Chapter 25
Like Like
Since the All Green Lights screening was on a night off, I texted the Hometown group chat with a link.
No pressure but I’m going to this (it was my first movie and how I met my best friend) so it might be fun.
Or humiliating! Find out, if you need something to do with your one wild and precious day off.
I drove myself to the movie theater, where Aisha was hanging out at a table inside the crowded lobby with one of her colleagues, whom she left behind as soon as she saw me walk in.
“It is so good to see your face,” she said, hugging me tightly. “This thing is sold out, can you believe it?”
“Wait, really? A twelve-year-old movie with a sixty percent on Rotten Tomatoes?”
“Oh my god, why do you always bring up Rotten Tomatoes?” She laughed and linked her arm through mine. “Thank you for coming.”
“No, don’t thank me, this is our thing together.
” I stayed linked with her as we walked into the theater, and took our seats in a reserved row.
I’d expected a small, decaying, vintage setting, but the building had clearly recently been restored with a thoughtful touch—retro in a current way—and there were a few hundred seats filling up before our eyes.
Our old costars Nikki and Veronica arrived, and I felt with a shock how lucky I felt to see them and be here in this noisy theater full mainly of other women.
The theater’s director of programming introduced herself to the audience at the front of the theater, and cheers erupted as soon as she said the film’s title.
I couldn’t believe the way that felt, the earnest excitement for something I was part of so long ago, the warmth flooding my system as she spoke of the power of seeing female friendships onscreen.
“I’m sorry I called it a shitty movie,” I whispered to Aisha, who hugged her arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. “I don’t think it’s a shitty movie. I never did.”
“I know,” she whispered back. “We’re good.”
The credits rolled, and my face flushed as my name onscreen drew cheers and applause from the crowd.
That enthusiasm at merely my name wasn’t a new experience, but it had never been about this before, a thing I’d been part of when I was still basically a kid and so much of my life was just beginning.
To appreciate me, here, for this? It was like nothing I’d felt before.
Younger me appeared on the screen, and the applause continued as I stared at my twenty-two-year-old face.
I looked like a baby, soft and rosy and new, someone I could barely remember being.
It was hard to wrap my brain around this girl being the one I blamed, the one who’d run out like a coward, the one who’d broken Rebecca’s heart. She’d been so young and so scared.
I cheered loudly when Aisha’s character showed up.
She’d been the opposite of my younger self, so confident in front of the camera from the start.
It didn’t surprise me to see the strength and charisma in my old performance, knowing where it would take me, but it hadn’t been how I’d felt on set.
The younger me had worried so much about messing something up or misunderstanding the director’s goals or literally missing her marks.
Had she been in the moment at all? Still.
There was really something special about that younger Tess onscreen. Even I could see that.
This time around, the relationship between my character and Veronica’s seemed even more coded, and from the knowing laughs in the audience, this was not a minority opinion.
My younger self had taken the script so literally and so at face value, doing her best to please everyone around her, that even mere months after her very gay breakup she hadn’t noticed the very gay subtext to the character she was portraying. God, I loved that about her.
And then I thought about how she was me. And so, it hit me like a force of nature, was that goblin inside of me, fighting to come out. And Professional Actress Tess Gardner! I wasn’t Chrissy Jenkins with an alter ego. We were all one.
As the credits rolled, the theater’s team hauled out directors chairs for the Q&A, and I squeezed Aisha’s hand before she followed Nikki and Veronica to the front of the room.
They took a seat next to the woman who’d introduced the film, and I thought about how different this was than what I’d expected.
People were here to celebrate a movie about girls’ feelings and relationships in a space that felt carved out for everyone. What was I hiding from?
Me—the goblin, the younger self, the villain, the heart-breaker, the antihero, the bad guy, the person doing her very best in a life that was so much weirder than she’d ever intended—stood and, as a rumble of excitement sounded, walked up the aisle.
“So I’d like to get started with a question about—”
“Actually,” Aisha politely interrupted the moderator, beaming as I approached the panel, “I think Tess Gardner’s joining us too.”
I covered my face as the crowd kind of lost their minds, but recovered quickly—I was, after all, Professional Actress Tess Gardner—and thanked the staff member who rushed over a chair for me.
I’d done a million panels in front of a million people at this point, but this one—while I was wearing jeans and an old sweater, no carefully diffused waves, barely any makeup—was the easiest one yet.
I loved hearing what the other women’s experiences had been like—god, back then I’d been so self-focused I’d really had no idea—and even when the Q&A opened up to questions from the audience, I didn’t feel my guard go up.
The room literally felt like a safe space.
“I have a question for Tess and Veronica,” a twenty-something person asked.
“I used to watch this movie all the time as a kid, and my favorite part was always the friendship and really dramatic fight between your characters and how you made up. And then when I was sixteen, I was like, ohhhh, All Green Lights made me gay.”
The audience cracked up. So did I.
“Anyway, I’m just wondering if you two knew that people would see that plotline that way, and how you feel about it now, its legacy or whatever.”
Veronica and I glanced at each other. She nodded almost immediately, leaned forward to say something similar to what I’d thought earlier, how we’d taken the script at face value, hadn’t thought much past it, definitely hadn’t infused it with any intentional subtext.
I smiled and nodded through everything she said, and I could feel how the room was ready for whatever question was next.
If Erica were here, she couldn’t have been any happier for how that went.
“Actually,” I found myself saying into my mic, “I felt that way too, at the time. Watching it tonight, though, oh my god. It’s just so gay.”
The audience laughed even harder than before.
“I’m really proud of it,” I said. “I’m honestly really happy for you if this movie made you gay, it feels like such a nice and soft way for it to happen. And as a member of the LGBTQ+ community myself, anything with that kind of legacy feels extra special to me.”
A murmur rippled through the audience, as I surveyed the room. Three hundred-ish was my new number. About three hundred people knew, and I didn’t just feel OK.
I felt kind of amazing.
The Q&A wrapped up, Aisha got to make a great plug for Silverlochen and its future, and then I wasn’t even all the way out of my chair yet when she yanked me into the tightest hug of our entire friendship.
“I’m so proud of you,” she said, squeezing me somehow tighter still. “Oh my god.”
“I know,” I said, not letting go. “I didn’t plan it, I—I just didn’t want to keep the goblin in anymore, you know?”
“I don’t … know, but, sure.” She laughed and gestured to the crowd gathering. “I think you have to be Professional Actress Tess Gardner for a while.”
“I’m gonna just try to wing it as me and see how it goes,” I said. “I love you.”
She grabbed my face and kissed my cheek. “Love you too. Go talk to everyone you turned gay.”
The crowd was polite, but there were still a lot of them, and a lot of stories to hear from people the film had mattered to.
I took so many selfies, signed some Blu-rays, accepted multiple friendship bracelets with beads spelling out Sam & Josie, almost cried at least half a dozen times.
The rest of my career, I knew, wouldn’t be like this every day—or even, perhaps, ever again—but it was a good kickoff.
This night was better than I ever dreamt this impossible thing could be.
When we finally walked out of the theater and back into the lobby, a small burst of applause sounded, and I shrieked when I realized that Hometown’s cast plus Kevin, Stephanie, and Hannah had come. I threw myself at them, hugging everyone, even Michael.
“We were thinking we could all go to Walt’s,” Kevin said, gesturing. “It’s just like three blocks down. Even people in LA can manage three blocks, right?”
“You know, the lack of public transportation in a city really tells you—”
“That’s very interesting, Michael, but let’s keep things moving.”
I almost screamed when I heard her voice, when she approached the group out of thin air. From the way everyone was watching me, the almost-scream might have been far from an almost. “Sorry, I didn’t see you.”
“Restroom,” Rebecca said. She was casual, like me in a sweater and jeans, though of course her version looked like fashion while mine was a lazy day off work. “Kevin, you’re in charge of getting everyone there. I’ll catch up.”
I watched our group practically march off before turning back to her. “I didn’t know you were coming.”
“Kevin invited me,” she said. “I’m so glad he did. Fuck, Gardner. That was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”
“It definitely deserves way more than sixty percent on Rotten Tomatoes,” I said, and she laughed and pulled me into a hug.
“That’s absolutely not what I meant. How are you feeling?”
“Um,” I said, and laughed as I stepped back from her. “Really good right now. Tomorrow might be another story, I don’t know. I don’t feel like thinking about that yet.”
“No, why should you?” She watched me, her gaze serious. “You’re amazing.”
I felt it, stronger than ever before, what could have been, the other lifetime, the everything we could have had together.
And for the first time, I didn’t automatically blame myself.
We really had been doomed. The brief flashes we’d found together, though, were more than most people got at all.
Even if we were doomed, we were fortunate, too.
“Should we walk down?” she asked. “Or do you have people to see, schmoozing to do, et cetera?”
“I want to walk down, but I should check in with people first,” I said, turning to find Aisha and making eye contact with someone else instead. “Andy?”
He shrugged and walked over, glancing at Rebecca and then back to me. “Hey.”
“Don’t hey me,” I said. “I didn’t know you were coming. Wait, you didn’t know I was coming either. Why are you here?”
He shrugged again, glanced at apparently nothing behind me as if that weren’t a deeply suspicious way to have a conversation with someone. “I don’t know. It was a big deal to Aisha.”
“Why do you look nervous?” I asked, a zip of recognition shooting through me. “Oh my god. Do you like like Aisha?”
“Like like? Are we twelve?” He glanced away again, and I realized that Rebecca was still standing there.
“Andy?” Rebecca held her hand out to shake his. “God, I’m thrilled, I can’t believe I’m meeting Rosie’s uncle.”
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, which made me crack up. “Sorry. I hold Tess accountable for that, obviously. Good to meet you.”
“This is Rebecca Frisch,” I introduced, as if he’d never Google-image-searched her or commented on her height. “Hometown’s director.”
“On a serious note,” Rebecca said, which I could tell made Andy tense up in the same way at the same time as it did me, “I’m genuinely so happy to meet you. The way Gardner has talked about you …”
“I hope you know to ignore most of it,” he said, which made Rebecca laugh.
“Only some of it, but of course. Are you two coming to the bar?”
“Go without us,” I said. “We’ll let Aisha finish up here and join everyone as soon as we can.”
“Sounds good,” she said, and hugged me again. “Congratulations, Gardner. You’re brave as hell.”
I tried not to think too much about how it felt to have her arms around me, and calmly waited with Andy while Aisha chatted with people as they donated money and bought adorable Silverlochen T-shirts. “So does Aisha know or not know?”
He sighed. “I haven’t said anything. Wanted to check in with you first.”
“Oh, it’s like I’m the dad in the American Gothic painting,” I said. “Me and my pitchfork protecting my best friend’s virtue.”
“Don’t,” he said.
“I’m kidding. You’re my two favorite people in the world and if you wanted to take her out and not use like five vapes during the course of the night, I feel like you would automatically get a second date.”
“You wouldn’t think it was weird?”
I rolled it around in my head, my brother and my best friend and the possibilities between them.
“If I’m being completely honest, of course.
But not in a way that should keep you from pursuing it.
You’re both incredible and—Aisha deserves someone nice and upstanding like you.
I’m honestly excited at the thought of how adorable it would be. ”
“Cool your jets,” he said, which made me laugh. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
He sighed. “Really? I’m honest with you and you’re going to pretend nothing’s up with you and that director?”
“No,” I said. “I mean, yes. I mean—there was something. Back then, and more recently too. And now there’s not. It’s a doomed situation.”
“Uh-huh,” Andy said. “I’ll just say, that person did not react to meeting me like someone in a doomed situation would.”
“Oh, whatever,” I said. “You don’t know the logistics. Go help Aisha get all her stuff together so we can all go out and I can coincidentally leave you two at your own table while I hang out with the cast.”
Andy sighed again. “You’re gonna be exhausting about this, aren’t you?”
“You’re welcome.”
He patted my shoulder. From Andy, that was a full-on hug. “I’m really proud of you. Not for any of this, obviously. For the other.”
Tears pricked my eyes, and I didn’t want to cry in front of my brother, which made me imagine Aisha shouting You two need so much therapy.
Maybe that was why, when I got home hours later, I sat up in bed with Rosie and my laptop and emailed my favorite of all my ex-therapists.
Hi Mallory, I know it’s been awhile, but if your schedule allows, I’d love to get back on your calendar.