Not in the Script

by Amy Finnegan

  “Then it sounds perfect for you.” I love it when Emma gets this excited. Her big blue eyes are brighter right now than the lamp that’s next to her, and none of her smiles on film even come close to what the real thing does to me.

  We spend the next half hour or so going through Emma’s classes for next semester, then she brings up the videos from last year’s Fashion Week in New York that someone posted on YouTube. I happen to be in a few of them. “I’ll make you a deal,” I say. “You can watch those runway clips if I get to google your name and check out all forty-five million links. Fair?”

  “Forty-five million? Whatever.”

  She obviously hasn’t looked for a while. “Want to see?”

  “Um … no,” she replies. “Why did you google me, anyway?”

  “Why did you look me up on YouTube?”

  “Because you won’t do your runway walk for me.” She’s tried several times to get me to do it on the running path. “I’ve got it down pretty good now, though. Watch!”

  I’m perfectly fine with her trying to imitate my walk. She struts back and forth with her cute bare feet, and in her baggy—but still smokin’ hot—sweats that are rolled up a few inches above her ankles. And I tell her stuff like: Your arms are swinging too high. Slow down. Walk backward. Diagonally. Now walk on your hands.

  Emma rolls her eyes and starts beating me with couch pillows. I play along just long enough for her to give me hints that I’m getting too physical for her comfort, and then I snatch away her weapons. I have to know something.

  “So how long are we talking here?” I ask. “Three, maybe five years? Until we can actually date, in public?”

  She sinks into the cushions. “I’d never expect you to wait that long. But I keep making one mistake after another with guys, and I don’t want you to be the next one.”

  Nice sucker punch. “I definitely don’t want to be a mistake.”

  “We’re getting to know each other really well this way, though,” she says. “And if things had been any different, I doubt we would’ve spent this much time talking.”

  I laugh. “True. Very true.”

  She quickly gets serious again. “And I need a chance to tell Rachel what’s been going on before anything really changes between us. But I don’t want to tell her until after the premiere because she’s really looking forward to coming out here. And I’ll feel less guilty if I can explain things face-to-face, so she’ll … hopefully understand.”

  Why should Emma feel guilty about any of this?

  “So I’m guessing this means that little rule we talked about in the car will stay in place until then?” I ask, and my stomach sinks when she nods. “All right. I can handle that. But some things”—I slide my hand along the couch and slip my fingers between hers—“are getting impossible to resist.”

  Emma smiles and inches closer. “Friends hold hands, don’t they?”

  “I don’t do it with my friends,” I say, “but I’ll take your word for it.”

  Emma

  By the time I’ve showered and dressed the next morning, Jake is home from the hotel and in his mom’s kitchen, burning pancakes. And he was apparently in a hurry to get here because he’s still in the same gym shorts and T-shirt from the night before, and his hair looks like a hurricane hit him. The crazy thing is, he’s never been so irresistible.

  He turns from the griddle and catches me watching him. “Hey there. You hungry?”

  “Starving.”

  “Good, because—dang!” Jake hurries to shovel off the pancakes. “How’d I burn those?”

  “They were already burning when I walked in here,” I say. “A full minute ago.”

  “Nuh-uh, really? But look, this other batch is perfect.” He holds up a serving platter stacked with neatly round pancakes. I suspect Jake only added half the required amount of water, though, because they’re twice as dense as they should be. Either that or he accidentally followed a recipe for pound cakes. “I guess I was just thinking about … well, you. So you can’t blame me for burning them.”

  “When it’s obviously my fault,” I say. His eyes are so amazing—jade green this morning. The exact color seems different with everything he wears.

  “Jake!” Mrs. Elliott hollers from her room. “Answer the phone, please!”

  Without really looking, Jake reaches around me to pick up the kitchen phone. Then just a few seconds after he says hello, his face loses all color. He turns away without even a signal to me, walks out to the back patio, and closes the glass door. To keep busy, I start cleaning the kitchen, but my mind goes wild trying to make sense of his reaction.

  Mrs. Elliott finally comes in and asks, “The call was for Jake?”

  “Yeah,” I reply, doing my best to sound casual. “He’s on the patio.”

  Mrs. Elliott then turns sort of pale too, and makes her way to the counter to check her caller ID. “I’m gonna skin him alive!” she says, and my heart rockets to my throat. “Not Jake. His father,” she goes on. “He’s been calling every weekend, trying to catch Jake. But he always makes things worse. And he’s already done enough damage, so I told him to back off for a while.”

  His dad. The one topic Jake continues to skirt around.

  His silhouette is now on the other side of the sheer window panel—the phone in one hand, dropped to his side, and his other hand resting on the door handle. “Maybe you should talk to him alone,” I say. “I’ll finish getting ready.”

  I leave the kitchen before Mrs. Elliott replies. About twenty minutes pass before Jake knocks on Amber’s bedroom door, where I slept. “Breakfast is ready,” he says, sounding normal. The smells of eggs and bacon now waft down the hall, and when I reach the kitchen, Mrs. Elliott is already at the table, and Jake pulls out a chair for me.

  He’s smiling but still has a vacant look in his eyes.

  “So, you were saying last night that you like Sophie?” Mrs. Elliott asks me.

  As we all talk about Jake’s friends, he glances at his mom’s plate over and over again, and I can’t figure out why. She hasn’t started on her pancakes yet, but she’s making her way through the scrambled eggs and bacon just fine.

  I watch closer as she finally attempts to cut her pancakes using the side of her fork—totally impossible because they’re as hard as Frisbees—then saw through them with a table knife, like I’ve been doing. But the top of her stack keeps sliding to the side, so she has to set down her knife, pick up her fork again, and go back and forth like this, one utensil and then the other, until she finally has a bite-size wedge.

  Jake puts his own utensils down, and that’s when I realize what’s going on: his mom can’t use her knife and fork together because she can only use one hand. But she doesn’t seem nearly as bothered by this as Jake does. He reaches for her plate to help, but Mrs. Elliott shoots him a glare and says, “Thank you, Jacob, but I can feed myself.”

  Jake looks at her with an expression of dejection, then wipes his mouth with a napkin. “I’ll, uh … be back in a minute.”

  I can only watch as he stands and walks out the patio door again.

  “He’s having a rough morning,” Mrs. Elliott tells me.

  “Should I go out there?”

  She hesitates. “If you’d like to. But don’t take it personally if he’s snippy.”

  Outside, I find Jake staring blankly at the warm morning air. “Hey, you have a porch swing,” I say, not daring to sit next to him. I think back to yesterday in the garage, and how he gave me an opportunity for privacy if I wanted it. “You can talk to me,” I say, “or I’ll go back in. I’m fine either way.”

  Jake scoots over and motions for me to sit. “We need freaking chain saws to eat those pancakes,” he says. “Why didn’t I just make omelets, or oatmeal? My mom could’ve easily eaten those with one hand.” He pushes his fingers through his hair. “You’d think that after a full year, I’d be used to this. But I even put the fork on her paralyzed side. Did you see that?”

  I construct a care
ful reply before I speak. “I’m sure the only thing that really matters to your mom is that you thought to make her breakfast. And I bet you do it every time you’re here.”

  A smile tugs at Jake’s mouth, but he doesn’t reply. He just takes my hand and strokes his thumb over the top of it, clearly still agitated. As the seconds pass, though, his touch becomes more gentle, and it’s almost painful for me to resist an impulse to lay him down, rest his head in my lap, and play with his hair until all his worries go away.

  He clears his throat. “I doubt it will ever get easier to see my mom like this. She used to be the one who rushed off to help someone, no matter what they needed. But now, well … nobody’s here for her. My mom’s friends have all moved on, and the person who owes her the most—my dad—has done nothing more than send a cheap bouquet of flowers and a stupid get-well card. I hate him for a lot of reasons, but mostly for that.” Jake looks away and brushes flour off his shorts. “That was him on the phone.”

  I nod. “Why did he call?”

  “Who knows? He’s probably run out of gambling money again and wants to hit the jackpot the easy way—using me.” Jake lets go of my hand and leans forward on his elbows. He’s silent for a bit, then finally goes on. “It’s hard to believe now, but my dad used to be super cool. When I was a kid he came to my ballgames, we built forts in the backyard, chased lizards—all the stuff that makes growing up fun, you know? Then everything just … stopped. Not overnight, really, but his weekends in Vegas got more frequent, and soon he was gone three or four days at a time. Then he lost his job, then he lost another one. And eventually, he left and didn’t come home for weeks. And Vegas is only five hours from here.”

  Imagining all this makes my throat tight, and I don’t trust myself to reply.

  I’m not surprised when Jake’s own voice sounds even more strained when he speaks again. “We talked on the phone once in a while, and he always said he’d be home soon. One summer my mom couldn’t convince me to go anywhere—not even to the park across the street—because I was afraid my dad would come home while I was gone and I’d miss him before he left again. I kept up that kind of crap until I was about twelve. That’s when I finally figured out he’d been lying to me, for years.”

  Jake falls quiet again, so I say, “It must’ve been an awful time for your mom too. Especially watching you suffer.”

  “Yeah, it was bad. And Amber was as messed up as I was, but my mom just put on a brave face and got a job. She did transcription work at home, so she’d be around when we were out of school. Then my dad borrowed against our house without my mom knowing, and we almost lost it because he wasn’t paying his part of anything anymore. He just kept making things worse and worse for her, and they finally divorced.”

  “And now?” I ask.

  “He’s been around here and there, but not much,” Jake replies. “Then a couple of years ago, once I started showing up in magazines, he called me with a sob story about being laid off. He said he’d been kicked out of his apartment, all this garbage, and for some stupid reason, I believed him. So without telling my mom, I sent him what he wanted: five thousand bucks—almost everything I’d saved after my first few months of modeling. But it didn’t take long for my mom to figure out what I’d done, and when she did some research, she discovered that my dad had been doing just fine, living it up in some swanky casino that gave him a room as long as he kept spending his money there. He’d just needed some extra cash to enter a high-stakes tournament.” Jake looks back to me with an expression of utter torment. “I doubt you’ve ever fallen for a scam like that.”

  I’m already thinking of a time when I did. “When I was fifteen, my aunt Ivy from Fayetteville called to tell me her daughter was having problems breathing at night and needed surgery on her sinuses, but they didn’t have good enough insurance to cover it. My aunt explained the situation first, then asked for my mom. As they talked, I sat there and cried my eyes out, thinking one of my favorite cousins was going to die. My mom was acting funny about it, though, so I begged her to stop being selfish, and she finally told my aunt that yes, I could help out, and she sent the money.”

  “Let me guess, your cousin didn’t have surgery?” Jake asks.

  “She did, actually,” I reply. “She got an amazing—but totally unnecessary—nose job, and won the Miss Fayetteville pageant.”

  Jake surprises me with laughter. “How did your aunt expect to get away with that?”

  I shrug. “We went to visit my cousin after the surgery, and she had no idea what I was talking about when I asked if she could breathe better. She didn’t even know what a sinus was.” My mom still brings up this occasion whenever she wants to remind me that she’s always right about everything. “When my parents confronted my aunt, her excuse went something like, ‘Emma has her fame and fortune, and this is the only way my daughter can get hers. You owe it to your family to take care of them.’ Which is ridiculous, right? I would’ve happily paid for a life-saving surgery, but I didn’t owe my cousin a new nose.”

  Our families haven’t spoken since. It’s a typical Southern feud.

  “It’s bad enough when anyone takes advantage of you, but so much worse when it’s a family member,” Jake says. “So whenever my dad calls and says in his fake, cheery voice, ‘Hey there, Jake! How’s my boy doing?’ I just want to say, “Funny you ask, Dad, because I’m actually doing everything you should be doing, and I hate you for it.” Jake clenches a handful of hair in his fist. “I know that’s cold, but my dad’s a smart guy—he has a freaking master’s degree. But he chose to live this life, and dragged the rest of us down with him. So why should I give him that chance all over again?” Jake is still gripping his hair, so I ease his hand away and hold it. “At the same time, I’m tired of hating him. Avoiding him. Pretending like he doesn’t exist. I need to get over everything he’s done. Maybe even forgive him. But how?”

  I’m not sure if he’s looking for advice or just venting. Still, I take a chance and say, “I totally get why you don’t like to even think about your dad, but I doubt you’d feel so conflicted about it if you truly hated him. And pushing him away doesn’t seem to be working for your own peace of mind, right? So maybe you could start talking to him for only a few minutes at a time—try having a normal conversation for just that long. But when it comes down to it, Jake, earning back your trust is up to him.”

  “Yeah, true. And I should probably try that. It’s just that I have a hard time trusting anyone now,” he says quickly, then seems to regret telling me this. “I kinda, well—” He starts tugging on a loose string at the hem of his shorts. “I get what you could call a knee-jerk reaction whenever people seem too good to be true. I instantly doubt them. I doubt that anything good can last. And I’m usually right.”

  Jake glances back for a sec, giving the impression that even I fit into this category, and I can’t let him believe that. “At least you don’t have to worry about me,” I say, “since I’m nowhere near too good to be true. I think I’ve made it perfectly clear that I’m a pain in the butt.”

  He laughs and wraps an arm around me, his entire body seeming to relax. “You, Emma Taylor, cause me plenty of pain. But don’t count on scaring me off so easily.”

  I nestle into him, the two of us fitting together so perfectly it’s as if we’re custom made for each other. “Well, as you can see,” I reply, “that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.”

  I’ve always thought that when I one day found myself feeling like this, I would wonder if it was the real thing—if it was something genuine enough, like Jake said, to last. But I realize in this moment that there isn’t a single questioning if in my head.

  I’m falling in love with him.

  I return to work on a Tuesday, the dreaded day each week when the tabloids tell me what’s going on in my life. They are way off as usual—and on a scavenger hunt to figure out why I didn’t go to Tahoe with Brett—but for once, I couldn’t care less. They can speculate and lie all they want, just a
s long as they don’t bring Jake into it.

  The only flaw in my grand plan is that the tabloids are hurting Brett, most of them suggesting that he’s fooling around and making me cry all day long, begging for his attention.

  During Wednesday’s lunch break, the first time I work with Brett after Labor Day weekend, he waves a stack of tabloids in my face. “Great, I’m on covers as a playboy again! And I don’t deserve it.”

  “That’s unusual,” I reply. Then I realize he looks genuinely devastated, so I take the tabloids away from him and toss them into a nearby trash can. “Brett, they’re just as stupid as they’ve always been. Why would you let them bother you now?”

  He plops down into his cast chair, pushes his fingers through his hair one way, and then the other. Then he stands back up again. “Because you know that I’m trying,” he says, and grabs me by my shoulders—his trademark move. I guess it could be worse. “I’m being good. Better than good. I’m bored out of my freaking mind here in Tucson, but I’m playing the part of McGregor’s choirboy anyway. It doesn’t matter though, does it?”

  “Sure it does. They’ll eventually catch on,” I reply, but I also have my doubts. “And you’ve told me yourself that you want to change, so you’re not just doing this for McGregor, and especially not for the tabloids. It’s for your own happiness, right?”

  Brett nods and gives my arms a squeeze, making me suddenly aware of Jake’s presence. He’s been studying in his dressing room during lunch but is now filling his plate at the food table. He doesn’t seem to be watching us, just glancing around a bit, but I still slip out of Brett’s hold and return to my own plate.

  The following Tuesday, while we wait for an issue with the library set to be resolved, Brett waves a fresh tabloid in front of me. “Guess who the bad guy is this week?”