Now Daxon
Now DAXON
I don’t care who’s watching. Whose heads turn as I call for her like the ground is crumbling beneath my feet.
This business is always personal circles my head over and over in her voice.
I stop, breathing hard, pulse jumping. If I could just talk to her, if I could get her to understand. I need her to understand.
I want her to know how sorry I am that I made her feel like she could hate me.
But what I know Wil needs is space. So, when she leaves, head down, and climbs into a waiting Uber, I don’t stop her.
My teeth catch my bottom lip as it starts to shake.
Greg appears at my side, his hand pressing gently into my shoulder. “Dax,” he says, “you good? It’s okay. Come on, come inside.” He steers me around to the larger, more permanent-looking trailer he’s been based out of this entire shoot. Inside, it looks like a regular office. Blinds on the windows, leather chairs, a whole three-screen setup on the desk to review dailies and meet with studio execs. He sits on one side; I sit on the other.
“Talk to me,” says Greg.
My hands tangle in my lap. “She left.”
“Left?” His face falls.
“She’s gone.”
Greg drops my gaze and tips his head up towards the ceiling. He looks like Gandalf in Fellowship when he realizes they’ll have to go into the Mines of Moria—like this is the last thing in the world he wanted to hear, and everything is about to go to hell.
“What happened?”
So, so much. A billion beautiful, irreplaceable things and one infinitely terrible thing.
At first, it was a summer plucked out of time, back doing what we love to do, together. Nights that stretched endlessly, tiny moments between scenes, glances when the camera wasn’t looking. And god, just the feel of her so close, finally, after so long.
I don’t know how much he knows about Wil and me, so I start at the beginning from that first Marnie audition when Wil brought the house down with enough pluck and personality to fill an ocean, and that it was then that I knew I was gone forever.
Greg nods and listens, stoic but worried, because it’s a lot, our story, for someone whose job it is to keep us united towards one common goal.
And then I tell him about Katrina, and now, what a seven-year-old secret has ruined.
We talk logistics, how to proceed if we can’t bring Wil back. Greg outlines contractual obligations and legal proceedings, and my stomach twists and tightens as I imagine that quitting this project would be the cherry on top of the shittiest thing that’s happened to Wilhelmina Chase in a long line of shitty things she’s been dealt.
“I’ll do what I can,” I say. “I’ll talk to her. Can’t make any promises, but I’ll try.”
Except that, before I do, I have one quick stop to make.
“Somebody really likes their Jell-O.”
It’s 11 p.m. and I’m the last person in this town’s Piggly Wiggly supermarket, checking out with what looks like a literal metric ton of strawberry-flavored Jell-O mix. Little white box after little white box rides the conveyor belt towards Shirley, the checker. Honestly, if you told me she was the ghost haunting this place, I’d believe you, because this woman is probably eight hundred years old.
“Guilty,” I say brightly, sticking my card into the reader. The fun thing about Jell-O is that when it melts, say in an extremely nice vintage car parked out in the sun on our base camp lot, it stains. Big time.
I may spend a few days with red hands, but hey, it’ll be worth it.
All night, I’m up mixing red powder with water and filling the fridge in my rental to within an inch of its life, then waiting as it solidifies. In the morning, I feel just a smidge unhinged loading bags of the stuff into my driver’s trunk. But what’s a good revenge story without a little insanity?
We have a scene scheduled for today, Katrina and I. Her character gets to tell mine that he’s trash and to stay away from her daughter, which feels extremely on the nose given what’s gone down. And honestly, I don’t intend to stick around long enough today to get that filmed. I’m planning on coming down with a wicked case of the Find-Wil-Chases—it’s an epidemic.
It’s 6 a.m. and I’m unloading tote bags of wriggling strawberry Jell-O from a Lincoln town car at base camp. Casually, I walk them over to where Katrina’s Aston Martin convertible is parked, its top down making this all too easy.
The valet shakes his head at me, telling me no one’s allowed near the car. I shuffle around the bags in my hands—surprisingly heavy, I have to say—and hand him a folded bill that makes him change his mind.
Then I get to work. By the time I’m done, you can’t see the dashboard, you can’t even see the steering wheel. Everything in this priceless, precious car with its milky vintage leather interior is now jiggling red cubes. It’s already warm out. I give this about an hour in the sun before it’s melted.
And, sure enough, right about the time I’m telling our producer that, unfortunately, I’m not feeling well and I can’t film today, a scream slices across the asphalt and fills my twisted heart with the kind of joy that only comes with a prank well done.
Today, revenge is sweet. Strawberry Jell-O sweet.
All that’s left is to find Wil.