Chapter 9
BEN AND I STOPPED AT TRADER JOE’S ON OUR WAY HOME FROM school, and he grabbed the ingredients to make a creamy Tuscan chicken dinner from our electric skillet, which sat near the end of our beds. I was to make the salad.
Ben knew who I was and who I wanted to be. He knew what made me happy. He knew when I was sad before I did. He knew what made me tick, because it made him tick, too. Our friendship came as naturally and as comfortably as the rising sun.
I came out of the hot shower and pulled on my striped pajama bottoms and an old swim club tank top. Ben was standing over our skillet in a thin gray T-shirt that draped over his muscular build, and his pajama pants hung. His dark-blond hair had grown out a bit and waved into a mess.
“It smells so good!” I breathed in deeply.
“Can you pull out the table?”
I giggled as I took off the lamp that sat on our nightstand.
I cleared our schoolbooks, plays, and notes, my lucky golf ball, my jewelry, and his phone.
I then dragged the nightstand toward the foot of our beds and pulled out a tealight from the drawer.
I lit the candle and put it in the center of the tiny, square, makeshift table.
“Oh shit. We’re cute.” Ben looked at my setup while plating the chicken.
I knelt on the floor as Ben placed our dinner down on the table, then sat cross-legged across from me. My first bite almost knocked me over. It was creamy and shockingly delicious, considering it was made in our non-kitchen and cooked in an electric skillet.
“Ben,” I said with my mouth full, looking him dead in the eyes. “Yum.”
He chuckled softly and took a bite for himself.
“Have you decided if you’re going to ask Justin to meet his agent, or, like .
. . give them your résumé or something?” Ben picked our conversation right back up from earlier in the day, after I told him my boss’s LA agents were coming into town to discuss a strategy to get Justin’s production company more press and better scripts.
“I’m worried it would look bad. I’m just an intern.”
“What’s the worst that could happen, he says no?”
“I’m pretty sure the worst that could happen is looking like an asshole,” I retorted.
But I considered Ben’s argument. Justin was a dick, but we were close in age, and he knew I was trying to be an actor, too.
I didn’t feel like an actor in Vancouver, to the point where I had become embarrassed to admit that’s what I wanted for my life.
There were no real, meaningful credits to my name, and I constantly felt like an imposter when I told people that’s what I was, because I wasn’t.
I was a student. I was a fraud. In Vancouver, I wasn’t real. In New York, I was.
“Stop worrying what people think about you,” Ben said with his mouth full. “You’re not asking for a part or anything. You’re asking for an introduction to his agent, and for him to see you as something other than an intern. Stop being so Canadian and be bold.”
“Oh, I’m Ben. I walk into a room like an American. I’m beautiful and take up space. Make way, world!” I pitched my voice up and rolled my eyes to the ceiling. Ben dropped his fork and leveled his glare at me.
“I walk in the room like an American? What does that mean?” His look was a mix of amusement and annoyance.
“Like you know you belong there.” I lifted my finger and booped him on the nose. I surged to my feet, pressed my hands into my pajama bottoms, straightening them, then charged out the front door, leaving Ben on the floor at our tiny table.
Coming back into the room, I flung the front door open with so much bravado that it slammed into the wall, knocking down our framed Fight Club movie poster.
“Oh no.” I broke character and lifted my hands to my mouth.
“Great demonstration. A-plus,” Ben said sarcastically while popping another forkful into his mouth.
“Sorry,” I said, picking up the fallen frame and leaning it against the wall.
“Still so Canadian.” He wagged his fork, making fun of my instant apology. “Are you sorry?” he mocked.
“Fine, I’m not.” I decided with a confident nod, then dug back into my salad.
“You know, this whole apartment looks like you. Do you think I want twinkly lights over my bed? You sleep with a comforter that has a goldfish swimming inside a martini glass. And I can’t escape that shit because we live in the world’s smallest studio that you found.
That frame cost me eighty bucks. It’s an original, studio-printed poster, and it was the only thing I put up on the wall that was mine.
” Ben looked up at me again and pressed his lips together. “Don’t you think you should be sorry?”
“ . . . No?” My voice wavered, and my face twisted with discomfort.
“That sucks, Ellie.” Ben held firm, and I could swear I saw his heart break.
This is a test. He’s testing me, right?
Ben pushed his plate away and stood. “I’m not that hungry anymore. Just go ahead and finish without me.” He walked over to his poster to hang it back on the wall.
He was torturing me. This was one of the seven layers of hell, where I’d meet my maker and they’d say, “But you didn’t say you were sorry.
” I’d spend an eternity living in shame and guilt as I watched that poster drop on an everlasting loop.
Each crack in the glass would crack my soul, and I’d forever relive that time I saw the light leave Ben’s eyes and I did nothing to revive him.
“Ben . . .” I began, but Ben cut me off as he spun back around to face me.
“Pussy.” Ben’s grin stretched across his face.
I deadened my expression. “Really? Pussy? Is that necessary?”
Ben walked out of the apartment, then swung the door open again just as vigorously as I had, crashing the poster to the ground once more, with a bounce to his step.
I shook my head and returned to my food. “You’re a doofus.”
“A doofus?” Ben laughed.
“Yes, a doofus. Deal with it.”
Ben chuckled as he sat back down. “So, I’ve been thinking about Los Angeles.”
Welcome to the club, buddy.
“What are your thoughts about making our way out there once we’re done with school? I know we’re establishing our network here, but then there’s more opportunity there. We’d have to start all over if we left. I don’t know.”
I felt my heart jump up into my throat, then shoved it back down with another forkful of food. Moving to Los Angeles had been my goal since I was fourteen. Did Ben really want to go with me one day?
“First off, we’re only in our first year. We’ve got loads of time.” I tried to temper my expectations. “Secondly, what’s with all this ‘we’ business?”
Ben smacked my fork with his. “Have you thought about it? Because I’m not going if you don’t. I’m not taking a chance with another roommate. You’re locked in, kid.”
“You’re asking me if I’ve thought about moving to LA? Hmm, yes. Every day of my life since I was in utero, and I have the diaries to prove it,” I said, nodding at a box under my bed between chews of food and gulps of wine.
“OoooOOOoo! You have diaries?! Here?! What’s in your diaries?” Ben asked enthusiastically.
“There is a lot of Rory. Like, it’s disturbing.” I had scanned my diaries in the weeks leading up to my move, and Rory Campbell had managed to work his way into almost every entry since I was twelve, like a goddamn psychopath.
Ben snorted. “Do you still diary?”
“Yes, I still diary.” I smiled, looking down at my food.
“Have I made an appearance in said diary?” Ben’s smile was wicked as he scraped up sauce with his fork.
“Here and there.” I smirked.
“Here and there and everywhere?”
“Alright, that’s enough of that.”
“I wanna read!” Ben whined and dropped his fork with a clang.
“You want to read my diaries?” I cackled. “You’re an idiot. Yeah, okay. Sure there, bud. Let’s go read my diaries,” I said mockingly.
“Oh, come on. How bad can it be?” He poured himself another glass of wine.
“Oh, it can be pretty bad, Ben.” I held out my glass for a top-up as well.
“I’m reading them,” he teased as he filled my glass, his eyes dancing all over mine.
“No, you’re not.” I accepted his staring contest and dug in deep, furrowing my brow.
“Yes, I am.” He imitated my faux-serious expression.
“No. You’re not.”
“Yes. I am.” He was so confident it killed me.
“No, Ben. You’re not.”
An hour later, Ben was five diaries deep. He sat on the edge of his bed and was howling, clutching his chest every other page. A surprising shock wave of thrill shot up my spine every time he looked at me, appalled, bewildered, or in awe at the ridiculousness laid bare in my diaries.
After reading one entry, Ben looked over at the bottom of my bed, where all our bedside table items had been discarded. “Interesting . . .” I could tell he was slightly alarmed but still eager for more.
“What?” I threw my head back onto my martini fish pillow.
Ben stretched over my bed to pick up my lucky golf ball. “Is this the ball you swiped from the Long Drive competition?”
“I don’t want to say yes, but yes?” I pinched my face together and closed my eyes.
“Hmm,” he hummed curiously and continued reading. I fiddled with my rose gold bracelet nervously. After a few minutes of chuckling through his nose, he eventually tossed his head back with tightly shut eyes and started snorting, attempting to prevent himself from letting out a bigger laugh.
I had to ask. “What now?”
“You’re so mad at your sister because she got a Christmas present from Blair, and you got nothing from Rory. You eviscerate her.”
“She didn’t even like Blair! It still makes me mad.” I pretended to be angry.
“You wrote a poem about cupcake earmuffs. You said it was an affront, then called her a cunt.”
“I DID?!” I roared, then pulled my pillow out from under my head and threw it over my face.
“I like reading your stuff, Ellie. You’re good at this. Your short stories are good, too. Why didn’t you go for Bronwyn’s writing program?”
“Well, loads of reasons,” I scoffed. “First, I’m an actor. But also, the writing program is four years.”
Ben nodded absent-mindedly, his eyes still on the page. “You’re a writer, too, you know. Maybe we could write together sometime. Like, a play or something.” Ben put the diary down. “Didn’t you write one of your monologues for your audition? I don’t think anyone else did that.”
“Who knows,” I sighed. “But yeah, I was a horny Humpty Dumpty. It was dumb.”
Ben’s smile was wide. “Must not have been that dumb. It got you here.”
“I’ve never let anyone read my stuff before, not on purpose. Hannah and Kara have snooped once or twice, but I don’t share this side of myself with people,” I admitted.
Our eyes connected, and after a beat, he picked the diary back up. “Thank you for trusting me.”
“There’s a whole world inside my head that now only you know.”
Ben’s eyes flicked back up to mine from over the diary, and he let out a long, measured exhale. “I wish I knew you when you were a kid.” He tapped the diary’s cover with his finger. “I wish I knew you like this.”
“Yeah, but you know me like this.” I smiled softly.
“You’re right. This Ellie is a little nutbar. My Ellie is better.”
“Your Ellie has leveled the fuck out.” I took a sip of my wine.
“Tell that to the magician in my bathtub,” Ben quipped, and I spat out my wine into my glass. “Do you want to go golfing together sometime soon?” Ben asked, surprising me.
“Oh man.” Another sigh escaped me. “I don’t know.”
“Why? I’m pretty good, and I want to see you play. I want to know how you’re going to hit the ball in front of me. Rory made you nervous. Do I?” Ben asked, and my stomach turned over. “The way you talk about him in here . . . It’s pretty wild. It all feels really real, and you were just a kid.”
“I have big feelings,” I admitted.
“No kidding,” Ben said quietly. “Do you still love him?” He brought his eyes back to my diary.
My heart fell through my chest. I could answer that question with anyone and everyone, but I didn’t know how I felt about Ben being the one to ask it.
“Never mind. Don’t answer that.” Ben swallowed, clearly reading my mind. “Anyway, I want to go golfing with you. We can trade off. I can teach you how to hit a baseball. Or we should go to a game.”
Ben moved our nightstand back between the heads of our two beds, placed the lamp in the center, and turned it on. He then climbed into his bed and leaned against the headboard, cracking open the next diary in my collection.
“I’ve been to a baseball game before.”
“Yeah, but you’ve never been with me.” Ben looked down at my diary, and his eyes went wide. He closed them again, tipped his head back, and tightened his mouth, and his shoulders shook.
“Do I even want to know?” My voice dropped.
He turned the open diary around to show me what he was looking at. It was an enlarged photo taped to the back of a page, taking up the entire space.
“Elijah Wood as Frodo?” Ben wheezed, and tears sprang from his eyes.
“I AM NOT ASHAMED OF THIS!”
Ben shook his head and looked back down at the diary, flipping to another page. “I love this so much.” He let out a massive happy sigh before asking, “So, why did you stop playing golf ?” His question was seemingly innocuous.
“I’m sure you’ll get to that part. Give yourself a couple more diaries.” I exhaled, unsure if I wanted to get into it. “How did it feel when you stopped playing baseball?”
Ben had told me about the shoulder injury that sent him into early retirement on our way to Connecticut when Zoe’s family opened their house up to us for Thanksgiving.
“It felt like I didn’t know who I was anymore, and I didn’t know if I liked myself without it. What did I have to offer without baseball, you know? I wished for things to be different for so long even though I knew I could never get it back. I still wished.”
“I’m a dreamer, too. I wish for the impossible all the time.”
Ben leaned his head against his bed’s headboard. “I lost a lot of myself, but then I found acting. Then I found Bronwyn . . . And then I found you.” Ben held my eyes with his own, and my heart thunked. Just . . . thunk.
I let out a heavy exhale before saying, “I didn’t stop playing golf. I went to the driving range all the time, just a public one. But I stopped going to Juniper when I was sixteen.”