Chapter Twenty-Three

Five minutes later, we’re leaving from the staff door and heading to Adam’s car.

Fifteen minutes after that, we’re sitting at the open window in a tiny beachside café, looking at the chalkboard menu.

“Did you just break me out of rehab?” I say.

“Koch told me you have unique needs,” he says with a devilish smile I’ve never seen before. “I’m just trying to meet them.”

“As my mentor.”

“As your very dedicated mentor,” he says. “Look, I know it’s been a rough few days. I felt like you needed to get out of there. And I figure I can handle you.”

“Is that so? You don’t think I’m going to go wild and, like, do a stick-’em-up on this place demanding all their coffee and dark chocolate, and then take off down the coast?”

“No.” He gives me a half grin. “Not that it wouldn’t be interesting to witness and not that I would put anything past you. But I don’t think you will.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m choosing to trust you.”

“Oh.” Sudden, un-asked-for tears well up in my eyes, and I look away, blinking them back as fast as I can. “I’ll keep that in mind, then.”

“Speaking of unique needs, what’s the coffee concoction you find so lacking in the Sunrise lounge?”

“All of them, but especially the lattes. That machine is crap at making them.”

“I’m an espresso guy myself. But I think the lattes are good here, too,” he says, pointing to the open kitchen and bar area. “See, they have a real machine with a human doing the foam.”

My latte, when it comes, is steaming hot and perfectly foamy with a little design in the foam, and I sigh with pleasure at the normalcy of just sitting in a café.

“Thank you,” I say.

“You’re welcome.”

“How old are you, Adam?”

He tilts his head sideways and gives me a funny look.

“What? It’s a normal question, isn’t it?”

“I’m twenty,” he says. “If you must know.”

“I’ll be eighteen in September,” I say.

“I know,” he says.

And then there’s kind of a long moment where we’re just looking at each other. It’s not comfortable, but it’s…not unpleasant, either. In fact, I would say it’s pleasantly uncomfortable, if that makes any sense.

“Hey,” I say, looking for something to talk about before things go from pleasantly uncomfortable to unpleasantly uncomfortable. “I’ve been meaning to ask you—about your dad and that screenplay. Did it ever get made?”

“Oh yeah,” Adam says with a bitter chuckle. “It got made. And my dad got paid and his name was on it.”

“Well that’s good, at least.”

“Yes and no. What got made…was unrecognizable from his original script. Honestly, I hate to say it, but it was a piece of shit.”

“Oh.” I wince. “And it tanked?”

“As a matter of fact, no.” He shakes his head. “It was a hit.”

“No way.”

“Oh yeah, box office hit.”

“Freaking Hollywood.”

“Seriously.”

“Okay, you have to tell me what it was,” I say. “I’ve probably seen it. I probably know people who’re in it.”

He gives me a squirmy look, then shakes his head.

“You won’t tell me?”

“Lola, it was so bad…”

“Come on. What is it—some kind of family shame?”

“No, but…” He trails off, the look on his face confirming what his words are denying—he’s embarrassed.

“Adam, it’s not your film. It sounds like it’s not even your dad’s film. Have I not told you an extraordinary amount of crap about my life? I mean, I’ll have you know I’ve told you more about my life than I’ve told anyone, probably.”

He grimaces, then takes both my hands in his and says, “Okay. I’m trusting you.”

“Wow.” I squeeze his hands back. “You’re making that a habit.”

“Forth Shot,” he says. “It’s called Forth Shot.”

“Forth Shot? Holy shit, Adam.”

“I know. Craptastic. You saw it?”

“Sure I saw it. You’re being modest—it was huge. Not…a great work of art or anything, but it was fun.”

“Not for my family, it wasn’t. Critics hated it, and yet everybody still wanted him to write a sequel. He was done, though. How could he write a sequel to that?”

“Mm. I see your point. Especially if it didn’t turn out anything like his original concept. But he was… He’d have had the cred to write something else, wouldn’t he? Or was it too late?”

“Too late. Took his money and started drinking it. Et cetera.”

“Et cetera being…?”

“Shooting it, smoking it, snorting it.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah.”

“So he had an artist crisis.”

“Is that a thing?”

“Are you kidding?” I say. “Artists do crises better than anyone. It should be a thing. You could, like, do a PhD on that and make it a thing.”

“I’m not going to stay in school that long.”

“I’m just saying you could. Anyway…Hollywood is a rough place.”

“I can’t blame Hollywood,” Adam says. “I used to blame him. Like, why did he have to be such an idealist? Why did he have to be an idealist but also so weak? Now, though, I get how so much of it is the disease. He could have been in any career. I do think he cared too much about what people thought. Critics, his peers, complete strangers. I try not to do that.”

“Care what people think?”

“Strangers especially. Like why leave your measure of self-worth up to a bunch of people who don’t even know you? I’m never going to do that.”

“Never?”

“It’s wasted energy. Think about it. And it’s not just strangers—I try not to care what people think of me in general.”

“How can you not care? How does that produce…a positive result, even, if you don’t care what other people think?”

“I don’t mean I don’t care at all,” he says. “I mean if I’m making decisions from just knowing what’s right and wrong, or knowing what’s right for me to do in the moment, then the rest should hopefully…fall into place. Like this—I sneak you out of rehab—yeah, it’s against the rules. Someone might judge me for it, I might get in shit. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that…” He gazes out the window, then shrugs. “They weren’t there when I made the decision. They’re not in my shoes and they don’t get it. But I do. So if I get in trouble or whatever, I can live with it.”

“But if you made a decision you weren’t so sure about?”

Faking your way into rehab, for example…?

“Well…then you do end up caring, because there’s doubt involved. Hopefully that’s the moment to admit you were wrong and apologize.”

“Such a mature vision of the world you have for a twenty-year-old,” I say, with a grimace. “All good decisions and taking responsibility and apologizing…”

“My mom says I was born an old man.”

“You totally were. You are.”

“Oh yeah? How old, then? Old-old?”

“Yeah, like a grandpa.”

“Oh, no.” His look of dismay is almost comical.

“No, I’m kidding,” I say, laughing. “More…old like some friend’s older brother I’m not supposed to have a crush on who tries to pretend I don’t exist.”

“You have a crush on a friend’s older brother?”

“No, I’m just trying to give you a pertinent example,” I say, and then feel myself starting to blush as I realize I just made it sound like I have a crush on him. “Although that’s not quite right…uh…as a comparison. My point…my point is more that you seem my age sometimes, and then you turn into…you know, the bran muffin.”

“Nice.”

“From the cupcake. And that’s what tempts me to try to provoke you all the time.”

“I see,” he says with a quirky half smile. “Well, consider me provoked.”

“I’m a pain in the ass, I know.”

“It’s all good.”

“I should be better.”

“Probably.” He nods, but he’s smiling at least.

“I guess maybe I—wait—is this some kind of stealth therapy?”

He laughs, his brown eyes warm. “Nah. Just two people out for coffee, talking about life.”

“You know what I like? And that I’m surprised I like?”

“What?”

“That this isn’t just any old bullshit conversation that I might have with one of my friends. It’s about something.”

“I kinda suck at bullshit conversations, so that’s good,” he says. “Although I can talk music and pop culture all day long, and I don’t think that’s bullshit, necessarily.”

“Agreed. We should do that sometime,” I say, leaning forward.

“Sure,” he says.

“Okay,” I say.

“Good…” he says, and then just sips his espresso and waits.

“So,” I say when the silence has gone on too long. “Back to this not caring thing of yours… Don’t you think our survival—whether we thrive or not—is based on whether people like us? Or approve of us? Both my parents—their careers wouldn’t exist without people wanting to see their work, and people have to like their work to want to see it, and people have to like them to want to see their work in the first place. That’s true about a lot of jobs, not just in the arts.”

“But if they’re thinking about people liking them while they’re doing the work—how do you think that affects the work?” Adam says. “Particularly in the arts?”

“Hmm… By the way, I love you for this latte.”

“Oh, now you love me? Don’t you hate me most of the time?”

“I’m taking a break from hating you, Adam.”

“It’s that good?”

“Yes. But you don’t really think I hate you, do you?”

“No,” he says, and then we have another one of those pleasantly uncomfortable moments.

“About what you were saying earlier.” I clear my throat. “When you think about it, every artist of any kind has to live with that I-don’t-give-a-shit-what-you-think-but-I-need-you-to-love-me paradox.”

“Hence…” Adam holds his hands palms up. “Addiction. Lots of dead actors, addicted or dead-too-young musicians, writers, painters. Not everyone can live with that paradox.”

“No, I guess not…”

We get quiet again, finishing our drinks, and I think about my parents from the perspective of all of this. They’re not awesome parents, but both of them are, consciously or not, living with a lot of psychological stress, and you need to be strong to handle it. And maybe in your fight to handle it, you lose sight of other things. Like your kids.

After, Adam says we have a little more time before he thinks we’ll be missed, so we walk out to the cove. It’s windy and overcast, but because of that, it’s deserted. We leave our shoes behind, walk along the waterline for a bit, and then I follow him onto a rocky outcrop that stretches into the ocean. Midway out is a larger, flat-ish rock, and Adam sits down on it. I join him.

“I wanted to ask…” Adam says tentatively.

“Yes?”

“I don’t want to upset you again, and I really don’t mean it as stealth therapy as you called it, but I have this feeling you might need to talk…”

“About earlier?”

He nods. “Something really got to you today.”

I look away, then back to meet his eyes. “I just got needy,” I admit. “It was neediness and loneliness and wishing things were different.”

“On the phone, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop—”

“Sure you did; you were standing right there,” I say, but without rancor.

“All right, I was listening,” he admits. “In case you forgot, I’m supposed to be looking out for you.”

“I know.”

“You said something about being stuck in the airport?”

“Oh…” I look down, feeling a stab of shame. No one needs to know, not even Adam, about how I’m such a loser that my own father forgets me on a regular basis. No one needs to know he’d forget me overnight on an empty studio set and then again, years later, when I’ve flown across the country to see him. No one needs to know how scared I was sitting in the airport all those hours or how humiliating it was to call Jo-Ellen only to have her inform me Dad was actually on vacation in Cabo.

I never talk about it. I’m not going to talk about it now.

I lift my head and tell Adam the fake, happier version of the story—the one I tell everyone, if I have to tell it at all—about how Jo-Ellen messed up his flights and it wasn’t his fault, but how I flipped on my dad anyway, causing a big argument.

“I’d have flipped, too,” Adam says sympathetically.

“It’s not like he wasn’t excited I was coming,” I say, inwardly cringing because I feel like my desperation, my pathetic-ness, is just oozing out of me, like the lie must be so obvious. “He just had the dates wrong. Because of her.”

“Of course,” Adam says.

And then, even though this is when I’m supposed to continue the story, I stop. Because I can’t do it.

“Shit,” I say, and hang my head.

“What is it?”

“You and your stuff about feeling what’s right,” I mumble. “You’re messing with my head.”

“What? Lola.” He leans in, puts his fingers under my chin, and lifts it so I have to look at him. “Talk to me.”

“Fine. Okay. I just told you my ‘official’ version of that story. The spun version,” I say.

“I see,” he says quietly. “Why?”

I want to look away, but I can’t—partly because his hand is still cupped under my chin. I want to keep lying but somehow can’t do that, either. Because after everything he’s done and the day we’ve had, it feels like total shit to lie to Adam. It feels poisonous. “It’s not that I wanted to lie to you; it’s more like I want to lie to myself about it. I like the ‘official’ version better than what actually happened.”

“What did happen?”

“Dad’s assistant didn’t mess up the dates. He just plain forgot about me. Forgot I was coming. Went on vacation.”

“Oh, Lola,” he says, and puts his arm over my shoulders and hugs me to his side. “Damn.”

“It’s so humiliating,” I whisper.

“Humiliating? If anyone should be humiliated, or embarrassed, anyway, it’s him, not you.”

“Intellectually, I can see that, but emotionally…somehow I feel like I’m, you know, like it’s something about me.”

“There is nothing wrong with you. That’s bullshit.”

“Please don’t tell anyone,” I say. “I mean, it’s not a major trauma compared to some of the stories I’ve heard the last few days, but I don’t want people to know.”

“I won’t say anything. But forget comparing your hardships. It flat-out sucks, and you’re allowed to think it sucks. In my opinion, anyway.”

“Thanks, Cupcake.”

We talk a bit more about it, and what’s nice is how pissed off he is on my behalf. I can hear it in his voice and I can feel it in the way his arm has tightened around my shoulders, keeping me close at his side. After a few minutes, we both go quiet and I relax against him, the parts where our bodies meet humming with warmth, the silence comfortable.

“Do you feel better?” he says finally. “From talking about it?”

“I do, actually,” I say. “Physically and everything—I feel much better.”

“Good,” he says.

“That was nicely done, by the way.” I glance up at him with one eyebrow cocked.

“Huh?”

“You know, getting me to talk—first the sneaky escape, the great chats, the perfect latte, and this…” I indicate the cove, the ocean, the sky, with a sweep of my arm.

“I wasn’t trying to manipulate you, Lola,” he says, looking concerned.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” I say. “I just mean—this is nice. It’s all been really nice.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Is this, like, your spot?”

“My spot? Kind of. One of them. I love to explore all these kinds of coves, up and down the coast.”

“So,” I say, thinking to lighten the mood, “you bring all the girls here?”

“I’m not going to dignify that with an answer,” he says, stiffening and taking his arm off me.

“Wait…what?”

“I’m offended.” He moves away from me.

“Hold on, what just happened? You’re offended at what? At my suggestion that you would romance girls on beautiful beaches, like I’m saying you’re some kind of greasy ladies’ man? ’Cause I didn’t mean it like that. Or are you offended at me putting myself in the category of ‘girl’ when I am a rehab patient and you would never in a million years think of me as a ‘girl’?”

“Forget it—”

“And by the way, I think I just caught you caring what I think of you.”

“Damn it.”

“So?”

He turns to face me. “Fine,” he says, eyes locking on mine. “Offended, maybe stupidly, because yes, it is one of my favorite places, and no, I haven’t brought anyone else here.”

“Okay…” I study his expression, trying to shake the feeling that I am suddenly in territory I have no idea how to navigate.

“And concerned about what you think…yes. Unfortunately.”

I frown. “Why unfortunately?”

“Because I care about you, and because…”

“Yes?” I say, still confused.

“I guess because despite what I said earlier, as this day goes on, I’m not sure my bringing you here was completely, um, grounded in what I…think I should be doing.”

He finishes and then watches me, like I’m now supposed to know what the hell he’s talking about and make some kind of response.

“I… Is this… Do you mean you’re mad at yourself all of a sudden for breaking the rules? Or you thought this would be good for me but now you don’t think so…even though it so obviously has been? Help me out here because honestly, I’m having the best day. One of the best days in…I don’t know how long. So what’s the problem?”

“The problem,” he says, then exhales forcefully, “is that I have been thinking of you…as a girl. Sometimes. More than occasionally. Despite my best efforts not to.”

“As a girl…?”

“Yes. Is that clear enough?”

“You…” I stare at him, willing my brain to catch up to what the rest of me already knows. “Really?”

“Yes,” he says and rolls his eyes in exasperation. “Really.”

“Holy shit” is all I can manage to say at the moment. Everything has gone into a simultaneous slow-motion/fast-motion state—slow-motion in the present where we are sitting facing each other on this pile of rocks out on the ocean, and every tiny changing expression on his face suddenly has to be translated inside me to mean something new, and all the sensations in my body stretch out from one heartbeat to the next—the places he was touching me only a minute ago so much colder than they should be, my lungs not quite getting enough air, the deep-down pull to get closer to him. Meanwhile the fast-motion swirls in another part of me, where my mind is replaying all my moments with Adam since I arrived at Sunrise—the sparring, the provocations, the banter, the push and pull of will and emotion and intellect, the between-moment moments—this film plays in my mind and I see, for the first time, that there is something there, has been something there all along.

Not like the thing with Wade—something totally different.

“Holy shit,” I say again, shaken. “You like me.”

“Yeah.” He gives a cute, weird, almost helpless sort of laugh. “Yeah, you could say that.”

“So…” The wind picks up. I swallow, eyes still locked with his. “You brought me here to do something about it?”

“No,” he says, “that was definitely not my plan.”

“But now you’re going to do something about it?”

“Other than telling you? No. No way.”

“What?”

“Oh my God, I shouldn’t have even told you. We need to go.” He scrambles to his feet, breaking the moment, then reaches a hand out to help me to mine, and once I’m up, starts off ahead of me for the shoreline.

“Wait—Adam…”

He has to have heard me, but he doesn’t turn back. In fact, he’s practically running away.

“Listen, you chickenshit,” I shout, huffing and scrambling as I try to catch up. “What the hell?”

By the time I get to the beach, he is up at the top, putting his shoes on, and I have no choice but to jog after him, slide into my flip-flops, and then follow him to the parking lot.

In the car, we get our belts on and he puts the key in the ignition.

“Wait,” I say, putting a hand out to stop him from turning it. “Please could you just hold on a minute?”

“Yes,” he says with a heavy sigh, refusing to look at me.

“Don’t you even want to know if I’m…if I would be into it?”

“No,” he says. “Because whether you would or not, neither answer is going to make me happy.”

“Well, that’s too bad, because maybe I would be.”

He groans and puts his head in his hands.

“Seriously, right now, Adam? Okay, my mind is a little bit blown and it took me a second to…uh, adjust, but guess what? I think I would be.”

“No, no, no,” he says.

“Why not?”

“Because.” He raises his head to look at me. “As I have told you over and over, there is a line. Our relationship is supposed to be professional. We shouldn’t even really be friends, much less…the other things I’d like us to be.”

“Other things, huh?”

“Don’t.”

“I can’t help it, Adam. We’re talking about it, so I’m thinking about it. We’re alone in a locked car in a mostly deserted parking lot where no one knows us,” I point out. “We could do other things right now and no one would have a clue.”

“No.” Adam turns and presses his forehead against the driver’s side window. “And besides, this isn’t about just wanting to mess around in a parking lot.”

“Fine.”

“Which would be a huge mistake.”

“I said fine,” I repeat, voice sharp because now I’m feeling embarrassed.

“Okay,” he says.

“So…are we talking never?”

“Not while I’m working at Sunrise and you’re a patient, or even an outpatient. And you’ll be an outpatient for a long time, ideally.”

“You do realize it’s still true, however effed up I may seem sometimes, that I don’t need to be in rehab? That I’m only still in rehab because there’s no parental unit willing to get me out?”

“Doesn’t change anything.”

Now I’m the one to put my head in my hands and groan in frustration.

“Lola,” he says softly, putting a hand on my back, which sends sizzling pangs up and down my spine, “not doing something you really want to do because you know it’s the wrong thing, or the wrong time—doing the hard thing—that builds strength. That’s what character is about.”

“Blah, blah, blah…”

“I’m sorry. I was stupid to tell you. Regardless, I can’t be a good mentor to you if I’m trying to be something else at the same time. And you? Admit it—you have no idea what you want. Maybe you’re vulnerable. Lonely. Maybe you’re just flattered. Maybe you didn’t even think of me like that until five minutes ago.”

“Maybe I’m going to punch you in the nose for making assumptions about what I do or do not feel, or what I do or do not want,” I say, though he has an extremely valid point about my not having thought about this until five minutes ago. I’d felt it, yes, but I hadn’t thought about it. “Let’s just forget it.”

“Please don’t be mad.”

“Mad? Mad is the least of it, Adam.”