Chapter 24
BEN AND I WERE SHARING AN UMbrELLA THAT WE’D HAD TO PICK up from Duane Reade after an unexpected downpour pummeled us during our walk home from school.
Hannah was in town. The arrangement of her and me sleeping on the bed and Ben sleeping on the floor had worked out for the first two days, but when she suggested things might be a little less cramped if she stayed with Lucas, I kept my mouth shut and my smile smug.
Along with Zoe, we were all heading back to Grayrock, dodging enormous piles of garbage that lined the street, when Ben spotted a glowing orange sign in a window that read “PSYCHIC.”
“Let’s do it.” Ben tugged on my arm.
“Oh! Fun!” Hannah did an excited little jump. She and Lucas were sharing an umbrella as well, and Lucas didn’t appreciate the jostling, which caused the rain to slide off the umbrella and onto his shoulder.
“Hey! Settle down, Canada!” Lucas yanked the umbrella away from Hannah entirely. She shrieked and grabbed his arm, cuddling for cover.
“No. Ben, no.” I leaned back, away from the psychic, trying to keep him on track. We were going to the movies, and I still wanted to change out of my tights from our last class of the day.
“I’m with Ellie. I don’t like psychics,” Zoe said, walking behind all of us with her head tilted back, letting the rain fall on her face. “Now, find me a witch, and we can have a real conversation.”
“Watch this.” Hannah switched one of her rings around, putting it on her left ring finger. “Lucas, you keep your hands in your pockets, and I’ll bet you all thirty dollars that the psychic thinks we’re married.”
“Yes. I’m in.” Lucas jumped under the eave of the psychic’s door and closed their umbrella.
Ben gave my arm another small pull. “You don’t have to do it, but you’re gonna watch, because now I want that money.”
The door chimed as we opened it, and we stepped into what looked like the waiting room of a doctor’s office.
We all sat stiffly on a long white couch in front of a coffee table.
Ben and I exchanged a glance as a woman appeared from behind a closed door.
She pulled up a seat and sat in front of us.
I looked around the empty, musty room with dying plants and said, “Oh, are we doing this here?”
The psychic’s attention dropped down, sweeping across our bodies. Hannah noticed the psychic note her “wedding ring.” She and I made eye contact, and I could see her attempt to restrain her bubbling excitement.
The psychic turned to Zoe first. “At times, you find yourself doubting decisions you’ve made, which have led you to where you are today. Try not to look back on those crossroads in your life. If you are constantly looking back, you’ll never see where you are.”
Zoe nodded kindly. The psychic moved her attention away, and Zoe looked at me, rolled her eyes, and mouthed, Where’s the witch?
The psychic adjusted herself in her seat, gently touched her temple, and closed her eyes. “I sense there is some type of marriage in this room.”
Hannah’s mouth tightened as she eagerly anticipated the psychic’s next comment. Ben pressed his elbow into the coffee table and covered his mouth with his hand. I could tell he was trying to mask his excitement as well.
“This love will last a lifetime, but with it comes hardships.”
Ben snorted at the most generic and basic piece of wisdom any of us had ever heard.
Zoe tapped into her acting, and tears welled in her eyes. She looked over at Lucas, then at Hannah, and back again. She breathed dramatically. “I knew you’d break her heart eventually, you bastard.”
Ben chuckled again, causing the psychic’s focus to shift to him. She grabbed his hand and closed both of hers over it. His eyes went wide. I could see him trying to hold in his smile.
“This is a recent development.” She nodded back and forth between me and Ben.
“We’re well over the year mark, so . . .” His eyes flipped over to me. I had to look away to stop myself from breaking into a smile and accidentally offending anyone.
“He’s been hittin’ that for a long time.” Zoe gave an affirming nod.
“Zoe . . .” I said under my breath, as everyone else choked back their laughter.
“There’s something significant bound to happen between the two of you.” The psychic kept her eyes closed. “I see sun and palm trees.” She patted Ben on the hand. “You’ll be happy.”
I gave Ben a little nod and a smirk. Los Angeles had been a topic of conversation between us lately, so I was pleased that the psychic was on my side.
It wasn’t that Ben was opposed to moving once we graduated.
It was something he was interested in, but he wavered.
He just wasn’t sure anymore. But I couldn’t shake the image of LA I had cemented inside my heart and head.
Since I was a kid, I had been wanting to know who I could be there.
“We would need a solid reason to go,” Ben had said one Friday night while mixing drinks.
I was sitting at Lifers bar, waiting for his shift to end.
We were nearing graduation, and I had been suggesting that we sublet our apartment and try LA for a couple of months.
At first, he was all in, but then he started auditioning in New York, and casting directors kept calling him back.
He was booking jobs, surprisingly big jobs.
He had already been cast in his first off-Broadway show and was a recurring character in a TV teen drama.
His momentum was building, and I knew he was afraid to kill it.
The worst part was that I understood where he was coming from.
He had a point that was hard for me to argue with.
“I need that thing that knocks it over the line. Like a job, something like that,” Ben said while pulling up a bill and handing it to the person sitting next to me.
“There will be more opportunities in film and TV there. Everything gets developed in LA, so if you want to find your way into the right rooms and meet the right people, that’s where you need to be. Random auditioning isn’t going to do it.” I maintained my argument.
“I don’t know. I think I’m doing okay.” He shrugged, dismissing me. “We’re trying to climb a mountain. We’ve made connections here, and I don’t want to go back down again. You gotta go up.”
“There are more ways than one to get up a mountain,” I debated. I was certain I was right, but had no idea how to correlate the mountain metaphor to our choice of career with any discernible path.
“I don’t know why you’re so dead set on it.”
“It’s hard to explain, and I’ve tried before. I think it’s that I’ve always been restless. It’s just a feeling in my gut, and it’s never gone away, you know?”
“Again, a feeling in your gut is not a solid reason for us to go.” Ben side-eyed me while reaching for a bottle of gin.
“You’re not going to get magically cast in movies just because you’re in LA.
It’s not like the city is going to know you’re there and be like, ‘Oh! Ellie McCain? We’ve been waiting for you!
’ It’s going to take the same hard work that it takes here.
If you’re not willing to put in the work, it doesn’t matter where you are. ” Ben shook his head.
“Ben, I put in the work.” My head flew backward. I was offended.
“No, I know. That’s not what I mean.”
“I’m writing almost every day.” My back stiffened.
“So let’s take one of your scripts and make something. Let’s do it here, because we know people here and we can get it done here. Who do we know in LA?”
Ben and I never fought. Ever. We battled playfully and debated each other all the time, but we never fought. I felt myself shrink. “I don’t know, Ben . . . But I feel like we’re living a lot of your life right now, and not a lot of mine.”
“We’re living our life, Ellie. New York is working. You might need to be a little more realistic.”
I sat back in my seat, at a loss for words, overcome with a feeling I had tried to run from before.
Now I looked over at Ben inside the psychic’s blindingly white foyer-turned-office. Hannah’s energy changed beside me as we all waited to hear Ben’s reaction to the psychic’s reading. The rain was battering the windows, and Ben’s smile twisted.
“Sun and palm trees, huh?” Ben said to the psychic. “I think you’re holding the wrong hand for that one.” He tilted his head toward me. “That’s this pretty girl over here.”
The psychic opened her eyes and stared right through me into the back of my head. “No. It’s not her. She doesn’t belong in the sun.”
I nodded, widening my eyes even more, feeling unnerved. “Cool. Good to know. Thank you. Should we get going?” I stood and straightened my pants.
Hannah looked at me, concerned. “Sure. But you don’t want to—”
“Nope,” I said curtly.
Ben paid the psychic, and we all walked out. I regretted making things uncomfortable, and my friends could sense the tension. Lucas, Hannah, and Zoe walked ahead of Ben and me, all huddled under one umbrella.
“So . . . New York it is, since you don’t belong in the sun?” Ben fastened his lips together, holding back his teasing smile. I shoved him playfully, but he grabbed my waist and dropped the umbrella, soaking us. “Look at how beautiful you are in the rain.”
I smiled as he bent down to kiss me in the storm.
Later that night, I woke up at one in the morning to Ben, wearing pajama pants, digging through our fridge. He was dimly lit by the Grayrock sign through our terrible curtains. He pulled out corn on the cob leftovers and bit into the cob one-handed, like it was an apple.
“Seriously?” I mumbled from my side of the bed. “Cold corn on the cob? That’s your decision?”
Ben turned his head to me, with a cheeky smile. “Have you ever had cold corn on the cob? Delicious.” He took another bite. “Why are you awake right now?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the movie. Maybe the psychic. Maybe the corn. You pick.” I sat up and rested against the headboard.
“What are you thinking? What’s freaking you out?” Ben brought his corn with him to sit at the edge of our bed and hold the tops of my feet.
“I don’t know.” I adjusted my pillow.
“You don’t know what you’re thinking, or you don’t know what’s freaking you out?” Ben took another crunch.
I lifted one knee, hugging it to my body, then rested the side of my face on my knee. I looked at the vertical Grayrock sign through the crack between our curtains. “I don’t know . . .”
Ben stopped eating, stretched his body so he could reach the non-kitchen area, and put the corn down. He scooted up the bed and positioned himself in the exact way I was positioned, with his face on his knee, only he was looking at me. “It’s you and me, Ellie.”
“Yeah.” I matched the softness in his voice. My eyes lifted over his head to focus on Grayrock’s glowing red R.
“I’ll go,” he said quietly.
“What?” My eyes fell back down to Ben. He was looking at me intently, searching for something, but I wasn’t sure what.
“To LA. Once school is done. We’ll go.” Ben lifted his head, and I did the same, mirroring him, perfectly in sync with each other as we always had been.
“Ben, it’s okay.” I lifted my hand and gently stroked his cheek with my thumb. “You don’t have to say that. You’ve got a lot going on right now. If it didn’t work for you there, you’d always blame me, and you’d always wonder, What if ?”
Ben pulled me toward him, and we fell into each other like converging streams into a waterfall.
He lifted my arms, and I left them in the air as he took off my tank top, never taking his eyes off mine.
My hair cascaded back down over my body, and he kissed my collarbone, prickling my skin with goose bumps.
I closed my eyes and felt every touch, every kiss, every movement as if I needed to remember it.
Once Ben had fallen asleep, I brought my computer onto my lap and googled flights to Los Angeles, wondering, What if ?