On Screen & Off Again

Now Daxon

Now DAXON

M y lungs still while I wait for her reaction, but I know it’s not far off. Wil can’t hide her feelings to save her life—they’re written right there on her face, plainly in all-caps, permanent marker.

And when I see what it is she’s feeling, my stomach lurches. She’s freaked .

“W-what?” Wil’s eyes are huge. They flit wildly around her lap, then up at me, then down again.

“I know you’re busy committing felonies, but think about it.”

Suddenly she laughs and glares playfully at me, like she’s in on a joke. “You’re shitting me, right?”

“No. Zero shit.” I shake my head.

“Oh.” Wil’s smile fades immediately. She screws up her face, her eyebrows furrowed and tight, and squints at me. “Why are you asking me this?”

“You’re right for the part.”

“So... it’s a ‘type’ thing?”

I give a big, animated sigh and let my hand drag its way heavily down my face. “Just say you’ll audition.”

Wil blinks. “No.”

“Wil.” I sit up straighter in my seat, leaning forward and locking my eyes on her terrified gaze. It’s a look all too similar to the one she wore the day I left.

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“I... I’m starting community service soon. A hundred hours.”

“We don’t start filming for a month. You have time.”

But that’s not it. I know with one glance at her face, pale and wooden with agonizing self-doubt, with fear.

“No,” says Wil, and it’s a curt, crisp, terrified sound that falls out of her mouth. “Thanks. But no.”

“Come on.” My voice comes out soft and quiet, barely audible over the hum of conversation around us. I can see her clear as day in this role. Her vibrancy, her willingness to go there and be loud and emotionally raw. “You’d be great.”

For a second time, Wil laughs. Only, there’s nothing funny about this one. It’s a choking sound, a shield but a really poor one. “You know what, I’m gonna go.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Hang on a sec.” I dig in my pocket, pull out my wallet and leave more than enough cash for the meal and the tip beneath the lip of my plate.

Wil’s back is to me, but she waits. When I’m right behind her, she starts up again, head down, plowing through the restaurant until a blast of warm night air hits us.

And then come the flashes. Strobing and constant, bobbing in the darkness in the hands of three paparazzi.

“Daxon, Wilhelmina, is there a Marnie, Maybe reunion in the works?”

“Wil, do you think you deserved jail time?”

In front of me, Wil turns to stone. Her shoulders are rising and falling too fast, and in the glow of the camera flashes and the city lights, I make a decision. I reach out and take her hand in mine, firmly, and all but pull her down the sidewalk behind me, ignoring the photographers.

“I’ll drive you home,” I say softly when we’re alone, loosening my grip on her hand.

Wil doesn’t let go, though. She doesn’t say anything until we’re standing in front of my car. I go to open the door for her. An ambulance whizzes by, screaming into the darkness, and Wil stops and looks up into my face.

“I’ll come in for it. I’ll read.” Her voice is barely a whisper over the traffic passing us and the distant calls of the photographers, but I hear it loud and perfect and clear.

“You will?” I say, my hopes rising.

“I will.” Her hazel eyes, lined in black and wide as the moon, trace mine with a desperation I haven’t seen there in what feels like a thousand years. It’s the same look she had the day Marnie was canceled.

It’s when she lets go of my hand that I remember she was still holding it, that I remember my name. How to inhale and exhale. Wil dips into the passenger seat and I shut the door behind her, my fingers cool and free without her clutching grasp.

But I miss the feeling as soon as it’s gone, and in the darkness, I flex my hand wide and back in again, remembering.

The purring sound of wheels on road fills the silence. Wil looks out the passenger-side window at the lights going by. Halfway to her house, she draws in a huge breath and looks to me.

“I’ve been auditioning,” she says. “For everything.”

I glance at her, then back to the road. This is news. I haven’t read her name in years, haven’t seen her in anything coming out. “And?”

“Not one.”

“Callbacks, at least?”

“Not one.”

I can hear the place where her voice snaps clean in half. She takes in a huge gulp of air and presses her hands to her cheeks, fingers turning claw-like as they grip her skin.

“That doesn’t—” I start, but she cuts across me.

“Not one , Dax.”

I catch my tongue between my teeth and bite down. Acouple seconds tick by and then I hear her give a small sniff, catch the flash of her knocking something off her cheek. In the center console, I have a box of tissues, and I dig around for it and pass it over without words, my eyes on the road.

Really, when it comes down to it, I’m not good at comforting. I mean, I try. But I’m awkward and fumbling and never wind up saying the thing that would help. The most I can typically pull off is offering a little bit of Star Wars trivia in the hope of a decent distraction. It’s not usually well-received.

Ten minutes roll by in silence and we pull up to her front gate, gravel crunching under the tires as I navigate the driveway. I kill the engine and sneak a glance at Wil. The look on her face as she stares up at her house, empty in the eyes, doesn’t let me look away.

“You scared?” I ask her gently.

She nods. “Yep.”

I don’t know what to say to this. I know what I used to say. How easy it would have been a handful of years ago to reach across the seat and pull her close to me, my fingertips in her hair, her lips on mine. But now? I glance at the steering wheel then back at her.

“I have the script in the trunk. You wanna read with me?”

We shift in the shadows of Wil’s dark kitchen until she flips on the light, setting her bag on the island. I curl the script into a tube and hit it softly, absently, against my open palm, staring around at the way Adult Wil decorates a house.

Colorful is the first word that comes to me. No, scratch that. Wil’s kitchen is a chaotic storm of color and print. Exotic blue tile around the stove, hot pink swirling marble countertops. Kitchen chairs with chrome frames and electric-green, faux-snakeskin cushions.

If I didn’t know Wil, I might get the feeling somebody blindfolded her, held up a bunch of samples, she pointed at random, and here we are.

Except I do know her. Or did . And every inch of this kitchen is Wilhelmina Chase. Gregarious and wild, a whirlwind of color and life, a testament to the living piece of art calling this place home.

Wil goes to the fridge and pulls out a White Claw. “Want one?” she asks me. I nod, thank her, and catch it as she tosses it to me, the way she’d do with Cokes from the mini fridge in her trailer a thousand years ago.

Plopping the script on the island, I pull out one of the bar chairs (leopard-print bamboo) and sit. When I take a deep breath, I realize that the room smells like her. Like childhood, like dinners with her dad. Like summer. Our last summer. Inside my chest, my heart kicks and tightens, a grenade ready to blow.

She pulls up the chair next to mine and reaches across me for the script, her arm brushing my chest.

“Which scene?” asks Wil.

“Page twenty-seven.” I watch her flip through my highlighted, crinkled pages, finding the audition scene I have cattle-branded on my brain from a week of reading through it with hopefuls.

“I didn’t read the book,” says Wil after a silent few seconds of scanning the page. She glances at me. “Give me the SparkNotes version.”

I lean back a little in my chair and think how best to explain. “Well, uh—”

“Ooh, no, wait. Let me guess first,” says Wil, scrunching up her face in faux concentration. “Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back?”

A snort comes barreling out of my chest and I shake my head at her slowly, eyes narrowing in disbelief. “Does Hollywood know about you?”

“Har-har,” says Wil dryly.

We share a grin for a second too long—long enough to create that feeling in my gut like I missed a step—and then I take a long drink from the white can in front of me and clear my throat. “It’s set in the forties, during World War II. Lila and Nick fall in love one summer before the war starts—as teenagers—and reunite on the battlefield as young adults, towards the end of the war when he’s wounded and she’s the nurse assigned to his unit.”

Next to me, Wil seems to melt a little. Her elbow’s resting on the counter, her chin in her hand, and she’s slouching forward slightly, her lips pulled into a faraway kind of smile. “Oh,” she says softly.

“Yeah,” I say.

God, it’s familiar, isn’t it? I feel like I’m reading from the back of our own book, Wil’s and mine.