I didn’t swim this morning, and I’m lounging around in my condo, still in my pajamas and, yeah, thinking about Rainer. Listen, I don’t think he’s into me. Not like that. I get that he’s a full-fledged movie star and I’m a total newbie. But something about our day yesterday makes me feel like my crush isn’t completely unwarranted. God help me. I have a total crush on Rainer Devon.
A loud knock on my door jolts me back to reality. Two knuckle raps. When I swing it open, Wyatt is on the other side. My stomach instantly pulls back, like someone has socked me.
“Paige,” he says. “We need to talk.” He’s wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt and black pants, and his hair is standing up every which way.
“Fucking wind,” he says, catching my gaze.
He follows me into the kitchen, and I take out some of the Evian water bottles the craft service people keep stocked in my fridge. They asked me what I liked to eat the first day on set, and since then coleslaw and peanut butter crackers have been showing up in my refrigerator and cabinets.
“So,” I say. My hands are shaking so badly I can’t even open my water bottle. “What’s going on?” Wyatt has never visited me in my condo, ever. He sometimes goes to Rainer’s but that’s usually only when Sandy is there. This is bad. I know it is.
Wyatt shoves something at me. It’s his iPad. And on it are grainy photos of Rainer and me from yesterday, splashed across a tabloid website.
I see pictures of Rainer and me driving with the top down, holding hands at the Fish Market. Snapshots of him putting his sweatshirt around me at the overlook and even ones of us talking, so close it looks like his forehead is pressed up against mine. And a stupid headline to top it all off: LOCKED COSTARS ALREADY GETTING COZY.
I suddenly become intensely aware of the crescent moons on my pajamas.
“Oh,” I say.
He turns his face to me. He doesn’t look pleased. “Yeah. Oh. Want to tell me what’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I tell him. “They were taken completely out of context, I swear. We were just exploring the island—” But I stop talking when I catch the look on Wyatt’s face. It seems to say that any explanation I give him is only an excuse.
“I don’t really give a shit what you do with your personal life,” he says. “But I will not have my movie go up in flames because you two can’t keep your hands off each other.”
“Hey,” I say. Anger flares up in my chest. “That’s not what happened. This hasn’t affected—it won’t—we’re not even—Rainer—” What I want to ask is why he isn’t bringing this up with Rainer. Why this is suddenly all my fault.
Wyatt holds his hand up. “You might think this is just some teenybopper fantasy, but do you have any idea how much thought and attention and time has gone into this project? How many hundreds of millions of dollars? People’s careers?”
“I know,” I say, but I can’t continue. My chest feels tight. I’m afraid I’m going to start crying.
Wyatt flicks his eyes across my face. “You think I’m hard on you,” he says. “You think I’m unfair. You’re wondering why I came to you and not him.”
I don’t blink. He continues.
“Rainer is who he is, but you’re just getting started. There are things you don’t know yet about the way this business works.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that he’s the producer’s son, but you have a shot at actually being an actress. Do it right. If not for yourself, then definitely for me, because I will not settle for anything less than the best. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Wyatt takes off his glasses and tilts his head, the way he does right before he sets up a scene. I know he’s picturing things in his mind, trying to figure out the best angle, how to get the truest version of the moment he’s trying to capture. When he speaks again, his tone has softened, like a piece of plastic in front of a hot flame—it starts to melt at the edges.
“You know this is just going to get worse,” he says.
I don’t answer, just stuff my hands down into the pockets of my pajama bottoms.
Wyatt takes an Evian bottle and rolls it across his forehead, then twists the top and flicks the cap down on the counter. “I don’t think you realize your responsibility yet.”
“I do,” I say. I’m fighting back tears because I don’t need to hear this, not again, not now. “All I do all day long is think about the responsibility.”
“Show me.”
His eyes are fierce, just like they are on set. He’s challenging me. “Show me you get it.”
I want to ask him how, but I know that would make it worse. I should know how. I should act how.
“I will,” I say. I stand with my hands on my hips.
“This is your life,” he says. His tone is still strong, clipped, but his features have softened. “Once you put something out in this world, you cannot take it back. Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
Wyatt takes another swig and sets the Evian bottle on the counter. He doesn’t say anything as he moves toward the door, and then he turns around. “We may have found our Ed,” he says. “I’m bringing him over to test with you later this week.”
I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. Last I heard, Ed wasn’t expected on set until the very end of filming. He doesn’t have a ton of scenes in the first movie, or a very prominent role in the first book other than in flashbacks. Mostly he comes into play at the beginning and then at the very end.
Wyatt eyes me. “We’ll see how you chemistry-test, but barring some kind of repulsion”—his eyes flick briefly to his iPad—“he’s the one.”
“Who is it?” I ask. Not that it matters. I always get celebrity names jumbled and anyway, I think they were considering another unknown for the part.
Wyatt looks at me, and I can swear his eyes twinkle. It’s the strangest thing to see. “Jordan Wilder,” he says, before disappearing out the door.
As soon as he’s gone, I feel my eyes start to burn. My stomach feels sick, too. Did he just accuse me of trying to sabotage this movie? With an affair I’m not even having? The exhaustion of the last few weeks—my insecurities about the movie—all come bubbling up to the surface. This time I don’t hesitate: I pick up the phone and call Cassandra.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!”
Cassandra’s voice charges through the phone, part high-pitched shriek and part baritone boom, before I can even get in a hello.
I melt onto a barstool at my kitchen counter. I should have known she’d already have seen them. I think she has a Google alert set on my name. “It’s not true,” I say.
“Have you seen these pictures?”
“Yes,” I say. “And that isn’t what happened.”
I didn’t think I’d have to defend myself to Cassandra like I did Wyatt. I suddenly have the intense desire to hang up and crawl back into bed.
“Pictures don’t lie,” Cassandra says. Her tone is indignant, and I imagine her on her landline (she talks less on her cell phone now—unlike me, she listens to a lot of what Jake says), twisting the cord around her wrist the way she does when she’s nervous or really focused on something.
“Neither do I,” I say. My words are edged, and I know she hears them.
“I know,” she says. Her tone softens. “But how do you fake that?”
I run a hand across my forehead. I think back to yesterday and try to explain what I couldn’t to Wyatt. “Rainer grabbed my hand for a second to pull me out of the way and then later I was cold, so he gave me his sweatshirt. Those pictures are totally out of context. They just look real.”
I hear her sigh, imagine the cord going slack. “Sorry,” she says. “I wasn’t accusing you of anything.”
“No?”
Her voice gets quiet. “I feel like I barely know what’s going on in your life—”
“I know,” I say, cutting her off. I swallow. “It’s just been really busy here.”
“Apparently.”
She laughs, and so do I. More out of relief than anything else.
“I miss you,” she says.
“I miss you, too. How is everything?” The line goes silent for a moment. “Cass?”
“What’s going on at home?”
“Oh, the usual,” she says. “Sit-ins. Protests. And I’m just talking about what’s been happening in Mrs. Huntington’s speech class.”
We both laugh. It feels good. Familiar.
“How is Jake?” I ask. I bite my lip as I say it. Cassandra knows what I’m asking—does he miss me? Is he seeing someone?—but she doesn’t really like to talk about it. Me and Jake, I mean. Cassandra makes a small grunt, and I imagine her nodding slowly, her blond hair rising and falling on her shoulders.
When we were younger, the three of us had a “three musketeers” pact. We’d put our arms into a triangle—hand to shoulder, hand to shoulder, hand to shoulder—and repeat the slogan “all for one and one for all.” No one without everyone. There was a clubhouse in Jake’s backyard and a rule book Cassandra made. We decorated the book with glitter and leaves and named it Bob, although I can’t for the life of me remember why.
When Jake and I kissed, I told Cassandra, of course. I thought she’d be thrilled. She was always talking about how much she thought he liked me. But she wasn’t happy. Not even a little bit. She said we didn’t understand our own slogan, that we were breaking all the rules. It had just happened. The kiss, I mean. It was the night my sister ran away. She was always doing things like leaving for long weekends to go up to Seattle or stealing money from my parents and disappearing for forty-eight hours. Usually it was just to visit one of my brothers or something, but she never told anyone where she was going or how long she’d be gone for. It used to make my parents panic. Every single time she didn’t come home for dinner they were convinced she was dead. I never understood it. She had pulled the same thing last weekend; odds were she was alive. But they never saw it like that. They were always terrified. Like this time would be different.
This was just a few weeks before she got pregnant, or at least before we found out. She had taken off on one of her sojourns, and my parents were furious with fear. They had called the police and were pacing our living room. Both my brothers were accounted for, and she wasn’t with either of them. And I hadn’t seen her in school that day.
Jake was over, and we were studying for something. It was probably geometry—I always needed help with geometry.
Jake and I were in the living room when my sister finally came home. She was drunk. Like stinking, stumbling drunk. You’d think my parents would have been pissed. They certainly would have been had it been me. But they weren’t. They were relieved. Their little Joanna was back. The star soccer player, the first girl after two boys. The golden child. I know I sound bitter, and it’s not that exactly. It was just this moment where I realized the supreme unfairness of life. I didn’t get upset about it or anything. I don’t think I felt it at all. It’s more that I thought it, realized it. Like a date in a history book or a number on a math test. It was a fact. No matter what I did. No matter how many stage roles I got or how good I was in school or how well behaved, they’d never really worry about me like they worried about her.
Jake hung around for a little while after the commotion calmed down, a tearful Joanna going up to her room unpunished and laden with water and coffee. I watched the whole thing from the living room, and when it was over I remember Jake taking my hand in his and sliding the pencil out from under my knuckles. There were large red dents on my index finger.
“Are you okay?” he asked me.
I don’t remember what I said, or what he said after that, but I do know that when he put his hand on my cheek and then his lips on mine, I let him. And it felt good. Because I knew Jake was on my side. Whatever side that was, he was on it. And I guess that was Cassandra’s problem. There was a side after that.
She didn’t talk to us for a month afterward, and we never called ourselves the three musketeers again. Not even jokingly.
That was almost two years ago.
“He’s good,” she says now. “Busy. We both are.” Cassandra is silent for a moment, and I wonder if she hasn’t seen much of him since I’ve been gone. A wave of guilt hits me—what if I was their glue? “Have you spoken to him?” she asks.
“Just a few e-mails,” I say. “But you know Jake and the phone.”
Cassandra laughs. “Ugh. Totally. So when are you coming home?”
I spin around on my stool. The sunshine and ocean greet me. “Isn’t a better question when are you coming to visit? You do know I’m in Hawaii, right? And your favorite movie star is here?”
She laughs. Cassandra’s laugh reminds me of twinkle lights at Christmas: bright and soft and a little bit magical.
“Clearly Rainer is more interested in you than me,” she says.
“I was talking about me.”
I’m almost sure I can hear her smile. “So you’re calling yourself a movie star now, huh?”
“Only to you,” I say, and when I do, I’m hit with just how much I miss her. Like the emotion is a stone thrown hard into a pond. It sinks, but the ripples keep on spreading. I wish she were here. Pulling at her long blond curls and wearing some crazy, colorful ensemble and making us dance around the living room to Madonna.
“Come visit,” I say. “You and Jake. Next weekend. What do you say?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “There’s school stuff. And I spent all my babysitting money on those new ocean underworld DVDs.”
“I’d pay,” I tell her.
“Oh.”
“It’s not a big deal,” I say, all at once, the words knocking into one another. “It would mean a lot to me. You could see what the set is like, and we could spend some time together. The three of us.”
Cassandra’s tone brightens. “Yeah, good luck getting Jake on a plane.”
“Please,” I say, because all of a sudden I need her here. Both of them. It’s like if they visit, if they see this, maybe I will feel more like myself. Maybe this will become real.
“All right,” she says. “I’ll talk to him about it. And in the meantime try to keep your affairs out of the international press.”
I laugh. “It’s crazy, right?”
“Crazy,” she says. “Totally bat shit. But I kind of love it.”
“That makes one of us,” I say.
I hear her sigh, and the pop of her lips. “You’ll come around,” she says. “You always do.”
We hang up, and I keep looking out my huge floor-to-ceiling windows. They’re the one thing in this condo that reminds me a little bit of home. My bedroom has one window that looks out into the backyard. I used to like to pull my desk chair up to it on the weekends and sit with a huge mug of hot chocolate and a good script. But now my sister lives in that room, and there’s a playpen jammed up against the glass. Joanna wanted to be a massage therapist, and a while back she started to get her training. We all thought it would be a good idea because she could make her own hours and get pretty decent pay, but it never worked out. She ended up blowing off class, saying she missed Annabelle, and went instead to stock produce at our local Whole Foods. She works more hours now than she ever did in school.
That’s the thing about my family: No one wound up where they wanted to go.
My mom didn’t end up an actress; my dad didn’t end up an architect. Both my brothers keep ending up nowhere, and half the time I don’t think my sister even knows where she is.
It’s not like our story is tragic or anything. Nothing that terrible has ever happened to us. Which I guess, actually, is the point. People are always saying the pendulum swings both ways—greatness and tragedy—but my family’s seems to be stuck in the center.
I think about Cassandra and Jake. Jake will be great, and not because he’s destined for it but because he knows what he thinks and isn’t afraid of hard work. He was volunteering at the animal shelter and starting a garden at five. He’s wanted to help in whatever way he can since as long as I can remember and sometimes that drives me crazy (like when Saturday nights are spent pulling up non-indigenous weeds), but it also means he’s committed to something. And Cassandra? She’s passionate about everything, but especially the people she cares about. There hasn’t been one of Jake’s Saturday sit-ins she’s missed, or one bio assignment she hasn’t talked me through. They’re both extraordinary because they care. About the world and the people around them. About me.
They have to come visit. If they do, this experience will be everything it’s supposed to be. I just know it.