On Screen & Off Again

Now Daxon

Now DAXON

H earing Wil’s voice through the phone is like teleporting to a place I haven’t been in forever.

I hear the sound of my name dropping off her tongue in a desperate breath, and it brings me right back to seventeen. My lungs stop functioning. I’m like a goldfish that’s just jumped out of the tank, flopping useless as it suffocates on the counter.

I can picture her so clearly, or at least the way my teenage heart saw her, wild and haunted. The image is inside my bones.

But wait—she’s in jail ? Suddenly, I’ve got six thousand questions and a few million concerns. My stomach twists. Ihaven’t heard her voice in so long, haven’t texted her, haven’t seen her at all.

Which’ll never stop being weird considering there was a time when she was my night sky, every star.

“You busy?”

Her question hangs there a second while I evaluate my situation. I’m at home, building the Millennium Falcon out of Legos. In my underwear. “Uh—no, I’m just hanging out.” There you go, Daxon, keep it casual.

“Okay,” she says. “Could you, um, would you mind... bailing me out?” She relays the location.

“Okay. Yeah. Sure. Okay.”

“Like, now?”

“Oh, like, now ? Like, right now. Okay.” I get up and fish one-handed for a T-shirt and some jeans.

“Dax?”

“Yeah?”

There’s a stretch of silence so long I think, by the time it ends, I’ll be forty. I wait for her to say whatever it is she wants to say, my bruised imagination inventing words I know I’m not about to hear again, words I’d step on a thousand Legos to hear again.

“Please hurry.”

I hear myself telling the officer behind the bulletproof glass that I’m here to bail out Wilhelmina Chase.

I watch my hand sign the bail receipt in my dopey scrawl, and then I sit, waiting, my knee jiggling as I try to think of something to say to her. Does your dad still make pot pie? comes to mind. Arrests aside, how about coming in to audition for this movie? is all I got.

“Is this what our tax dollars pay for? There are guinea pig pens cleaner than this place. And why are all the toilets clogged?”

I hear her before I see her, and immediately I stand. The officer she’s talking to rolls his eyes as he removes her handcuffs, and I catch the two-inch, jagged scar on her left wrist from the summer she learned to climb the trellis leading up to my bedroom window.

She rubs at her hands and waits, scowling, as the officer behind the desk gathers her effects. And then Wil turns and looks into my face. The expression there is one that used to mean shut up and don’t tell my dad . Except we’re not kids anymore, so it’s probably taken on new layers in the years of not knowing her.

“Ready?” I ask. This half-laugh, half-air sound comes falling out of my mouth as I try to figure out whether I’m going to smile or not—whether I should .

Given the things we said to each other, the way we broke up, maybe I should turn and go. But I feel it happen, feel the edge of my lips starting to rise.

“This is a three-for-one sale,” Wil says, all business. She turns to the desk. “He’s bailing out Margot Martinez and Cassie Levy, too.” The officer nods and calls in the order through the walkie-talkie attached at his shoulder.

“I—am?”

“Get your wallet out,” says Wil, pivoting back to me. I do what she says, because that’s what you do with Wil, and I hand it over.

“Are they coming right out? What’s the ETA?” she asks the officer.

I imagine having the confidence to tell a cop—or literally, anyone—what to do and how to do it. To take over any situation and drive.

This is something that clearly hasn’t changed in Wil. Her tenacity. Her audacity .

Man. Seven years. How the hell does it feel like a blip and an eon at the same time? Like all I did was turn around for a moment, and we were nothing.

Two more bails are posted, and we’re joined by two girls dressed all in dark colors. One, extremely pretty and Black, tall with long hair, wears an oversized hoodie and black jeans. The other, white with choppy, shoulder-length blonde hair, wears a black dress, her black tights full of rips and snags.

I remember the tall model girl from years back, and she smiles at me like she remembers me, too, but I don’t smile back. Last time I saw her, she was helping Wil walk out of my life forever.

“Drive us home?” Wil asks me, shoving the sleeves of her black jacket to her elbows.

I reach for the door, but she beats me there, pushing out into the night. “Uh, yeah. Sure,” I say to her back.

Cassie and Margot clutch each other by the arm and head down the jail steps towards the parking lot, whispering and laughing. But Wil stops at the top step, waiting for me. Our eyes meet, brown on hazel, and I’m filled with butterflies that I was sure had forgotten how to take flight.

She’s here. She’s standing right in front of me, and it feels like, if I blink, I’ll lose her again. I think for a second she’s about to say something, but Margot and Cassie call her name harshly from the lot and she hurries down the steps after them, saying, “Let’s go, Daxon,” over her shoulder. I’ve never had a choice, so I go.

The route to Wil’s dad’s place is written neatly across the part of my brain that knows her favorite color, and the way she has a different laugh depending on the situation or the lie she’s getting away with. Things I know better than parts of myself. I can’t help but wonder if any of them have changed.

“No, not east. Take the west. We’re going to my place,” Wil tells me from the passenger seat, all but taking the wheel.

Her place. She would have her own place by now. “What’s the exit?” I ask.

“Topanga.”

Margot and Cassie are glued to the glow of a cell phone in the back seat. They speculate loudly about a text from someone, and Wil is turned almost all the way around in her seat to participate, leaving me somehow alone up front, even with her arm, her breath, the familiar homey smell of her clothes and perfume five inches away.

I can’t help myself from asking it. “What—uh, what did you guys do?” I’m afraid of the answer.

“Do you know Timothée Chalomet?” Cassie asks. I glance at her and Margot in the rearview, their faces eager in the dark, and I’m about to tell them no, unfortunately, I don’t, when a text comes in and they’re back to the phone.

“Wil,” I say. But Wil is laughing. Snorting and silly, draped over the seat with her chin on her arm, poking at the phone screen. “ Wil .” No answer. I should pull over, maybe, figure out what happened and go from there. But I let myself play chauffeur while Wil tosses directions to me, dissecting the idea that, out of everyone cool and important that I’m sure her life is filled with now—she called me .

Up in the dark hills, along sloped, curving roadways where ivy and bougainvillea overflow against walls and rooftops, is Wil’s place. Spanish-style and taller rather than wider. Black awnings trumpet from the second-story windows.

I park in the driveway and Margot and Cassie burst out of the back seat, talking a mile a minute like they’re coming back from a night out at a club, not jail. The crickets chorus. Wil takes her time closing the passenger door, running a hand through her hair—so much shorter than I’ve ever seen it, sharp and straight to her chin, but still the same copper color.

“You still drive like someone’s grandmother,” she says to me over the hood of the car.

I let out a tired laugh and run my hand down my face. “Thank you?” The moon hits her just right, the corners of her lips beginning to lift. “It’s a nice house,” I say.

“Walk me to the door?”

I nod like I’m a bobblehead, but grin and say okay, letting her lead the way up to the front door. “So... what’d you do?”

“Why?” Wil’s eyes narrow a little as they scrutinize my face.

Part of me doesn’t want to know. Not really. Wil chose this wild, out-all-night, Hollywood tabloid life that I never wanted a piece of.

If I think about it, my life has been a puzzle, every piece pushed together with precision and intention. Damn it, my life is one big Lego set, coming together brick by brick, and now I’m hoping I have a foundation big enough to stand on.

But there will always be one piece missing.

“Because... I don’t know. You’re—we haven’t... You called me. I gotta know.”

As Wil crosses her arms across her chest, tips her chin at me and examines the tiled archway above her front door, I’m hit with the reality of us. A thousand years apart could never pull her from my life completely. Her heart-shaped face, her unscrupulous hazel glare. These things are burned into my brain—my soul—forever.

“I went to get it back,” she says.

“Get what back?”

“My dad’s ring. From Katrina.”

The tabloids ate that story up, Katrina’s indiscretions just before their wedding, Bob’s shattered heart. It’s not hard to see how it could’ve lit a fuse under Wil. My eyebrows furrow. “You mean, you went to steal it? What did you do, break in?”

“I went to get what belongs to my dad.”

“Jesus, Wil.” I shake my head. She was always good at pushing boundaries, but this one she clearly took a flying leap over.

Wil rolls her eyes at me and, for a flash of a millisecond, she’s seventeen again. “It’s not a big deal,” she says, waving her hand lazily into the night air like she’s dismissing smoke from a cigarette.

“Getting arrested?” I scoff. “It’s actually a pretty big deal, yeah.”

“I don’t need a lecture.” Wil holds her hand up to me like she’s pressing pause. Her other hand drifts towards the doorknob, her shoulders pivoting to dismiss me. My stomach leaps. This is it, she’s about to disappear. How many years will it be this time? Ten? Forty?

“Why did you call me?” I ask, the question leaping out of my chest.

Wil’s hand hesitates over the knob. Then, slowly, it drops to her side, swinging. Her eyes sweep sideways to meet mine. “You get one call. Yours is the only number I could remember.”

I blink at her. “You remembered it?” We felt so important and grown-up the day we got our own phones. Spent hours learning the numbers by heart.

“You didn’t change it?” Wil asks, her smile lopsided and challenging and so frustratingly sexy it’s like a poison dart to the chest.

“Well,” I start, my voice sing-song and throwaway, shoving my hands into the front pockets of my jeans, “you never know when Wilhelmina Chase is gonna call you from the big house.” I say it to my shoes, then let my eyes rise to meet hers.

Wil chews her lip, appraising me, and she’s not smiling anymore. Actually, she looks kind of ashen, sober—sad. She takes two steps forward and, with no warning, wraps me in a hug. Before I can release the startled breath that fills my lungs as her small arms wrap firmly around my torso, she’s already gone, retracted her embrace and crossed her arms.

“Thank you,” she says. “For answering.”

I breathe into the night air, drinking her in, trying to memorize the moonlight on her shoulders, the porch light in her eyes. “Thanks for remembering my number.”

“I remember everything.”