Let me, as they say, set the scene.
I am fifteen years old. I’m the lead character on a television show called The Girl Next Door, a weekly laugh-track sitcom with more tracks than laughs. Ba dum dum. The show is, against all reason, a hit. I begin to be referred to as “TGND” in the press and, sometimes, in real life. Not that I’m complaining—I’m, as they say, #justsaying.
It’s our second season, and as our popularity has increased, the quality of the actors they start hiring to play my love interests goes up. Playing The Girl Next Door’s Guy of the Week has become a nice way for a boy to get his start in the business, though it’s never a long-term gig.
TGND is a bit of a heartbreaker.
Fifteen-year-old me is in a moony mood. I have my head in the clouds. In the down moments on set, in between shots, I’m less focused. I’m daydreamy.
Maybe it’s because my parents have been talking about getting divorced—again—and I’ve decided to believe in love rather than its end. Or maybe there isn’t any explanation other than the fact that I’m fifteen.
Whatever the reason, I’m feeling like I should be falling in love. I’m ready to do some real heartbreaking. Plus I have a massive crush on the guy who plays my quirky but awesome dad, and even I know that’s a bit creepy. More than one person has told me—kind of pointedly, but without any names being used—that there’s no better way to cure a crush than to fall in love. (Beat.) “With someone your own age.”
When I climb out from underneath the anvil of embarrassment, I make a deal with myself. I’m going to fall for someone more age-appropriate if it kills me.
So, I’m in the casting director’s office because I know next week’s script calls for the introduction of a new guy whose heart TGND will crush, and she’ll have a stack of headshots to go through. I know this because, though I haven’t seen the script yet, it’s been three episodes since the last guy hit the road.
“No, no, too young, they can’t be serious, already turned that guy down twice, hello. My, my, what do we have here?” Shawna, the casting director, says, holding one of the headshots by the corner like she doesn’t want to smudge it.
“Can I see?”
She makes as if to hug the photo to her chest, so now I really want to see it.
“Give it.”
She hands it to me.
“Isn’t he dreamy?” she asks. “I bet you totally fall for him.”
“No one says ‘dreamy’ anymore, Shawna. Sheesh.”
But he is.
So the scene is set, and Connor gets the part, and I’m primed for him. Even though he’s eight years older than me—twenty-three playing sixteen—I fall for him hard. Maybe I would’ve fallen for anything that pretty put in my path at that moment. I tell myself that sometimes, to avoid thoughts like destiny, cosmos, soulmate. But that’s what I felt from the first moment we met. My new heart, my new body, my young brain couldn’t help thinking those things.
All the clichés applied. When we kissed, it felt like I’d never been kissed before. Happiness had a new high. And sadness had a different bottom too. In truth, I felt addicted. I needed more and more and more of him.
I couldn’t get enough.
I could never get enough.
I thought it was like that for him too. Sometimes I knew it was, and sometimes the doubt crept in. In a weird way it didn’t matter what he felt. Love like that is always selfish. I would’ve done anything for him, I did do anything he asked of me, but it wasn’t for him. It was for me. To keep him with me. So I wouldn’t lose him.
That’s when the drugs came in. All fun, of course, at the beginning. That giggling first hit of hash at a party in the hills in a room full of beautiful people in a moment so scripted I sometimes can’t remember if it was real or just some part I played.
But what came after that was certainly real. One party rolling into another. The first drink of the day taken to erase the scar left by the drinks of the night before. The first pill popped, just a pill, a bit of medicine, that looked like an Aspirin and didn’t my head ache? Hadn’t I had a long day working, working harder than any teenager should work?
Besides, Connor did it.
Connor did it.
I know that something’s wrong when I wake up in the klieg-light blare of a thousand flashbulbs. I’ve never seen anything like it, not even the year I attended the Oscars as a nominee in a ballerina-pink ball gown with a tutu skirt.
I was kind of hoping the Oscar-in-a-ballerina-pink-ball-gown juju would rub off on me.
It didn’t.
But back to the lights.
Because the lights are so frickin’ bright. It’s still dark outside, yet my bedroom’s lit up like a stage set.
There also seem to be helicopters circling my building, which is not that unusual, sorry to say, but which is also generally a precursor to bad news.
What the—oh, right. I went to see Connor last night. Not to mention the whole jumping-out-of-a-plane-that-was-about-to-take-off thing. Which one of those idiot girls clearly filmed on her phone and broadcast to the world before they took off.
Bernard must be apoplectic, and I’m so mad at myself right now I want to drink a million drinks until I erase myself.
That’s the—you listening, Amber?—last, last, last time I ever do anything like that.
I am strong. I am stronger than that. I am stronger than him.
I’ve got to be.
I lie on my back and look at the beams illuminating my ceiling, cataloguing the night’s stupidities. Despite their number, they still don’t add up to helicopters.
Maybe Connor got busted when his plane landed? But they should still be in the air, right? I try to remember how long it takes to fly to Barbados. I mean the Bahamas. It was the Bahamas, wasn’t it?
I shake myself. The answers to my questions are just a click away. All I have to do is check the TV or my phone or Twitter; thousands of my 2.7 million followers are sure to have tweeted the worst of the links at me. It sounds so egotistical, but it’s true. All I’d have to write is, Where’s Connor? and I’d have more information than necessary in a matter of seconds.
I just have to suck it up and face it.
I decide that the TV is probably my best option because, based on past experience, helicopters = TV coverage. And unlike my phone, at least it won’t contain angry texts from Bernard, or my publicist, Olivia, or the sponsors of Fabulous by Amber Sheppard, etc.
It won’t contain any messages from Connor, either.
I flick it on. It’s tuned to CNN. It takes an instant for me to put together the images, the words ticking across the bottom of the screen.
When I can read them, this is what they say:
CONNOR PARKS’ PLANE LOST DURING FLIGHT TO THE BAHAMAS . . . SEARCH AND RESCUE OPERATION UNDER WAY . . . NO SURVIVORS EXPECTED TO BE FOUND . . .
The answer to everything.
Just a click away.
I don’t leave my apartment for two days.
I don’t leave my bed, really, other than to use the bathroom or stare into the fridge for half an hour at a time, knowing I should eat something, but finding nothing I can push past my closed-off throat. I’m a little over five feet tall, and I’ve never had much weight to spare. The yoga pants I’ve been wearing since I got the news are barely staying up.
There are no survivors.
They search and search, and eventually they start to find pieces of the plane. The wreckage is spread out over half a mile of crystal-blue ocean, pieces of metal reflecting up at the circling helicopters like a trail of shiny new pennies.
They send in the deep-sea divers. Despite the extent of the wreckage, they find several bodies strapped into their seats, the impending crash apparently enough to finally get them to heed the captain’s requests to buckle up.
Connor is one of them. One of the ones who was strapped in. I would have bet he wouldn’t have been, no matter what, but I guess his innate fear of . . . well, everything really, finally cut through the coke and bravado.
Oh, Connor. Why did you wait till it was too late to start acting sensibly?
They actually show images from down there, if you can believe it. What am I saying? Of course you can believe it. Ghostly white faces, blurred by the water, shot on that camera James Cameron invented to film the wreckage of the Titanic. And me, big dummy, despite the warnings about the gruesome nature of what I’m about to see, I just sit there, watching it all, feeling myself shrink by the minute.
I keep watching as they hoist his body out of the ocean, a scene the networks intercut with images of Connor’s fans standing in hands-clasped-over-their-mouths horror as they watch the news in the thousands of bars they’ve collected in to hold what feels like the world’s biggest wake.
It’s like one of those scenes in the old movies my film-buff dad made me watch when I was a kid, where you know an event is important because there are crowds standing outside electronics stores, eyes glued to the banks of television screens as they cast their bluish glow. And as I watch, I can’t help but wonder if it’s all fake—stock footage the networks pull out depending on the tragedy.
And then I think, Oh my God.
This isn’t a movie or a TV show or some fake news scene.
This is my life.
The man I’ve loved forever is dead.
And it’s another day before I speak to anyone.