by Jen Malone
I checked on Player Graham. He looked a little green. Melba was nodding along like it was all her idea and she hadn’t ripped us a new one last night. I was trying to process everything to figure out where I might fit into all this. I wasn’t liking the conclusion my brain was coming to.
Ellis continued, “This way, we can show the world that you’re becoming a man and taking advantage of all that comes with it. Your mom and I have discussed this and we really think this is going to end up being a great career move. This is going to show directors you’re mature enough for the adult roles they want you for. From here on out, forget about any of the restrictions we talked about in the past. I want you flirting with as many girls as you can and I want you dating far and wide. Except, unless she’s a celebrity in her own right, I don’t want to see any repeats. No one gets to be seen with you twice. It would kill your marquee value.”
My confusion must have been all over my face because Ellis spared me a sympathetic smile and explained, “It means the amount of money a movie can expect to make just for having a certain star attached. Some people will go see any movie Jennifer Lawrence is in, regardless of whether the movie is about her serving cat food to a deadbeat boyfriend. Just having her name on the marquee outside the movie theater brings in a certain guaranteed audience. Every actor is assigned a value in points and most productions have to put together a collection of stars whose points add up to a certain value to get a green light from the studio to film their movie.”
“What, like a mathematical formula?” I asked.
“Exactly like a mathematical formula. And Graham’s point value is in the stratosphere right now. He can carry a film all by himself at the moment, without needing other big stars attached. Which means he can have his pick of projects. But it could all go away like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Don’t let any of the art fool you; this is a business first and foremost.”
With that, Ellis turned back to Graham and tapped her remote a few times on the table to ensure she had his attention.
“What this all means for you, for now, is that you are free to date anyone”—she turned her gaze on me, and the rest of the room followed suit—“but her.”
Graham was asked to stay behind with Ellis, but as the rest of us filed from the room, Melba slipped me my cell phone. She’d confiscated it the night before, not trusting that I wouldn’t answer it if any reporters happened to track me down.
I peeked at the screen. Thirty-four missed calls from Wynn. I should have known a devoted celebrity tracker like her would be right on top of breaking news like this.
The phone rang once on the other side of the ocean before it was snatched up and Wynn whisper-yelled in my ear, “It’s about freaking time!!!” I could hear all the exclamation points she was adding to that statement.
“Why are you whispering?” I said back in a normal voice.
“Because it’s only six a.m. here. But who cares about that? Oh my freaking God—tell me everything and don’t leave out one teensy-tiny detail. I need to know it all.”
“Oh God, Wynn, it’s all so crazy I don’t even know where to start.”
“Fine. I’ll ask questions and you answer. There are about a million and two things I’m dying to know. Number one: boxers or briefs?”
“What?” I choked out.
“Graham. Does he wear boxers or briefs? Inquiring minds want to know.”
I craved my best friend. It felt like a physical need. Hot tears prickled at my eyes as I tried to determine whether I needed to laugh or cry more. I settled for both at once. I sank down the wall until I was seated on the floor in the hallway outside my hotel room and managed, “I miss you so much.”
Wynn indulged me with a rare serious moment. “Is it bad? I know you emailed me all the stuff about him not being allowed to date. Are you guys in trouble?”
I filled her in on Ellis’s new directives and how they left me out of the equation entirely.
“I’m sorry,” Wynn breathed quietly. I had to give her credit. She was handling my “cheating” with her crush with surprising grace.
“This doesn’t weird you out, does it?” I asked her.
“Well, I have had to say good-bye to an integral part of my sweet, innocent girlhood,” she joked. “Seriously, though, I might be crazy jealous, but it’s not like I’m genuinely hurt. I’m putting on my big girl panties here. I hardly had any actual claim over him. Besides, I fell for the fantasy of Graham Cabot. You fell for the real person,” she said. Her voice was soft when she added, “And you did, didn’t you? I could tell from your email the other day. In all the years you’ve spent listening to me dissect every single thing a random cute boy has said in passing to me, you’ve never gone all girly-girl like that before. By the twenty-seventh time I read ‘and then he said, and then I said,’ I knew you had it bad.”
I sighed like the world was coming to an end. At least my world. A series of moments played like a movie in my mind. Graham winking at me while messing with the reporter. Graham calling me Pickles. Graham looking into my eyes while the plane bounced around in the sky. Graham in the pool, wiggling his obscene third toe at me. Graham pulling me up the hill to the Basilica, Graham’s voice in my ear at the market, Graham fastening the rabbit’s foot onto me, Graham kissing me, Graham kissing me, Graham kissing me. That last one was on a loop in my brain.
“I think I have it pretty bad,” I told Wynn.
“How bad?” she asked.
“I think I might have . . . feelings.”
She squealed loud enough to wake not only her entire household but the rest of Shelbyville as well.
“Oh my God, Annie! You LOVE Graham Cabot.”
How many times had I heard Wynn say, “I love Graham Cabot so much”? A hundred? A hundred thousand? And how many times had I uttered those words? Not even once.
“Slow down,” I protested. “It’s way too early for that. But there’s definitely something there.” Which was crazy. I mean, we’d just met. But still. I sank my head into my hands, cradling the phone on my upper arm. How was this happening to me?
Wynn was still babbling away, unaware of the scope of the Shakespearean drama I was living out. “Well, this no-dating thing will all blow over. It has to. I can’t WAIT to meet him when I come to LA. Do you think he’ll have us over to his mansion? He has to live in a mansion, right? Seriously, does he smell amazing? He looks like he’d smell amazing.”
She was feeling every bit as giddy as I should have been, but the key difference was that she hadn’t just been issued a publicist restraining order.
“Wynn. It’s not like that. I can’t . . . we can’t . . . we’re not allowed to date.”
Wynn calmed down on the other end and resumed normal best friend duties. “Yeah, but do you think they’ll really stick to that? I mean, if you guys are actually in love, they can’t do that to you, right?”
“Well, for one thing, I don’t know what either of us is feeling just yet. For another, his publicist was really clear about the fact that dating me would mess with Graham’s brand. The same way he wasn’t supposed to be seen with a girl before this, because they thought his fans would have a hard time accepting him as off the market, now she’s decided he should show the world he’s grown up and he should date.”
Wynn interrupted, “Okay, but that’s great, right?”
“Not great. She wants him to be a ladies’ man. Different date every night kind of thing. She thinks his fans will be okay with that. One thing he definitely cannot do is date a nobody like me,” I said, letting bitterness creep into my voice.
“Annabelle Mae Shelton, you are NOT a nobody and you better not let anyone over there call you that or they’ll have me to deal with!”
I had to smile. I could picture Wynn, sitting upright in her bed, punching at the air. In kindergarten, when Marcus Riley called me a fartbutt, Wynn had stuck out her foot
to trip him in the cafeteria, sending his whole lunch tray up to meet his face. In fifth grade, when Summer Alito invited all the girls in our swim club to her sleepover but me, Wynn skipped it in protest. I could always count on her to have my back in any confrontation I was too chicken to do anything but run from. Which made me ache all the more. My throat closed over a hard lump.
“I miss you,” I told her, plain and simple.
“I miss you too,” she said. I heard the same notes of sadness in her voice. “You know, when I read your weekly horoscope it said you would surprise people and cause them to see you in a whole new light. But I never suspected this is what it would mean.”
The fact that Wynn was still reading my horoscopes, despite the fact that I was thousands of miles away and had only ever rolled my eyes when she talked about anything to do with Virgo’s moon rising or Capricorn being in the twelfth house, made my heart squeeze with love.
She continued. “Listen, let’s not focus on the going-forward stuff right now. You haven’t told me anything about Graham and I want to hear everything, leading right up to that delicious-looking kiss I watched on my computer about a bajillion times last night.”
So I told Wynn everything. She stopped me right at the kiss and insisted we didn’t need to spend one second talking about anything that came after his lips tasting a little like the cinnamon that had been sprinkled on his crepe.
And it helped. Wynn always helped.
Chapter Twelve
As if my summer weren’t essay-ready already, rolling through the French countryside in a forty-foot RV could headline its own chapter.
I could picture a private plane, a yacht, even, maybe a deluxe tour bus. But a brown-and-orange RV with a zigzag racing stripe around its belly was not where I’d ever expect to find someone who apparently had “marquee value” out the wazoo.
Which was sort of the point, I guess.
The press for Triton that Graham had been doing had been a little too effective. He’d put the spotlight right on himself and then gone and kissed a mystery girl before disappearing. His fans were all atwitter and whatever info the fans craved, the gossip magazines burned to provide. Melba and Ellis had formed an exploratory search party and scoped out the airport. They reported it crawling with tabloid reporters hoping for an interview with Graham, me, or preferably Graham-plus-me. Likewise the train station. And so they hopped on a jet to do advance recon in Barcelona and arranged for the rest of us to travel to Spain Midwestern-retiree style. Quite the disguise. I’d grown up in rural Georgia, so I knew plenty of people who lived full-time in these things and, for once on this trip, I was in my comfort zone while Graham was the fish out of water.
Roddy was steering us along the A20 and Mom was in back with a bad headache, which left Graham and me to fill out the small “kitchen” table in the center of the bus. We’d started a card game, mostly to avoid talking about everything we couldn’t talk about, but it hadn’t gone so well. Probably because of all the tension between us.
For my part, I had no idea where his head was. Was he mad at me for causing him to potentially mess up his career? Was he upset with himself for letting his guard down? Or was he, like me, replaying our Eiffel Tower kiss over and over to the point where he could almost feel the warmth of our lips pressed together?
His stupid trained-actor face wasn’t giving anything away.
After we’d abandoned the game, Graham muttered, “Homework time” and hauled out an obscenely high stack of Triton posters. He began signing away. Nearly an hour later I flipped closed my guidebook to Barcelona and sighed loudly into the silence. Graham swung his eyes to mine, eyebrows high. I looked over his shoulder to the closed door that led to the bunk beds in the back of the bus where Mom was resting, then checked behind me to gauge how far out of earshot Roddy was. Determining we were about as alone as we were ever going to be allowed again, I whispered, “Wanna talk about it?”
“About what?” Graham said, trying to be funny, but with only a halfhearted effort before his face fell again. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” I answered. “Are you mad?”
“Mad?” He looked genuinely confused. “At you?”
I hung my head.
“Annie, look at me.”
I didn’t move. Graham reached across the table and lifted my chin with his finger. I wanted to freeze time at the small touch. “Pickles,” he murmured. I raised my eyes to his, blinking a little to keep them from watering.
“I’m not mad at you. Are you insane? You should be mad at me. It’s my fault I dragged you into all my baggage. I should have just left things alone after the other night at the pool. I’ve been so disciplined for so many years and I just wanted a chance at a little bit of normal. It was stupid of me to think it would be that easy.”
“It wasn’t stupid,” I told him. “You deserve a little bit of normal.”
“Actually, I don’t. My mom always tells me how I’m special. And it’s usually when she’s telling me something I can’t do. ‘No, Graham, you can’t go to the football game your friends are playing in. You’re special and people would mob you.’ ‘No, Graham, we can’t go cut down a Christmas tree. It will be much less of a scene to get one delivered. Because you’re special, baby.’ But I want the career and this is what the sacrifice is. Has always been.”
“I don’t get it. I watched you talk to all the reporters at the press junket and you were so confident and easy with them. Why can’t you be the same way with your mom or with Melba and tell them how you feel?”
Graham looked far away for a moment and answered, “I just can’t. It’s different than with the reporters or the people on a movie set. Mom’s tied her whole life to me and I can’t let her down. Melba’s just following orders. Besides, what would be the point?”
I slid my fingers through his. There wasn’t really anything to say. It flat-out sucked, but he didn’t need me to tell him that.
We sat like that, holding hands but lost in our own thoughts, for a while longer, with the French countryside whizzing by outside the window. The scritch-scratch of Graham’s free hand signing posters and pushing them aside was the only noise.
When I shouted, “Stop!” it shattered the quiet and almost made Roddy swerve off the road.
“What the hell, Annie?” Graham exclaimed.
“Pull over,” I ordered Roddy, who complied without any pushback.
“We have a bathroom on board, you know,” called Graham, as I grabbed my bag and swung the door open. While I backtracked along the highway, I was vaguely aware of Graham and Roddy gaining on me. But I was on a mission.
About an eighth of a mile back on the road, I stood in front of my big score.
“Look at it,” I directed Graham as he caught up to me.
I pointed to the road sign. It was round with a bright red outline, and inside the center of the circle was a drawing of a car. Fairly normal. Except on top of the car was a giant red, yellow, and white jagged lightning bolt. It looked like a “BAM!” explosion from a comic book.
I had a giant grin on my face and Graham’s matched it. “What do you think it’s trying to tell us?” he asked.
“I have absolutely no idea!”
“We have to Google it when we’re back in the family roadster.”
Roddy had not batted so much as an eyelash all day yesterday as Graham and I had goofed our way around the entire city of Paris, but he was looking at the two of us like we’d just sucked up an entire balloon of helium and were now trying to sing the national anthem.
“You people are off your rockers,” he said, turning to make his way along the shoulder to the RV. I could see Mom’s figure now, just pushing out the door.
“Here, take one with me in front of it,” I instructed Graham, handing him my phone. He snapped me holding my hands up as if I were cradling the sign. I grabbed my phone back and took a picture of j
ust the sign. Graham even shot a few on his phone as cars streaked past us. When we got back to the RV, Mom and Roddy were still outside, leaning against the side.
“Find a good one?” she asked. Mom wouldn’t need to be told why we stopped. She’d gotten used to never getting from point A to point B without a shoulder stop like this. “Like father, like daughter.”
My first impulse was to shut down, but instead I just shrugged.
“I’m glad to see you’re softening,” she told me, leaving Graham to wrinkle his brow as Mom and I talked in code.
Without another word, we all piled back into the RV and resumed our positions as if our little break hadn’t ever happened. I ran cool water over a washcloth I found in the bathroom and brought it in to Mom for her forehead. She was already lying down again, with eyes closed.
When I joined Graham, he shoved his phone across the table. “I Googled it. It means ‘No flammable material.’”
We laughed for a second and then he asked, all serious again, “What did your mom mean just then? About you softening?”
“Can we not?”
“Sure. We can ‘not.’ But it occurs to me that I’ve spent the last few days dumping all my crap on you and you’ve been awfully quiet about offering any truly personal info of your own.”
I picked up the deck of cards we’d been playing with at the start of the trip and began shuffling them over and over. I refused to lift my eyes.
