The fact that Lisa didn't budge from the loud sound simply made her scream again, twice as loud.
Cameron was there within seconds. He felt the gun was cold, saw Lisa wasn't bleeding, and knew a gunshot would have woken him and Janice. But when they tried to wake her, her body fell limp. Even had they not seen the suicide note, there would have been no doubt in their minds what she had tried to do because she had tried it before.
"Oh my God," Janice moaned. "The Valium!"
She raced to their closet to find the open lock box and the empty Valium bottle.
"How many were in there?" Cameron demanded to know.
"I -- I don't know," she said, terror-stricken. "A bunch. I don't know!"
They quickly threw on some clothes. Cameron carried Lisa to the car. Janice snatched the note and shoved it into her jeans back pocket as she got into the backseat.
They read it in the hospital waiting room while Lisa's stomach was being pumped. Cameron was furious that his daughter would make up such a story, but also filled with self-loathing that he had been such a horrible father. He remembered the little baby girl she once was, and for the first time in his adult life, he cried.
I'll say his name was Dr. Joseph Powalski -- Dr. Joe to Lisa -- and he was halfway through his nine holes at Studio City Golf & Tennis when his cell phone rang. He was supposed to see Lisa later that day to help her through her rape trauma and, when he heard the news, he blamed himself for not having visited her earlier. But he was less than a foot away from a birdie on the hardest hole on the course, so he made the putt before he left.
Lisa had always liked Dr. Joe because he was the only adult who didn't demand anything of her. He had a nonjudgmental nature and laughed at all her jokes. So when she woke up in her hospital bed and saw him sitting there, she was glad it was him and not her parents. He asked how she was feeling, and she told him the "therapist-rapist" joke. He chuckled heartily as if he had never heard it before.
"You went through a big couple of days, didn't you?" he asked.
She told him everything. Janice had already given him the note, so he knew much of it but he wanted to hear it in her words.
"I knew the Valium wouldn't kill me," she said. "But when the gun was in my mouth, a voice inside me told me to stop. That's when I went to write the note. And the more I wrote, the more I realized I didn't want to die. People can like me -- I just have to give them something to like me for. But not the lying rape thing because then I can't like myself. I HAVE to like myself first, don't I? It's got to be something else, right?"
"People will love you just because you're you, Lisa," he said.
"That's a little naive, Dr. Joe," she responded. "But either way, I swear, I wasn't going to go through with it. Just writing that note convinced me of that."
Dr. Joe wasn't crazy about the fact that Lisa believed she could only be loved for a reason, but he became convinced that she wouldn't be attempting suicide in the near future.
He later grilled Janice on exactly how many Valiums she had been taking a day, then cross-referenced that number with the subscription date on the bottle. He was able to deduce that there had been five pills left, and it lent even more credibility to Lisa's honesty. Based on that, as well as Lisa's true remorse for what she had done to Robby, Dr. Joe released her in the custody of her father and set up an appointment to see her Monday afternoon. He then suggested that Janice see a colleague of his to discuss her own self-destructive tendencies.
Cameron's intention was to set up an appointment with himself, his daughter and Theresa Chavez that afternoon to tell the D.A. the truth about the alleged rape. He intended to call Theresa as soon as they got home, but when they walked out the hospital door, they were accosted by the press.
Some underpaid orderly had tipped off his TV and print reporter contacts for his standard fee. The moment word got out that Lisa had tried to kill herself, every newsman in town knew they had made tomorrow's front page or the evening's six o'clock.
Cameron and Janice tried to shield their daughter from the crazy assault as the reporters shouted one question on top of another.
"Was this because of Rockman?"
"Are you too afraid to take the stand?"
"Did Rockman's people try to kill you?"
"HE NEVER TRIED ANYTHING!!!!!!" Lisa suddenly shrieked, and all the newsfolk shut up. "Robby Rockman never tried to rape me! I made it all up!"
"Lisa, don't," insisted Cameron who was wedged away from his daughter by three large men with handheld microphones.
A brand new barrage of questions followed, but the reporters were forced to accept the sad truth that what they thought was a page one story would now be on page twenty, and this was the last day of what could've been a goldmine.
"Did Rockman put you up to this?"
"How much was the payoff?"
"Was force-feeding you the Valium just a warning?"
"If you want her to talk!" screamed Janice. "Then let her talk!"
"You don't have to do this, baby," Cameron offered his daughter.
"I know, Daddy," she said. Then she told the whole story, and Robby saw it on his dressing room trailer TV.
Why the hell would she do this? Robby asked himself as he ran his fastest toward the hospital. Why did she have to go and tell the truth now? He would've had the whole thing worked out within days, and it would have benefitted them all.
Norman had given Robby his case file from the D.A.s office, and Robby had read it while killing time in his trailer. He had been mostly intrigued by the teen-agers' statements. Mitch, the hulking tackle for the North Hollywood High Huskies, was clearly an idiot jock who couldn't keep his girlfriend's lies straight. But Lisa was something else.
She covered every inconsistency. The nose-bite, the torn outfit -- she was clearly brilliant. Her only mistake was over-estimating the intelligence of her boyfriend. The fact that her medical report showed her to be a virgin only made his plot all the more foolproof.
Robby had pieced together what had happened. There had been a scuffle between the two; maybe Mitch had even tried to rape her himself. But when the cops showed up, she accused Robby. And he knew precisely why. He knew this girl.
Robby had been in his early twenties when he began to play Mr. Bell. Although he had been with Trudy for quite some time, they had only been officially married for two years and little Andy wasn't even a glint in his eye. But he became a parent to teen-agers long before he was old enough to have one of his own.
Most of the kids on "School, Sweet School" had been doing commercials and bit parts since they were in diapers. They had been given the adult pressures of making money, supporting their families and being responsible before they even understood what the word meant, and Robby found this sad. So while parents and agents pushed them to succeed, Robby encouraged them to have fun. When directors yelled at them for not knowing their lines, Robby jumped to their defense, and he became their champion.
So they confessed to him their problems at the "regular school" they attended on hiatus -- ordinarily, they had a production tutor. He was told how the other kids ostracized them for being nerdy geek actors, or how they were put on a pedestal for being stars. Either way, no one ever saw them for what they were.
But everything they confessed to him seemed to boil down to the same issue: popularity. Eating disorders came from it, drug use came from it, guns and gangs came from it, suicide came from it.
So when Robby read Lisa and Mitch's reports, saw the pictures of the hulking tackle and the skinny, pimply-faced girl, he knew exactly who they both were. And he felt for the girl more than he had ever felt for a stranger before. He understood why she had tried to kill herself and what her problem was. And it confirmed in his mind that his plan would work because, at its core, it would help her.
He just wished he had had a chance to talk to her and explain it first. He never wanted to do it this way.
"I wasn't supposed to be out with Mitch that night," Lisa explained to the screaming press. Cameron and Janice had pushed their way back beside their daughter and stood next to her while she made her public confession.
"Mitch was all over me and maybe I should've done it with him because he bought me a nice dinner and everything, but I just couldn't. But when I said no, he just kept trying to. And it was so gross and scary and he kept calling me names and hurting me, so I bit his nose and punched him in the, you know, and ran away. But he chased after me and my clothes got torn, and we were barely out of his father's car when this truck came out of nowhere and bashed into it and knocked it over the hill. Then there were police and reporters with cameras and lights, flashing flash bulbs and everyone was asking me questions and I knew that if I told the truth my parents would kill me and Mitch would hate me and all the kids would take his side and no one would ever like me. So I lied. I lied when I said that Robby tried to rape me -- it was Mitch who tried to rape me, and I'm so, so sorry."
Then she buried her head in her father's chest, and sobbed raindrop-size tears. "It's okay, honey," Cameron consoled her. "I'll always love you."
And as the new barrage of questions started, one voice rose above all others.
"Now tell the whole truth!" shouted Robby, just slightly out of breath.
It was as if someone pressed the "mute" button on the screaming media. Their shouting questions directed at Lisa transformed into hushed whispers directed at each other or disappeared altogether. Robby had everyone's full attention, center stage, just the way he liked it.
"It does no good to tell only part of the truth, Lisa," he said softly to the girl. "If you're going to come clean, let's go all the way. Tell them why you wanted to hurt me."
Robby slowly began to walk towards her. Like Moses parting the Red Sea, reporters and cameramen moved out of his way creating a path for him to approach her.
"I -- I just told them the truth," she answered, confused.
As he got to the top of the steps and headed towards Lisa, Cameron cut him off.
"I'm so sorry for what my family has put you through," he told Robby.
"You have nothing to be sorry about," Robby replied. "Would it be all right if I spoke to your daughter for a moment?" Then he gently approached the frightened girl.
"You don't have to be scared anymore, Lisa," he said as if she knew what he was talking about. "You've come this far. Now let's finish it."
"I -- I'm sorry I said you tried to rape me?" she muttered as if speaking to a teacher when you don't know the answer.
"I know," he said with great sympathy as he put his arm around her. "But it was really all my fault." Then he turned to the press. "Folks, Lisa was mad at me because I insisted we tell her parents about us. We got into a fight and I lost my temper and I yelled at her. She said what she said about me only because I was so mean to her. But I completely forgive her. The fact is, Lisa and I love each other more than anything and have been secretly seeing each other romantically for the past year."
Then he looked deep into her eyes and asked, "Isn't that right, baby?"
As composed and confident as he appeared, Robby was utterly terrified. This was so not how he had wanted to do it. He had wanted it worked out in advance with Lisa already on board. He knew he could have convinced her to go along with it, he knew exactly what he would have told her, but he never got the chance.
So now all he could do was wait and hope that the girl would help him keep this day on page one, and not ruin his life forever, once again.
*** Up Next: "Lisa's Answer: Live On TV" ***
The main characters in this e-novel are fictional and are not intended to portray or resemble any actual individuals, whether living or dead (except for Jeff Abugov who is a real screenwriter, director and producer.) Although certain real people and companies are mentioned in this e-novel, all of the events are fictional and are not intended to portray or resemble any actual events.
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