Jennifer E Smith

by This Is What Happy Looks Like (v5. 0) (epub)

  “Yes, really.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ellie said. “Really. I guess I’m just still getting used to the idea of you and Devon.”

  Quinn stood there on the steps for another moment, frowning at Ellie across the porch. “Well, I guess not everyone’s cut out to date a celebrity,” she said, and then, without another word, she walked off toward the road.

  “Quinn,” Ellie said, but Quinn didn’t turn around, and there was nothing to do but watch her go. As she sat there on the porch, her heart sank. Even if she were to run after her, she knew there wasn’t much she could say right now. Because the problem had nothing to do with Devon and it had nothing to do with Graham; the problem was that Quinn was absolutely right, more than she even knew. Ellie had been keeping secrets from her, and the only way to make things right was to tell the truth. But that wasn’t an option.

  She’d been in enough fights with Quinn over the years to know that it didn’t matter how or when you apologized. If she wasn’t ready to hear it, then it wouldn’t change anything. Quinn would come around in her own time—she always did—but Ellie had never been very good at the waiting, and even now, her stomach was already churning at the thought.

  Tomorrow, she’d call. Tomorrow, she’d start her apology campaign. But for now, there was no time to worry about it. Graham would be here in less than an hour, and she still hadn’t been inside to survey the damage.

  When she pushed open the screen door, Bagel came barreling down the front hallway, pinballing off the walls and scattering the collection of rain boots and umbrellas that lined them. Ellie stood on the ratty welcome mat and watched the dog kick up a dust bunny from underneath the table in the foyer. With a sigh, she dropped her bag beside the door and ventured into the kitchen.

  Mom was eating a cup of yogurt at the sink, absently watching the news on the ancient TV beside the toaster. One whole counter was covered in newspapers, the dates ranging from yesterday to two weeks ago, and the sink was brimming with dishes.

  “What time is book club?” Ellie asked, eyeing Mom’s outfit, which consisted of sweatpants and a plaid button-down with slippers.

  Her eyes drifted over to the microwave clock. “Oh,” she said, looking genuinely surprised. “It’s right now.”

  “You better go then,” Ellie said, hustling her out of the kitchen and then lingering in the hallway to make sure she made it all the way up the stairs. Then she turned to the sink, grabbed a sponge, and began to attack the dishes.

  “I thought Quinn was staying for dinner,” Mom said when she appeared again a few minutes later, wearing the same plaid shirt but now with a pair of jeans and loafers.

  “She had to run some errands in town first,” Ellie said, ducking her head so Mom wouldn’t notice how red her face was; she’d never been much of a liar. “We’ll be fine, though. Take your time.”

  “Okay,” Mom said, grabbing her keys from on top of a pile of coupons. “Will you be sure to feed Bagel too?”

  Ellie nodded and waved a soapy hand, letting out a breath when she heard the door slam shut again. She leaned against the sink with a sigh, daunted by the state of the house. When she turned her head, Bagel was sitting by her foot, tail wagging furiously.

  “This is going to be a disaster,” she told the dog, who only smiled a big doggie smile and continued to wave his white-tipped tail.

  By the time she finished the dishes, cleared some of the debris from the counters, tossed the ball for Bagel, and fed him a meal only marginally less appetizing than the dinner options in the fridge, there were just a few more minutes to shower and change and inspect the place before Graham was meant to arrive.

  Upstairs, Ellie was about to throw on her usual jeans, but instead chose a green sundress her mom had recently bought for her, ripping off the tags with her teeth. She usually hated to wear green; with her red hair, she worried it made her look like a Christmas ornament, but as she stood in front of the mirror, she realized it looked better than she would have thought. Not exactly up to Hollywood standards, but it would have to do.

  With two minutes to spare, she headed back downstairs, running through her checklist again. She wasn’t really expecting him to be on time; boys were always late, and her limited knowledge of movie stars suggested they would probably be even worse. There would still be time to tidy up, hide any embarrassing childhood photos, take down a few of the lobster knickknacks that littered the house.

  But as she walked back into the kitchen, her heart fell.

  There were no more newspapers on the counters, no more silly magnets on the fridge; she’d hidden Bagel’s squeaky toys in a cabinet and the dishes were all put away. The house looked nice, maybe as nice as it ever would. But standing there, seeing it as if through Graham’s eyes, Ellie understood that it would never look nice enough.

  It was small and cluttered and shabby. The twelve years they’d lived there showed in the scuffed walls and the scarred wooden floor, the thin film of dust that coated every framed photo. The knob on the kitchen sink had been broken for so long they almost forgot there was something wrong with it, and it was hard to know when the white refrigerator had turned beige.

  Her eyes darted around the room, and she pushed down a wave of alarm. How could she have thought this would be a good idea? He wasn’t just some guy; he was a movie star. His bathroom was probably bigger than their kitchen, his bedroom bigger than their whole house. Ellie had never been to California, but she imagined everything there as sleek and new, about a million miles away from this ramshackle place, the paint worn by the salt from the ocean, the porch sagging from years of wear.

  She reached for her phone, thinking she’d e-mail him and change their plans. The idea of going into town and facing all those photographers was intimidating, but could it be worse than this? Having Graham Larkin stand on the cracked linoleum floor of their kitchen, eating leftovers out of their chipped bowls?

  She knew there would be consequences if her picture ended up in the papers. Her mom would be furious, but it was more than that too: it was the possibility that someone might put two and two together. Their whole existence here was built upon a secret, and it would take only one mistake to ruin everything.

  But behind her, the dog was drinking out of the bathroom toilet, and on the windowsill, the air conditioner groaned loudly before chugging to a stop.

  Ellie bit her lip and stared at the phone in her hand.

  But it was too late.

  With a sharp bark, Bagel went crashing down the hallway, and a split second later, the sound of the doorbell rang out through the tiny house.

  From: GDL824@yahoo.com

  Sent: Monday, June 10, 2013 7:24 PM

  To: EONeill22@hotmail.com

  Subject: Re: if you get lost…

  I’m on my way. (And trust me, I’m not lost.)

  For the past hour, Graham had been wandering the streets of Henley. When he told Ellie he needed to run back to his hotel and check on a few things, he’d been lying. He just wanted to give her some time to get ready. The moment the dinner invitation had slipped out of her mouth, he could see that a part of her had wanted to take it back.

  He should have told her not to worry, right then and there, as they stood at the top of Sunset Drive, the late-afternoon light coming through the leaves in a way that made the freckles on her nose stand out. He wished he’d told her that he’d grown up in a house not much bigger than hers, where the bathroom tiles were crumbling, and the basement smelled funny, and the stairs conducted a chorus of creaks and groans each time someone had the nerve to climb them.

  He should have told her that his parents still lived there, only now, when he came to visit, his mother prepared the house as if for a stranger, some visiting dignitary or long-lost relative who might be impressed by flowers on the windowsill or neatly folded towels, all meant to disguise the true nature of the place, to make it unrecognizable when all Graham really wanted—all he was ever there for in the first place—was the exact opposite: to find h
is way home again.

  But the words had failed him. He’d become so accustomed to keeping those sorts of thoughts to himself that he no longer seemed capable of sharing them at all.

  In town, he walked with his head down, moving past small groups of tourists examining the menus outside of local restaurants. At the end of the street, the movie set was silent, the hulking trailers dark and empty. They’d long since wrapped for the day, but even so, Graham knew Mick would still be buzzing around somewhere, going over the script or checking on the equipment before tomorrow’s scene, which would be their first filming out on the water.

  As he passed a hardware store with one of those old-fashioned mechanical horses out front, he noticed a sign in the window announcing the annual Fourth of July festival, and he paused to examine it more closely. Every year, it seemed, there was an all-day party in the town square, a concert and cookout followed by dancing and a fireworks display, and even now, Graham could almost picture it: the streets filled with people, kids running around with sparklers, the distant pop of firecrackers, and the swell of music in the air. It reminded him of the celebrations in his own hometown, and he was struck by the memory of all the parades he’d watched with his parents when he was younger, the three of them waving flags as the marching bands boomed past.

  He was halfway down the block, heading in the direction of Ellie’s house, when it occurred to him that he’d still be in Henley then. The production wouldn’t be moving back to L.A. until a couple of days after the Fourth, and though Graham couldn’t remember the exact schedule at the moment—had, in fact, hardly even looked at it yet—he was sure they must have at least a little bit of time off during the holiday weekend.

  Before he had a chance to think it through, he pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed his parents. As it rang, the possibilities of the weekend expanded in his mind, and he found himself smiling at the idea of it. His parents had only ever visited him once on set, and that was right at the beginning, during one of his first scenes, which had been shot in a studio in L.A. They’d been hopelessly out of place, the two of them standing off to the side in their cable-knit sweaters and glasses, his mom shivering from the low temperatures in the studio, his dad squinting against the glare of the lights. During a break, his mother had given him a kiss on the cheek and explained that she wasn’t feeling well, and Graham watched them walk out the door with a leaden feeling in his stomach, a sense that something had already been lost between them.

  But this would be different. He could show them around, impress them with his knowledge of the production, let them see him in action in a place where they’d be more comfortable. He’d take them on a tour of the town, buy them dinner at the Lobster Pot, bring them to the festival so that they could watch the fireworks together, just like they had when he was younger. Maybe he’d go fishing with his dad. Maybe they could even meet Ellie.

  When the answering machine picked up—the same recorded message that had been on there for years—he snapped back, clearing his throat. “Hey, guys,” he said, then hesitated. “It’s me. Just wanted to see if you had plans for the Fourth. If not, I was thinking maybe you could come out and visit the set. You’d love it here. It sort of reminds me of home. And it could be fun for you to spend the weekend. I’m in Maine, by the way. Can’t remember if you knew that. Anyway, let me know what you think…”

  He trailed off, then hung up fast, already feeling less certain of his plan. His parents hardly ever traveled. When Graham was a kid, they took exactly one family vacation a year, driving two hours to an oceanside motel, where they’d stay exactly three days before returning home again, pink-cheeked and sun-drunk from their hours on the beach. It wasn’t that they weren’t curious about the world; it was just that it was all they could afford on two teachers’ salaries.

  “We live in California,” they’d always say cheerily. “Our whole life is like a vacation.”

  But the California that Graham had grown up in was very different from the one he lived in now. It was even different from the one where he’d gone to school, a twenty-minute drive from home that might as well have been twenty hours. Just before his freshman year, he’d managed to win a partial academic scholarship to a private school a few towns over, and his parents used the money his grandparents left him to make up for the rest. It was an amount that had seemed vast to Graham at the time, and he’d felt guilty about taking it when there were so many other things they could have done with it: make repairs on the house, replace their puttering car, pay off the bills that seemed to collect on his dad’s desk with alarming frequency.

  Now, of course, Graham had enough money to do all of those things: he could buy his parents a brand-new home or a whole fleet of cars, send them on a trip around the world or pay down all their debt without even blinking. But the only thing they really wanted—the only thing they’d ever really wanted—was for him to go to college.

  It wasn’t that they weren’t supportive of his acting, but they seemed to regard it as something to be tolerated, a stopover on the way to higher education rather than something that might shape the rest of his life. The only movies his dad ever watched were old black-and-white classics, and he didn’t consider anything made in the last few decades to count as art. When Graham took them to the premiere of his first movie, they clapped and smiled in all the right places, but he’d been acutely aware of how it all must have looked to them: the fight sequences strewn with high-octane special effects, the over-the-top dialogue, and, worst of all, the scene where he’d finally kissed the heroine, which had not until that moment struck him as unbearably cheesy.

  Graham knew that even as they tiptoed around him, strangers in the foreign terrain of his new life, they were hoping he might come to his senses, get this whole acting thing out of his system. They had a habit of talking about his career as if it were a gap year of sorts, as if he were putting off college to run away for a season with the circus or spend a few months studying the mating habits of monkeys in Bali. But the truth was that Graham had no intention of going to college next year. Once he finished his high school equivalency with the help of his on-set tutor, that would be it for him.

  Part of it was that he truly enjoyed acting, and he couldn’t imagine walking away from the ever-expanding opportunities in his future, all the actors he still wanted to work with and the roles he still wanted to play. And part of it was that he just didn’t see the point. The idea of college was to study hard in order to get a good job, in order to make a lot of money. But he already had plenty of money, enough to last him his whole life. And he could learn anywhere, couldn’t he?

  But if he was being really honest, it was about more than just that. The way he’d always pictured college—hurrying to classes in ivy-leafed buildings and trudging up snow-covered pathways in the winter, sitting perched on the bleachers during football games and debating philosophy in rooms full of bright-eyed students—seemed hopelessly distant from his new life, where he’d completely lost the ability to blend in. And the last thing he wanted was to be one of those celebrities who fancied themselves a scholar, making a halfhearted effort at being a normal college kid while being trailed by cameras and gawked at by classmates, missing finals to jet off and shoot an indie film in Vancouver. Graham had no interest in being any more of a spectacle than he already was.

  He knew his parents were quietly hoping he’d change his mind, and he hated to disappoint them. But he felt sure about his decision. And that had become just one more reason that they no longer seemed to understand one another, that they’d become less like a family and more like three people who had once lived together for a time.

  What they needed, Graham was thinking now as he neared Ellie’s house, was an old-fashioned family vacation. What they needed was food and flags and fireworks in a place that was about as far from California as you could get. In just a few short days here, he already felt like a different person. Maybe Henley would work its magic on his parents as well.

  But
when the door opened and Ellie appeared—her long hair still damp from the shower, looking beautiful in a bright green sundress—he realized it wasn’t Henley at all.

  It was her.

  He leaned forward to kiss her—a movement so automatic it felt like tying his shoe or climbing the stairs, something you do without even thinking about it—and he was still several inches away when he wrenched himself back unsteadily, everything coming into focus with an abruptness that startled him.

  They hadn’t even had their first kiss yet, and here he was, leaning in like it was something that happened every day, a motion like a ritual, like they’d kissed a thousand times before. It took a moment to right himself, and he pulled his shoulders back as he regained his equilibrium. He didn’t want to be half asleep the first time he kissed Ellie. For that, he wanted to be wide awake.

  She was eyeing him with a look of confusion, and Graham couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Hopefully she didn’t realize that’s what he’d been about to do.

  Hopefully she just thought he had terrible balance.

  “Hi,” he said with a sheepish grin.

  “Come on in,” she said, looking somewhat flustered herself.

  She ushered him into a hallway that smelled of lemon cleaning solution, and Graham stooped to pet Bagel, who was sniffing his shoes with a businesslike air. They both followed Ellie into the kitchen, where the table was set for two. The room was dimly lit and there was still a hint of dish soap in the air. But Graham hardly noticed anything beyond that; his eyes were pinned to Ellie’s green dress as she moved between the cabinets and the refrigerator and back again, her face apologetic.

  “It’s not like we ever have a lot of good stuff here,” she was saying, “but I figured there’d at least be a frozen pizza or something.”

  “So what you’re saying is,” Graham teased, “there’s no lobster?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Very funny.”