Chapter 7
Michael
What had it been about her? And why did I care?
I had problems on top of problems. I had neither the desire nor the time to let a woman get under my skin. It wouldn’t be fair in any case. I was going to do the movie and get my father back on his feet, and I didn’t have a minute for anything else.
But once I’d retrieved my car from Venice and started the drive home, my concerns over the movie and my PR problems were replaced by excitement. Laine. Right in front of me. She had gone from a beautiful and sullen teen to a stunning and witty woman. I’d felt explosive, like a test tube of nitrous, ready to detonate at the slightest agitation, as soon as she was within reach. I had to pull over at a bus stop and see if I still had her number. I synched my phone and scrolled through ancient backups. My head was down and clear of worries about anything but what the girl in the bleachers thought of me.
This was a one-eighty. I was supposed to run from her. I had a bizarre relationship with paps, so intimate and so distant. A one-way mirror through which they could see me, but I couldn’t see them.
Her number was gone, of course.
Even at three something in the morning, I could text Monie and have her dig up Laine’s number. In my world, a ridiculous request was almost normal. I pressed the phone to my lips then just did it. If Monie didn’t want to answer the text, she didn’t have to.
I didn’t wait for an answer. Sitting in a bus stop, even in the middle of the night, was an invitation to be seen by strangers.
As I snaked up the hill, I checked for SUVs parked across the street from my house. Nothing yet. Even paparazzi slept sometimes. I hit the gate remote and turned into the drive. Little holes the diameter of camera lenses had been poked into my hedges. In the end, I’d just covered the inside of them with tarp, turned my gate into solid metal, and tried not to be home, ever.
I stopped inside the driveway and pulled the emergency brake. When the gate closed, I took out my phone. Monie had messaged me back.
—213-343-5529—
I fist-pumped. Monie was getting a fat bonus. I dialed the area code then stopped. I’d forgotten what Laine had become. Had she put a hole in my hedge? I had a career that left me no time for relationship maintenance. If I was going to be irresponsible and get involved with a woman, I probably couldn’t pick anyone worse than Laine Cartwright.
But when she’d given me a do-over at Club NV, it was like a drop of sugar water on a dry tongue. Even after Britt, and Ken, and everything that had happened between meeting her and sitting in my car in my driveway, I wanted to experience the excitement of her again.
I had no reason to step outside my path. I was set. It was like senior year all over. Everything was a go.
Back then, I’d been tightly scheduled and ready at the gate. I had Lucy, who I loved as much as an eighteen-year-old can love anyone, and I felt settled there. Acting was the least risky career path I could have chosen, but to calm my father’s disapproval, I’d majored in English lit, knowing full well the drama department was ready to switch me. I’d gone and auditioned for two features behind my dad’s back but with my mother’s approval.
I hadn’t known the girl who started sitting in the tennis court bleachers in October, and as I tried for that inside corner over and over, she didn’t seem to be there because she knew me either. Her face was buried in a book, legs akimbo over the seats in front of her as if she were ready to spring.
“Do you know her?” I’d asked Lucy one night when she came by at the end of practice.
My girlfriend looked at the bleachers and wrinkled her nose. “That’s the new Hatch kid. Sophomore, but she’s way behind on everything. Dumb as a post. And cranky. I mean, they pulled her out of the gutter. You’d think she’d be happy. Hello?”
I was fascinated. The gutter? What was it like in the gutter? What kind of person did it make you? And how could something so beautiful, even from twenty feet below, come from the gutter? Who was she? Inside. I think I looked up at her—with a sneaker leveraged against the seat in front, the other knee draped over the armrest to the side, a book in her lap, and impossibly long hair waterfalling over her shoulders—for one second too long.
Lucy had tugged on my jacket. That long look had caused no end of trouble for the gutter girl.
It was either that, or months later, when I lobbed a ball up there to get her attention.
“Thank you!” I called. Tennis etiquette dictated that I say “thank you” instead of, “Hey, can you get that for me?”
She put her book down, untangled herself from the seats, and grabbed the ball.
“Do you talk?” I shouted.
She folded her arms. “When I have something to say.”
She’d been so hard, so impossibly distant. Her unavailability was thrilling. I had absolutely no control over my curiosity.
“And you have nothing to say?” I shouted.
“I do. Your coach says to give it a rest twice a week. You should listen.”
I could have said the same to her, but she probably needed to study more than I needed to practice.
She threw the ball down. It went wild and landed on the other side of the court. “Sorry,” she called down. “Can I have a do-over?”
I lobbed another ball up to her. “Thank you.”
She scuttled for it and threw it back. It landed close enough to me to be called a successful throw. She’d waved and sat back down, twisting her legs around each other and getting back to her studies.
I realized I’d been in the front seat of my car and stroking the edge of my phone for way too long, remembering her. She was a vortex. I’d avoided getting swallowed up in her once, and now, more than ever, I needed to avoid it again. I would replace the camera, finish the movie with my father, and do whatever I had to do afterward.
I tapped the little garbage can by Monie’s text, and the DELETE key came up.