Chapter Five
YES, CHARLIE YATES’Shouse was an Old Hollywood–style mansion-slash-villa-slash-estate on a switchbacky road packed with mansions just behind Sunset Boulevard. Of course he lives in a dream house, I thought, as we stopped out front and Logan yanked up the parking brake. He was living the dream. And that’s what the dream looked like.
After we parked, I dallied: I put on fresh lipstick, patted down my pom-pom, and pulled out a little mirror to spot-check—one more time—for pepper in my teeth. Even though I hadn’t eaten any pepper today. That I knew of.
I’d already done all these things in the airport bathroom, but, dammit, I did them again.
I was about to stand before Charlie Yates.
I was about to come into contact with genuine greatness.
It wouldn’t have entirely surprised me to find a throne in his living room.
I’d watched every video of him on the internet—most of them on stages at screenwriting festivals in front of adoring audiences—and practically memorized his remarks on structure, character arcs, and how to keep the mushy middle from sagging. I’d seen his face. I knew his voice. I knew that he was thirty-five, and a Gemini, and slightly duckfooted, and had an unwavering affection for flat-front, wide-wale corduroy pants. And while no one would accuse him of being movie-star good-looking, he had a kind of disheveled, no-rules, maverick appeal that I couldn’t classify as anything other than handsome.
Also? He had a habit of grabbing the front of his hair while he was talking, and squeezing it in his fist so tightly that when he let it go, it was all pointing in another direction.
Come on. Irresistible.
It was the kind of thing I’d think about sometimes, idly, while making dinner. What was it about his face that I liked, exactly? Some hidden geometry that clicked with patterns in my brain? The plumpness of his mouth, maybe? Or the angle of his jaw? Or—and this might betray how many times I’d rewatched some of those videos—something about the shape of his nostrils? Is that a weird thing to say? That a man has appealing nostrils? But he did. Friendly, straightforward, symmetrical nostrils that kind of dimpled down a little when he was suppressing a smile.
Writers, in general, aren’t exactly the best-looking subsection of humanity. Like if aliens came down and said, Show us the most perfect physical specimens of your kind, we wouldn’t go searching for the coffee-stained writers of the world, hunched over their laptops in their basement efficiencies. The bar for writers, looks-wise, wasn’t exactly high. Charlie might be a normal person’s eight—but he was a writer’s ten, for sure. That, plus his early success—the quirky indie movie that he made in college was a sleeper hit and launched his career—made him a media darling. Most screenwriters? No one’s ever heard of them. But we all knew and loved Charlie Yates.
He had a perfect storm of talent, charm, and irresistible nostrils.
And I really, really hoped I would not accidentally say that out loud when I met him.
A nightmare vision of my pumping Charlie Yates’s hand and gushing, “I love your nostrils!” flashed through my mind—and then, at the frozen horror of his expression, my trying to make it less weird by explaining: “It’s that teardrop shape they have, and how they kind of lean back against that tippy-top part of your upper lip, like they’re James Dean about to smoke a cigarette. You get it, right?”
Oh, god. I really was my own worst enemy.
Logan reached Charlie Yates’s front door while I was still wincing at that, and so there was nothing to do but drag my suitcase and carry-on through the gravel of the driveway at top speed to catch up.
As Logan knocked, I tried to settle my breathing.
God, I was nervous. Should I visualize the ocean? Try a power stance? Do a quick meditation? I tried to assess how much time I had before Charlie Yates opened that door.
But he didn’t exactly open the door. Not in the usual way, at least.
In response to Logan’s knock, the knob turned a little and then the door cracked, leaving maybe a four-inch gap. It was clear from the voice inside that Charlie was wrapping up a phone call and not answering the door so much as just unlocking it. So Logan held his finger up at me, like, Give me a sec, then handed me his phone and keys to hold, and slipped inside.
Leaving me standing alone on the front steps with Logan’s phone and keys, my bags, and my backpack full of favorite pens and notebooks.
Huh.
Looking back, Logan must’ve thought he shut the door behind him. But it didn’t catch. Which meant, minutes later, I was accidentally eavesdropping on their conversation through the slit at the doorjamb.
A conversation that got very dark very fast.
“Got a present for ya, buddy,” Logan said to start off, seasoning his voice with as much bro-ish camaraderie as the Queen’s English would allow.
“What do you mean, ‘a present’?” Charlie asked. His voice was more gravelly in real life than through my computer speaker.
“A writer,” Logan said. “I’ve brought you a writer.”
Charlie wasn’t following. “How did you ‘bring me a writer’?”
I tried to assess their relationship. There was something in Charlie’s tone—nice, but not warm—that made it seem like Logan was trying too hard.
“Outside,” Logan said. “A rom-com writer. To work on It Happened One Night.”
“You brought a writer here? To my house? Right now?”
And then I knew.
Charlie Yates had no idea I was coming.
Oh, shit.
Whatever was happening right now, it was not Charlie Yates approved.
I held my breath. Once I knew it, I couldn’t unknow.
“Yes,” Logan went on, clearing his throat like it was beading with flop sweat. “She’s here right now. She’s here—and she’s ready to help.”
I could tell Logan thought that if he made it all seem reasonable enough, it would actually just be reasonable.
But this was Charlie Yates. He wasn’t going to be Jedi-mind-tricked by his manager. And he had exactly one syllable of response for this situation: “No.”
“No?”
“No. I don’t need help.”
“Of course you don’t need it,” Logan backtracked. “Just to make things easier.”
But Charlie Yates wasn’t buying it. “Working with other writers never makes things easier.”
“A consultant. Of sorts. It’s my friend. The one I told you about last time.”
“I don’t need a consultant.”
“Of course you don’t. More like a secretary. A typist.”
A typist!
Logan was trying to push past this initial resistance. “I’ll just bring her in, and we can—”
“No.”
“No?” Logan asked.
“No.”
“Does no mean—”
“No means no. No, I don’t want you to bring her in. No, I don’t need help with the screenplay. Or a consultant. Or even a typist. I know how to type. And how to write a screenplay, too, by the way.”
Yep. He’d offended him.
“I don’t need anything,” Charlie went on. “Not from you—or anyone. Especially not some amateur writer friend of yours.”
Ouch. But fair.
“She may be an amateur, but there were circumstances—”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. This isn’t happening.”
“I just think that if you—”
“Buddy. Come on. I’d be irritated if you showed up with anybody, honestly. But some random girl you had a thing with in high school? That’s just insulting.”
“I’m telling you, she’s good.”
“I’m telling you, I don’t care.”
“I’m handing you the help you need to get this done and move on, and you’re throwing credentials at me.”
“Credentials exist for a reason.”
“Look, rom-coms are her specialty. They’re her whole thing. She can recite every line of When Harry Met Sally to you verbatim.”
“Please don’t let her do that.”
“I’m telling you, you’ll never meet another writer who knows more about rom-coms. She’s obsessed. And she’s got nothing else in her life. No relationship. No kids. Nothing at all. This is all she does. Imaginary love is the only thing she’s got.”
Oh, god, Logan. You’re killing me.
Then Logan made a fateful decision. He lied. To Charlie Yates. About me.
I can still hear it in slow-mo.
“She’s read the screenplay,” Logan said, “and she loved it.”
What!
It was all I could do to physically restrain myself from bursting in and correcting the record. I did not love it! I opposite of loved it—times a thousand. I detested it. I abhorred it. I wanted to scorch it from the earth—and my own memory, and all of space and time.
It was one thing for Logan to humiliate me in front of Charlie Yates with true things about my actual tragic life. It was quite another for him to defile my writing integrity with falsehoods.
That’s when Charlie paused. “She read the screenplay, and she loved it?”
I knew in an instant: Logan had so miscalculated.
Logan had made a guess that Charlie didn’t know his screenplay was bad. That he couldn’t help but love his own work. That if he told Charlie I loved his screenplay—the way he thought Charlie secretly loved it, too—that would put us on the same team. United against a cruel world that didn’t understand.
“Yes,” Logan lied.
No!
But it was the wrong call.
“Then she doesn’t know shit about rom-coms. Even I know that thing is an insult to the genre.”
Thank you!
Why did I feel so relieved that he knew that?
Logan registered his mistake now. Charlie Yates knew his terrible screenplay was terrible. Lying to him that I’d loved it was not helping me but doing the opposite. So he rerouted: “The point is, she’s a huge fan of you, man!”
“Has she seen the original?”
“Only a million times. Seen it, read it, studied it.”
“Then there’s no way she loves what I just wrote. She’s either a liar… or she doesn’t know shit from a shoelace.”
Harsh.
Harsh, but well-said.
She doesn’t know shit from a shoelace. Did he just make up a new aphorism?
Logan was still trying to take the ego route. “I’m telling you. She’s a Charlie Yates superfan. She’s so excited to work with you.”
That, at least, was true.
Next Charlie said, “Of course she is. Who wouldn’t be?”
“You’re being such an ass right now. I’m telling you, she’s good.”
“And I’m telling you to get her out of here.”
A pause, where I had to assume they were staring each other down.
Then Charlie said, “Wait. Hold on. Is this the same girl from the video you texted?”
The video? He texted?
I looked down at Logan’s phone in my hand. I’d known his passcode in high school. I tried it, and it still worked. Triple O Seven. Guess some things never change. The screen opened to a text he’d just sent to Charlie saying, There in 5.
Above it, I could see the bottom section of the last thing he’d sent before that.
A video.
Standing on Charlie Yates’s front steps, I tried to process the domino-fall of realizations their conversation had just set off in my mind: Charlie Yates had no idea I was coming. He had not consented to work with me—nor did he want to work with anyone. The job opportunity of a lifetime that I had abandoned my sick father for and robbed my sister of her future for and dismantled my entire life for did not actually exist.
To top it all off, my ex-boyfriend from high school had just both lied about me and told mortifying truths… and, apparently, sent Charlie Yates some mysterious video.
I stared down at the phone screen with dread, afraid to know for sure. What video?
From the format, I could guess that it wasn’t the YouTube video of the writing talk I’d given for the library that now had almost three hundred views. Nor, clearly, was it the sample freshman English class that lived on our community college’s home page.
No, this video was vertical.
This video was personal.
This video had come from Logan’s phone.
And here I faced a choice that was really no choice at all. I wanted to stay and continue eavesdropping—since I no longer trusted Logan’s relationship with the truth. But I needed to know which video Logan had sent.
Please, please, please don’t let it be the bikini video, I begged silently as I snuck with my bags away from the door, out into the yard, creating enough distance to watch it without being heard.
The bikini video—that I’d regretted a thousand times. The bikini video from ten years ago that Logan had sworn he’d erased—but I never 100 percent believed him. The bikini video I’d recorded for him when he’d asked me to send him “something sexy” and so I’d gotten Sylvie to record me crawling through the surf and growling like a panther at the beach in my first—and last—bikini.
The bikini video that topped my list of Most Embarrassing Things I’d Ever Done on Purpose.
He wouldn’t have. Right?
He couldn’t have.
But now I knew something new. I really had no idea what Logan would or wouldn’t do. If he’d trick me into flying out here for a job that didn’t exist, he was capable of anything.
There was a bench in the yard, and without really noticing, I backed up and parked myself on it. Next, the fight inside the house now out of earshot, I slid the video into frame on Logan’s phone and tapped PLAY.
It wasn’t the bikini video.
It was a video I didn’t even remember. Had possibly never seen before.
It was me. In high school. Laughing and walking away from Logan, saying, “Do it right this time!” I watched myself moving—walking the way girls walk when they know they’re being watched. I wore cutoffs and a striped T-shirt. My red curls were longer and wilder then, draping down my neck like mermaid fire. I paused to tie them into a bun.
I’d forgotten that. My hair was so long in high school I could tie it in a knot.
Wow. That girl was like a stranger. Like some kid I’d walk past on the street.
She lifted her arms, stepped forward, and then kicked up into a handstand. And then she started reciting a passage from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night while upside down.
Oh, god. I’d forgotten all about this.
“O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?” the young me bellowed, walking on her hands. “O stay and hear, your true love’s coming, that can sing both high and low. Trip no further pretty sweeting. Journeys end in lovers’ meeting—”
As I watched, the poem was coming back to me, and I was just anticipating the next line when my dad—looking younger than I ever remembered him, with dark brown hair and broad shoulders—stepped barefoot into the frame and flipped up on his hands, too, and finished the line. “Every wise man’s son doth know.”
“Dad!” the other me complained. “This is for school.”
It was this ordinary moment, but it was mesmerizing. There it all was: The backyard I grew up playing in. My mother’s herb garden on the flagstone patio. The overgrown crepe myrtle tree we used to climb.
It wasn’t a video on a phone. It was a time capsule.
A time capsule of everything I’d lost.
That’s when I heard something in the video that stopped my heart.
Her voice.
My mom’s voice.
She must’ve been standing right next to Logan as he filmed, because her volume was so loud—so much louder than everything else in the video, ten feet away—that for just half a second, it didn’t seem like the sound was coming from the phone in my hand.
“Emma! Your shirt’s coming off!” my mom called.
And it felt so much like my beautiful, long-lost mother wasn’t there, but here, right here, in the present moment, beside me in Charlie Yates’s yard, that I glanced down at my shirt to check it. For one heartbreaking instant, my brain thought she was with me here and now—and sent a spark of joy so bright it almost hurt.
But of course she wasn’t here.
We scattered her ashes in the ocean nine years ago—as soon as my dad was healed enough to make the drive.
The spark faded. I came to my senses. The video kept playing.
“My shirt’s not ‘coming off,’” the other me corrected my mom. “It’s just falling down.”
“Either way, we can see your bra.”
“It’s not a bra,” I said. “It’s a bikini top.”
“Well, it looks like a bra. Tuck your shirt in.”
“I can’t. I don’t have any arms.”
“You do have arms,” my still-upside-down dad pointed out. “You’re just using them as legs.”
Just as Logan, still focused on the bra issue, offered helpfully, “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, Mrs. Wheeler.”
“That’s not comforting,” my mom said as she stepped into the frame. And then there she was—not just a voice, but a vision. My beautiful, ethereal, ordinary mother, striding across the lawn in a jean skirt and sandals toward her goofball daughter. She grabbed my shirt while I was still upside down and tucked it in while my legs went all cattywampus.
“That’s better,” she said, patting me on the butt. Then she continued off across the lawn and I tumbled down into the grass.
“Mom!” I shouted. “I was performing Shakespeare!”
“Perform with your clothes on!” she called over her shoulder, just as a spindly kid cartwheeled into the frame. Sylvie.
“I want to perform Shakespeare!” Sylvie said, her voice like a chipmunk’s.
But I was up now—and running toward the camera with a goofy grin on my face. “Cut! Cut!” I called, making the “cut” gesture across my neck. And then, just as I collided with Logan, the video ended, going still at the last frame: my mom across the yard, on the back steps, with the door halfway open, heading into the kitchen to make dinner.
What did we have for dinner that night? I wondered, and it suddenly felt so heartbreaking that now I’d never know.
For a minute, there in Charlie Yates’s yard, the phone lay quiet in my hand. I was somewhere out of time.
And that’s when I realized I was crying. The ragged kind of crying that overtakes you without your consent.
I was just about to play the video again—sensing I could watch it forever on an endless loop, gulping down that forgotten moment nonstop without ever quenching my longing to see it again—when Charlie Yates’s present-day front door slammed open, and the present-day Logan came charging out of it, yanking me back to present-day reality.
Which suddenly, in contrast, didn’t seem so important anymore.
“Emma, you’ve got to—” he started.
But Logan stopped at the sight of me—at, I’m guessing, the gully washer of tears on my face. I looked back at him, blinking—my heart tied up in a fist, my throat thick, and my face overtaken with reawakened grief.
For a second, we were in a standoff.
And then I realized he must’ve been thinking I was crying like this over Charlie, over a person who, apparently, saw me as nothing but an amateur.
Which sparked me into action.
“This,” I said, drawing an imaginary circle around my face with my finger, “is not about this”—and I drew a much-larger circle around Logan, and the house behind him, and—what the hell—the whole city of LA.
Then I held up Logan’s phone to him—frozen on that final image—until he saw what this was about.
Logan’s shoulders dropped. “Emma, I—”
Just then, Charlie barreled out the front door with an air like he was about to make a proclamation.
He was—and I realize this goes without saying—bigger in real life.
It was my first—and possibly last—time to ever lay eyes on Charlie Yates, and I confess, it hijacked my attention for a second. Because there he was. That was the hair he always grabbed with his fist. And those were the wide-wale corduroys I’d seen in so many videos. And there was one of his trademarked rumpled Oxford shirts. And that was the signature stubble on his neck that he forgot to shave more often than not.
He certainly hadn’t been fretting over his appearance in an airport bathroom.
Of course, in his defense, he’d had no idea I was coming. But this, I knew from YouTube, was how he dressed all the time—whether he was on a conference stage or getting snapped by the paparazzi in a five-star restaurant. He was constantly showing up to industry events in flip-flops and shorts, or with bags of takeout food because he’d been writing all day and was famished. He once ate a cheeseburger and a large order of fries during a panel discussion at the Paley Center for Media—ripping little ketchup packets and squirting them onto a napkin on his knee.
That’s how huge this guy was. Nobody cared.
Nobody even complained in the comments.
He was famously unorthodox onstage. He once took a nap during a roundtable. And it wasn’t just forgiven because he was a legend. It was part of what made him a legend in the first place. Only later would I wonder if it was a power move. Like he was too cool to play by anyone’s rules. Like having to try was a sign of weakness.
Point being: Here he was. Ten feet away.
At the time, all I could think was: It’s him. It’s really him.
And despite everything, seeing him in real life like that had a seismic effect on my body.
Like the nearness of him was causing fractures and fissures at deep, subterranean levels.
Like the presence of the living, breathing Charlie Yates was somehow… fracking my soul. Or something. The sight of him, for just a second, took me deep inside my own body. Where everything suddenly felt radically different. Like I might go to turn on some internal faucet and watch fire come out instead of water.
Am I overstating it?
Probably. But I know what I know.
The sight of me seemed to affect Charlie Yates, too.
What would Charlie have seen in that moment? A random, weeping female in his yard. Blotchy face. Eyes red from crying. Tear-smeared, shiny cheeks. Puffy pink nose. And so angry. Angry like a person with lightning bolts shooting from her eyes. Not to mention the hair: I always have to remind myself how carefully I had definitely clamped my hair back into a sensible pom-pom before we arrived—because my imagination always wants to say that, in Charlie’s first-ever sight of me, I had fire-orange medusa snakes writhing around my head.
How often do you step out of your front door in life to find a sight like that?
Poor Charlie.
Even without the snakes, I’m sure I was a sight.
But before Charlie could react, or scream, or run back into the house and dead-bolt the door, Logan pulled us back on track. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said to me.
At that, my gaze shifted back to Logan. “Do you?” I demanded.
“My motivations were honorable!”
But I was shaking my head, Charlie Yates now forgotten. “My mom is in this video.” I held out Logan’s phone. “She’s here,” I said. “My mom. My family. How could you just… text it around? I”—and here I tapped my chest with my hand—“I haven’t even seen this. How could you just send it to—to a stranger? It’s my mom, Logan.”
To be honest, I didn’t even know what I was trying to say.
Rare for me.
Usually I started with words and found the feelings later, if that makes sense.
But here, all I had was a feeling. A feeling that this lost moment in time—these lost people, this lost family—was too precious to share.
Was it weird that Logan still had the video—much less that he would text it to his client without ever even showing it to me? Yes, of course.
But that’s not what had me so appalled.
This was my mother. Her jean skirt. Her favorite sandals. Her warm voice like butterscotch. This was my beloved family. My unbroken father, my preteen sister, my forgotten self. This was everyone who was precious to me—captured just weeks before the end. It was everyone I’d ever loved, beautiful and hopeful and frozen in time. It was valuable beyond description. It should be nothing less than cherished. And it wasn’t for anyone, even Charlie Yates, to watch on some phone while he was sitting on the toilet.
Or wherever Charlie Yates checked his texts.
“Emma,” Logan said, “I get it. I’m sorry. But—”
I shook my head, busy forwarding the video to myself.
“Emma, look,” Logan went on. “I was trying to get you this job.”
“You told me I had this job.”
“I was working on it.”
“You lied to me.”
“A white lie.”
“Go ahead and tell yourself that.”
“It was the best plan I could come up with.”
“Well, it was a shitty plan!”
“I see that now. I definitely see that now. But he needed to meet you, Emma.”
“There are lots of ways to meet people. Coffee! Brunch! Dinner!”
“Would you have flown all the way across the country for a coffee?”
“With Charlie Yates? Yes! Hell, yes!”
“Ah,” Logan said. “Well, I didn’t—fully—understand that. I thought you needed… a push.”
Unacceptable. “You manipulated me.” Then I added, “I gave up my whole life, and I left everyone I love for nothing. Worse than for nothing! For humiliation! For crushing disappointment!” I glanced over at Charlie. “For you to lie to this asshole about his apocalyptically shitty screenplay and tell him that I loved it!”
We all let that land.
Then Logan said, “You heard us?”
“The door didn’t close.”
Somewhere in the yard, a bird decided to tweet.
Then Logan said, “Just come inside and let’s all talk.”
But that was the other thing. Seeing that video made me overwhelmingly homesick. “I don’t want to talk,” I said. “He doesn’t want me here, and you never should have brought me here.” Then I added, “I just want to go home.”
I pelted Logan’s phone and keys onto Charlie Yates’s lawn, and then I grabbed my bags and started dragging them away, the broken wheel on my carry-on screeching in protest.
“Hey,” Logan said, following me. “You don’t even know where you are.”
I kept walking.
“Look,” Logan went on, “I know I did this all wrong. But at heart, I’m right. Charlie needs you. And you need him.”
“He already said no. Like fifty times. In no uncertain terms.”
Logan nodded. “Okay, that’s true. He did say no. But he can change his mind. And the only person who can make him do that is you.”
But I just kept walking.
“Emma,” Logan pleaded. “Help me do this for you.”
“I don’t want to,” I said, keeping my eyes straight ahead. “And I’m not going to. I’m leaving. And then I’ll find a fancy hotel that I cannot afford—and send you the bill. I’m going to take a scorchingly hot bath and eat everything out of the minibar. And then tomorrow? I’m going back home where I belong—to see if Sylvie can get her internship back. And then I’ll start finding another career. Because you’re the only person I knew in LA. And we’re not friends anymore.”