Chapter 7
We’re on our way back to the hotel when Juniper’s phone rings. “Katie,” she tells me.
She answers, and I watch Juniper’s face empty of color as Katie is talking. “Yeah,” she says. After a long pause, “Yeah.” Another long pause. “Got it.” Another. “He’s actually with me.”
She hangs up, and right then, Ellen calls. I send it to voicemail.
“What was that about?” I ask. Juniper looks ashen.
“Apparently there’s a Twitter thread. By one of the other kids who got abused. Let’s just look.”
She opens Twitter and finds it immediately, because my name is trending.
The truth is, Kai Laramie never said a word about the abuse. If he had, I might have been spared the worst thing that ever happened to me. Instead, I revealed the abuse. I told the principal of our school.
Kai knows this, and he still let the headlines read shit like HERO MOVIE STAR STOPPED HIS ABUSER DEAD IN HIS TRACKS or whatever. But Kai never said ANYTHING. Obviously he’s a victim in this, but claiming he’s a hero is a bit much.
Just for the record: I turned him in. Kai testified because I had a weed charge on my record and the prosecutors thought that would hurt my reliability as a witness. I’ve been through hell with this.
It’s fucking humiliating to be put through more hell that makes Kai seem like some kind of superhero and completely ignores what I did. It’s typical of the media, of course, but someone fed them these lies and we all know it was Juniper Castillo.
She’s so obviously behind all this. She wants to be a star so fucking bad. You go on her Instagram and it’s nothing but her and Kai, her sweet and innocent and heroic Kai. But the story is a lot more complicated than the media will tell you.
The truth is, Kai got abused and said nothing and now he’s a hero. I got abused and said something and now I’m nobody? Well, I call bullshit. Come out with the truth, Kai. And have your girlfriend apologize for retraumatizing both of us.
The first tweet in the thread had over ten thousand retweets. The first reply, with over five thousand likes, was Sorry this happened to you, bro. Typical Hollywood bullshit.
The second reply: These two are such fucking phonies both of them. He’s Mr. Stolen Valor and She’s Mrs. Pretend to Love Kai While Hanging All Over Charles Oldham. Probably made up all that bullshit about her poor, dead mother.
My stomach is in my throat. “Is that true?” I say finally.
“Is what true?”
“Are you hooking up with Charles?”
“One, I am not hooking up with Charles.” Juniper’s voice is rising.
“Two, I am not your girlfriend, so I’m allowed to hook up with whoever the hell I want.
Three, how can you ask that right now? This is not about Charles Oldham.
This is about someone trying to ruin both our careers, Kai.
You understand that? Don’t deal with this properly and poof. Everything could be gone.”
There is something intoxicating to me about the possibility of poof, everything being gone, but I don’t confess that to Juniper. I just say, “I’ll call Ellen.”
She picks up before it’s even rung. “You will sit down with Jill tomorrow,” Ellen says.
“You will tell the truth, and this is the truth: You didn’t want to talk about your abuse, but it leaked, and now you’re going to affirm your fellow victim’s victimhood and heroism while also acknowledging that the real villain here is not you but the man who abused you, and the leaker who retraumatized you, who wasn’t Juniper.
That’s all we need to do. We’ll let her break the embargo and talk about the movie, which will hopefully minimize the stuff about you.
One interview tomorrow morning, before the rest of the junket, and then you don’t say another goddamned word about this and we let it blow over. ”
“Okay,” I say.
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Once you do this interview tomorrow, we can put it in the rearview mirror.”
“Okay.”
Except it will never be in the rearview mirror. That’s what Ellen still can’t understand. On some level, even though he’s dead, it’s still happening. It happens in my mind. It happens when people bring it up. It happens when I dream.
_____
Back at the hotel, I search my name on Reddit and Twitter.
Conversations are everywhere about Juniper and me.
The big one on the pop culture subreddit already has over a thousand comments.
Some people are defending us—especially Juniper, who is seen by many to be “catching strays”—but the most upvoted comments say we’re fake and always have been, that you can tell when something is just to promote a movie, and that Juniper probably lies about being abused by her dead mom to get attention and sympathy.
The consensus seems to conclude that Matthew Malone is a great guy but these two seem like conniving little starlets.
_____
I’m asleep when the phone rings. I look at the hotel clock: 2:18 a.m. It’s Juniper. She’s crying uncontrollably. At first I can’t even tell what she’s saying. “I’ll be right there,” I say.
I pull on some clothes and race to her room. She’s sobbing. “I fucked up and now they’re gonna cancel Andromeda,” she says.
“What makes you say that?”
“I just feel it. I know it.”
“Juniper, you’re having a panic attack.” She’s sweating and crying and very clearly in distress, but I am also frustrated with her, because who cares if they cancel Andromeda? It’s just a movie.
“I have nothing without it,” she says.
“That’s not true, Juniper.”
“I can’t not work,” she says. “You don’t understand. When I’m not working, I’m nothing. I don’t matter to anybody.”
“That’s your mother talking,” I tell her.
“I didn’t make it up,” she says. “I didn’t.”
“I know,” I say, and she relaxes into me as I’m holding her. “I’m sorry, and I’m here.” I hold her for a long time, until she calms down and her ragged breaths get deeper.
“You know our Obstacle?” she asks.
“Never have quite figured it out.”
“We can’t disentangle what we want from what we’re supposed to want.”
“That’s why so many kids our age go to law school,” I say, and she laughs. I stroke her forehead, pushing her hair aside, revealing the soft baby hairs above her temple. “I love you,” I say. “You’re way too into Hollywood, but I love you.”
“This is all I’ve got,” she says. “This is everything to me.” I want to ask her about me, about her brother, remind her that there is much more to her life than Hollywood, but I don’t.
“You didn’t leak it, right?” I ask. “It wasn’t you.”
“Kai, I would never.”
“You really want the movie to succeed.”
“I do,” she confesses. “I do. But no. I would never, ever do that shit. As much as I care about the movie, I care a hell of a lot more about you.”
“Will you be there tomorrow?” I ask her. “At the interview?”
“Of course,” she says through new tears. “Of course, Kai.”
_____
The piece comes out online the same day as the interview:
Kai Laramie sits with his costar and dear friend Juniper Castillo in a standard hotel chair in a standard, if luxurious, hotel conference room.
Despite professional makeup and hair, his eyes are red and he looks like he has been crying.
I ask him how he’s feeling and he says, “In our business, you have to give up some privacy, but the truth is my abuse is deeply private to me, and I’m sorry that it has been publicized so widely and that as a result, other people were hurt.
It’s true that my classmate was the one who revealed the abuse to administrators at our school, and I’m very grateful that he did.
He saved a lot of people. That I didn’t have the courage to say anything is an enduring regret for me. ”
These words sound rehearsed, like he spent all night thinking of them, but then they also sound earnest. A full profile of Laramie is forthcoming in the magazine, but for now, suffice it to say that Laramie is the type of young person who doesn’t seem to know his own innocence, the type you want to protect with a measure of maternal attention.
I ask Laramie if he regrets his burgeoning celebrity, and he says, “I don’t know if regret is the right word.
I love acting. I love making stuff with other artists. ”
When I first interviewed Laramie, we discussed everything from Andy Warhol (the artist at the center of his buzzy new biopic, Andy Warhol Never Gets Old) to his childhood in Indianapolis.
But now, in our second meeting, there is only one topic: the trending conversation about Laramie’s abuse, and his failure to correct the initial reporting that he was the “hero” who turned his abuser in to authorities.
“I didn’t want to correct the record because I didn’t want to acknowledge the record,” he says.
(Indeed, at Laramie’s publicist’s insistence, I agreed not to ask him about the abuse in our first meeting.) “I should’ve said yes, I was abused, but no, I wasn’t a hero except insofar as all who survive abuse do so heroically. I’m sorry I didn’t do that.”
Laramie is also quick to defend his costar, with whom he has confessed to being “sometimes” in love. “I trust Juniper absolutely and she has no involvement in this whatsoever.”
But enough about the scandal. Let’s talk about the movie, which succeeds at being what its subject Andy Warhol never was: deep.
An astonishingly moving portrait of an artist at the end of his life and two young professionals at the start of theirs, Andy Warhol Never Gets Old is the kind of movie that feels at once fresh and classic.
Both Laramie and Castillo have survived a lot in their young lives, and somehow this real-life trauma seems to have been carried onto the screen in a way that feels vibrant without ever verging into garish.
Castillo, as she detailed in a viral Medium post, “My Mother Loved Me. She Also Abandoned Me,” experienced abuse and devastating neglect throughout her childhood.
“I don’t know what it’s like to be loved by an adult who doesn’t want something from you,” she wrote, and Laramie’s sleepless eyes on the morning of this interview are a reminder that, perhaps, Laramie feels the same way.
We romanticize the lives of young and brilliant actors.
We think of them as fundamentally different from us.
And it’s true: Castillo and Laramie are better-looking than I will ever be, their hair just so, their smiles carefully calibrated.
But these are just people, people placed into a machine that transforms personal history into media attention, that forges reality into fiction and fiction into reality.
Juniper is reading the story out loud to me as we both lie above the covers on her bed. She pauses and says, “It’s really good.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “I seem a little stupid.”
“You do not seem stupid, and she called our movie ‘at once fresh and classic.’ You come off looking mature and self-aware.”
“I just hate the idea that for the rest of my life, the first thing people will know about me is that I didn’t turn in my abuser.”
“You couldn’t turn your abuser in, Kai. If you could’ve, you would’ve.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I remember when the cops showed up at school and had a warrant to search his office and everything, I remember thinking, It’s over.
But actually it was only beginning. It was the beginning of my parents and brother knowing.
The beginning of people at school knowing.
Other teachers knowing. The beginning of knowing I was gonna have to testify, and everything else. ”
“Yeah,” she says. “Thanks for staying up with me, by the way. I’m sorry I freaked out. It doesn’t matter if they cancel Andromeda. I know that. I just panicked. I shouldn’t have made it about me.”
“It’s okay,” I tell her, because it is. She can hear her mom’s voice the way I can hear his voice, only he wasn’t my parent.
I ask her to keep reading and she does. I love listening to Juniper read.
I’ve never been able to read out loud with any confidence or fluidity; Juniper reads like a professional narrator, with perfect enunciation and absolute surety.
No word surprises her or trips her up. What must it be like, I wonder, to have that relationship with language, where everything flows, where it’s no work to decode letters into sounds, and sounds into concepts.
But, of course, it’s partly the difference between us that makes it so easy to love her.