On Screen & Off Again

Now Wilhelmina

Now WILHELMINA

“L emme see if I can get you a water while we wait,” says Vanessa, my on-screen sister. She flags a passing server and they walk off together to the bar. “Stay here, I’ll be right back.”

I can’t blame her for suggesting it. Blood is pumping rhythmically in my ears like the doom-laden drums that play before King Kong emerges from the forest, or something.

God, that sounds like a thing Dax would say.

Dax.

And Katrina.

My eyes are wide and searching the restaurant for a place to step away. Get some air. Possibly vomit. It’s dark in here, lounge-y. The live tinkling of piano keys plays against clinking silverware and conversation.

“How many?” asks the hostess.

I look at her, but my eyes can’t focus on her face. “I—you know what, I just need...” and my feet start backing up. I keep going until I full-on bump into an older man in a suit jacket. “Oh god, so sorry. I’m so sorry. Are you okay?” But I don’t wait for him to answer. I keep going, down a hall lined with pictures of Hollywood icons—Sinatra, Marilyn, Elvis—until the sign for the restroom appears and I push in.

It’s empty. I breathe alone in the dim lighting. Let my shoulder sag against the tile wall beside the sink and tip my head, shutting my eyes.

Daxon Avery and Katrina Tyson-Taylor. Out to dinner. Like two old friends.

Which can’t be fucking possible because he knows , intimately and without any doubt, the extent that that woman has upended my family. I saw Max Perry there; I get it. But also, I don’t.

My fingers press against my brow as a headache spreads mercilessly. I can’t be here. With people staring. I turn for the door, ready to tell Vanessa that I need to head home, when it opens.

My eyes drop immediately. “Excuse me,” I murmur and go to step around this person. But they shut the door behind them and stand in front of it, blocking me. When I look up, my heart plummets what feels like fifty stories.

Katrina.

“Stuffing your pockets with free tissue?” she says.

There’s no fake nicety. We’re not on set, not at work. She’s free here to say and do whatever she wants.

“Let me out,” I say, my voice low and curt. My eyes are focused on her right shoulder, unable to lift to meet her eye.

“There’s a little bottle of hot sauce on every table, bet you could swipe a few without anyone seeing. Maybe sneak the saltshakers, too.”

My breath is ragged and slow, quivering as I finally raise my head and look into her face. Well, not her face. The face she upgraded to a couple years back. My eyes narrow.

“I have nothing to say to you.”

Which is a complete lie. I want to throw names at her. Iwant to go off. Her birthday was a few days ago, and I swallow back the urge to ask how she rang in seventy-five.

“I’m sure you don’t,” Katrina says. “Not without your lawyer present, anyway. How you got off with just community service, I’ll never know. Must have hired a real shark. Well, not you—your daddy.”

“Shut up,” I snap. “Move. I’m leaving.”

She doesn’t. Katrina looks over me at her reflection in the mirror, taming a few flyaways. “Not yet. I went to lunch with an old friend the other day. Harris Bastian? You know Harris. God, he put in years on that little show you did. I’m so glad to see him moving up in the world.”

Just the sound of Harris’s name sends a prickling shiver down my spine. And though my stomach has balled itself into a lump of coal, I don’t let my face reflect how I’m feeling. “I said move .”

“Speaking of moving up,” Katrina continues, like I didn’t say anything. She unpins a sparkling barrette from her hair, smooths the piece it was clipped to then refastens it. “I was shocked to see you’d booked something like this. After how many years hiding away? You must’ve pulled some strings somewhere. Daxon, though, what a fit . The perfect romantic lead. He’s really going somewhere. I’m so glad he didn’t renew his Magicworks contract all those years ago. He would’ve been sucked in for who knows how many more seasons of shitty kids’ TV. No, it’s a good thing he ended that show when he got the chance. I heard he graduated from Yale with honors, is that right?”

Wait... what?

Didn’t renew his contract .

All the blood that was boiling in my ears begins to freeze. My hands had turned to fists at my side, and now they’re shaking, fingernails shoved into the skin of my hand so hard they could draw blood.

It’s a good thing he ended that show when he got the chance .

It’s not true. That’s not what happened. Dax would’ve told me. He would’ve told me before we got canceled, I know he would’ve told me.

“I told you to move .” My teeth are gritted.

“You didn’t know,” says Katrina, delighted. “Ouch.” And she steps aside to let me pass.

“I know everything,” I tell her confidently. Which is totally a lie. But it sounds so good and true coming out of my mouth, low, with finality. “And I never forget.”

I pull open the bathroom door and slip out, call a cab and get myself home.

TO THE STARS – OFFICIAL SCRIPT

EXT. THE BOARDWALK – AFTERNOON

It’s September now. The pier is quiet, the Ferris wheel still. No music, no laughter, just a moody sky above NICK and LILA as they stand looking over the water, saying goodbye before LILA is set to leave for school.

NICK

This isn’t the end for us, Eliza Patterson.

LILA

(cold, numb)

Don’t lie to me, Nick. It doesn’t suit you.

NICK stares across the water like he can imagine the battle beginning to rage on distant shores. His life here is over. Summer with Lila, in this town.

NICK

When I get back, I’ll find you.

LILA

When you get back?

NICK

War’s coming. I intend to fight.

LILA

(horrified)

No. Nick, you can’t.

NICK

It’s the right thing.

LILA

No!

NICK

Lila...

LILA turns her back on him, angry tears slipping down her cheeks. We see her breaking, see her walk the thin edge of despair, watch her as she teeters, towards a hard new reality: this could be life or death.

But she takes a breath and wipes the water from her face. Below them, the sea rages. Above them, thunder cracks and lightning splits the sky. Her mind is made up: if she lets him go now, maybe she can forget him.

LILA

So, go. Leave. Go on. Go to war, get blown up for all I care!

NICK

(stunned, hurt)

Stop it.

LILA pushes NICK in the chest. She’s weak, he isn’t hurt from it, but it’s her words that nearly knock him down.

LILA

Go! I hate you for making me love you like this.

NICK

Listen to me: You go to school, and you excel, you hear me? You graduate with honors. Take over your daddy’s company one day. I wanna read about it in the papers. I wanna see your name and your picture and know you ended up alright.

LILA

Stop it.

NICK

You do everything in this world that you want to do.

LILA

I mean it, stop. Stop it right now. Just go!

NICK

(turning to leave)

And when I think about you, Lila, it’s gonna be with a heart full of love and no regrets.

I have almost nothing left in me to give, but... there’s something about this scene that sparks a flame. We’ve lived this moment, me and Dax. Not at the brink of the Second World War, maybe, but at the breaking point of our world, of each other. The wet on Lila’s face is real. The pallor Nick wears, the desperation in his eyes, that’s real, too.

And the anger Lila feels as Nick leaves her before she can leave him, leaves her for something that could take him from her, from the earth, forever, well, that’s not hard to summon.

We wrap the scene. A production assistant brings me a water. The lights switch off. The on-set chatter comes alive, and Daxon tries for the eleven millionth time to get my attention, to talk to me, but I walk away. I walk to the golf cart waiting to drive me to my trailer.

Once there, I stand still and alone in the quiet.

From the moment Dax answered my one call from jail, I handed him my pounding, bloody heart on a silver platter. Ididn’t mean to, it just happened. Because he’s Dax. My Dax.

And yet, again, I’m standing here wondering what deficiency I must have, what kind of wrong I am, to be so easy to leave behind.

I’m remembering those months when Katrina took over my home. Boxed up my mother’s things. Pushed in, pushed me out. And now she’s done it again. And Dax let her.

I pull my jacket tighter around me and leave the trailer. Dusk is settling and it’s hot, but there’s a wind that sifts its fingers through my hair, finally free of my long, neat Lila wig.

“Wil!”

My stomach drops fast and heavy, like an elevator someone’s just cut the cables on. It’s Daxon. I don’t answer him. Iwalk half the length of base camp, as fast as my short legs can carry me. He follows me the whole way. I breathe into my nose and out my mouth, an old trick my mom taught me when I’d get hot-headed as a kid.

Maybe I can tell the director that I need some time away.

My eyelids scrunch closed and I breathe in, counting to four, and breathe out again, counting to six. I can’t stay here and look at Dax every day and say words so much like the ones I used to say seven summers ago.

“Wil, hang on.”

But at this, the air comes ripping out of my mouth in a snarling sound. “Get away from me, Daxon.”

“I want to explain,” he says from six feet away. His shadow is long in the dying sun. The edges of it brush my shoes and I fight the urge to back up.

My jaw is clenched. “No.”

“I know you saw me with Katrina. Nothing happened, okay? It wasn’t like that. It was a business dinner with her agent.”

I roll my eyes. “That is the last thing I’m thinking about right now,” I say. My voice is frigid. “How many fucking years, Daxon? How many years have you been my best friend? Apart of my family? You know everything about me, you know what getting Marnie meant to me. I can’t believe you chose not to renew your contract and didn’t tell me about it first.”

Dax is visibly taken aback. “How did you know—?”

“I didn’t.” The words come out of my mouth slowly, with a weight to them. “I had to hear it from Katrina. You should’ve told me.”

“Wilhelmina.” He says my full name in a pained whisper and I literally feel my heart shatter like a mirror ball, reflecting back moments of our lives as they once were in the scattered pieces around our feet. Dax’s eyes are big and soft, terrified. He swallows and his throat bobs. “I—it’s complicated.”

“It’s not fucking complicated, Daxon. You took something from me. You left me drowning. And then you hid behind Yale and never thought for a minute that maybe I deserved the truth about why.”

“Look, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you found out like that. But I’m not sorry that I went to school. It was the right choice. And this thing with Katrina is nothing, I swear. It was business,” he argues. “It wasn’t personal.”

My skin is prickling with anger. “This business is always personal.”

“Wil, come on. It’s me. And I fucked up when I was seventeen. I didn’t handle it right. I’m sorry for that, I am. When I heard they were canceling the show, I had no idea it was because of me. We were on for so long, Wil. Things end. It was time.” He looks around the lot, eyes scanning for listening ears. “Let’s go sit and talk this out.”

Dax steps forward, his arm reaching out to me like he expects me to take his hand. I recoil.

So much of my body is made of pure anger now that I don’t know where that stops and the good parts, the rational, understanding parts, begin.

“No,” I say.

“Wil.”

“Fuck you,” I tell him. “I’m leaving.”

“You’re... leaving? For how long?”

I nod and shut my eyes a moment. “I can’t do this right now.”

When I open them again, I can tell his jaw is tight, the muscle there jumping as his gaze slips away from me and he takes in a deep breath.

“No,” he says, and the sound of it is firm. It’s a tone I’ve never heard before.

“No?”

“We’re gonna talk this out. Right now. We’ve come too far.”

“No, we’re not going to do anything anymore,” I spit, and start to turn.

“Would you hang on a second? Please?” Dax’s words cut across the space between us and hit me hard in the chest, and I stop. “Everything we’ve been through, all those years, I deserve two minutes of your time.”

“You just had ’em,” I say, voice cold and static like it belongs to someone else.

Maybe I’m taking the easy way out. Except, where Dax is concerned, where Katrina is concerned, nothing is easy.

I turn around and I walk off the lot and call a car. I’ll take a red-eye home.

My hand digs in my pocket for my phone and I pull up Margot’s contact, needing a familiar voice to drown out the distant sound of Daxon calling my name.