Everyone I Kissed Since You Got Famous

Chapter Fourteen

“Fuck,” April said. “This is good.” She pulled off her heart-shaped glasses and looked up at her webcam.

“Yeah?” Katie asked. “I wrote and edited all day today. This is it. The first draft. The one I thought I needed at least a month to write, but apparently getting this done only required fifteen to twenty thousand calories of my mother’s food, a come-to-Jesus talk from my agent, the realization I’ve been suffering under thirteen years of longing, a Category Five media storm, and a very Intro to Composition writing lesson that I could’ve gotten from any tutor anytime in the last eight years.”

Conscious of how fast she was talking, Katie made herself take a breath. “But now you have to tell me if it works,” she said. “I think it does, but I might have lost perspective. Mainly for all of the same reasons I was able to write it in the first place.”

“I’d give this script to you to read, is what I’m saying.” April smiled. “Even if there wasn’t a lot of money.”

Katie closed her eyes. That was good to hear. She trusted April’s judgment more than her own wobbly instincts as a writer of screenplays. “I’m so glad. I know it will need revision, but it does feel like I’m really doing it.”

“You’re really doing it. Green Bay is good for you, TMZ’s crash of your idyll very much excluded.” April put her glasses back on and picked up the script, which Katie realized she’d not simply printed out but actually had bound. It was covered in green ink where April had taken notes. That, more than April telling her it was good, made goose bumps sluice from Katie’s scalp to the tops of her legs with joy and pride and interest in making something, her own something, and seeing it come together.

It meant even more to see that marked-up script in April’s hands, hear the sound of her turning the crisp pages, and listen to April’s sharp and incisive notes, because literally everyone around her was having such a hard time ever since Wil’s TikTok had posted and set the entertainment news on fire.

Katie hadn’t done any of the things she normally would have done. She hadn’t circled her wagons, met with her team, or prepared a statement that contained the exact right amount of detachment. She’d been writing. She was letting these chips fall.

But all day, her mom kept bringing her snacks, checking if the basement suite was a comfortable temperature, and pointedly not asking the questions that were filling her eyes with so much worry.

Madelynn had reached out to Katie again, full of rage and ready to lay in wait behind Ben’s favorite specialty cigarette shop in Brentwood so she could tear his throat out with her bare hands to present to the Academy.

April put the script down. “What I think is that you give this one more pass, and then we show it to the people who were interested when we bought the option.”

“Honor, you mean.” Katie’s belly went tight with thoughts she hadn’t let herself have for the last twenty-four hours since Wil posted their kissing video. Thoughts about how she had strayed wildly from the original plan she’d made with Madelynn, the one that led to the Hollywood Reporter profile of Katie in a director’s chair and a luscious, dream-making investment from Honor Howell. Thoughts about Honor saying, I wonder how ready you are for work out of the spotlight. Madelynn had warned her. Honor wanted evidence that Katie wasn’t actually seeking these stories about Ben. She needed to know that Katie was more interested in work than in fame. What Katie had done—what she’d had no choice but to do—might have made it so that it didn’t matter, as far as Honor Howell was concerned, whether April thought the screenplay was good.

April stretched her arms over her head. The sleeves of her oversized cardigan sweater dropped past her elbows, and gold bangles glistened on both of her wrists. “A script with this much of a vision adapted from a book no one could stop talking about is one of those unicorn first projects for a new production company,” she said. “With the right cast, it could mean major profit, distribution, and awards buzz. Especially since your vision for this is cheap—and for that I thank you—so it gives us room to spend money on talent. I’d love to show this to Alison so she can start thinking about casting. She’s a vault as far as leaks. She won’t even tell you if you have spinach on your teeth.”

Katie pressed her hand against her belly. Alison Cornelius was one of the biggest casting directors in Hollywood. Katie had taken more than one very important call from her. April was already talking about spending money. Location. Meetings.

Katie told herself that even if their studio didn’t get funded, she’d fund this movie herself. She could convince April to let her. She didn’t think about how she’d fund Marisol’s picture. She couldn’t let herself imagine how she might have let Marisol down, and how Marisol would be reminded of it every time she looked at the news. The internet. Social media.

“When will you be here?” April leaned back in her chair. “I’m assuming you’re not taking the rest of your month, given the maelstrom. Are you staying for Christmas, at least? Tell me it’s not so bad you can’t do that.”

April must have seen something in her face. The something that meant there were photographers camped at the end of her parents’ drive, and the police had made the call to say there wasn’t much more they could do, sorry, and her dad was checking and rechecking the security system and doing a lot of mumbling under his breath.

It wasn’t the same something in her mom’s eyes. That something was about the TikTok video. It was about how Katie hadn’t talked to her mom about it first, or at all, and Katie never failed to tell her mother about decisions she was making, where she was traveling, or who she was meeting with.

Thatsomething was about Wil. Who had used the back gate to come and see Katie without calling first. Who had moved, for Diana, from the category of “safe person” to a different category Katie didn’t entirely understand from her mother’s perspective.

“Wil—” She stopped. She hadn’t even exactly, totally, completely confirmed Wil was coming with her to LA. Her soul had said yes, and someplace that was between her throat and heart had said yes, and her eighteen-year-old self had done many, many dances in the middle of the room and in the shower and for the cats, excited as she could possibly be, but it still wasn’t something that felt possible.

April leaned forward and grinned. “Can we talk about Wil?”

“I don’t think so,” Katie whispered.

“Okay. Fair, although I’m putting a giant pin in that. A pin you can see from space. But can we talk about Wil-You-or-Won’t-You’s post yesterday?”

Katie looked at the small spot on her screen where the bound script of her drafted screenplay sat on April’s desk. That, she’d been ready to talk about. But ever since she’d told Wil to post the kissing video—since Katie had let the answer to Wil’s question emerge from the ache beneath her rib cage without allowing herself to think about the consequences—she hadn’t said a word about the video. Not to anyone.

Talking to her closest friend about it would make it real in a way Katie wasn’t sure she was ready to face. “I assume you’ve talked that to death, to death, to death with Madelynn,” she said.

“No.” April narrowed her eyes. “I don’t mean the press stuff or what Ben said. I’m talking about the post. Your filming Wil and Noel. The actual video.”

Katie patted her lap so a cat would get into it. Sue came over and sat near her leg. “I haven’t watched it since I edited it.”

But Katie was listening.

“I’m not sure I’ve seen such a powerful sixty seconds of film in a long time, and it was technically perfect.” April leaned forward and looked like she was jiggling her mouse. Then she looked at a spot on her screen and broke into a wide smile. “Honestly, I still haven’t stopped getting chills. It’s beautiful. Beautiful. Like a painting that makes you stop in the museum and feel like crying. Which has happened to me maybe one time, ever. I have no fucking idea how you got that kind of light inside a house.”

Katie rubbed her chest with her palm.

“Also, it was all you. It wasn’t a guest director spot on an established show with its own vision. This was yours. It had the tiniest, tiniest hint of a signature.” April looked away from the video she obviously had playing so she could smile at Katie.

“It was just one minute.” Katie could barely hear herself speaking, her voice was so quiet.

Wil had been just as complimentary. She’d told Katie she’d watched the final file over and over again, fascinated with what Katie had captured, and with the light. With Noel’s smile. With how it made her feel. Katie had listened to her search for metaphors and then instead simply tell Katie it seemed like something that was from her.

You got into the video what Noel’s smile felt like. How did you do that?

“I’ll give you a moment to process my love of the video.” April held up the script. “Give this another pass. I’ll send the scan of my notes. There’s work to do in the middle third, but you’ll like it. You always like getting notes, maybe a little too much, so be forewarned that if you fuss over my notes too long, I’m going to put an endpoint on your process.”

“Duly noted.” Katie blew out a breath, relieved. She’d been both excited and worried about this conversation, but it had gone well. While she didn’t feel like she was completely keeping up with all the changes in her life, she was at least staying present and trying to let things happen the way they wanted to happen.

She felt good.

Right up until April sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. “Okay. You’ve had your moment.”

“Not nearly enough of a moment.”

April grinned like this meeting was fun. “First, strategic planning. Remember when we talked about the Kennenbear joint and the Gloria Latener script, and we were looking at where and when you might want to fit Gloria’s movie into your schedule?”

“It was only a few days ago, so yes.”

“That’s over.” April made an explosion gesture with her hands. “No chance. Not happening.”

“Why? Did Gloria call you? What did she say?” Katie’s mind was racing. She’d always had an excellent relationship with Gloria Latener. She hadn’t even considered what the fuss over the TikTok might be doing to her chances for roles. Good God.

“No, nothing like that. It’s this.” April gestured back and forth between them. “It’s your video. That was such a move! Your name on that video is giving you the kind of self-generated viral moment we hadn’t even dreamed of. Madelynn’s over the moon. That kind of video means you can position yourself as a director beyond the reach of the studio rivalries. You have your own audience now, and they’re hungry for more. It’s this screenplay”—April picked it up and shook it at the camera before dropping it back on her desk—“and the fact that I’m more than confident it’s going to bring us everything we wanted and more. It’s Marisol calling me twice since the last time I saw you, both times to ask if I could give her more clarity on the Ben Adelsward situation because she’s dying to make this movie, has been dying to make this movie for years, her community needs this movie, Hollywood’s hairy white ass needs this movie, and now that she’s finally figured out how she wants to make it, she’s angry every minute she has to sit at home waiting to get started. Katie.”

She couldn’t catch her breath.

“This is happening,” April said. “Right now. I can spare you until Christmas, but then you need to get yourself back to LA to help me deal with exactly how much this is happening. Like, we need an office. We have to hire staff. Put the lawyers to work on their reams and reams of paperwork. It’s everything we wanted, delivered with a bow on it and in a way that means we don’t have to beg the studios for favors or get in line or try to remember to be nice girls. We can do what we want, we can make room for other good people to do what they want, and we can be part of changing how this business works.”

“Oh.” Katie was having a tough time staying present. This was much more reality than she’d bargained on. “Listen—”

“No.” April put her hands to her face. “I know I made it sound like we were going to be able to take it slower than that, telling you Alison’s a vault, whatever, whatever, but no. You’re a director of your generation alongside the new world of directors of our generation. That’s the story now. Remember how Marisol got started, projecting her short film about labor practices on the Mexico City exchange building? There was an actual riot. You made a video of two people kissing that explains exactly why we kiss people, and you put it on a platform that people use for everything from coordinating aid to a war-torn area to how to apply bronzer. Katie Price did that, one of the most recognizable people in the world, who everyone wants to know more about, but nobody knows you because you’ve kept your story to yourself. So I won’t let you decide whether or when you’re going to be ready to do something when, Katie, you have already done it. It’s here. There isn’t a way to go slow or stay quiet about who you are anymore. You’re out there. Everybody wants more of you.”

Katie didn’t realize one of her hands was pressed against her throat until she swallowed.

“Look,” April said. “I’m a very powerful person. I shouldn’t be. I don’t look like what anyone wants a powerful person to look like in this town. I don’t act like what you’re told in agenting school makes a powerful person in this town.”

Katie cleared her throat. “Agenting school?”

“It’s underground. There are ogres.” April smiled. “My point is that I am the same redheaded fat girl who binged romance novels and adored her best friend and her cats and whose bat mitzvah theme was ‘The Gilded Age’ without irony and included posters about notable inventions during the era.”

It surprised Katie the way her bark of laughter made her eyes burn with tears.

“Sure,” April said. “I’m powerful because I literally never walked off my own path. The one without irony and with sugar and romance and cats and nerdery. I let it get bigger and bigger, what was already inside of me, until I became the powerful boss bitch you see in front of you today. And I only deal with the people who respect me, and so it follows that the general opinion is that ‘everyone’ respects me. This means my life is pretty good, Katie. I don’t have to spend time leaning against doors keeping people out. I can just be me, to my highest degree, and I keep my door open, and the people who need me and who I need tend to walk through it.”

“You are trying to teach me a lesson,” Katie guessed.

“I am trying to tell you that I have enjoyed watching you every single time you went on Busy’s show to talk about your cats, because that was the path you had to walk on. But you’re on a new path now. It’s a scary path, I’ll bet, but it’s the right one. I need you to keep walking that path.”

“I think I’m going to bring Wil with me to Los Angeles.” Katie heard herself say the words with no plan or intention to say them. April gasped.

“In a few months,” April said. “A year.”

“No. When I see you next. Wil will be there. Probably.”

April’s head started to shake back and forth.

“You just said a lot of stuff about walking my own path!” Katie had only meant to mildly call out April’s denial, but then she realized April’s denial made her angry. “Unless, unless you want people like Ben, et al, to stop pushing me around because you want to be the one to push me around, all for yourself, and are afraid I’m going to ruin my career a second time by making a debut on the coattails of someone I’m fucking.”

“Are you—”

“That’s none of your business! But I want Wil to come to LA with me if she wants to.” That was easy to say. So easy to say. “And Madelynn says I have to trust her, trust both of you, and I’m working on that, but it also means you have to trust me, not only because we’re friends and we love each other”—Katie took a breath and checked April’s expression quickly, because she’d never said anything like that to April before, but it was okay, April was nodding—“but also because if no one trusts me to be anything more than the Katie Price you’ve known since Ben, I’m not going to make it. I will diminish and go into the east.”

It would kill her. That was what Wil had said.

It would kill her not to figure out how to be herself.

“I don’t—” April started, then shook her head as if to dislodge a wrong idea. “I thought I was riding the rocket of your video as a viral declaration of your creative intentions. I didn’t think—I’m sorry, but I didn’t think it was a declaration of your relationship with Wil. Listen, forgive me, but that is a dilution of what this could be. Not just for you.” April closed her eyes. “But for me.”

Katie rubbed her palms down her thighs and gripped both of her knees, hard.

She was so angry. Instantly, completely enraged by April’s comment.

A dilution.

She made herself take a deep breath. Katie understood that April had been focused on the video as an expression of abstract artistry. She understood, too, that expressions of abstract artistry which made people feel things were a commodity in Hollywood. April was her business partner, not just her friend, and so of course, of course she’d watched that video and seen dollar signs.

And Katie had told her nothing, next to nothing, about Wil. Why would April know her feelings? How could April guess at what was in her heart? Katie herself was still figuring it out!

“I don’t even know where it’s going with Wil.” Katie shook her head. “I do know. But I don’t know if I can have it, even if I want it more than anything. And, look, this is scary! I’m just here, writing this script and falling in love—”

April gasped again.

Katie held up her hand. “No. Not right now. Maybe falling in love again, or maybe I never stopped, I don’t know. My point is, if you can go all over Los Angeles and find out if this production company is happening and if people with money are going to take me seriously as a director, then I can go all over Green Bay, Wisconsin, in my high school best friend’s Bronco and imagine us in an alternate life, with four cats, making out on a sofa with mallards on it.”

“What?!”

“It doesn’t matter.” Katie took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “Listen, I get how you want to use this video. To be honest, I can be grateful that it’s a Hail Mary against the likelihood that I’ve tanked more traditional sources of funding.”

“Katie.” April sighed.

“No. Hold on. Do it. Let that video take on the cachet of something intentional. Let it be a way to capture the attention of America and convince them I have something new to offer. And I’ll—” Katie pushed away an angry tear. “I’ll keep it quiet with Wil. So the video means just that, and it’s not some… diluted thing that the Nun of Hollywood did with her new girlfriend as a lark.”

Phil hopped down from where he had been napping with Trois in the cat bed and sauntered over to Katie. He had always been sensitive to her feelings. He jumped into her lap. Sue had decided to lie by Katie’s thigh.

“I’m sorry. Katie, look, I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t, you know. A lark. Or some impulsive thing I did that happened to get out.” Katie could feel the heat rising into her cheeks from her neck. “The first person I was ever in love with was Wil. She never made me do anything, I just wanted to be with her all the time. I wanted to ride around in her Bronco and listen to everything she had to say about everything.”

April leaned forward with her head on her hand. “If you could bottle Wil Greene’s presence, it would be a weapon of mass destruction.”

“Yes, but you haven’t met her in person. Wait until you meet her in person. I don’t know what kind of truly enormous tolerance I had built up in high school, but it was gone when I ran into her at my mom’s holiday party, and I was confessing to her about how I masturbate within fifteen minutes.” Katie took a deep breath, trying to locate herself in the wild drift of her feelings. “Wil asked me to, but I want to take her to Los Angeles. Without knowing what’s going to happen between us. Just to see if I might, maybe, have enough to offer her.”

April’s eyes were red and wet. Katie had never seen her cry before. “Once you decide what day you’re coming back, tell me, and I’ll set up the trip for you. I’ll try to give the two of you privacy.”

“But not to hide Wil.” Katie let her agent hear the warning in her voice. She would not be pushed around when it came to this. Wil was too important.

“Not to hide Wil, but for Wil. For this chance for you, too.” April held both her hands up in a gesture of apology.

Katie was suddenly exhausted. “I love you,” she decided to say. Smiling, April swiped at her tears. “You’ll have to show me pictures from your bat mitzvah sometime.”

They laughed, and after talking about nothing in particular for a few minutes more, she and April said their good-byes and disconnected.

Katie’s gaze wandered to the tree that her mother had set up in the basement suite this morning. It had pink lights all over it. Her heart pinched.

She couldn’t stay for Christmas. It was too good of a chance to escape. The media would expect her to remain here. Would expect Wil to stay.

Katie closed her eyes and thought of her. Wil.

Hottest girl in school, valedictorian, cheerleader, softball player, orchestra, and, for a little while, Katie’s best friend.

And the first person who’d been able to command her attention long enough for Katie to fall in love with her.

She picked up her phone. She started to text Wil, but then, out of curiosity, she went to TikTok first. Her heart was racing. She didn’t log in to the Katie Price account—it would have so many notifications, it might not even load. She logged into her lurker account instead, her hands shaking.

Of course she’d filmed the kiss, edited it, watched it dozens of times. But it wasn’t hers anymore. It was the world’s. And that part, Katie hadn’t seen yet.

A lot of Wil’s videos went viral. Unsurprisingly, the Noel kiss had gone, well, mega-viral.

But there was lots of conversation, too. Lots of people stitching to it and making their own things, playing it in the background with commentary. Giving Noel some very excellent props, but also, also, really seeing Wil and what she was doing.

Everyone who watched Katie’s film understood, in many cases for the first time, that Wil was perceptive, commanding, generous, and saw people.

And maybe, well, absolutely, there were a lot of people talking about Katie’s technique. Adding to the video. Creating whole mini-movies and stories where what she and Wil had made was the beginning, or middle, or end of a whole other piece, story, or film.

She put the phone down and laughed. God.

Thenshe texted Wil.

Wil came over the same way she had the last time, through the secret back gate, still undiscovered by the media.

“Do you remember,” Wil asked, stomping her feet, “our last sleepover?” She shrugged off her leather jacket and unwrapped her scarf. Her cheeks were nearly red with cold. “Before you left for Chicago?”

She wore a soft flannel shirt with illegally tight jeans, and her hair spiked and waved around her ears and neck. Katie watched her run her fingers through it, the unbuttoned cuffs of her shirt flipped back, highlighting her new manicure. Her nails had been painted black, with pastel geometric patterns. Something about how she was moving, how the Christmas lights from the pink tree caught her jawline, the tight jeans, superimposed this Wil with then Wil, and for a speechless moment Katie was overwhelmed with what felt like a thousand feelings—all of them tender and hot and excited and familiar and new and welcome.

“Yeah,” she finally said. “We told our moms we were going to pick up a pizza and got distracted. Didn’t have our phones. Came back three hours later after laughing so hard the whole time my scalp hurt, then got yelled at while we ate cold pizza.”

Wil grinned. “No. Not that one.”

Katie tried to push away all of her Wil feelings so she could focus, but it was impossible when Wil was standing right in front of her with so much cleavage giving that flannel a life it had never dreamed of when it was sitting on the shelves at L.L.Bean. “Um?”

“The sleepover we called the last sleepover.”

“Oh!” Katie looked at Wil. “Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh.”

“The tent. After we swam in Lake Michigan.”

Wil laughed and stepped closer. “What were we up to?”

“I mean,” Katie said. “Nothing happened.”

“That is not how several recurring dreams over the last thirteen years remembers it.”

“Technically.”

“Technically, it was two friends sharing a tent and s’mores,” Wil said, stepping even closer, and God, she was extra-super Wil tonight, and Katie could not take it. “But I am really starting to understand why I started a TikTok where it was a foregone conclusion I would get to kiss the person in front of me.”

“And also maybe why that almost-kissing part lasts so long in those videos.” Katie cleared her throat. “I forgot about…”

“Did you, though?” Wil put her finger on Katie’s collarbone.

“I absolutely did not forget,” Katie admitted. “However, I did maybe submerge the memory a little. So that I could survive, probably.”

Wil traced her finger along Katie’s collarbone, tracing up her neck when Katie shivered. “I don’t have any kisses lined up right now. With anyone who is not you.”

Katie studied Wil’s face, wanting to memorize the way she looked after she’d said that.

Good. That was how she looked. So good that Katie wanted to keep the movie of it in her head forever.

“I’m happy to hear that.” Katie caught Wil’s fingertips where they were sifting through the hair behind her ear. “State your business, then.”

“You told me you wanted to go for a ride.” Wil raised her eyebrows. “I have a lot of buttons undone to signal I can provide a good one.”

Katie laughed. “In your new car. The one parked by the garage that looks like the Batmobile.”

“Where are we going?” Wil bent over and grabbed her jacket.

Katie waited until Wil was facing her again, then slowly fisted the front of the flannel, pulling Wil to her. “One last time, we’re going out investigating Mr. Cook, but really getting distracted. Not by anything in particular, just by being us, together. We’re going to do that before I put you on a plane with me to LA, because once we go to LA, the whole world is going to change all over again. I think those two girls in the tent should have one last drive.”

Wil kissed Katie’s neck. “I like it.”

Katie kissed Wil’s forehead.

Then they ran out into the snow.