Chapter 12
Autumn
“Ready?” Dante's hands flexed over the steering wheel.
“No,” I mumbled through a mouth guard, staring down the length of his quarter-mile racing track.
“Life's funny that way.” Dante stepped on the gas anyways.
The Ford Focus took off down his track toward a spot on the pavement he had me spray with the hose earlier. The modest-looking four door sedan Dante drove us in was the same make and model of the one we'd use on set for this stunt. He didn't push all that fast, but my heart was still in my teeth anyways, anxiously waiting for what was coming next.
“I don't know what the conditions are going to be on set yet so were going to practice on both wet and dry pavement. When you do this, you absolutely have to keep the car under forty-five miles.”
“Forty-five. OK,” I said, my knuckles were white from the death grip I had on the sides of my seat. That shouldn't be hard. Ten miles an hour was intimidating to me right now.
“Otherwise you run the very real risk of flipping the car.”
“Joy.” Fucking hell.
The vibrations throughout the car set my bones to chattering as we rocketed toward the stunt's top speed. Just before we entered the water-slicked section of the track I watched the speedometer climb. Forty...forty-five...forty-six. Wait. Fifty. Oh God. Fifty-five!
“Quick brake to transfer weight to the front of the car and...” Dante quickly slowed us back into that forty-five mile an hour sweet spot just as we drove into the wet pavement. Dante said something else too, but I didn't hear him. In my head everything quietly slowed, except for the rushing pump of blood in my ears: that was only getting louder.
Dante wrenched up on the emergency hand brake and jerked the steering wheel hard to the side. The force of the car's ass-end whipping around pushed me hard into the door. I squeezed the seat even tighter, worried that I was somehow going to be flung from the car. If my GoPro Camera hadn’t been screwed into the dashboard it would’ve flown out the open window.
The tires screamed bloody murder. There was this moment of weightlessness as we drifted forward like reaching the apex of a rope swing set only sideways and along the ground.
He reapplied the foot brake while rapidly turning the wheel the opposite way; counter steering. When we were facing the opposite way we started he dropped the E-brake and smoothly drove us out of the spin. “E-brake down and drive out.” Dante eased us to a gentle stop. “You can stop screaming now. It's over.”
“What the hell was that? You said forty-five. We were pushing sixty!” I pried my hands from their death grips only to bury them between my legs to keep them from shaking like a leaf in a hurricane.
“It looks better when you come in hot. You can always slow it down before the spin.” Dante started driving back to the first position. “Besides I said you. I know what I'm doing.”
“Great.” The word dripped with sarcasm. “So follow all the rules except if you don't feel like it?”
“Pretty much.” Dante shrugged. “With this many variables, stunt driving is more of an art than a science.”
“Huh. Pottery, upholstery, figure painting… I don’t remember my art teacher going over stunt driving. I must’ve been sick that day.”
Dante gave me an amused look. Despite his stoicism there was always a self-satisfied smugness beneath the surface whenever we did any actual stunt training. He really was incredibly talented with all this stuff, and he knew it.
The last several days bled into each other like a weeklong triathlon. The strength training each morning was brutal—and Dante was a drill instructor from hell—but the skill training later in the day was something else entirely. The fight choreography, high falls and now car stuff was all so terrifying and exciting, all the while Dante became more patient and instructive. He felt like a different trainer.
He was a hard ass and a complete prick, but there were also flashes of childlike excitement in him when he was performing a stunt, or showing me how to do something. He was too focused on what he was doing to smile, but I could tell by the pinch in the corner of his lips that he wanted too. The more I saw that wonder in his eyes and the concern over my safety the more apparent it became he was wearing a mask.
So who was he really? The uncaring dick, or…something else.
“I'll show you one more time then you're going to try it.” He said.
“Wait a sec.” That's insane! He wanted me to do this already? “You're going to teach me how to like, regular drive first, right?”
“What?” Dante braked to a hard stop and gave me a severe look. “You can't drive? At all?”
“That was like the first thing I told them!” My eyes flared bitterly, despite not knowing exactly who I was angry at. “They didn't tell you that! I don't even have my driver's license.”
“How do you not have a license?”
“I live in a major city and work from home! What the hell do I need one for?” I shouted back defensively.
Dante sucked in air and rubbed his face with both hands. We sat in uncomfortable silence while he figured out what to do next. Eventually he exhaled, unbuckled and opened the car door. “Ok. Looks like I'm teaching you how to drive.”
“Right now?”
“You have other plans?” Before he slipped out of the car he cocked his head toward the door for me to get out and switch with him.
“No, but—” I got out of the car to finish so I wouldn't have to shout to finish my thought. “Can we take a little break first?” I didn't want to come out and tell him that I was still a little rattled from what we just did, although screaming my lungs out probably gave him a pretty good idea of my mental state at the moment.
“At least five hours have just been added to our day.” Dante shook his head. “We’ll stop only for food. Breaks are a luxury we don't have time for today.”
I groaned, trudging over to the other side of the car. “You can teach me how to drive in five hours?”
“Of course not. We can't burn a day on that. But I can teach you forward, reverse, shifting, turning and how to use the E brake. All the components of this stunt.”
“What about the rest of it?” I protested.
“The rest isn't in the shot,” Dante replied. “It doesn't matter.”
“It's not in the shot.” That was always his response when I tried to do more or dive deeper into what we were doing. That or, “We don't have time for why.” Dante's mindset was if it's not on camera, then we're not doing it. And yeah, I understood that to a degree, we were under a serious time crunch, but still... It was hard not to be frustrated!
After a thirty second tutorial where he pointed at things and told me what they did, he had me start the car up and begin driving. Shakily and slowly I did laps around the track. How many people could say they learned how to drive a car from a real-life stuntman?
Yeah, well I can't either.
Dante only showed me the relevant pieces.
Stunt work wasn't like any skill I'd ever learned. Aside from general fitness for body preparedness, none of what Dante showed me had any cohesive structure to it. It wasn't like dance lessons or martial arts. It didn't feel like a full thing. I was putting a puzzle of the Eiffel Tower together, but using pieces from different boxes like cars, animals and outer space. It was impossible for me to see how it all came together.
We did things until we didn't any more, then we moved on. Imagine learning the foot placement in Salsa, followed by most of the strings of a guitar, then how to perfectly flip pancakes correctly in a pan, then finally how to just take off in a plane. That grab-bag of disconnected bullshit was stunt training for me so far.
I was terrible at it and it was driving me crazy!
We didn't have time to get back to one-eighties before Dante was forced to call it for the day. If left to his discretion we'd have been out there till midnight training, but as per the contract, once a week Dante had to share me with my acting coach, Reggie.
It also didn’t help that the day ended with a massive blowout argument. He went over everything too fast and I didn’t have enough practice to learn anything. I don’t know why he pushed so hard, but the most frustrating part was that we both wanted the same damn thing!
To make me ready for this film.
After Dante stormed off I headed back to the house. It wasn’t long before I heard him banging away in the building I wasn’t allowed in. The guy practically never slept. It was nuts, he never seemed to get tired.
What the hell did he do in there all hours of the night?
Me, on the other hand. I felt like silly putty that someone worked over with a baseball bat. The second I closed the bedroom door behind me, I stripped clothing off me with every step. Every muscle in my body ached from exertion. My sluggish legs moved as if they were underwater and filled with sand. All I wanted was to lie down for a few weeks, but that wasn't an option. Glancing at the clock I had just enough time to take a shower and call Mom before Reggie showed up.
The whole house had this homey, rustic feel to it, but not the bathroom, that was modern, sleek, and hi-tech. I found myself thanking whoever designed it every time I walked in. It had immediately become my favorite room in the house. I looked longingly at the huge Jacuzzi bathtub several feet away, but knew I'd never have the time for it. I vowed on all that was holy that I'd find time to use it before I left this place. The thought of a nice long, hot soak maybe with some incense, music and wine made my legs tremble.
A girl could dream…
The rest of the room was a door-less open space with cool dark tiles that felt amazing on my battered, raw feet. I activated the shower and three separate heads kicked on, streaming, and or pulsing water from every direction. It was like standing in a full-body massage. Absolutely everything was adjustable, the height, angle, and pressure of the water, to the music and mood lighting.
My favorite part though was the two foot wide vertical window that stretched from the floor to the ceiling. It didn't catch the sun head on, but it was close enough to show most of the vivid colors the sky had to offer. The tile walls captured the sunset's violet and orange hues, giving the bathroom a rich, painted quality. Between the all-encompassing jets of hot water and the unending desert view, it was impossible for at least some of the days stress to not melt away.
After drying off and reluctantly embracing reality, I called Mom before it got too late for her. I tried to call her every night, but the last few days ran so long with training I missed my window. She was always either waking up or falling asleep, or just about to have some tests done.
“Mom?” I asked, pinning the phone to my ear with my shoulder as I massaged lotion into my legs. “How’re you feeling?”
“Oh I’m fine, Amanda Bynes.” Mom's voice had the low, rumbling quality of someone who had just woken up after a short nap. Even still, it felt really good to hear her voice. “How's my actor's first full week of training?”
It felt like I'd been here a month!
“Amanda By—” My brain was spent from the twelve hours of non-stop activity today, and I was not even close to being done. “Seriously? The girl from the Nickelodeon shows? That's your go to celebrity? I don't think she's even an actor any more.”
“I'm eighty percent sure that she did some movies recently.” Mom yawned, waking up a bit more.
“Mom…”
“Maybe not eighty now that I think about it, but definitely a solid seventy.”
“Are you feeling any better since the surgery?” She had a lumpectomy on her left breast the day before yesterday; the tumor had almost grown to the size of a golf ball. I was so incredibly nervous that I called Aunt Paula every hour that day for updates. Surprisingly, Dante didn’t give me any shit about it. In fact he was the one to remind me to do it a few times.
“Better,” she groaned, shifting positions. “I always thought Righty would be the one who tried to kill me, not Lefty. Lefty and I were buds. I feel so betrayed.”
“I never trusted her.” I smiled weakly, trying to cover my anxiety with humor. “How’s the radiation? Are you a superhero yet?”
“I have to wait a month before I get my powers unfortunately.” Mom sulked. “But we’re starting chemo tomorrow. So I have that to look forward to.”
We talked about all the nitty-gritty details, before she asked to move on. I completely understood. She was so immersed in it that she needed some distractions.
“I feel bad about complaining to you considering what you’re going through.”
“Don’t be. They don’t have Netflix here. I need you to distract me from NCIS and Wheel of Fortune by telling me all about your training.” She sounded more alert and upbeat now that we changed topics. “Just call me Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.”
“I’ll bitch and moan on one condition. Stop with the super obscure references. I'm too tired to point out all the reasons you're using them wrong.”
“Aww,” she whined.
“I'm sore, I hate this, and I want to come home!” I pouted like a ten-year-old who fell off her bike. Flashbacks came to mind of calling Mom during my first Girl Scouts camping trip crying my eyes out for essentially the same reason only on a much, much smaller scale.
“Is it that bad?”
“Oh my God, it's horrible. I woke up at five thirty in the morning to go jogging with him through the desert. Before this week I had never seen a sunrise from that side of sleep before and I was hoping to keep it that way!”
“I was talking about my references, but no, it's fine. We'll do your thing first.”
“I was too winded to enjoy even a second of it. I struggled to just keep Dante within eye shot so I didn't die in the middle of the desert. Every morning after breakfast we play 'the game' which was just forty-five minutes of me trying to hit him and failing miserably. Then brunch.”
“I love brunch!” Mom piped up. She was fully awake now. I should've found a way to lead this conversation with brunch.
“Then several sets of actual weight lifting. More food. We started doing some driving stuff today, but when he realized I didn't have my license we spent the rest of the day going over just some of the basics, then—you guessed it—more food. I just got out of a shower and am waiting on my acting coach to show up so we can work on accents and annunciation or some crap for the next forever hours. Then dinner.”
“Wow. That's a lot. A lot of everything.” Mom let that sentiment linger while she tried to process it all. I was right there with her. It was still hard for me to wrap my head around. “How many times do you eat throughout the day?”
“Two times more than I would like. That was the biggest surprise by far about all this training! How much food I had to eat. It's crazy. I mean every meal is amazing, but after my second pound of food, holy crap, it was hard to force it all in! I never thought in my entire life that I could ever get so tired of just eating. I know that sounds like such a first-world problem, but I feel like an overfilled balloon.”
“You know...” I could picture the scrunched up face Mom was making as she spoke. “Starving kids in Africa and all that.”
“Where!” I shouted in exasperation. “Send me an address. I'll gladly mail them some seasoned chicken breasts and steamed broccoli.”
“I'll look into the USPS shipping guidelines. So you're sleeping in his house? That's kind of weird, right? Is he in the next room over?”
“No,” I said, walking out to the window. The light was on in his workshop. “He sleeps out in the barn... Garage? Guest house? I don't actually know what he calls his man cave. The estate is enormous. There's an airstrip here! People can land planes on his property. Airplanes.”
“Ohhh. The barn. Do you feel like the daughter of a manor lord, and he’s your lowly stable boy?”
“I do not in fact.”
“Let us away for a tryst in the barn, mi' lady. We shan’t be long.” Mom excitedly ignored me, then switched back and forth between a high and low voice to act out an absurd play. “Oh, Rodrigo, we shouldn't! If my father were to run afoul of our trespass...'”
“Rodrigo?” I asked, laughing.
“I care not for lord Wadsworth Pennington! I must have you!”
“What do you do when I'm not around?” I asked, with a sweeping smile that cut my face in half. Imagining Dante in an open flowing white shirt and torn, tan trousers was exactly what I needed after today.
“Trashy Victorian romance novels and crappy TV mostly,”
“Ah.” I said. “So the same things when I am around.”
“Pretty much,” Mom replied, probably shrugging.
“Now that you mention it, that is the one place I’m not allowed to go on the estate.” A lonely light on the second floor window of Dante’s mysterious building sharply defied the fading sunlight. “That’s off limits.”
“So is Dante pre or post witch’s curse, because I'm getting a Beauty and the Beast vibe.”
“He's got the muscles, but isn't nearly hairy enough to pull the rest of it off.” Although he did have that one lone beautiful flower in the hallway... “Either way I left my burglarizing kit back at the house so no B and Es for me this time.”
With the window open it was easy to hear the car pulling up.
“Hey. I think my acting coach is here. I have to let you go.” I walked back into the bedroom and checked the far walls window. Only it wasn't Reggie's bright yellow Lexus that pulled up. It was a limo.
And Jason Brenner stepped out of it.