24
THE NEXT MORNING, WE GO TO brUNCH. THERE’S A NEW DOORMAN AT THE front desk. There’s a lone paparazzo at the entrance, who snaps furiously when we leave. Penelope gives him her middle finger.
“So,” Taryn says. “Yesterday was a shock. How do you feel now, the morning after?”
Part of me doesn’t want to even think about how I feel. Another knows that anything I bury down will surface sooner or later.
“Still raw,” I say. “Still unbelieving. Hurt. I’m thinking about how people will receive my future work, knowing it’s me behind it. I’m thinking of all the meetings I’ll have to go to now, the executives I’ll have to face, the insults online, the pressure to start social media accounts.” I sigh. “Part of me is, I guess, a little relieved. This big secret I’ve kept for years now . . . I guess I never realized how much it was weighing on me.”
This morning, for a blissful second, I had forgotten. Then it had all hit me with the force of a battering ram. This is real. Your life has changed. My email, typically empty save for a few pings from Sarah, was flooded with media requests. My phone log was filled with calls from people I haven’t talked to in years. A guy I’d gone on a single date with fifteen months ago texted, asking if I could look at his TV pilot.
I had, promptly, locked my phone in another room. It couldn’t hurt me, I told myself. It wasn’t real.
Then why did I feel like someone had scooped my chest out?
Most of the interest is because they think I’m dating Parker. Once they realize we’re not together, it will all die down .
That’s what I tell myself, at least.
When I confirm things are done with Parker, Gwen looks sad for the first time since I’ve known her. “So, none of it was real?”
I take a sip of my latte. Warmth spreads through my hollow chest. “Of course it was,” I say. “But what does that have to do with it?”
WHEN WE COME BACK FROM brUNCH, ONE PAPARAZZO HAS TURNED into two. My friends help me pack a suitcase. Gwen takes it down. I leave separately, with Taryn, to stay in her apartment.
Being in a new place helps a little. I’ve let my phone die and have thrown any ounce of focus I can muster into my screenplay. It’s still due in three weeks, no matter what I’m going through.
Taryn’s away at work during the day, but at night we talk, eat dinner, and watch TV. One night, we go to eat in SoHo and pass a street stand selling scripts. “Any of yours?” Taryn asks.
“A few.”
Penelope comes over most nights and tells us about her crush on Luke (she, apparently, broke it off with the hot doctor a day after arriving here, because of the distance). And, also, how Parker knocks on the door every day without fail.
I go on walks, trying not to think of him, but the city is full of our memories. He’s right. I painted it over. But now, it’s all in his shade. I can’t escape him.
“Don’t read the articles,” Penelope tells me, and I wonder if it’s because they’re awful.
Taryn puts me out of my misery by saying, “Not the worst. Just, you know, typical misogyny.” I guess fans of some of the franchises I’ve written for assumed I was a guy and are deeply disappointed.
I avoid the internet as much as possible and find, with some distance, Penelope is right when she says, “The internet isn’t real.” What’s real is us, on the floor of Taryn’s apartment, playing board games none of us know the rules to and can’t, between our four degrees (two for Taryn), understand, even when we try. Real is Gwen giving me a haircut in Taryn’s bathroom, because she says they always help, and she’s been giving them to herself for years. It’s just a few inches, a few layers, but she’s right. I feel lighter.
Real is my sister calling Penelope (whose number she’s had memorized since she was a teenager), demanding to be passed to me, and saying, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Guilt stabs me in the stomach. “I’m sorry, I—”
“I can’t believe you’re dating Parker Warren!”
That guilt turns into a sudden urge to throw the phone through a window. I take that moment to tell Cali about my career. Apparently, she didn’t actually read the article.
She asks questions, says, “I love that movie!” Then: “I had no idea you could be funny.”
I frown. “Cali, that’s not even a comedy.”
“Oh.”
After a few days, I hesitantly open a webpage. Then I start clearing out my inbox, deleting all the media inquiries. I click through them quickly, grateful that they seem to get scarcer as the days go by. Then I see something that makes me pause.
It’s from a woman named Elena. She’s not a journalist; she’s a freshman at a college in Texas.
“When I was a teenager, I got mono. Not from anything as exciting as kissing, but because I had a bad habit of sharing cups in the cafeteria. I was bedridden for weeks, at my grandma’s house. She kept the TV on one channel, and your movies always played. I was a captive audience, you might say, but I was hooked, after the second one. You became my favorite screenwriter,” she wrote. “Your movies would repeat, but I didn’t mind. I always found something different to love, each time it was on. I started to think about the structure. I started to write movies in my head. It was all for fun, though. I never thought I could actually do it, until a few days ago. Learning it was you, a woman in her twenties, writing my favorite movies makes me feel like maybe I can make it too. I’m adding a creative writing major, and I’ve started my first script. I want you to know that your words have helped me through the darkest periods of my life. I watched your last one with my grandma, when she had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. We didn’t agree on much, but we both loved that movie. We would quote it all the time. It was like a language, or bridge, between us. I tattooed our favorite line after she passed. It’s on my arm. Thank you for that gift. The gift of connection. My only hope is I can one day give that to someone else.”
I don’t even realize I’m crying until the tears fall onto the keyboard. My face is pulled toward the screen, rereading each line.
No one has ever told me that my words have impacted them. I’ve never given them a chance to.
No one has ever told me I’ve inspired them. Because they didn’t even know who I was.
The last line I read over and over, because it reminds me of my mom. She hated the hospital. She hated the fact that she was too weak, in the end, to put on anything but lipstick. I despise this place, she used to say, so movies were her escape. Every time I visited, I brought a new one, a new favorite. We would watch it, and she would hold my hand and say, I can’t wait to watch your movie. I’m going to be there, at the premiere. I promise.
She didn’t live long enough to see me sell my first script.
I didn’t even attend the premiere.
I close my laptop. It’s already worth it , I think. If one person has taken something good from this, then any bad is erased. Elena’s words are like armor around me. This is why I do what I do. This is why I wanted to become a writer in the first place.
The news starts to settle. Less than a week later, Penelope needs to get back to LA, and it’s time for me to go home.
“Thank you for taking me in,” I tell Taryn.
“What are friends for?” she replies, and another previously hollow place feels full and warm.
The paparazzi are gone. They’re already on to the next story.
I walk up to my unit and am about to knock, when the door opens. A six-four man comes walking out. His smile strains as he sees me.
“Luke?” I say, bewildered. It’s nine in the morning. On a Saturday.
“Oh, hey, Elle,” he says, and then he practically runs to the elevator. Penelope is in the doorway. She’s wearing scraps of silk as pajamas, and her hair is messy.
“Oh my god,” I say. “Did you have sex with my contractor?”
Penelope tilts her head. “Well, he’s not really your contractor, he’s your sister’s. And he’s not really your sister’s, because he ended work yesterday. But yes. Yes, I did. Several times.”
I squint. “On my bed?”
“Well—”
“You know what I mean!”
“No,” she says, and my entire being melts in relief. “It was more of a clothes-still-half-on, against-the-wall situation. The first time, at least. Then we were on the floor. And the kitchen counter. And—”
“Do you think they make those exterminator tents, but for Purell? Like, for all over the apartment?”
She laughs as I step inside. I catch her glancing over at me as I put my bags down. “You look good.”
I look at myself in the closest mirror. I look exactly like a person who has spent most of the week oscillating between crying and furiously writing a screenplay.
“ ‘Better’ is maybe a more accurate word,” she says.
I sigh. I do feel better. I show Penelope the email from Elena, and she looks close to tears herself by the time she hands my laptop back.
“You know, I think this can be a good thing,” she says. “After you get past, like, the trauma.”
I give her a look.
“Now you can do the stuff you never could. You can mentor other writers. You can do interviews about your process. You can brag to the members of your high school class on Facebook.”
That makes me laugh.
She gently hits my arm with hers. “You know what I mean.”
I do. Being anonymous has kept me from having to grow. I might have wanted to reveal myself on my own terms, on my own timeline, but now that it’s happened . . . it doesn’t all have to be bad. I know that now.
We spend the day out in the city, going to the places we miss from our college days. We marvel at which stores have closed, which are exactly the same. I take her to some of my new favorites.
“I don’t know how I spent this summer without you,” I tell her, as we’re falling asleep, sharing a bed, the way we did in college, when the other one was going through something.
“Me neither,” she says. “But I’m glad you went outside. I’m glad you stopped being an island.”
“Me too,” I say. And, even though it brought me pain, I mean it.