Now a Major Motion Picture

by Cori McCarthy

  “Good.” She took my shoulder with one hand. “And so you know, that boy is head over heels in love with some girl. Don’t let him lead you on.”

  Crap.

  “Men. Always keeping secrets,” I said, a joke to cover my sudden letdown.

  She sighed and seemed even more disappointed in me than ever. “This is why you have to read the books, Iris. Your father is wrong. The story isn’t about punishing a king who makes a sexist choice. It’s about a girl who discovers the sheer power of her courage.”

  “As if courage is that simple.” Jaded Iris had come back strong, the words scalding my throat. “You can’t order courage on Amazon Prime and simply unbox it.” I thought about Grandma Mae. About me. “Some people have it. Some don’t.”

  Cate Collins looked like I’d spit at her, and I waited for her to correct me. Scold me. Even say my name in that motherly way. But she didn’t, and my dad’s voice whispered, Nice one, Iris.

  I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

  IF I’M BEING HONEST, I HAVE SOME INTEREST IN BEING HONEST

  When Cate and I reached the great old tree, I gasped. The base was hollowed out while the ancient branches reached high and huge. Beautiful skeletal arms grasped for the heavens.

  “Hello.”

  I jumped. Eamon stepped out from inside the tree with a grin on his face. The grin was aimed at me, and my body flushed with mixed signals. I felt like smiling back and turning around and sprinting away.

  “Did you get a few shots with the sunrise?” Cate asked.

  Eamon nodded. My eyes trailed down to his handheld camera, and I had a strong desire to toss it off the cliff. At least that squashed my crush for the moment.

  “Design has been building this tree for eighteen months,” Cate said to me. She knocked on the side and it made a hollow sound. Then she stepped inside and showed off the small living space within. “This is Maedina’s home.” I recognized it from Ryder’s drawings. Cate stared lovingly. “Tonight we’re going to burn it to the ground in one take.”

  “Why?” I asked, startled.

  “Because that’s what happens in the book. Sevyn can’t control her affinity with lightning, and when she finds out that Maedina was the one to curse her, she calls down the mighty bolt.”

  That would probably be pretty cool on screen. I tried not to look too impressed.

  Cate turned to Eamon. “You’re the director right now. Tell me where.”

  “Ah, here?” He motioned to the gnarled roots. “I can get the tree and the ocean in the shot.” Cate sat where Eamon had pointed, and Eamon set up his camera on a small tripod.

  “Should I leave?” I asked.

  Cate looked at me with those hard, blue eyes. “I think you should stay and hear the story of how your grandmother’s books saved my life. Eamon is recording it for his blog series.”

  I laughed, falling headlong into one of my dad’s favorite sayings. “The only way my grandma’s books could save your life is if you were in a Wild West gun fight, and you had the book in your vest, and it stopped a bullet from entering your heart.”

  Eamon and Cate stared like I’d grown horns. “Not a morning person?” he asked.

  “She’s parroting her father’s beliefs. Let’s move forward.”

  How did she do that? I thought about storming off but didn’t want to appear even more petulant.

  Eamon started recording and scurried around the camera to sit beside Cate. “Here we are on gorgeous Inishmore with wonder director Cate Collins. Cate, fáilte and go raibh maith agat.”

  “My pleasure,” she said.

  “You have said in several interviews that M. E. Thorne’s Elementia books saved your life.” Eamon tossed a brief but potent look at where I stood off camera. “Care to elaborate?”

  “Well, twenty years ago when I started film school, becoming a female director was a pipe dream. They didn’t seem to exist. And we don’t even have to go that far back. Four years ago, a study showed that eighty-five percent of all movies released in 2014 had male directors. Eighty-five percent. The zeitgeist over the years about hiring more female directors is nice, but the thing about large-scale filmmaking is that you’ve got to earn your spot. You can’t pluck a female director out of film school and hand her a half-a-billion-dollar project. Still…”

  She paused, and I could tell that sharp, intelligent Cate Collins was debating what she would say next. She cracked a knuckle and kept going. “Peter Jackson directed five movies before his vision for the Lord of the Rings films was green-lit. I directed sixteen feature-length films before Vantage Pictures would meet with me about discussing the possibilities for an Elementia movie.”

  “That doesn’t sound quite fair.” Eamon’s innocence shone when there was a camera on him. Maybe that’s what had drawn Cate’s eye during casting.

  “My gran had a saying. Fairness is fantasy. That’s rather apropos, come to think of it.” Cate smiled; she wasn’t looking at me, but it felt like she was. “But you were asking how the books saved my life. Well, in film school, I had a mentor, a wise, talented man who had been in Hollywood for decades. He has since passed.”

  “I’m sorry,” Eamon said.

  “Don’t be. If he were still alive, I doubt I’d have the courage to tell this story.” She rubbed her hands together. “Straight out of film school, he selected five of us as interns. I was honored because I was the first woman he’d ever picked. We all worked our asses off. For years. The boys kept getting promoted. They got their own productions. I did not. And one day, I marched into his office and demanded to know what I was doing wrong. He gave me a glass of water and asked me not to get hysterical—as if that were something I often did. ‘You’re the most passionate director I’ve ever met,’ he said. ‘But you’re a woman, and the studios don’t want women. They’re too emotional. Too unstable. I’m sorry.’”

  She paused. “So I quit.”

  Eamon had gone downright green, and she patted him on the knee. “I felt dead after that. I was broke and living on a friend’s couch. She put a copy of Elementia in my face and said, ‘This is a story about girls kicking butt. Read it.’ And I did. And it inspired me to fight back.”

  “How?” Eamon asked. “What did you do?”

  “The first thing I did was change the name on my résumé to C. Collins. Like M. E. Thorne or J. K. Rowling, I hid my gender with my initials, slipping past that hurdle. I immediately started getting calls from producers who assumed that the C was for Charles or Conor. After all, my résumé was impressive. Sometimes the producers were pleasantly shocked when I walked in the door. Sometimes they pretended like the position was already filled.”

  Cate turned her face toward the rising sun, basking in the gold glow. “I made ground an inch at a time, shooting indies for peanuts. Living on nothing. I kept going, like Sevyn. I didn’t let anyone stop me, and I called down the lightning when I needed to. After all”—she turned, pinning me with her sharpest look—“courage is quite simple. First, be honest. Second, don’t back down.”

  • • •

  I slumped back to the trailer by myself only to find Ryder on the phone.

  There was only one person he’d be talking with.

  “Iris is back. Yeah, okay.” He touched the mute button. “Dad wants to talk to you. He knows what happened, and he doesn’t think we should come home.”

  “Okay.” I took the phone.

  “I don’t want to leave either.” He sat on the edge of his bed and tied his sneakers.

  “Where do you think you’re going, Ry?”

  “I’m going to help the food people. Dad already said it’s okay, so don’t try to stop me.” He slipped out the door like he did this sort of thing all the time, and I stood with the phone in my hand, racking up a bill I couldn’t even imagine.

  I touched the mute button to disengage it. “He
y, Dad.”

  “Your brother says you want to come home. I’m going to finish my draft in the next day or two. I’ll fly there and take your place. You can come back.”

  What?

  “Iris?”

  “Well…” The words piled fast. “Cate gave me a job. I think I should see it through.” Granted this was about Julian Young, but I also thought about Eamon sitting next to me on the picnic table last night, his shoulder bumping mine.

  “Are you scamming money? The production is skin and bones, from what I hear.”

  “No, of course not!” I snapped. Dad didn’t like it when I spoke sharply, and I pictured him in his pajamas—writer’s uniform—standing with the phone outstretched. “Sorry.”

  He sighed, and I swear I felt it gust across the Atlantic. “I’m about to finish my draft.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. I’ll come relieve you. I’m sorry I sent you into that Thornian hell in the first place. Has Ryder been listening?”

  Apart from getting lost and nearly dying yesterday?

  “He got himself dressed this morning. No hassle.” I reached for the cup of toothbrushes by the tiny sink and felt Ryder’s. Wet. “He even brushed.”

  “You should email his therapist. Mark the achievement. Or I can do it later.” He paused for a long moment, and I remembered that it was midnight back home.

  “How’s Mom?”

  “She’s still green. You’re better with her than I am when she’s like this.” Green was the term we used for the weeks or months when Mom went into her greenhouse and didn’t come out. She had an apartment in there; she didn’t need to come out.

  “I see.” The situation now made sense. Dad was about to finish, and Mom was in her own world. He was lonely. “Maybe you could come see this with us. It’s…something else.” What was coming over me? These words had not been sanctioned by my brain’s overthinking committee.

  “Oh, don’t go changing sides on me, Iris. You’re my literary-fiction girl. I raised you so I could have a nonfantasy ally in this damn family.” This was a joke. Sort of. But it was also true, and for the first time, I didn’t like that I’d been raised to be on his team.

  I paced until I found my voice. “You know I’m not into elves and crap, but being here makes me wonder what was going on in Grandma Mae’s head. How did she have the courage to write her guts into those stories? What if the world had hated it?”

  “Your grandmother didn’t care what people thought about her. Not even her son.” My dad’s voice was on the edge, and I held my breath. “Iris, she was a classic writer—whiskey and neglect. Don’t need more of those in our lives, do we?”

  “No.” He didn’t hear the edge in my voice. He never did. “You’ll call back in a few days?” I asked. “When you’re done?”

  “Soon as I’ve sent my draft to my editor and the coast is clear.”

  The snippiness of his voice worried me. “Dad, are you staying off Goodreads?”

  He almost growled. “Who reviews a book about a dead FBI tech director and gives it one star for…” I pictured him leaning forward, scrolling, quoting. “‘Not having enough dogs and cats in it.’ What is wrong with this world, Iris?”

  He hung up before I could attempt an answer, which was in line with our longstanding relationship. He lobbed questions like grenades, and I sat in the crater of the aftermath, pondering.

  “What’s wrong with this world, Dad?” I thought about everything that had transpired since we arrived. “Enough to need a fantasy one.”

  Ryder’s—or my dad’s—old copy of the Elementia trilogy was still sitting next to my brother’s pillow. I picked it up and flipped to the last page. To the bio and headshot showing off Grandma Mae’s long, dark hair and the eyes Eamon hadn’t been wrong about. They had a dark brightness to them that felt bold beyond this world. But Eamon had been wrong about me. Mine might have been the same color, but they were flat and sad. My dad’s eyes.

  I pushed away the thoughts and read the short bio.

  M. E. Thorne was born in San Francisco in 1945. She is the author of the Elementia trilogy. She lives in Ireland.

  Wait, she lived in Ireland?

  AN IRISH INTERLUDE

  Outside, the morning sky was turning brilliantly blue. I went in search of breakfast and maybe to have a few words with Ryder. He’d been strange earlier—getting dressed and calling Dad all on his own. He’d even left without pleading with me to go with him.

  A tall, angular man stood beside a griddle, popping silver dollar pancakes in the air. Apparently, this was Mr. Donato. Ryder stood next to him holding out a plate. He caught three in a row before he missed one, and I was about to speak up, but Mr. Donato’s response was to toss a pancake onto Ryder’s head. My brother’s cheeks were bright red from laughing, and all I could think about was how he’d slapped himself last night. I’d made him snap.

  Only Dad pushed him over the edge at home.

  I grabbed a banana and sat at an empty picnic table with my empty thoughts.

  “Hey, I’ve got something for you.” Eamon appeared next to me like he actually did have sneaky elf powers. He held out a closed fist, and I put my cupped hand beneath it. He opened his fingers, and nothing but air appeared on my palms.

  “Oh look, it’s an excuse to talk with me,” I said.

  “Magic elf dust, Iris.” He winked. “You have to believe in it to see it.”

  I pretended to sprinkle it on his head. “You need it more than I do. To help you get a comb through that hair.” He pretended like he was offended, and I pushed his shoulder. Someone snorted behind us, and I turned to see Henrik with his dark glasses and floppy hat and clipboard.

  “Something funny?” I asked.

  “Yes. Puppies are hysterical.” Henrik handed small pieces of paper to Eamon and me, our sides for the day. I noticed that Cate had already put Ryder’s job on there. God, she was quick. My meeting with Julian was there as well.

  “Why is my name stamped on this?” I asked Henrik.

  “In case it gets leaked on the internet. Then we know it was your fault.” He walked away, heading for Cate’s trailer. It was identical to the others apart from a small Irish flag by the door.

  “What’s Henrik’s story, Eamon? Cate and him are an unusual pairing. He’s such a grump and she’s so can-do.” Eamon shrugged, and I glanced at his T-shirt and jeans. He’d changed since the interview this morning. Now he looked like he’d fallen out of a 1990s music video—which reminded me that one of these days, I was going to see him in full makeup and costume. Acting. “When are you shooting scenes?”

  “I’ve got a few more days. Still just enjoying the general splendor on set.”

  “And doing your blog series.”

  “Ah, yes. But I promise not to bring that up while you’re around. I know how you feel about cameras.” Now Eamon looked at his side. “What are you doing with Julian Young?”

  I leaned in. “I’ve been assigned a special mission: make Julian Young a better actor.”

  “You’re going to need that magic dust then.” Eamon leaned in too, and his crazy hair brushed my forehead. “So you’re staying around after all?”

  “Don’t get too smug about it.” We were oddly close, and I studied him. He was cuter today than yesterday. Some boys were like that. One day they were sort of odd, and the next they had noses and grins and eyes that seemed manufactured in a fall for me factory.

  “Do I look strange?” He wiped his mouth, a dash of shyness making him even cuter.

  “No, you look like you.”

  “I do work hard at that,” he said.

  Ryder shrieked gleefully, sending laughter through the line of hungry crew members. Huh, my brother didn’t need me, which meant I was free, which was weird. “According to the side, I have hours before I meet with Julian. What should we do, Eamon?
”

  Eamon’s face lit up. “We could go down to the quay. Or the sweater market.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “Really? That’s what you’ve got?”

  “What would you want to do?”

  Oddly enough, I found myself thinking about the scene I’d read to Ryder. About the cliff and the remains of Manifest. “Did you know that my grandmother lived in Ireland?”

  “I did. Did you know that she came to this very island many times? I’ve got a picture of her up at Dun Aengus.”

  I blinked at him. “What? How?”

  He swung his backpack off his shoulder and pulled out a torn-up biography titled M. E. Thorne: A Legacy in Magic & Grief. I knew biographies about my grandmother existed. The doctoral candidates always came knocking, and my dad loved giving them “the real story” that he wouldn’t tell me, but I’d never been close to one before. I poked it with a wary finger. “Why do you have this? Oh no, you’re one of those die-hard Thornians, aren’t you?”

  “It’s research for my role,” he said. He flipped to the middle of the book, to the glossy chunk of pages containing all the pictures, and then held one out to me. It was a gorgeous picture of Grandma Mae. She was maybe forty. Smiling at the camera with her long, black hair blowing out around her. Her toes were on the very edge of a cliff drop.

  “I wonder who she was smiling at,” Eamon said. “Your grandfather?”

  “Not likely. They never married. My dad barely knew him.”

  “Who then?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know anything about her. My dad says it’s not my business.”

  “You could read this.” Eamon held out the book, but I leaned back.

  “Would you want to find out all the ugly things in your family’s past from a book?”

  He shook his head; at least he understood. “But then how do you know they’re ugly?”

  “Because I’m not dumb,” I muttered. I looked at the picture again. “This is here?”