Chapter 21
Michael
By six thirty the next morning, my night out had been broken apart, analyzed, chewed, digested, and regurgitated. The photos of my affection toward the paparazzi at the back door of the restaurant got the least press, naturally, because I was having fun. The fight was front and center in still and video. Arnie and I had shaken hands over the upturned table. It hadn’t been photographed as extensively, but by the time I got up, it was as if the handshake had never happened.
The places that had had enough time to write more than a hundred words about the fight speculated that I was losing my shit because of the break in the Bullets schedule. They attributed my rooftop kiss of a paparazza to my tension. I was a workaholic, they said, and without my drug of choice, I was snapping.
I admitted I felt as if I was bending, but it wasn’t the schedule as much as what the schedule break might cause. My father would start drinking if the movie fell through. Brooke and I knew it. He was on a thread.
I didn’t usually look at the media’s reaction to me and what I was doing. It had always been bland and boring. Just me walking or drinking coffee. There had never been any bad behavior to get distracted by, so it had been easy to follow a simple rule… don’t look.
The rule was easy until Laine, in that dress, her hair unpinned, her fingers gripping my elbow as I kissed her. I felt alive. And that was a cliché, of course. A phrase directors used that I tossed off as meaningless, representing a feeling that had something more at its core. I had tried to capture it a hundred times by linking it to other feelings that were closer to delight.
But this wasn’t delight. It wasn’t joy. I’d gotten it all wrong. Life, yes, but inside it sat a precarious tilt toward death, oblivion, pain, and danger. Alive didn’t mean happy or joyous. It meant that my relationship with my own existence was unstable, and only in the nearing loss of it did I realize I wanted it so badly.
How had Laine come to represent that? Was it when she nearly fell off the roof and I grabbed her, or was it the look on her face when her brother took those pictures at NV? Or maybe I’d made that connection with her on the tennis court bleachers. Knowing who and what she was, so different from me, brought close enough to touch the side of the world that I never got to see. Was it her survival that caused my fascination?
I sat on the back patio, flipping through the news on my tablet. The pictures of Laine and me still attracted my eye. The LA Post piece was ridiculous, because they didn’t get it. They didn’t know the half of it, but they pretended to until the end.
“It’s seven in the morning,” Ken said, sounding as awake as always, when I called. “I was waiting another half an hour to call you.”
“What the fuck is in the news today?”
“You beating the hell out of a poor kid from Arkansas?”
“How did they find out I knew Laine from before?” I asked.
“What the hell are you doing reading the papers? We have a deal. You don’t read the papers, and I tell you what’s in them. One, you choking—”
“How did they find out who she was? Her history?” I wasn’t quite shouting, but I was using a bitch of a tone that only worked through my teeth.
“It’s their job.”
“No.” I pointed at the view of the city below because Ken wasn’t in front of me. “The Almanac cherry-picks what’s easy.”
“Jesus Christ, Michael, Britt breaking her shoulder is the worst thing that could have happened to you. I’ve never met a guy who needed time off so badly and couldn’t handle it when he got it.”
I knew Ken. He’d deflect until I was apologizing for Arnie, for not being productive on my days off, for not strictly maintaining my image. That wasn’t going to wash anymore.
“What did you tell them?” I asked.
“Anything in the public record that would make you look sympathetic. Kissing a foster child as opposed to a slimeball, you know? It works, especially after the incident—”
“With Arnie? Arnie’s a moron. If murder were legal, he’d be dead already.”
“Can you make sure to not say things like that in public?” he asked.
“Can you never breathe her name again to anyone? Ever? I don’t care if it’s in the public record. She’s mine, and that means she’s my problem.”
“She can be your asset too.”
“Can it be normal? How about that?” I said. “Not an asset or a problem. Not a big deal. Just some girl that I may or may not be seen with again.”
Ken sighed as if I was a recalcitrant child he’d explained things to a hundred times. “No, Greydon, normal is not on the menu. Your career would die of boredom on a diet of normal.”
I shook my head. “Just leave her out of it, Ken. That, or you let me know what you’re doing before you do it. Can we agree on that?”
“Sure, kid. Sure.”
We said good-bye and ended it, but his assessment of my choices stuck in my mind. I craved normalcy, and I craved the tingle of life. Could they even coexist? I’d played normal, everyday guys living a life I’d never lived. I’d played them deadened and dull, because that was what I’d been told normal was.
I didn’t want normal.
I wanted real.
And my God, Laine was real.