He laughed. “Think you might be projecting a little?”
“I had a nightmare about it, once.”
“We were more of a PJ Masks family. Until about two years ago.”
“Actually,” I pointed out, “he still loves it.”
“Says who?”
“He told me on the phone. We’re very close, Sammy and I,” I said teasingly.
“He told me he’s over it,” Thom protested.
“He might want you to think he’s over it, but he’s not. Everybody thinks kids want to grow up as fast as possible, but they’re as nostalgic as the rest of us. And their memories of being younger are fresher and closer, they’re the only memories they’ve got, so it’s even more painful that they can’t go back.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
We sat in silence for a while, watching neighborhoods go by. We’d left the countryside behind, and downtown Philly was a blur of red-brick buildings, a leaden gray sky, and thick billowing clouds. If we got caught in a rainstorm, I’d look like a drowned rat for the special.
“Is that…what the whole book thing is about? Nostalgia for childhood?” His eyes were soft as his fingers laced through mine. “That’s understandable, but…”
I pulled my hand away. “You know, we’re not in group therapy anymore, you don’t have to analyze me.”
We were both too stubborn to continue talking after that. We rode in silence for the remainder of the trip, until the loudspeaker informed us we were nearing Grand Central.
As we departed, it hit me how immature I was being. “Hey, I’m sorry. I meant what I said last night. I want us to have our rain check. I want to meet your family, come stay at your place tonight. All of it.”
His face relaxed into a smile, the shy one I’d begun to long for. “That’s a relief. Because I have a surprise for you.”
24
“Daddy!”
We exited the terminal and squinted against the late-afternoon sunshine. As our eyes and ears adjusted to the movements and sounds of 42nd Street, three figures loomed into our sight lines.
I recognized them from FaceTime. Thom’s parents and son had come to pick us up.
“Daddy!” Sammy’s voice was loud and insistent, yet he hung back, flanked by his grandma and grandpa. I didn’t want to stare too hard, but the child was beautiful. Enormous eyes, thick dark eyelashes, messy light brown hair.
Thom dropped his bag with a thud and squatted down so he was eye level with Sammy. He held his arms open.
We all watched to see what Sammy would do. After a painstaking moment in which none of us seemed to breathe, he launched himself toward Thom, who wrapped him in a hug and managed to lug him upward, one-armed, and spin him around. It was crazy and off balance and scattered. Sammy’s sneakers flew past in a loop as Thom swung him.
Thom’s mother, silky hair in a bob, offered me a smile of my own and held out my…
“Purse!” I cried. It must have arrived that morning from Renee.
I took my beloved from her proffered arms and spun it around in a circle like Thom and his son. Everyone laughed, as though inviting me to join their team.
Sammy had picked out a pizza place the next block over, so we walked in that direction while I flicked through the contents of my purse to confirm my credit card was there. When we arrived at the restaurant, I said my goodbyes to his family. As I thanked them for picking us up, I raised my hand and prepared to hail a cab.
“We’re glad you took Thom up on his offer of spending the night,” his mother replied with a smile.
“It’ll be great to get some time to chat with you once all this craziness is over,” I answered.
“You guys go get a table,” Thom told his parents. “I’ll be right in.”
“Why is Daddy not coming?” Sammy asked as his grandpa ushered him inside the pizza place.
Thom and I smiled at each other. “I better head out.” I shrugged, standing on my tiptoes to give him a kiss.
He held my hand. “Crazy thought: What if you didn’t go?” he asked. “What if you stayed?” Before I could answer, he forged ahead. “We could take Sammy to a movie, see the city at night, take a late train home, let him fall asleep on the way back. What do you think?”
I smiled perfunctorily. “Heh.” Was this a lame attempt at a joke?
“I’m really asking,” he said.
“I don’t—that’s why I’m here, that’s the whole reason I came on this road trip.” I tried to make light of his behavior by lifting his wrist and peering at his watch. “If I don’t get going, it will have been for nothing, so…”
“But it’s turned into something else. Hasn’t it? It’s turned into you and me. Right?” His need for reassurance was so unlike him—as far as I knew, at least—that I couldn’t wrap my head around his behavior. His confident veneer slid open like automatic doors, revealing a man who looked completely out of his element. “Not you and him.”
Oh.
“You’re worried about J. J.?”
“You told me yourself, multiple times, that you guys always get back together, that no matter how long you’re apart, you always find your way ‘home.’ I’m afraid he’s going to manipulate you, and…” His voice dropped so low I struggled to hear it. “And I’ll never see you again.”
I knew it took guts for him to say that; to be open and honest about his fear. And if I hadn’t been minutes away from the anniversary, I would have taken time to reassure him. But all I could think about was how far we’d traveled and how difficult it had been to get there, and how Thom of all people was the one standing in my way. His timing was atrocious.
I did the worst possible thing I could in that scenario. I rolled my eyes.
“You’re being absurd. I’ll see you later, okay?”
Before I could hail a cab, Thom’s fingers lightly encircled my wrist. He tugged me to a private alcove under the awning of a shuttered corner store.
“Can you see it from my point of view?” he asked. “Why I wouldn’t want you to go?”
“Can you see it from my point of view, by which I mean the expression on my face, that I’m in a hurry?”
It came out way harsher than I intended. We stared at each other.
“I get it now,” Thom said finally. “Yeah. I should’ve known.”
“Should’ve known what?”
“That you couldn’t date regular guys after J. J. Randall.”
“That has nothing to do with—”
“I think you’re excited to see him tonight. Maybe all the attention you’ve been getting, all the social media love, has made you feel like you’re on his level, and now that it’s so close—being famous is so close—you can taste it. You can be one of them, at last! You’ve railed against them for weeks but the moment he acknowledges you—the moment he expresses the tiniest interest in you, you run back to him—”
Tears filled my eyes. “Enough.”
The air around us was charged with anger and confusion, a sense of unreality.
“Reddit and going online isn’t your addiction,” Thom continued. “It’s him. Him, and fame. I’ve seen pill heads my whole life, I know what chasing a high looks like.”
“I hear it’s a lot like gambling,” I said sharply.
We stared at each other, our breaths rapid, colliding. I regretted my words instantly. “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, but I need to go. I’ll see you after. I want to see you after, okay?”
“I don’t.”
His words hung in the air.
My face tightened, every nerve in my face hot and sore. I could hardly breathe. The world around us seemed to be buzzing; a droning sound drowning out our words and the ways they harmed each other.
“Why are you doing this?” I pleaded.
“Go get your man. Go get your old life. I don’t have anything to offer you so let’s stop pretending this was ever going to work,” Thom said.
Sammy exited the restaurant, head swiveling as he searched for us. H
e literally bounced off the walls, plowing into every available surface—brick wall, grandparents—and back again like a Ping-Pong ball. Thom’s dad gripped the boy’s shirt collar to prevent him from smacking into a passerby. Sammy struggled against the restraint and yelled, “Stop it, Grandpa.”
Thom sent them a pleading look. Seeing him torn between intervening or finishing our conversation, I tried to be patient, tried to see past his hurtful behavior to its underlying cause.
But I didn’t have time.
A taxi pulled up and I dove for it, sadness and anger warring within me. To think, I’d considered building a life with this person. How was it possible I’d fallen asleep with my head on his chest last night, his heartbeat steady and strong and so, so right?
“Don’t you worry, Thom,” I said in a loud, cheerful voice, “I’ll pay you back every cent of this trip. Check your mailbox next week for a check.”
He looked pale now. Shaky. “You don’t have to do that.”
“It’s no problem. I’ll be coming into a lot of money soon.”
His confused, hurt expression made me even angrier; propelled me to new heights of belligerence and spite. “I’m announcing the book deal the moment I hit the stage.”
Part III
1
In the backseat of the cab, I jammed the seat belt clicker into the wrong slot, over and over, until I realized it belonged in the one beside it. I pushed down so hard I pinched my finger and cursed a blue streak.
“Where you goin’?” the driver asked.
“Rockefeller Center, please.”
“We’ll have to circle it. There’s something going on tonight and there’s a big crowd outside,” he warned me.
“Yeah, I know,” I said through the pain, shaking my hand out. “Just drop me the closest you can get without killing anyone.”
The driver’s uncomprehending eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.
My purse seemed endless. Where were my credit cards? So help me, Renee, if you forgot to…wait, I already found it when we were walking from the train, so it had to be here somewhere. Had I moved it into the other pocket? Goddammit. Wait, there it was.
I wiped uselessly at my eyes and pulled my knuckles away, wet.
Fuck. I was going to have puffy eyes for the cameras. I was going to look like a fucking HAG. Thanks, Thom.
Oh God. Was it really over? How could we go through all the things we went through and have it end so abruptly, so nastily?
The events of the past seventy-two hours flickered through my mind like an animated flipbook. The car breaking down. The skate park and the Hilton. Kissing.
The tent.
Listening to his heartbeat.
And within all those things, winding around them like scarves, pulling tight to bind them together: laughter. Yes, we’d talked about painful and difficult things, serious things, but within the pauses there was always laughter, and I remember thinking, I could talk to him forever, and needing to find out his opinions on everything because so many things in the world seemed new to me again, with him beside me.
So why couldn’t he support me?
Fresh, angry tears slipped down my cheeks.
I thought back to joking around on the train about our first crushes. Winnie Cooper for him and Michael from For Better or For Worse for me.
“What chance does a regular guy have?” he’d muttered. He was preoccupied with my past, convinced he wasn’t enough for me, and worse, he seemed to believe I expected my boyfriends to be two-dimensional pinups who came with private jets and personal chefs.
What he didn’t know was that for me, a “regular” guy was all I’d ever wanted. I adored the fact that he ran his own business and worked hard to take care of himself and his son, instead of employing a team of yes-men to blow smoke up his ass and cater to his insane whims. Give me an anonymous, nose-to-the-grindstone guy over a celebrity any day. In my life, that was rarer. I should’ve told him that. Would it have killed me to acknowledge his fears in a sincere way, instead of joking about it? Why did I have to be the class clown all the time? Why couldn’t I have been kind when he needed me to be?
Even as I wavered, a tsunami of anger washed away the guilt.
He had no right to make decisions for me or accuse me of being a fame-whore. And the fact he thought he did have that right made my stomach roil as the car jolted to a standstill.
The taxi driver hadn’t exaggerated: The crowd outside Rockefeller Center seemed a mile deep. I quickly paid and threw myself out of the cab. My slip-ons flapped against the pavement and the world went sideways.
I’d tripped and fallen, in front of a line of ticket-holders. Sprawled on the ground, eyes closed to squeeze out the world, I could make out a few conversations swirling above me like lassos. I wished one of them would loop around my neck and squeeze. Just put me out of my misery.
A rush of voices grew louder, nearer. “Is that…”
“Yeah, she’s here, she made it.”
“It’s Holly Danner!”
“Who?”
2
By the time I was dusted off, checked for injuries, and ushered inside through a back entrance by a khaki-clad, no-nonsense woman (the AD) wearing a headset and carrying a clipboard, the special had already started. Groggy and dull-eyed, it dawned on me I hadn’t made it in time. Oh, and I had a scuff mark on my FACE from wiping out on the sidewalk.
“We’re glad you’re here, honey, but you know we’re filming this live, right?” the assistant director asked. “Where have you been?” I didn’t blame her for wondering. Everyone else had arrived by limo and no doubt worked the red carpet, posed for photos, and signed autographs before sitting down onstage with Cindi Cooper, the investigative journalist moderating the Q&A segments. She must have picked the short straw at the network—a woman who’d spent months in wartime Bosnia shouldn’t have been overseeing the ultimate fluff assignment.
The AD shoved a bottled water in my hand and attempted to smooth out my hair. “How come you didn’t arrive early for hair and makeup?”
“I’ve been traveling. It took a lot to be here today. I wasn’t sure I’d be on the roster; I…I thought I might be turned away.”
“Are you kidding? You’re all they talked about the past hour. Wondering if you’d come, where you were…”
“Hmm.” Doubt it.
“Anyway, the first segment is the longest. Twenty minutes. Then break for commercial, then five segments of ten minutes each. Kick back and I’ll escort you out once I get the all-clear.”
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I transported myself back to the set of Diego and the Lion’s Den. The smell of sawdust. The flimsy plywood sets, the freezing air inside the soundstage. The three-quarter-size furniture, so we wouldn’t look swallowed up. (Talk-show sets were the same way; desks and chairs were customized, petite but proportioned, so the talent would stand out, dominate.) You don’t recover from something like that, I don’t think: Having reality bent to your benefit. Being and looking larger than life.
Which was why it jarred me so much to look out from my hidden spot in the wings and see them sitting on regular folding chairs on a stripped-down, undecorated stage.
There they were: the people I’d both loved and hated, railed against and adored. There they were, primped, plucked, pulled apart, and rearranged for ultimate consumption by a ravenous public.
Who even were they?
I used to know. Now I wasn’t sure anyone did. Or if it was even possible.
On TV, the radio, and movie screens, they loomed larger than life because they were designed to be. But in person, the only way to describe actors and other celebrities was “doll-like.” Their exquisite features and insidious perfection seemed carved out of lesser humans. If you had a personal staff attending to your skin, follicles, teeth, body-mass index, makeup, wardrobe, hairstyle, exercise regimen, and more (Swag Coach; personal tattooist; Reiki specialist) you would hover above the earth, too. Untouchable. Just out of reach.
<
br /> How did I forget how tiny they were?
I took them in, one by one, down the line, and envisioned each of them at their lowest moments. Because those were the things I’d need to write about soon. No sugarcoating their lives, no being coy. A detailed hit job. Multiple-choice questions about which one(s) had anal herpes wasn’t going to cut it.
Should be easy. They’d spilled their guts to me over and over, like trusting little bunnies.
Kelly Hale: My second older sister. The nicest teenage girl you could ever meet. One night, when we were all stuck inside because of a rainstorm, she confessed to us that at her high school in Muncie, Indiana, she’d had no friends. Not a single one. She belonged to tons of groups, yes, but they were people in Cheer and Dance she was forced to see. No one ever made plans with her outside those activities. Kelly Hale, a would-be prom queen in search of a prom. The first of the group to be emancipated from her parents, with the others following her lead based on their own career necessities and/or level of dysfunction in their families. Honeypot’s showrunner, a nerdy, wispy-haired married man and father of two, was famous for his feminism and for writing “strong female characters,” yet he had bedded every actress on his show. He told Kelly his personal tragedy was the kinship he felt for the Roman god Janus, who was considered two-faced. (Oh, the guilt. Oh, the agony of cheating on one’s wife. Oh, spare me.) In the same breath, he reminded her Janus was also the god of beginnings and transitions, of gates, doors, doorways, endings, and time. In other words, he owned her. He alone could open or close the doors of her career, and he’d love nothing more than to write strong female characters for her forever—so long as she was discreet and accommodating. Which was why she’d had two abortions at twenty, the same year she received a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a TV drama.
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