by Sonia Hartl
Paxton caught me staring, and before I could look away, he leaned toward Strawberry and whispered in her ear. Whatever the two of them were up to, they both sucked at faking it. It would’ve been comical if it hadn’t been done in part to get a rise out of me. I stuck my nose in the air and hopped up on my stool behind the register. It didn’t bother me that Paxton had purposely tried to hurt me. Not at all. Because the first rule of professional-level faking: you had to convince yourself before you had a chance of convincing anyone else.
I zoned out during the first half of the movie, keeping my ears trained in the direction of the not-so-happy couple on the other side of the counter, and my eyes on Brady’s expressions. He loomed in the back, his face illuminated by the projector, and he had a clear line of sight of the two people who had us both on edge. Every time he frowned, I had the urge to lean over the counter until I could see for myself what was going on.
Strawberry got up to use the bathroom, and because I had no shame, I took the opportunity to claim her seat next to Paxton. “Date going well?” I asked.
He shook his head and turned back toward the movie. “It’s fine.”
“I get what you’re doing. I even get why.” I reached across him and took some of his M&M’s because again, no shame. Goose bumps peppered my arm when I brushed his. “But do you have to torture Brady, too? He has nothing to do with why you’re pissed at me.”
Paxton gave me a cold stare. “Contrary to what you believe, the world doesn’t revolve around you.”
“I never said it did.” I popped an M&M into my mouth. “I only pointed out your obvious sham, and just because I’m ninety-nine percent sure it has something to do with me, doesn’t mean I’m a narcissist.”
We both turned at the sound of the bell dinging above the entrance. Just in time to see Strawberry’s golden-brown hair flying out the door, Brady not far behind. I gave him a mental fist bump.
“Oh darn,” I said. “Looks like you lost your date.”
“Looks like it,” Paxton said without much heat. He stood and dusted off his jeans. “Enjoy your movie, Macy Mae.”
The bell dinged again as Paxton walked out of the store, and I only half pretended I’d sat through the credits hoping he’d eventually come back.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
SUNDAY MORNING I SAT in bed with my quilt pulled over my head like a floral cave. After the Friday night movie disaster, Saturday had been a blur of suckage I’d rather not remember. Work had kept me busy, and Paxton had taken the on-call shift and spent it at the Jackson farm repairing their leaky garage freezer. He really went above and beyond to avoid me. Which not only annoyed me on a me level, but it also validated my mom’s stance on not complicating work with romance. Or, in my case, not-romance. Elise and Midnight had offered to take me out and get me grossly drunk after work, but I had big plans to stay in and scroll through Twitter until I passed out in a puddle of my own misery. Good times.
Since the Bees chattering away had pulled me out of sleep at seven, I decided to open YouTube and see how my dinner video with Eric was doing. We’d passed half a million views. I tried to muster some kind of excitement, at the very least a Judd Nelson fist pump, but I had nothing. It was as if all those things I wanted were happening to someone else, and I was just a spectator on the outside. I was numb, underwhelmed, and uninspired. I didn’t even want to do another movie review, since my Dirty Dancing one had gotten so many thumbs-downs.
If I left the video alone, it would easily reach a million views. My golden ticket. The magic number I’d been waiting years for. But it would also send a clear message about the kind of person I’d chosen to be. About what I’d be willing to do for clickbait.
Having a video hit a million didn’t mean anything if I didn’t come by it honestly. It would never be my accomplishment. And if I couldn’t get a million views on my own with my regular content, what was the point?
If I deleted the video, my YouTube channel might suffer, my business arrangement with Eric would definitely suffer, but I’d still have my soul. That had to be worth something.
I logged on to Video Manager, and my finger hovered over the delete button. One click and it would be gone. A few more clicks and my Twitter would go with it. Gritting my teeth, I shut down the app and left my phone on my bed while I went to get ready for the day. I couldn’t delete the video. I wanted to. Just like I wanted to quit scrolling through Twitter in the middle of the night, but in the end, I couldn’t do that, either. I’d built my entire world and every plan for my future around YouTube, and I wasn’t ready to test who I’d be without it.
After I took a shower and dried my hair, I headed into the dining room. Peg and Donna were already taking swipes at each other, and no wonder. They didn’t have their usual peacekeeper to sit between them.
“Where’s Gigi?” I asked.
The three Bees looked at each other, then back at their patterns. Weird.
“She’ll be along later,” Gram said.
I didn’t stick around. They’d gotten far enough into their quilt where they wouldn’t want me peeking at it before the big show. With Mom already gone to work, I curled up on the recliner in the living room. Eric tweeted about making plans with me for next weekend (he hadn’t), and I didn’t have enough energy to do more than like it.
I closed Twitter and went into my saved photos, pulling up the one Elise had sent me of Paxton messing with Midnight last week. A tight fist wrapped around my heart and squeezed. I missed him. Not just the kissing, though that had been excellent. I missed his lopsided smile and his late-night texts and his self-deprecating sense of humor and the ridiculous way he let Gigi dress him and the way he looked when he held one of his bunnies. I missed all of him. And I couldn’t stand to go another day with all this nothingness between us.
We needed a grand gesture. The tropiest of tropes. The heart and soul of every eighties rom-com. The very thing I’m pretty sure had turned my mom into a lifelong romantic. And I had the best/worst idea on what to do.
I went down to the basement and dug out Gram’s old boom box from the 1980s, and blessed her for never throwing anything away. It probably didn’t work since it had been rotting in the basement for at least twenty years, but it didn’t matter. I had Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” already downloaded on my phone. It would have to do. I’d stand in front of Paxton’s bedroom window like Lloyd stood outside Diane’s in Say Anything, and it would be cheesy and sweet and awful enough that he would have to talk to me.
I went out the front, around the house, and cut through the woods to Paxton’s. Bumblebees hummed over wildflowers as the morning sun cast a greenish glow through the canopy of leaves. The world still rolled on peacefully, while my insides twisted worse than the summer storms that would blow our kiddie pool into the next neighborhood. This had to work. I wanted him, I missed my friend, and I was tired of waiting for him to figure out how much he missed me too. Besides, I’d already been humiliated, shamed, lost all sense of right and honesty, so it wasn’t like I had a whole lot more to lose. Like Midnight had said, sometimes you just had to go through it before you figured out what you were really made of.
I’d just reached the top of the hill, when I spotted an unfamiliar car in the driveway. Lisbeth stood on the front porch in her nursing home uniform. Loose tendrils of gray hair had come undone from her bun. Gigi was next to Lisbeth, her arm around Paxton, who kept his head down, as if waiting for the ground to swallow him up. The three of them stood before a middle-aged couple. The woman had soft brown hair, the same shade as Paxton’s, and she was crying. The man next to her frowned, and the familiar expression stirred something in me. Even though the man was years older, I’d seen the same look on Paxton’s face the night I’d told him about my arrangement with Eric. Same nose, same jawline, same downward tilt of his mouth.
A lead weight dropped in my stomach as the realization set in. I was looking at Paxton’s parents. The ones everyone assumed were dead.
> A twig snapped under my foot and everyone turned to look at me standing at the edge of the property line. Paxton lifted his head, and when he caught my gaze, the fear pouring out of him nearly knocked me over. It was a million times worse than the day he’d shown up at my house when the bloggers were there. A worry line creased across Gigi’s forehead as she looked between the two of us. My palms were sweating so bad, I nearly dropped the boom box. Then I hurled the boom box into the woods, because I suddenly realized how immensely ridiculous I must’ve looked. I didn’t know what to say or what to do with my body.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I choked out. “I’m not really here. You didn’t see me. I’m so sorry.”
Without waiting for anyone to respond, I backed away and disappeared into the trees.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
PAXTON’S PARENTS WERE ALIVE. I had no idea what that meant. He’d been living with Lisbeth and Gigi for nine years, wouldn’t drive, wouldn’t talk about why. Everyone in town assumed his parents had died in a car accident and he had some kind of survivor’s guilt.
Maybe his parents were drug addicts, even though they didn’t really look like it, but Eric hadn’t looked like a vampire, and Midnight certainly didn’t look like the fresh-faced farm girl I knew from school either. Looks were super-deceiving. Or maybe they were horrific abusers. The thought of that made my heart ache. Whatever had happened when Paxton was nine was bad enough that he still didn’t want to talk about it, and I’d just interrupted a very intense family meeting with my boy drama.
I flopped onto a beach recliner in the Hamptons and nearly took off my sandal to dip my feet in the water, when I remembered that Gram had had her raptor foot in there and Mom hadn’t gotten the chance to bleach the pool yet. My next movie review was due to be uploaded tomorrow, but I didn’t have anything prepared, and I didn’t care. I had no energy.
“Hey.” Paxton stood at the edge of the Hamptons, his hands in his pockets.
I nearly fell off my beach recliner. “Hi.”
We stared at each other for what felt like a full minute, not saying anything. I didn’t know if he was waiting for an invitation into the Hamptons. It’s not like I’d ever bothered to ask permission before I’d wandered into his backyard.
“You can sit down,” I said. “Don’t put your feet in the pool.”
“Okay.” He took the lawn chair I’d sat in when Gram and Peg had gotten high. “Do I want to know why you showed up at my house at eight in the morning with a boom box?”
“I was trying to be cute.” I hit play on the Peter Gabriel song on my phone and held my arms over my head where the boom box would’ve been if I hadn’t thrown it into the woods. When he cracked a smile, I shut the song off. “An important moment in cinematic history.”
“You don’t need gimmicks to be cute.” He stared at his hands. “I think you’re cute all the time, just the way you are.”
My face heated. “You do still?”
“I’m sorry.” He knotted his fingers together with his head bent low, as if in prayer. “I’ve been a complete asshole. I know you saw right through my date with Strawberry, but I still shouldn’t have brought her to movie night. Seeing you go viral triggered a lot of things for me, and seeing you embrace it is hard. But you were right. It is your life, and your decision, and my personal issues shouldn’t get in the way of the things you’re trying to do.”
All the lingering doubt I had about keeping things going with Eric vanished. I didn’t need gimmicks or the Fly Ball Girl persona. I just needed to be me. And if that wasn’t good enough for the Twitter masses and my recent subscribers, then I didn’t need their approval anyway. The people I knew, the ones I cared about, liked me just fine.
They were the only ones who mattered.
“I miss you,” I said.
Paxton’s gaze was blazing. “I miss you more than you can possibly know.”
“I’m going to do a thing, and I want you to watch.” And wow, inuendo. Judging by Paxton’s smirk, he hadn’t missed it either. I fumbled with my phone as I strived to recover from my awkward wording. “I’m shutting down the Baseball Babe stuff.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to. It’s not good for my mental health.” The constant scrolling, the sleepless nights, the anxiety, the nightmares … I couldn’t do it anymore. Twitter was slowly eating me alive, and the more I engaged, the hungrier it became.
I proceeded to delete every tweet I’d sent in the last week. Next I flipped over to the Video Manager in YouTube. With only a small pang for the lost revenue, I deleted both of my Eric videos. I also deleted the Dirty Dancing video for good measure. The movie my mom had used to teach me about reproductive rights deserved better. And so did the subscribers who’d been with me before Baseball Babe.
“I’m done with all of it.” I stood and Paxton watched me with increasing intensity as I sat on his lap and wrapped my arms around his neck. “I don’t want to be the person who gives away their entire sense of self for clicks. I never wanted to be that person.”
His hand skimmed my bare thigh, which I’d taken the time to shave this morning. “Are you sure that’s what you want? If you need to play the part for YouTube, I’d understand.”
He wouldn’t like it, but he’d understand, because he understood me. The real me. “I’m very sure. Eric is going to be furious, but whatever.”
Speak of the devil and he shall appear. My phone buzzed with a series of texts and I barely glanced at it.
Eric: Macy
Eric: Macy, why are you deleting tweets???
Eric: You BITCH! YOU FUCKING BITCH!!!
Oops. Someone just checked YouTube.
Eric: Macy, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. Please text me back. I want to help you. I want to give you the life you’ve always dreamed of, the life we both want.
I shut my phone off and threw it into the grass.
Paxton wrapped his arms around my waist and held me tighter. “I’m so sorry. For everything. You had to put up with so much shit this week.”
“Karma will take care of Eric. I hope he gets uncurable anal fleas and has to spend the rest of his days dragging his ass across the floor like the dog he is.”
“Wow.” Paxton’s hands roamed up my back in a gentle stroking motion, and I shivered in response. “You really are Bizzy’s granddaughter.”
I caught his mouth with my own and kissed him. His arms tightened around me, like he was afraid I’d blow away if he didn’t hold on. I nipped his bottom lip, and he tilted my head back, kissing me so deep that my entire body shuddered in response.
“It’s about damn time!” Peg hollered.
We instantly broke apart and looked at the kitchen window, where Peg, Gram, and Donna had their faces pressed against the screen. Grinning like fools, all three of them.
“Don’t you have a quilt to make?” I asked.
“We’re retired. We’ve got nothing but time,” Donna said. “Go on back to your kissing.”
“Sorry, you three ruined the moment. There will be no more kissing today.” I waved them away, and they left the window, grumbling the whole time. I glanced at Paxton and even his ears had gone red. “If you’re going to date me, you might as well get used to this. The Bees are part of the package.”
“I live with a Bee; I know how they are. I’d just prefer not to make out in front of them, if that’s okay with you.”
I laughed and hugged him, wanting that closeness, even if we weren’t kissing. “I’d rather not make out in front of them either, the old pervs. Just wait until I tell you about the conversation Peg and Gram had the other night. I will never be able to scrub it from my brain, and I’m now going to subject you to it so I don’t have to suffer alone.”
He kissed my neck. “There’s no one else I’d rather suffer with more than you.”
I pulled back, skimming my fingers over his cheek. I didn’t want to do anything to dim the light and easiness between us, but … “Do you
want to talk about this morning?” I paused. “About your parents?”
“No.” He buried his face in my shoulder. “But I probably should.”
“You don’t have to.” I rubbed his arms.
“I need to.” He lifted his head. “If we’re going to do this me and you thing, I think you need to know some things about me, and decide …” He gulped. “And decide if this is something you still want to do.”
No matter what he said, I wouldn’t walk away from him. It had taken me way too much to get here in the first place. But if he needed to get it off his chest, then I’d be there for him, the way I knew he’d be there for me.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“I had a sister.” He turned his head, like he couldn’t stand to look at me while he talked. “Her name was Daisy. She was five and loved art. Her fingers were always covered in chalk dust and no matter how many times my mom washed her hair, she always had streaks of paint in it.”
“She sounds really sweet,” I said. I hadn’t missed the past tense reference.
“She was, and I was her hero, even though I mostly thought she was a pain in the ass when she’d paint on my walls.” He gave a pain-laced smile at the memory, and I’d never seen anything more heartbreaking in my life. “She loved to draw me pictures. Of baseballs and bats and diamonds, and sometimes stick figures of me in uniform.”
My grip on his arm tightened a fraction. “You played baseball?”
“Little League. My dad was the coach.”
“Is that why all this fly ball stuff—”
“No.” He blew out a breath. “Baseball is a smaller trigger, one I can usually handle. Social media, especially the viral stuff, that’s what I have trouble with. And driving.”
“Okay.” I grabbed his hand, in case he needed something to hold on to.
“We had to get to a game. My dad started the car, and then remembered he’d left his wallet on the kitchen table. So he ran back inside to get it. He said he’d be right back.” He choked on the last word and I squeezed his hand.
