Chapter 14
Luke and I are at the kitchen table again on Thursday afternoon, doing homework.
We spend the first thirty minutes looking through photos I snuck at school today, so he can understand the layout and what
all the classrooms look like. Next we scroll through a bunch of people’s social media profiles so he can understand their
vibe. I avoid going to Ben’s or Chelsea’s profiles, though. Both are a little too loaded.
After we finish and move on to homework, I expect him to mess around on his phone, but he brought a graphic novel and a sketchbook,
and sits quietly next to me, without interrupting me or standing to move around or wildly bouncing his knees. He’s focused
for a good twenty minutes. I sit back in my chair, considering him.
“What?” he asks, without taking his eyes off his book.
“You’re much calmer than you used to be.”
He looks up at me. He’s wearing one of those wide-brimmed baseball hats that are more popular in California than they are
on the East Coast. The inside brim is bright red, and the reflection of it makes his cheeks and the bridge of his nose look
sun-kissed.
“Vyvanse. Turns out I have ADHD.” He taps his temple. “Helps keep the thoughts inside my head.”
I nod, thinking back to younger Luke, goofing off, unable to keep his limbs still. “That makes a lot of sense.”
Now I’m the one who can’t focus. I brush my fingers back and forth along the keyboard of my laptop and stare off into space.
He must be picking up on my restlessness, because he says, “It’s funny. I’ve been to your house a couple of times now and
I’ve only ever really seen the kitchen.”
“It’s nothing special. But I can give you the grand tour if you want.”
“I do want,” he says. “I’m curious.”
Thisbe follows along at our heels as I show him the den and its famous couch, the formal living room we never use, then head
upstairs. I open Mom’s bedroom a crack to show him—I feel like a trespasser going in there, even when it’s just me—followed
by Nicky’s, and finally, my room.
I sit on the edge of my bed as he looks around. He’s so tall that the space feels almost claustrophobic with him in it. I
am so glad I made my bed this morning and don’t have random pairs of cast-off pajamas or underwear on the floor.
He takes his time walking around, looking at the thrifted items and art pieces I have hanging on my walls, checking out the
small duck-footed lamp on my bedside table, brushing his fingers against the colorful vintage quilt at the end of my bed.
Evie loves my room. She’s told me several times that she wishes I would dress myself the way I’ve decorated it.
“What, draped in quilts?”
“No. Unique, stylish, funny. Cool as hell.”
“I only like to be those things in private,” I joked to her.
Luke stops at a Playbill cover for a Jeanine Tesori musical I put up on the wall with a colorful pushpin. “Do you get into New York a lot?”
“Not often. But I love it. I’d love to go to college there.”
He nods thoughtfully as he moves to my bookshelf. “I could see you there.” He starts running his finger over the spines of
my books. “Uta Hagen? Stanislavski? I thought you were done acting.”
I’d forgotten those were there. If I’d remembered, I might have tried to distract him so he didn’t notice them. He’s one of
the only people who might understand what it means that I have them, that they’re so clearly dog-eared and well-read.
“I am done.”
He pulls out Respect for Acting and starts flipping through it. I know he’s probably seeing my highlights and notes in the margins.
“Those are . . . old,” I lie.
“I meant what I said before. You were always the most talented of all of us. I believed it then and I still believe it now.”
Even though I don’t fully buy it, the compliment feels just as good as the first time. “Thank you. That’s nice of you to say.”
“It’s not nice, it’s true.” He flips the book shut and returns it to its place on my shelf. “Do you ever think about getting
back into it? Acting?”
“Sometimes . . . sometimes I think about it.”
It’s the first time I’ve admitted this out loud. Hell, it’s the first time I’ve admitted it to myself. And the world doesn’t
crash down around us; I don’t throw up. Nothing changes, no one jumps out of the woodwork to tell me it’s the stupidest thing
I’ve ever said, that someone as untalented as me could never dream of working in the industry again. “But then I feel silly
about it. And it got pretty rough there toward the end. I feel like I’m one of those people who can’t shake an abusive relationship.”
“You wouldn’t have to work with someone like Brett ever again. He couldn’t get away with half the shit he did on set today.
There are more demands you can make, space you can take up now that you’re older. God, he was such a bully. I still can’t
figure out why he chose you as his punching bag.”
At the mention of Brett, I feel physically ill. I grab a pillow and hug it to my chest.
“What do you mean?” I ask Luke carefully. I watch his face, waiting to see if all this time, he knew about the “meetings”
I had with Brett, which weren’t meetings as much as they were verbal lashings, where he would take me to task on everything
from my performance down to the minutiae of my appearance.
He shrugs. “Just that he was an asshole to you on set, especially the last season. He never let you have any retakes. It was
weird.”
So he doesn’t know the full scale of it. In a way it’s comforting that he didn’t know. I consider telling him about it now. But even imagining the conversation exhausts me. It would be an emotional hemorrhage, a bleed-out, rather than a cleansing. And who needs that?
“I was an easy target, I guess,” I joke.
“No. Don’t say that. It was probably that you were the youngest principal character, and a girl. The perfect punching bag
for a big man.”
“Whatever the case, I just don’t know if I can ever go back there. To acting,” I say, moving the conversation away from Brett.
“I’d have to absorb CeCe Lafayette back into my identity. I’d have to have that out in the open. It would completely mess
up the life I’ve built.”
“How so?” Luke asks, as if the answer isn’t staring both of us in the face. And I guess for him, it isn’t.
“Well, Evie, for one,” I say. “I have no idea how she’d react, but I don’t think it would be good.”
“I don’t know. She seems cool. I bet she’d get why you did it.”
“No. I don’t think so,” I say. “Plus, everyone at school would freak out.”
“Who cares? You’re done in, what, like six months?”
“I like who I am now. I don’t want to give that up.”
“Owning the past doesn’t mean you have to give anything up.” He motions around the room. “You can still be whatever version
of yourself you want to be.”
I’m getting more and more annoyed. Sure, if I could snap my fingers, wash away everything that happened, maybe I’d be going to auditions in New York over the weekend, taking acting classes, doing the whole thing.
I can see it so clearly. The rehearsals that run late but are somehow still energizing, the obsessive character research, the moment when someone calls “quiet on set” and the edges of your very sense of self fade away.
But that isn’t me anymore. What lives in the past is too painful. It’s like the ten-million-year-old sarcophagus that archaeologists
uncover and announce they’re going to open at a set date, and everyone online is like, no, no, no, don’t do that, you’ll get
cursed with a thousand years of pain and misery. I have no interest in uncovering it, dusting it off, or inspecting it.
And the truth of the matter is, the last time I decided to go after what I wanted, the last time I “followed my dreams,” it
broke both my heart and my family.
“Why are you pushing me toward something you yourself said you wanted to take a break from?”
“Because it never lit me on fire the way it did for you,” Luke says. “Even as a kid, it was obvious.”
“Maybe my priorities have changed. My life now is good. Solid. I have people who love me.”
“You’ve always had people who’ve loved you,” Luke says.
“Please,” I say, thumbing the zipper of the throw pillow in my lap. “Just drop it.”
He holds up his hands. “You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”