Twice in a Blue Moon

by Christina Lauren

  “You tell her to buy herself something fancy,” I told her. “I’m not saying that. I’m already highly aware of how much this trip is costing.”

  She laughed. “Don’t sweat the money.”

  “I’ll try, somewhere between handling Nana’s controlling questions and having a good attitude.”

  Mom, as ever, was unwilling to engage in bickering. “Well, before you go, tell me something good.”

  “I met a boy last night,” I said, and amended, “Well, maybe more guy? Man?”

  “Man?”

  “Guy-man. He just turned twenty-one.”

  My mother, ever the romantic, became dramatically—comically—interested. “Is he cute?”

  A twisting ache worked its way through me. I missed Mom. I missed her easy encouragement that I find adventure in safe, tiny bites. I missed the way she balanced Nana’s overprotective tendencies without undermining her. I missed the way she understood crushes, and boys, and being a teenager. I didn’t actually think she would be angry with me for telling Sam about her and Dad—not anymore, now that I was officially an adult—but on the phone, across an ocean, was not the time or place to open that can of worms.

  I’d tell her everything when I got home.

  “He’s really cute. He’s like eight feet tall.” As expected, Mom oooh’d appreciatively. Just then, Nana turned the water off in the bathroom, making me rush to get through it. “Just wanted to tell you.”

  Mom’s voice was gentle. “I’m glad you told me. I miss you, muffin. Be safe.”

  “I miss you too.”

  “Don’t let Nana make you paranoid,” she added just before we hung up. “No one is going to chase you down in London.”

  * * *

  Sam and I met on the lawn again that night.

  We didn’t plan it. We didn’t even see each other after breakfast. But after Nana and I returned from the show, I snuck out into the garden beneath the sky full of stars, and Sam’s long body was once again stretched out on the grass, feet crossed at the ankle. He was a life raft in the middle of a green ocean.

  “I wondered if you’d come,” he said, turning at the sound of my footsteps.

  I’m not sure I could stay away, I wanted to say. Instead, I said nothing, and lowered myself down next to him.

  Immediately I was warm.

  We were both smarter that second night, layering up: He was wearing track pants and a Johnson State sweatshirt. I was wearing yoga pants and a 49ers hoodie. Our socks were bright white against the dark grass. My feet could have worn his feet as shoes and still have had plenty of room.

  “I hope I didn’t get you in trouble with Jude this morning,” he said.

  He did a little, but it wasn’t worth dwelling on because thankfully, Jude didn’t. After we left the hotel, she was swept up in the Tube, in the museum, in the glitter and pomp of lunch at Harrods. And then we walked, for hours, before ending the day with a production of Les Misérables at the Queen’s Theatre. My feet were still vibrating with the echo of my steps on pavement. My head was full of all the information Nana had tried to cram in there: the history she’d read of royalty, and art, and music, and literature. But my heart was the fullest; I was absolutely besotted with the story of Valjean, Cosette, Javert, and Marius.

  “She’s fine. And she’s asleep,” I reassured Sam. “I think she only got one foot moisturized before she nodded off.”

  “Think she’ll set an alarm to make sure you’re back in the room by midnight?”

  “She might… ” It hadn’t even occurred to me that she would do that, but it should have. That was absolutely the kind of precaution Nana would take to make sure I was safe. And midnight—ha. If an eleven o’clock curfew was considered late, midnight would be scandalous.

  God, I was so torn. On the one hand, what else could I do to prove to her that I wasn’t Mom? I wasn’t going to run away to the big city, get married at eighteen and pregnant soon after, chase fame and find heartache. I also wasn’t going to tip off the paparazzi and get us all swarmed on opposite sides of the world. I got why she was nervous—she lived through the chaos of my parents’ marriage dissolving and remembered the specifics far better than I did—but it was getting harder and harder to live under a constant veil of paranoia.

  On the other hand, would being a little like Mom really be so terrible? Sometimes Nana acted like Mom couldn’t possibly take care of herself, but that hasn’t ever been true. It was like Nana saw Mom’s pure spirit as a weakness, but Mom found joy in every tiny moment and had the enormous heart of a romantic. Nana might not have relished the decade Mom spent with Dad, but without him, there’d be no me.

  “I probably won’t stay out quite as late,” I admitted, pulling myself out of my mental spiral.

  Sam sounded both teasing and disappointed when he whispered, “But I liked being out late with you.”

  “I’ll sleep in my bed,” I said, grinning at him. Why had I bothered with lip gloss and blush before coming outside? My face was bright red even without it.

  “Now that’s a shame.”

  I stared up at the sky, unsure what to say and wondering if he could sense the way my blood seemed to simmer just beneath my skin. I didn’t remember him falling asleep last night, so I must have first. Did I curl into him, throw a leg over, press my face to his neck? Maybe he gripped my hip and pulled me closer. How long did he lie there before dozing off, too?

  “Nana would murder us both if it happened again.”

  “You’re eighteen, Tate. I know she worries, but you’re an adult.”

  How was it that being told I was an adult made me feel even more like a child?

  “I know,” I said, “but—and I realize how this sounds—my circumstances are a little different.”

  In my peripheral vision, I could see him nodding. “I know.”

  “I don’t think anyone cares where Mom and I are anymore, but… ”

  I trailed off and we both fell silent, leaving me begging wordlessly for the ease of last night to return, for the effortless unrolling of conversation. Last night was like falling into a pool of warm water, of knowing you have the entire day to swim in the sun, and nothing to do at the end of it but sleep.

  “What’d you do today?” I asked.

  “Luther wanted to re-create the Abbey Road cover, so we found a couple of random dudes to round out the Beatles with us.” He smiled over at me. “Had lunch from some curry place, and then went shopping for some things for Roberta.”

  “I feel like my day was a lot fancier, but you’re rounding the day out pretty well: those track pants are way nicer than my pajamas.”

  He laughed, glancing down as if he hadn’t really noticed what he pulled on after dinner. The realization made me glow inside. For the first time all day, it didn’t occur to me to be self-conscious about what I was wearing; the only downside to our first day had been my constant awareness that the department stores at the Coddingtown Mall in Santa Rosa clearly couldn’t compete with the fashion scene in London. In Guerneville, the things Mom bought for me felt edgy and modern; in London, I just felt frumpy.

  Sam’s smile turned contemplative. “Can I ask you something?”

  His cautious tone made me uneasy. “Sure.”

  “Has your life been happy?”

  God, what a loaded question. Of course I was happy, right? Mom and Nana were amazing. Charlie was the best friend I could imagine. I had everything I could possibly need.

  Though maybe not everything I’d always wanted.

  The thought made me feel supremely selfish.

  When I didn’t immediately answer, he clarified, “I’ve been thinking about this all day. What you told me. I remember seeing your face plastered all over the cover of magazines down at the grocery store—People and whatever. Most of it wasn’t even about you, it was about your dad, and the affairs, and how your mom just… disappeared with you. But then I looked up Guerneville, and it seems like a really nice place, and I thought, ‘Maybe they had a better lif
e there.’ Like I did with Luther and Roberta.” He rolled to the side, propping his head on a hand, just like he did last night.

  “Guerneville is nice but it’s not, like, nice,” I told him. “It’s funky and weird. There are maybe four thousand people who live there, and we all know each other.”

  “That sounds enormous compared to the one thousand who live in Eden.”

  I stared at him. Maybe his life had been just like mine, only on the complete other end of the country.

  “So, have you been happy?” he asked again.

  “Do you mean have I been happy in general or happy with my parents?”

  His attention was unwavering. “Either, both.”

  I chewed on my lip while I thought through it. Questions like this were such weird little provocations. I rarely thought about my life before, and I certainly tried not to feel sad about Dad. The entire world seemed to know him so much better than I did, anyway; I figured maybe when I was older, Nana wouldn’t mind so much letting me know him, too.

  I’d been stupid in a lot of things—my crush on Charlie’s cousin from Hayward our freshman year, and the scores of letters I wrote him; loving Jesse but never having sex with him even though we both wanted to, simply because I never had any privacy; the early days of being so enamored with Jesse that I drifted from Charlie when she was dealing with her own family drama—but one thing I’d never done is disobeyed Nana and Mom when they asked me to be careful, to keep our seclusion a secret to protect me and Mom.

  “It’s okay,” Sam said after a couple of minutes, “if you don’t want to talk about this.”

  “I do.” I sat up, crossing my legs. “I just never have.”

  While he waited for my words to come, Sam sat up too. He pulled up a blade of grass and drove it in and out of the lawn, like a tiny car winding around a complicated neighborhood.

  I studied his downturned face, trying to memorize it. “Mom and Nana are great, but I won’t lie and say that it’s not hard to know that there’s this whole other world and life out there that I don’t get to know anything about.”

  Sam nodded. “That makes sense.”

  “I like Guerneville, but who’s to say I wouldn’t like LA better?” I peeked over at him, and my heart climbed a little higher in my chest. “Don’t laugh at this, okay?”

  He glanced up at me, shaking his head. “I won’t.”

  “Part of me really wants to be an actress.” I felt the sensation rise in my throat like it always did, like I was choking on the dream of it. “I think about acting all the time. I love reading scripts and books about the industry. If someone asked me what I want to do, and I was being honest, telling them that I want to act would explode out of me. But, God, if I said that to Nana she would flip.”

  “How do you know?” he asked. “Have you talked to her about it?”

  “I tried out for a few school plays,” I said. “I even got the lead in one—Chicago—but she always found a reason why it didn’t work. To be fair, our schedule at the café is really crazy, but I think mostly Nana just didn’t want me to fall in love with it.”

  Sam chewed his lip and dropped his blade of grass, wiping his hands on his thighs. “I know what you mean there.” He went quiet for a few beats. “I always wanted to be a writer.”

  I looked over at him, surprised. “Yeah?”

  “I love to write,” he admitted, sounding almost reverent. “I have all these stories in notebooks under my bed. But it’s not an obvious choice for someone raised on a farm who’s expected to take it over someday.”

  “Do Roberta and Luther know you do it?”

  “I think so, but I don’t know if they realize how seriously I take it. I sent this short story I wrote to a bunch of literary magazines. I got rejected immediately from all of them, but it just made me want to try again.”

  “You should.” I tried to keep the fondness from my voice, but it was hard because I felt like he was showing me a side of himself that not everyone got to see. “What would they say if you told them you wanted to write?”

  “Luther would tell me writing is a hobby,” he said. “Something to enjoy but not something I can expect to pay the bills. And Roberta might not even be that enthusiastic.”

  “If I told her that I wanted to take up acting once I get to college—and working in the café isn’t an issue anymore—I think Nana would flat-out tell me I’m not allowed to.”

  He laughed, and it crinkled the corners of his eyes. “Yeah. I love Roberta to death, but she’s practical almost to a fault sometimes. She doesn’t have a lot of time for dreamers.”

  “What kinds of stories do you write?”

  “Maybe that’s part of it,” he said, shrugging. “Why I don’t tell them much about my writing. Most of my stories are about people in our town, or made-up people who might live in our town. I like to think about how they became the way they are.”

  I pulled up my own blade of grass. “I remember we had this whole discussion in history class a couple years ago, how history is subjective. Like, who is telling the story? Is it the person who won the war or lost the war? Is it the person who made the law or was jailed because of it? I kept thinking about that so hard afterward, like—and I totally get that I’m just one person, and not, like, important—but I wonder what’s the actual story between my parents?”

  Sam nodded, riveted.

  “Mom told me once that Dad fought for me, but in the end it was better for us to be up in Guerneville, away from the media.” I wrapped the long blade of grass around my fingertip. “But how do I know whether the stories they’ve told me are true, or whether it’s what they wanted me to hear so that I’m not sad about it? Like, I know LA wasn’t a good environment for her, and I know the circumstances about why they split up, but I don’t actually ever talk to my dad anymore. I wonder how much Dad fought her leaving. Did he miss us? Why doesn’t he call me?”

  He hesitated at this, and I wondered if he knew things I didn’t. It was entirely possible.

  “I’ve seen some headlines,” I told him, “and it’s impossible to miss his face on the magazines at Lark’s—sorry, our drugstore—but even though I know Mom’s version of things, is it weird that I haven’t ever gone online and read the articles written about my parents?”

  He glanced up. “Not really, I guess.”

  “I mean, I’m so obsessed with Hollywood but can’t even be bothered to read about my own family.” I paused, tearing up my blade of grass. “How accurate are the stories out there? I wouldn’t even know. I can’t know how he looked at her or what things were like between them when it was still good. I won’t ever know what kinds of things he did that made her laugh, but I don’t even know what people say about the whole thing.” I gave him a winning smile, but inside, I was a yarn ball of nerves. “I sort of want you to tell me.”

  Sam’s mossy-green eyes went wide. “Wait, really?”

  When I nodded, he leaned in, intense now. “I mean, I’m not going to lie and say I didn’t read up on this on Yahoo for hours last night.”

  A giggle burst free. “I’m sure you did.”

  “Seems the story goes,” Sam started, clearing his throat and coming back with a deeper voice, like an announcer, “Ian Butler and Emmeline Houriet met when they were young. Emmeline was insanely hot—which I’m sure you’ve heard from all your dude friends—Ian was Mister Charisma, and they fell in love and moved to LA, where his career took off. Hers… not so much. He was crazy about her. According to a profile in Vanity Fair back in the day,” he said with a self-deprecating little wink, making me laugh, “anyone who saw them together could tell.”

  Sobering, I looked down, trying to not seem too affected by this—the suggestion that it hadn’t always been misery for my parents.

  “He started on a soap, but then he got a supporting role beside Val Kilmer, and his next one was a leading role. He wins an Emmy, a Golden Globe shortly after, and around that time your mom had you.”

  I nodded. “1987.”


  “Then your dad had the first affair—or the first one the press knew about.”

  “Biyu Chen.”

  “Biyu Chen,” he agreed. “You were… two?” he asks, seeking confirmation.

  “Yeah,” I said, knowing this part, too.

  “Your mom stayed with him. More big roles. More awards. Apparently everyone thought Ian was sleeping around pretty much constantly after Biyu. But the affair that caused all the problems was Lena Still.”

  Without realizing it, my fingers had curled into fists. I remembered when a Lena Still movie was playing at the Rio Theater. She was cast as a warrior in a dystopian future, the sort of Chosen One trope. I never saw it, of course, but it felt like I did because of how much everyone at school talked about it. I couldn’t say to anyone except Charlie that year how much I hated going to Halloween parties with my peers dressed as ten different homemade versions of Lena Still.

  “So, in 1994, Lena was only twenty, and she slept with your dad.” I bit back the reflex to remind Sam that Dad was only in his early thirties—he was being gross but not that gross—but I didn’t understand where the defensiveness came from and certainly didn’t want to give it room to breathe.

  “She got pregnant,” Sam said, “and the press found out about it.” He paused, pressing a hand to his chest, and giving me a playfully earnest aside: “Many believe that she tipped off the press.”

  Many, meaning almost everyone.

  “But then they got in that car accident,” he said, “after the wrap party for their movie, and she lost the baby, and everyone felt so bad for Lena, not Emmeline.”

  Those headlines I’d seen. It was impossible to miss them, even when I was eight. I wondered how many times a day those supermarket tabloid headlines flashed through Mom’s thoughts, unwelcome and obtrusive. Bright yellow words:

  LENA STILL’S LOVE CHILD LOST. DEVASTATED, IAN BUTLER BACKS OUT OF BOND ROLE.

  Little mention of a wife or a child at home—and Mom said the ones that did mention it made her sound like an unreasonable clinger, a crazy woman.

  “And so much speculation about your mom.”