Chapter Thirteen
Our first stop is, laughably, a friend of a friend of Dad’s who is kindly letting me take some shots of James at the grand piano she uses to teach little kids lessons. She points us in the direction of the music room and says she’ll be in the kitchen if we need her for anything.
A fan favorite trope from the books is William’s tortured musician personality, and James is—per usual—living up to the tortured bit.
He looks distinctly uncomfortable when I direct him to sit on the stool as I simultaneously pull up a video on how to fake-play the piano and make it believable.
“We just need it to look like you know what you’re doing,” I say, pointing the screen at him when the video loads. “It doesn’t look too hard. I think it’s mostly curved fingers and keeping a straight back.”
I can’t read his expression as he flicks his eyes from the video to me, but it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of sardonic, I’m sure of it.
“You just have to pretend,” I say, laughing. “We’re good at that, remember? I swear this is the only solo shot I have planned for you for the entire day, okay? The rest we suffer together.”
The woman on the screen is saying something about elbows when James asks, “What’s your favorite song?”
I feel my mouth tilt upward.
“Why? Planning to start a podcast?”
James raises his eyebrows at me, waiting for an answer.
I sigh. “We only have twenty minutes allotted for this part, you know,” I tell him. “It’s going to take us thirty to get to the next stop and—”
“Juniper,” he interrupts. “Tell me.”
He sniffed out my reluctance like a bloodhound.
“You’ll laugh,” I say.
“I won’t.”
“You will, ” I say. “Everyone does.”
James takes my hand in his as the video fades to a black screen. Because he’s sitting and I’m standing,
“ Fine. It’s ‘Holding Out for a Hero.’?”
James blinks. “What’s wrong with Bonnie Tyler? That’s a great song.”
The ceiling is impeccably clean in this house despite its height. Not a cobweb in sight. I wish the kind piano teacher would return and spare me the shaming I know is coming.
Because there is publicly admitting how much you love the Meadow books, and then there’s this.
“It’s not the Bonnie Tyler version,” I mutter.
James looks down at the piano keys like they’ll give him an answer, his eyes scanning back and forth and his brow furrowed until…Ah. Yep. He’s got it.
He grins evilly at me, a devious look I haven’t seen until now that I can only assume is presenting itself because of our just one day agreement.
“C minor?” James asks. “Should I put it in C minor?”
“ Shrek Two was a masterpiece, ” I say defensively. “And anyone who says otherwise is just lying to themselves.”
James—it turns out—can not only play the piano very well, but also play just about anything by ear if he knows it. And he does know this particular version of the song, which I point out to him numerous times in between the clicks of the camera shutter.
“Stop laughing,” I tell him. “You’re supposed to look tormented.”
“I am tormented,” he retorts, still chuckling. “I’m playing Shrek Two on a gorgeous Yamaha that has definitely heard its fair share of Debussy.”
I roll my eyes before focusing on the camera screen again.
“Sorry for not having elevated tastes like Arabella,” I say. “I like what I like.”
“I think Arabella liking classical music was a way to connect her to William,” James says.
He’s still playing the piano while he talks, which seems physically impossible to me, a person who can barely walk and carry a mug simultaneously.
“They had to have more binding them together than just chemistry or scent,” he continues thoughtfully.
“There had to be a base to build upon. It’s just good character development, really.
Say what you want about the books, but Jennifer Sullivan knew what she was doing when it came to showing the infinite coincidences that have to fall into place to bring two people together. ”
“Coincidences?” I ask, lowering the camera. “You think that’s what it is?”
James finishes the song with a very unnecessary flourish.
He’s looking again.
“What else would you call it?”
I shrug, embarrassed, but I answer truthfully because it’s just the one day and what do I have to lose? What happens in the one day stays in the one day, surely, like Vegas. A liminal place in between what is pretend and what is real.
“Magic?” I ask more than say.
“Same thing,” James says. “Just a different name.”
“So you would call somebody in the wrong place at the wrong time magical rather than just a coincidence?” I ask.
“Bad magic, maybe,” he says, “but magic all the same. Or providence. Or fate. You get the idea.”
“So what was it when Nyx got sick and I had to stand in for their role of Juliet?” I ask. “Good magic or bad?”
I start putting my camera away, and James rises from the piano bench.
“That’s the thing,” he says. “Sometimes it’s both.
Bad for Nyx, good for us. And who knows?
Maybe it turned out to be good for Nyx in some way down the road.
Maybe their crush nursed them back to health and they ended up falling in love because of it.
Or maybe they needed to not be at the school for some other reason that we’ll never know because coincidence took care of it for them. ”
Even with the agreement of it being one day, I’m still surprised at how the photo shoots of the day feel like the intruders on our conversations rather than the other way around.
This is supposed to be a day of work, a day of cranking out the last burst of social media obligations so that there’s plenty of material to take us up to the follower count deadline, but instead it feels like something else.
When I point this out to James just after our next stop—the plant nursery Leonora referred us to whose owner lets us take an absurd number of photos with wild mountain flowers so we can have more Meadow aesthetic filler posts—he looks over at me with a raised eyebrow.
“You’re aware that the something else feeling is because this is basically a date, right?”
“It’s not,” I argue on instinct.
Dates, historically, have been something I could take or leave. (Mostly leave, if I’m being honest.) But in this context, in the context of James Freakin’ Neely, it feels more like a gift than an obligation.
“Even if it is,” I amend, “it’s only for today, so what do you call a single date with no hope of dating again in the future?”
“I call it a breach of contract,” James says. “Because we’re supposed to be pretending that today stretches into perpetuity. That’s the conceit.”
I tell myself that I can be brave in spurts. That I don’t have to be brave all day on repeat, but if I can snag moments here and there, I might have a clearer picture of James. And the clearer the picture, the less I’ll have to wonder when this is over, when the day is done.
“Is that what you did with Lily?” I ask. “Was it pretend?”
The GPS on the car screen says we’re only fifteen minutes away from our next destination—a little rugged stretch of lake “beach”—and James takes so long to answer, I worry we’ll arrive without him saying a word.
His hands tighten on the steering wheel, loosen, then tighten again.
“It was pretend,” he says carefully. “Until it wasn’t. For me, it wasn’t. Not in the end.”
An irrational bolt of jealousy flashes through my veins, but I push it back.
“She’s beautiful,” I say, because it’s true. “And she seems nice in her interviews. Down to earth and all that.”
“She’s nice,” James confirms. “And beautiful. Smart, too.” His fingers loosen on the wheel, and he takes one hand off to set it on the console between us.
“There’s a reason she’s still popular and didn’t go the way of so many child stars who can’t make it in Hollywood as adults.
She’s resilient in a way I don’t think I’ll ever be. ”
I decide it’s nice, actually, the way he talks about an ex. Well, a sort of ex. As weird as it is to hear the attributes of someone I’ve only ever seen on a screen, he talks about her like she’s a person, not the root of his villain origin story the way some guys do.
“So why did it have to be pretend?” I ask. “If you liked her so much.”
“It was pretend from the start. It was for publicity, all arranged under the table by our respective managements to promote the movie and get us better salaries.” He cuts his eyes to me. “Not so dissimilar from what we’ve done.”
“Yeah, except I’m not Lily Newman-Smith, ” I feel the need to point out.
James is back to looking at the road.
“She’s not, either, really. Newman-Smith isn’t even her real last name. Neither is Lily, or it wasn’t until she had it legally changed. It’s all pretend. All of it. Hollywood is masks all the way down in a way I’ve never seen before.”
“Is that why it didn’t work out between you two?” I ask. “Too hard to find the real people beneath?”
James shrugs.
“I’m sure it had something to do with it, but it was more about Lily not being interested in me outside of friendship.” He says it matter-of-factly, like it doesn’t cause him pain to say it, but there’s something about his profile that makes me wonder if that’s a mask, too. “It’s for the best.”
He hesitates, like maybe he is deciding whether or not to be brave, too.
“It hurt,” he admits, and his voice is quieter. “I thought…Well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. Luke seems to believe she led me on, but I think she was just fulfilling her role, playing her part. I can’t fault her for that when it’s what we agreed to in the first place.”
Part of me wishes Serena was here to help me make a list, to organize my head and my rambling thoughts that ping from social media posts to James to the future to Lily-whatever-her-name-is-Smith, and—
My phone screen lights up with a notification. I don’t know what I say or what expression I make, but I must act some sort of way, because James glances at me again and says, “What is it?”
My hair bun protests when I drop my head back against the rest with a groan.