On Screen & Off Again

Then Wilhelmina

Then WILHELMINA

I t only takes a handful of weeks after Dad introduces her to me for Katrina to start moving her things into our house. Into my mother’s side of the bedroom. Into her end of the closet. Until, by the end of July, she’s a permanent fixture. I,however, am gone as often as I can be.

The night I kissed Daxon Avery, I decided something: He was always supposed to be mine, and I would always be his. And that’s all that mattered.

So, the next night, I climbed the trellis outside his bedroom window and knocked on the glass. Dax appeared there, after a minute, in his Star Wars pajama bottoms. I beckoned for him to come out, hoisting myself up onto our old spot on the roof. He climbed over the sill and sat beside me. It was warm out. No wind. No clouds.

I touched his face. Held it in my hands and looked into his eyes. “You’re the only person who makes me feel found instead of lost,” I told him. Which, by the way, is the truest thing I know.

Lost Wil is loud and performative. She’s the one who signs autographs, who poses for selfies with her fans. She’s Marnie.

But Found Wil exists only right here. Where it’s quiet. Delicate. Soft. Heartbeats and stars.

He kissed me long and slow. “I’ll always be that for you. Ipromise.”

My throat tightened; my heart soared. I kissed him, and it was a long time before we came up for air.

Since then, the summer has been ours.

I follow Dax into ice-cream shops and out again with towering cones, dodging paparazzi. Up every last step in a movie theater until we hit the back row and spend zero percent of our time actually watching the screen. He drives, I ride shotgun, and we tear across the scorching asphalt of Los Angeles with the windows down, laughing, our hair wild.

Tonight, we park at the Griffith Observatory, kill the engine and climb onto the hood. I tuck my head into his shoulder. The soft, sun-worn, time-faded plaid of his shirt tickles my cheek.

“How many do you know?” asks Dax. His finger tracing shapes in the air against the stars.

“Who cares?” I mumble into his arm, kissing a meandering, shapeless trail against his shirt.

He laughs. “Pop knows stars. Did I tell you that he was an Eagle Scout?”

“No, you didn’t tell me,” I murmur. I’m drunk off of this. Off the normalcy. The dependability. Not much in my life has ever stayed this long, this consistently. My fingers clutch at his elbow, pulling myself as close to him as I can get, our ankles crossing, my flip-flops forgotten. Dax’s dads are nice guys. Welcoming and kind. The few times I’ve been over and seen them there, they asked how I was, how my family was. They’re talented designers. They’ve earned every ounce of their fame. Only thing is, and I doubt they planned it this way, but they have about six minutes a day to be dads.

I hate the look on Dax’s face when they’re supposed to show up for him but can’t because they’re filming or demolishing something for HGTV. Maybe if I hold him long enough, I can absorb all the shitty things in this world so he doesn’t have to see them or feel them or let them bite him. The way he does for me.

“Some are easy to pick out,” says Dax, still going on about the stars. “Like Orion’s Belt. It’s those three stacked ones. See ’em? In a line like that?” He glances down at me. I meet his eyes and my fingers dig into his arm, something big lodged in my throat. Dax’s eyebrows pull into a worried line. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I say quickly. I add a big, phony smile to throw him off the scent but Daxon was a bloodhound in another life, I’m convinced. He pivots his body towards me.

“What’s wrong?”

I shut my eyes. Breathe out slow to calm my heart. Mom collected chickens. Everything had to be chickens with her. Cookie jars and matching plate sets, a rolling pin, an apron. All chickens, all the time. Our kitchen was a shrine to her ugly, perfect chickens. Now, they’ve been bubble-wrapped, and put in a box.

Dax’s words echo in my ears. What’s wrong? Every other thing in my life is what’s wrong. Marnie ’s series finale episode premieres this Friday, and once it’s aired and over, then what?

What about us? Nothing that has ever taken a breath or seen the sun or existed ever, at all, has been more right. I can’t lose us.

“No, it’s okay,” I say, and open my eyes. “I’m... okay, it’s like—I was just, uh, I... am in love with you.” The words come out of me like trash from a can somebody’s kicked over. Abizarre mismatch of almost-sentences in a hundred different colors of awkward until finally, the truth. I hold my breath.

Daxon’s eyes slip from mine. My heart sinks. Shit. I’m freaking him out. It’s too much, too soon. But then he looks at me, hungry and touched, sincerity blossoming out of every inch of him. “Wil,” he breathes, reaching for me. “I’ve always...”

But he stops himself. There’s turbulence in his dark eyes, but I barely have time to read it before they’re up and away, focused on a cluster of stars.

“You’ve always...?” I try to feed him the rest of the thought like it’s a line in a script and he’s late with his cue. Dax nibbles his bottom lip.

“I got into Yale for drama.”

A steel fist wraps its crushing fingers around my heart and squeezes.

He didn’t say it back.

Why didn’t he say it back?

I blink at him, numb and frozen, breathing hard in and out through my nose. I didn’t know we were applying to colleges. “Y-Yale? You got into... you’re—Yale? Like, Connecticut Yale?”

“Connecticut. Yale.” He nods. “They have this drama program that’s really good.”

When I try to breathe in, nothing happens. Reality has crept in and lays itself down between us. “That’s... across the country,” I say.

“Right,” says Dax, nodding. “Connecticut.”

I’m tensing, bracing for the sky to crack and crumble down on us. The fact that it doesn’t makes it worse somehow. I sit up on the hood of the car and pull my knees into my chest. Dax’s hand brushes the small of my back then falls away and we’re quiet for a long time. Too long, probably.

He didn’t say it back .

“I was just kidding,” I say after eighty-four years of literal crickets. I steal a half-glance at him. “Before. When I said that I...” But I can’t say it again.

Dax sits up now, too. I hear him drawing his legs in under him, pretzel-style. “You were?”

“Yep.” I say it confidently, easily, and stare out towards the valley below us. Tiny taillights, bumper to bumper, on a distant freeway.

“Bullshit,” Daxon says. His voice is rough with something that isn’t usually there and goosebumps rise on my arms.

I shoot my words at him like venom. “Did you mean Yale? Because yeah. I agree. Bullshit .”

“Wil.” He runs a hand down his face, tired.

“Yale, Dax? Yale? Seriously?”

“Yeah, Yale. Seriously. I want to act. I want to learn how to act.”

“And the show we’ve been acting on for, what, five years was some group hallucination?”

“ Marnie wasn’t acting. It wasn’t craft. Not really, anyway. It’s... not enough.”

All throughout my body, magma starts erupting. It creeps into my cheeks, into the tips of my ears, down my legs, behind my knees, into my fingers and toes. My mouth goes tight as I try to keep in words I know I’ll never be able to take back.

But... fuck. I’m Marnie. And I’m not enough for him.

“I hate you for not saying it back,” I say. The heat behind my eyes is heavy and pressing, determined to push through. Iblink it back and move to climb off the hood. Dax’s hand reaches out, fast but gentle, and tugs on the arm of my hoodie. When I look at him, I want to die.

His eyes are full of tears. “Jesus, Wil,” he breathes, “do you know how goddamn in love with you I am? Have been for... since we met . Every day, every second.” He glances back up at the stars, and as a couple tears slip from his eye, Dax’s eyebrows get taut, his jaw sets, his lips frown. “But the semester starts in two weeks. I’m leaving in two weeks.” His eyes shift to mine then drop away.

When I close my eyes and imagine Daxon, I see colors that no one else can. But this awful truth is colorless. My shoulders droop. Electric panic and anger ricochet through my body, slicing and sharp, as I take stock of what I now know:

Daxon Avery is in love with me.

Daxon Avery is walking out of my life in two weeks.