Now Daxon
Now DAXON
I can’t see Wil out in the audience because the lights are so incredibly bright, but through every scene, every line, every time I’m second-guessing whether or not I look completely ridiculous in my period costume, I can feel her.
She’s radiating pride, emotion, awe. All the things you want the girl you’ve loved since you understood what love is to feel for you.
Out at the back of the theater, where fans are stacked three rows deep hoping for an autograph, I can feel Wil, too. I glance up between signing a shoe and an arm—which, by the way, is never not supremely awesome, if not mega-surreal—and I can see her at the edge of the crowd, hanging back in the dark place between the streetlights.
My signature gets sloppier the more things I sign. Not because I have horrific handwriting, which I do, but because I’m rushing. I want to get to her.
We left everything so wide open. Once To the Stars comes out, I think our lives are going to get a lot crazier, a lot busier; we’ll be everywhere. We won’t have time for each other the way we’ll want to. The way I want to, at least.
I can be okay with putting things aside for now. With being friends.
Except that the moment I hear a fan’s voice cry out her name, see heads turn and cameras raise, feel the manic electricity of bloodthirsty paparazzi closing in on her instead of me, a sudden instinct to help barrels through my veins.
“Back up!”
I didn’t know my voice could come out like that. Not a jovial exclamation, but forceful. I’m shouldering through the crowd as Wil is eaten alive. She’s always convinced her star has gone out, that no one cares anymore. But children’s television shows inform so much of who we are for the rest of our lives. They nestle in deep, and when you’re a key player in the emotional psyche of a generation of people, you’ll never go forgotten.
That’s Wil. Bigger, greater, more important than Marnie, but Marnie to the people that loved her, forever.
I get closer. I can almost reach her. The look on her face is enough to pluck my heart from my chest and send it flopping, sodden and cold to the pavement.
“ Back up! ” I yell again, and this time, enough paparazzi jerk out of my way that I’m able to reach my hand between their bodies and close my fingers around Wil’s arm.
I give a pull and she comes with me, darting eyes flicking between unfamiliar faces until they hit mine, and I swear I can see her pupils dilate with relief, can see the air coming back into her lungs. Wil grabs for me and I lock my arm around her in a vise grip and steer us off down the dark sidewalk, away from the yells and flashes.
They don’t stop. The paparazzi follow us excitedly, wolves with blood in the air. But I fling out my hand for a passing taxi, yank open the yellow door before it’s even stopped at the curb, and all but push Wil inside, sliding in after her.
“Go, please,” I tell the driver the moment I’m sitting down.
Next to me, in the quiet, I can hear how hard Wil is breathing. Air seems to be coming into her lungs, but it isn’t coming back out again.
“Address?” the driver asks.
“Wil.” I reach gently but firmly for her face, my fingers at her chin, and turn her head to me. Her hazel eyes are full of tears. “Breathe with me, okay? In, count to four. Out, count to six.” I model the breathing and she tries. I know she’s trying, but she’s hiccuping now, falling apart.
“Address?” the driver tries again.
I forgot he was even here. “Oh, 64th and Riverside,” I say without looking away from Wil’s face.
“Sorry. I’m so sorry. Panic attack. I-I’ll be okay. Just... forgot how it can be. Thank you,” she says, “for jumping in like that.”
I wrap her up and pull her in. Lean my head against the top of hers, the movement of the taxi rocking us. Her hair brushes my cheek, my lips, and I press a soft kiss to the top of her head. We’re quiet for the rest of the ride, Wil regulating her breathing. Then the cab stops and I reach for my wallet, pay the driver, and guide Wil out into the night.
Arm around her, I walk us to the elevator and we ride up to my apartment’s floor. I turn the key in the lock and forget for a moment to be embarrassed by what’s sitting at the tiny breakfast table against the window.
“Is that—” Wil says.
“It’s Lego Darth Vader. Yeah. Well, it’s his head. Really, it’s the mask, but it’s not... important...” I trail off.
She sniffs, and then soft laughter that’s all breath falls between us. Wil tucks hair behind her ear, looking down. Iwatch as her head lifts and she takes in the rest of the place.
“This is really nice—”
“You okay—?”
We say this at the same time, and for a second, I know we’re both about to say jinx! but we don’t, probably because last time ended with us making out against a refrigerator, which is absolute textbook non-just-friends behavior.
“Thanks—”
“I’m alright—”
Damn it . I laugh. Wil smiles.
If I loved her less, this would be so much harder, but because I have a lot of practice shoving down the leaping in my heart and trying to behave normally, I say, “Let me take your coat.” Wil slips out of her brown coat and hands it to me. She wipes at her smudged eye makeup with her fingertips.
“You were so spectacular,” says Wil after a moment.
My lips pick up in a grin, wider than I hoped it would be, and I can feel the heat rising in my face. I shake my head. “I’m a dorky dancer.”
“I know,” Wil says with a smile. “I lived it. But Dax, for real, you were incredible. Congratulations. You broke a thousand legs.”
“Thank you,” I tell her. “I’m really happy you came.”
“Me, too.” Wil crosses her arms across her chest. “I’m sorry about the... with the cameras and—”
“No, hey, it’s completely okay. I’m sorry that happened.”
She studies my face. “I’ve never seen you like that.”
“Like what?”
But Wil shakes her head and laughs quietly as if to say never mind .
“Wait, like what?” I ask again.
“I don’t know,” she says, after thirty seconds of looking into my eyes and clearly trying to think of the right word. But it’s what she doesn’t say that tells me everything I need to know. I look down at my shoes and smile.
“Stay here tonight,” I say. “I’ll take the couch.”
Wil nods. “You sure?”
“It’s a really nice couch. My dads picked it out. Actually, they did the whole place.” Rather, their team did. Construction workers, painters, design assistants. They came in one night like cobbler elves while I was away, and when I came back, the place was beautiful. Not my style at all, ironically, but nice. Really nice.
“I can tell,” Wil says. “Nice curtains.”
They’re gold. They shimmer. But they also tie the room together and marry colors you wouldn’t think would go together, but do. And it looks so chic and masculine and effortless, when, in fact, it took a lot of effort.
“Listen, they decorated against my will,” I say.
“This is a total bachelor pad,” Wil says, looking around. “You sure you want me here cramping your style?”
“I’m sure. Chase, this is the nicest hotel in Manhattan. We have, uh, Lego structures that were never meant to be seen by human eyes, and an embarrassingly full laundry hamper. Two-to-three socks laying around. Absolutely nothing in the refrigerator. It’s the height of luxury.”
Wil has a morning flight, so I hail her a taxi in the chilled autumn air and try not to memorize the feeling of her goodbye hug.
But I always do. The way her arms lock around my waist. The feel of her fingertips brushing my back. I watch her taxi get smaller and smaller until I can’t see it anymore and I head to the theater for a new cast member’s put-in rehearsal.
As I’m walking out the backstage door, sweaty and exhausted two hours later, my phone pings. I refuse to follow news about myself, but I must have set this alert and forgotten about it.
BUILT TWO LAST CANCELED .
HGTV WILL NOT RENEW ITS LONGEST-RUNNING SERIES AFTER FOURTEEN SEASONS.
And it isn’t the news itself that has me flagging a passing taxi, climbing in the back seat and saying, “JFK, please, fast as you can,” but the fact that I’m hearing it from Google, and not from my dads’ lips. They won’t ask, but they need me.
As I’m climbing out of the Uber in their driveway (nothing with me but the clothes on my back), I can feel a despair radiating off the house like someone’s just died. In a way, that’s kind of true. Built Two Last was my third parent, my second sibling, the family pet in one all-consuming package.
Between the four of us—Dad, Pop, Rainie, me—it was the most important—the Matriarch—always.
Did I ever fantasize about this day? About the show blowing up out of the blue like Alderaan? Yes. Yes, I did.
But now isn’t the time for dancing gleefully on the grave of a home improvement TV show. It’s about making sure my parents, who have built everything around this, are still standing.
Pop answers the door, and when he sees me, his dark eyes mist. He grabs for me, pulling me into his chest. My heart swells because these hugs are so few and far between. “Daxie,” he says, nearly throttling me with grief. “You came.”
Gently, I push him off and nod somberly. It’s truly wild to me how two people so exuberant, with so much love for life, can forget how to be parents so often. Pop has no lack of enthusiasm for my existence. It’s just the inner workings of my life, my separate interests, my friends—those are the things he breezes right past.
“Came as soon as I saw it. I didn’t hear it from you guys, by the way.”
“Come in, come in, Dad’s ordering dinner, Rainie’s here.”
“ Ordering dinner? Dad’s version of ordering dinner is walking into the kitchen and telling the chef what to cook.”
My twin, Rainie, appears at the doorway to the living room, rolling her eyes. “You’d think he was on DoorDash. Hey.”
I pull her into a hug, messing up her hair as she whines and shoves me away.
“So, elephant in the room,” Pop says, “the show is done. Dead. Six feet in the ground. And this is our funeral procession.” He gestures grandly to Rainie and me, and we share a look.
“How’re you holding up?” I ask.
Dad leans his head out of the kitchen. “Hey, sweets,” he says. “We’re spiraling just a little bit. But you know what? Everything will be fine . It’ll be fine. Don’t worry, okay?”
I am worried.
“You know what we need?” Pop asks.
“Booze,” says Dad.
“Bingo.”
“I’ll get the wine glasses,” Rainie offers.
“Shot glasses,” Dad clarifies for her.
Rainie throws me a wide-eyed look of comic horror and I feel the tension in my chest slip. I don’t know what I’d do if it was just me and them, no Rainie to keep things light.
We sit in the living room, Rainie and I beside each other on the sofa, Dad and Pop lounging on the plush carpeting, and we do shots. Well, Dad and Pop do shots. Rainie and I do one each and then nope out of there real quick.
This is bound to snowball into an avalanche of emotions, and we’re on ski-patrol duty.
“So, what’s next?” she asks them, mopping spilled tequila off the coffee table.
“Oh, god, honey, who knows?” Dad asks, laughing. He and Pop toast and down another shot.
“Okay, I’m officially cutting you two off,” I say.
Rainie caps the bottle and hands it off to me so I can place it up high on the table beside the couch, out of their reach. “You have to have something lined up,” she says. “You guys don’t stop moving. Ever. It’s freaky.”
Pop and Dad look at each other, their expressions so fond, so sad, little smiles that grow then fall, then change into soft reassurance for the other. “Actually, we were talking about buying a house somewhere tropical and spending some time away,” says Dad.
“Not putting together a new show?” I ask.
“Or a kitchenware collection?” Rainie adds.
They shake their heads. “I think we need a break,” says Pop, “from everything.”
“From everyone,” Dad says. “We had sixteen sympathy boxes of roses show up this past week. Sixteen . We have too many friends.”
Rainie snorts. I shake my head. I want to laugh at this, I want it to be something light and nice between us, but Dad said this week not today , which means that they’ve known about this for days and chose not to tell me.
After dinner, Rainie and I suggest our old family stand-by, charades, to see if it’ll keep the mood light, but Pop falls asleep on the couch mid-game, snoring loudly, and Dad is distracted texting Kris Jenner about getting lunch this week, continually missing his turn to guess.
Eventually, it’s just Rainie and me. We give up, yawning.
“They’re going to crash,” she warns when we drift from the living room into the kitchen to eat Oreos out of the box like we used to. “I don’t know when, I don’t know where, but I have a feeling it’ll be soon and on top of us.”
“They’re buying a house somewhere tropical,” I say doubtfully.
“Right? Somewhere tropical . So specific. Quick, spin a globe and I’ll put a finger down, and wherever it stops, that’s where we’ll spend millions of dollars to avoid our responsibilities.”
I laugh, looking around this kitchen. It’s had about ten face lifts since I’ve known it. The entire house has changed constantly over the years to where I barely recognize it or consider it particularly home-y; it doesn’t have that childhood nostalgia thing going for it.
Wil’s house, or rather her dad’s house, is that for me.
“Did they tell you?” I ask Rainie.
“What?”
“That it was canceled? Did they ask you to come?”
“No,” she says. “I saw it online this morning. Drove over.”
“Yeah, same. I left as soon as I saw it. Got in a cab and got on a plane and... I don’t know why.”
Rainie offers me the cream side of her split Oreo. “Because in this family, we’re the parents. They’re the kids. Your kids needed you,” she says.
I let that sink in.
In so many ways, I know it’s true. But it clicks on a light for me that I didn’t realize was switched off.
In the morning, Dad and Pop bicker excitedly over whether they’d feel more relaxed in Greece or Bora Bora, and when I sit down at the table, reaching for the coffee, they want me to settle the debate.
“You don’t speak Greek or French,” I remind them.
“We’ll learn,” says Dad.
“I got Duolingo on my phone,” Pop says, holding it up so I can see. He’s so excited. They both are.
“What about somewhere where they speak Spanish?” I suggest to Pop, who’s fluent.
But he shakes his head at me with a grin. “Where’s the challenge in that?”
I laugh, but it comes out as a sigh. “Or what if you just stayed here?” I don’t mean it to come out bitter, but I think maybe it does. Because Dad and Pop share a look and then Pop turns to me, frowning.
“Do you not think we should go?”
The second he says it, I feel bad. My stomach twists and sinks low with the special kind of shame that comes from hurting the feelings of someone you love. I set my coffee cup down and drop their concerned gazes.
“I think you should stay in LA. My movie’s coming out. It’d mean a lot if you guys were around to come to the premiere, instead of in Bora Bora.”
Both sets of eyes are trained on me, and slowly, I look up to meet them. I feel seventeen. I feel seven, begging them to make time for me.
Their expressions are soft and tender, maybe even apologetic. Dad stands up from his chair, walks around the table and hugs me to him. Pop reaches across for my hand and grabs hold. This might be the most attention they’ve ever given me in my entire life.
Dad kisses the top of my head. “You’d have to bring in a bulldozer to try and stop me from coming to that premiere.”
“You know how proud of you we are? Christopher, do I ever shut up about this kid?” Pop asks Dad, happy tears in his eyes. He’s not the only one.
“No, literally never,” says Dad. “And who would? Our boy’s a movie star. He’s taking over the flipping world.”
I wipe at my eyes and Dad holds me tighter. “We want to hear all about the movie, the play, that series you did. Every detail. Go.”
And it’s like I’m a rusted latch on a gate, stuck for so long, feeling constantly forgotten, and they’ve just wiped away the years. I can swing wide open again.
Wil stops by that evening with a bottle of vodka, and my dads lose their minds with excitement over seeing her again. It’s been years.
“I saw it in the news. I came right over. You two okay?” Dad and Pop take turns smothering her with hugs.
“God, finally, someone sane.” Rainie sighs dramatically and wedges her way between our dads to hug Wil, too. “I’m obsessed with this hair,” she says.
Wil touches the short, blunt ends with her hand and grins, color in her cheeks.
“Thanks,” she says. “It was annoying the shit out of me so I chopped it.”
“Amen,” says Rainie.
“Okay, so come in, come in, tell us everything about what you’ve been up to. How’s your dad? God, I love that man. The funniest human being on this planet,” Dad gushes. He and Pop usher Wil into the kitchen where wine has been poured and a charcuterie board waits.
Wil throws me a smile over her shoulder that I feel bursting inside me all the way from my scalp to my toes.
“Oh shit,” Rainie says, once they’ve gone.
“What?” I ask.
“You’re down bad- bad.”
“What?”
“Daxon,” she says, flicking me in the shoulder. I shove her gently away in response. “I knew you were obsessed with her and had your little summer fling thing, but holy shit. Somebody call a doctor.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I mumble, laughing to make it sound convincing, and head to the kitchen wondering if everyone around me can hear the hammering my heart’s doing.
But Wil’s hazel eyes jumping to mine over the top of her white wine, the sound of her laugh mixing with my family’s, her genuine sadness at my dads losing their show, the feeling of her hug goodbye this morning. The fact that she’s here at all—Rainie’s right, I’m down bad.
“Did you change up Dax’s room upstairs?” Wil asks Dad and Pop as dinner winds down. “I saw his New York place, and I gotta say, I’m impressed.”
“You know what, that’s the one room we haven’t touched yet,” says Pop. “We can’t agree on what to make it.”
“I vote Pilates studio,” says Dad.
“See, okay, but what we really need is another closet,” Pop argues.
“Actually, that’s true,” says Rainie. “These two have more shoes than anyone on this planet.”
Pop tweaks her nose affectionately. Wil and I catch each other’s eyes.
“Let’s go see it,” Wil says to the group at large, even though she’s looking right at me.
I stand up right away. “Sure.”
Wil follows as I head towards the staircase. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Dad and Pop start to get up to come along, but Rainie drags them both back down to the couch by the elbows, shaking her head.
As far as sisters go, I have a good one.