Without another word, Graham brushed past Harry and out the door of the trailer, breathing in the heavy air before hurrying down the steps, where a PA with a headset and a clipboard was waiting to escort him the twelve feet it took to walk to his mark, as if he might get lost along the way. Graham was used to this by now; sometimes you were treated like a god, and other times, like a four-year-old.
They’d already rehearsed earlier, and now the director greeted him with a few last-minute notes. They were shooting out of order, so today’s scene was actually one that would come near the end of the film, when his character finally broke out of his haze and realized what had been in front of him all along. Graham looked up as that very someone approached, dressed in an absurdly short jean skirt and a red bikini top.
“Hey,” Olivia said with a little smirk. Her long blond hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail that had probably taken the hair people hours to make so perfectly casual, and her makeup was applied in such a way as to make it look like she wore none at all. “I heard you’ve been enjoying the town.”
“Just checking out the local cuisine,” he said, trying to keep the edge out of his voice. Olivia was undeniably gorgeous, but something about her grated on Graham. She’d been in the Hollywood machine for years now—she’d started her career as a precocious kid on a popular medical drama—and the truth was, it showed. He first met her a couple of years ago at a party for one of her films, and when they’d been introduced, she’d barely looked at him, only tossed a haughty glance his way as she lit her cigarette before moving on to someone far more famous. That was before the first Top Hat movie had come out, and from the way she acted around him now, he guessed she probably didn’t remember that particular night. But then, from what he’d heard about Olivia, she didn’t remember a lot of nights.
The main street of town had been completely blocked off for filming. At the opposite end of the road, Graham could make out the ice-cream shop, and he wondered if Ellie was there now. Along the sides of the street, crowded behind metal gates, people leaned in with their cameras ready, taking photos and videos as a few big-shouldered security guards paced in front of them.
Graham wiggled his fingers and cleared his throat. He enjoyed shooting on location—studio lighting being no match for the sun—but he felt edgy today in front of an audience. When he first started acting, he’d been unsettled to discover that the filming so often happened out of order, and this was exactly why: it seemed impossible to work up to the big kiss when none of the preceding moments had been explored yet. It just wasn’t the way things worked in real life, and he felt like he could use a bit more of a drumroll.
Still, he knew most guys his age would give anything to kiss Olivia Brooks, and here he was being paid—and nicely—to do it. At the moment, she was discussing something with the assistant director on the other end of the set, and Graham hopped up and down a few times, trying to get his head in the right place as he waited. The wardrobe supervisor ran over and held out a hand, but it took him a second to realize she was waiting for him to take off his shirt. As he peeled it over his head, the crowd let out a high-pitched cheer, and Graham couldn’t help laughing, even as someone else trotted over with a comb to tease his hair back into place. He scanned the crowd once again, hoping that Ellie wasn’t there watching, though he suspected this would be the last place he’d find her.
When it was finally time to start, Graham took a long breath. He was supposed to go running down the street, hook Olivia around the waist, and then half pick her up as they kissed. It was, to be honest, a bit more acrobatic than Graham thought was realistic, and when they’d practiced it, it hadn’t gone particularly well. He wasn’t bad at scooping her up, but the momentum of the whole thing and the way that they spun often meant he missed her when he went for the kiss, and twice he’d gotten her neck instead.
“This isn’t Twilight,” she’d snapped.
Now he was poised to run, and the moment the director called “Action,” he was moving fast down the street. He’d been a center forward on his soccer team before he stopped going to school, and this part was fun for him, the sea air in his lungs, his muscles straining, his flip-flops slapping at the pavement. A blue car with a stunt driver inside pulled out from the curb and Graham did a little half hop to avoid it, but as he moved sideways, the strap of his flip-flop broke, and he ended up tripping over it.
The director yelled “Cut” and the cameramen poked their heads out from behind the huge black boxes. As the stunt man backed the car into the start spot again and Olivia sighed from down the street, an assistant from the costume department ran out with a spare sandal, which Graham tugged onto his foot. He wondered how many they had back there; it would be interesting to know what the flip-flop budget was for a movie like this.
On the second take, he made it all the way down to Olivia, and he even managed to execute the kiss perfectly, but when he looked up again, the director was frowning.
“That felt like… nothing,” he said. “At best, that’ll get a yawn out of the audience. Let’s aim a little higher, shall we?”
Graham glanced over at the crowd, wondering if he should be embarrassed at this affront to his kissing skills. On the next try, he thought he’d done better, but was met with similar criticism.
“Boring,” the director said. “Could we create a little more chemistry?”
Graham gritted his teeth. The guy might be brilliant, but he had an annoying habit of constantly saying “we” when he meant “you,” and Graham was pretty sure chemistry wasn’t something you could just create anyway; it was either there or it wasn’t, and with Olivia, it simply wasn’t. Yet somehow, even though there were two people involved in this kiss, Graham was the only one getting a lecture. Still, he nodded gamely, and set himself up to try again.
This time was apparently no better.
As he stood there listening to Mick talk to him about passion and beauty and the true meaning of love, his eyes wandered past the cameras and the crowds and the security guards, to where a girl with red hair was cutting across the town green.
“We have to make them believe it,” Mick was saying, and he reached out and thumped Graham on the chest. “We have to make them feel it here.”
“Uh, can you hold on just a minute?” Graham asked, taking a few steps backward. “I just need a short break…”
“Yes,” Mick said. “Good. Exactly. Let’s give this a bit of a think, and when you come back, I want you to be filled with passion. Got it?”
Graham nodded, his eyes still on Ellie. “Got it.”
He started out walking as casually as he could manage, but as soon as he was past the security barrier, he picked up a run. He was aware of the many pairs of eyes on his back as he jogged through the square of green grass at the center of town, but he couldn’t make himself care.
She was walking fast now, her eyes deliberately forward. She wore a jean skirt not unlike Olivia’s, only longer, with a plain black tank top, and her red hair was tied back in a loose ponytail. As he approached, he could see the sprinkling of freckles on her arms and legs, the skin beneath them pale in the morning light.
“Ellie,” he said when he was a few feet away, the word coming out in a puff of air. He paused to catch his breath as she turned around, looking unsurprised to find him there. Her eyes darted over to the film set, about a hundred yards behind them, and she took a few steps to her left, moving around the side of a gazebo. Graham hesitated only a moment before following her.
“Hi,” he said, his heart still beating fast. “How are you?”
She smiled. “Did you go for a swim?”
He shook his head, confused, and then realized he was wearing nothing but swim trunks. “No,” he said, suddenly self-conscious. “I’m in costume. We’re shooting a scene over there.”
Ellie nodded. “So what are you doing over here?”
“I wanted to say hello.”
She smiled. “Good morning.”
“Howdy,” he
said with a grin. Her eyes were very green, and he felt suddenly and uncharacteristically flustered as they landed on him. “Are you on your way to work?”
She nodded.
“What are you doing later?”
“Why, are you going to ask me to dinner at the Lobster Pot?”
Graham started to answer and then realized she was kidding. “I was just hoping maybe I’d run into you.”
She smiled. “Well, that’s the nice thing about small towns.”
Graham was about to respond when she turned and began to walk away, making her way up the green with surprising speed. He couldn’t help but be stunned by the quickness of it all, and there was nothing for him to do but watch her go, hoping she might turn around. But she never did, and it wasn’t until she reached the door of a blue storefront that Graham realized what had caused her to take off. Behind him, a group of photographers was rushing over, stumbling a bit on the uneven grass in their efforts to reach him first.
As the frontrunner finally made it up to Graham, he dropped his camera bag, panting. “Who was that?”
Graham only shrugged as the guy snapped a few half-hearted pictures of him standing alone on the lawn.
Afterward, when he arrived back down at the set, Mick looked up from his notes and stubbed out his cigarette, his eyebrows raised.
“Well?” he asked. “Are we feeling more inspired now?”
Graham smiled. “Yes,” he said. “We are.”
From:
[email protected] Sent: Monday, June 10, 2013 10:22 AM
To:
[email protected] Subject: this afternoon
Ellie!
(Just giving you a proper Russian salutation, now that I know your name.)
I’m done shooting at 4 pm today. Want to go in search of an authentic whoopie pie?
Yours,
Graham!
The reception in the shop was only ever spotty at best, so Ellie spent the morning flitting between the cash register and the ancient desktop computer behind the counter, grateful that her mother wasn’t in yet to ask any questions. Last night, she’d explained away Graham’s visit by claiming he was looking for Quinn, and this morning, she’d managed to avoid Mom altogether by ducking out early to open the store.
The truth was, Ellie wasn’t sure what to say, or even how she felt about any of this yet. All she knew was this: as she logged on to the computer for the sixth time this morning, she was desperate to see that familiar e-mail address show up on the screen.
It didn’t matter that she’d only just seen him out on the green. It didn’t matter that she now knew who he was. It didn’t even matter that it was Graham Larkin, of all people. For more than three months now, this was the thing she’d most looked forward to—that breathless moment as the page unfurled itself on the screen, bringing with it the promise of a new e-mail from him. That small chain of bold letters and numbers—
[email protected]—was all it took to set her heart pounding.
Now it was like her brain was split in two. One half understood that the person writing to her was just down the street. But the other half still couldn’t let go of the more general idea of him, the comforting and mysterious stranger with whom she could talk about anything. His sudden presence here had thrown her wildly off balance, and even as she noticed—with a little thrill—that a new e-mail from him had indeed arrived, there was something disconcerting about it. It was like talking to someone on the phone from across the room; even though you could see his lips moving, and even though you could hear the words, it was hard to process the fact that the two things were somehow the same.
The e-mail was just like him: clever and sweet and a little bit funny. And he wanted to see her again. She closed her eyes and let her fingers hover over the keyboard for a moment. When she opened them, she hit the reply button and thought about all the reasons there were to say no.
The problem was, she wanted to say yes.
Sorry, she began, typing slowly, one key at a time. Then she erased each of the five letters and sat back with a sigh. Most girls, she knew, would be delighted to find out they’d been corresponding with a movie star. But to Ellie, it just seemed unfair. She wanted nothing more than to spend time with GDL824 this afternoon. It was Graham Larkin she wasn’t so sure about.
She was still staring at the screen when the door to the shop was thrown open, and she only just managed to close her e-mail as Quinn arrived breathlessly at the counter. Last night after Graham left, Ellie had discovered a text from Quinn that said simply !!!. But Ellie had no way of knowing whether those little exclamation points signaled enthusiasm or anger or something in between.
And so she hadn’t written back, even though she wanted nothing more than to sit down with her best friend and marvel over the fact that somehow—unbelievably, ridiculously, impossibly—the random guy from California she’d been trading e-mails with for months had somehow turned out to be Graham Larkin.
Quinn leaned against the counter, breathing hard. “I’m late for work,” she said, coughing a little. “But apparently we have a lot to talk about…”
“I know,” Ellie said, pouring her a glass of lemonade from the pitcher they offered customers. She swallowed hard, realizing how nervous she was to look up and meet Quinn’s eyes. Just yesterday, she’d helped her get ready for her big date, had watched the way her friend lit up at the prospect of the evening. Yet through some strange quirk of chance, Graham had ended up on Ellie’s front porch at the end of the night, and she felt awful that—however unknowingly—she might have ruined things for Quinn. “Listen, if I’d known it was him—”
But Quinn only shook her head. “I don’t care about that,” she said. “I mean, I’m not saying it wouldn’t have been fun to have a fling with a celebrity this summer, or that it’s not hard to get my head around the idea of you and Graham Larkin, but…”
Ellie braced herself. “But?”
“I can’t believe you never told me,” she said, looking genuinely hurt. “All this time you’ve been keeping it a secret? I thought the deal was that we tell each other everything.”
“It is,” Ellie said, lowering her eyes. “We do. It’s just that—”
She was interrupted by the sound of the village clock as it rang out over the town, a series of deep thudding tones, and Quinn swore under her breath.
“I’ve got to go,” she said. “We’ll have to finish talking about this later.”
“Okay,” Ellie said, aware of the guilty blush that was making her cheeks hot. “I promise I can explain…”
“You better,” Quinn said, and to Ellie’s relief, she offered a small smile. “Otherwise you won’t get to hear about what happened to me last night.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing much,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Just that Devon Alexander kissed me.”
Ellie’s mouth fell open. “How did that happen?”
“After Graham left to find you, Devon ended up having dinner with me, and I think he was feeling bad that my big date left, so he was being really sweet, and afterward he walked me home, and it just sort of happened.” Quinn was shaking her head, though it was hard to tell whether it was with amazement or disbelief. Everyone knew that Devon had been in love with her since the second grade, but she’d never been remotely interested in him, and had in fact spent as much energy ignoring him as he’d spent adoring her. “And the thing is, it was kind of not so bad.”
“Kind of not so bad?” Ellie said, and Quinn’s face broke into a real smile this time.
“Okay, fine,” she said. “It was kind of good. Can you believe it?”
Ellie laughed. “No, actually.”
“So what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Did you kiss Graham Larkin?”
She laughed. “Weren’t you running late?”
“Yeah,” Quinn said, glancing at her watch. “I’ve got to go. But you’re not off the hook, okay? I’ll call you later.” She downed the last of her l
emonade before dashing back over to the door. Just before stepping outside, she turned around again. “Hey, El?” she said. “Don’t be weird about this thing, okay?”
“What do you mean?” Ellie asked with a frown.
“It’s just that he’s actually nice. And it’s obvious he really likes you. So just try not to get in your own way.”
“I don’t…” Ellie began to protest, but the door bounced shut before she could finish. She stood there for a moment in the quiet of the shop, thinking about Graham, and about Devon and Quinn and how unlikely that was. Her eyes slid back to the computer screen, and she bit her lip.
This time, her fingers seemed to move on their own.
Yes, she typed, just to see what it felt like.
The door opened again, and once more, Ellie clicked away from her in-box, looking up as a family of tourists wandered in. She flashed her most welcoming smile, but they were immediately distracted by the barrels of beach toys near the door. The two boys each grabbed a foam noodle and began jousting as their mother tried to wrestle them from their hands, but it was the youngest one that Ellie was watching, a small tow-haired girl who couldn’t have been older than four.
While the mother dealt with the boys, the father took the girl’s hand and led her over to the display of postcards, kneeling beside her and pointing at the various scenes. Her face was serious as she picked out one after another, holding them by the edges, her eyes big as she studied them.
Watching the two of them, Ellie couldn’t help the thought that always came to her in these moments, petty and jealous as it was: that there was no way that little girl would remember this. Childhood memories were like airplane luggage; no matter how far you were traveling or how long you needed them to last, you were only ever allowed two bags. And while those bags might hold a few hazy recollections—a diner with a jukebox at the table, being pushed on a swing set, the way it felt to be picked up and spun around—it didn’t seem enough to last a whole lifetime.
Still, whether this one would count for her or not, there was no doubt this girl would have more memories of her father than Ellie, who only had a handful to go back to again and again. Now, after so many years, they were fuzzy and well worn, like papers that had been folded and refolded enough times that you might mistake them for cloth.