Liv vividly remembered the first time she saw an R-rated movie in the theater. She was eight years old, and she’d just been taken from the first set of foster parents who’d actually cared for her. Chuck and Marty hadn’t just been kind to Liv, they’d treated her like a real person instead of some fragile orphan. And they’d introduced her to movies—lots and lots of movies. So when they had to move to Australia and leave Liv behind, she was heartbroken.
She remembered the day Joe came to pick her up from Chuck and Marty’s place, a cozy bungalow in West Hollywood with a yellow front door. It was right after Christmas, and Chuck and Marty still had small, bright lights strung around the single palm tree in their front yard. When Liv passed it, she turned to wave good-bye to her now-former foster parents, who both cried as they watched her climb into the passenger seat of Joe’s Jeep.
“We’re going back to the big white building?” Liv had asked, thinking of the child services department located near the La Brea Tar Pits. She’d already been through this twice before, once after her parents had died and again after Joe had taken her away from the Hannigans. She remembered driving past the small black pond with its statues of trapped and sinking animals as she waited to be delivered to another strange home.
Joe had grimaced, his hands on the wheel. “Not yet,” he said.
“Then where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise.”
When Joe pulled up to Arclight Hollywood minutes later, Liv’s stomach gave a happy flip-flop.
“We’re going to the movies?” she asked, scared that Joe might realize his mistake, say no, and drive her straight to child services.
But Joe just grinned. “You like popcorn, right?”
And not only did he let Liv get popcorn, he’d let her pick the movie, too. Without hesitation, Liv pointed up to the lobby’s giant screen listing movie times—the one that looked like it belonged in a grand train station rather than a movie theater—and pointed at Pan’s Labyrinth.
Joe furrowed his eyebrows. “That’s rated R. Might be a bit . . . much.”
“I want to see that one.”
“What about the one with the talking pig? That’s still playing.”
But Liv just shook her head, again pointing to Pan’s Labyrinth. She’d read about it in one of Chuck and Marty’s movie magazines, a dark and twisted fairy tale from a famous director. She knew the movie was violent, and she doubted Joe would let her see it. Even Chuck and Marty had been a little hesitant to show her The Godfather trilogy a few months before.
Joe looked over for a poster of the movie, showing the silhouette of a little girl walking into a terrifying forest. He looked back at Liv, then nodded.
“Okay then.”
The movie had scared the crap out of Liv. Its haunting visuals crawled inside her brain, seeming so real that she’d constantly had to look around the theater to make sure the monsters of Pan’s Labyrinth weren’t lying in wait at that moment, all around her . . . but as the images on the screen became more and more terrifying, Liv knew Joe was still by her side. His presence reminded her that the monsters on the screen weren’t real. That she was safe.
Liv couldn’t stop thinking of that movie now, as she lay in the backseat of Shannon’s van, staring straight forward but not really seeing what was in front of her. Her ears were still ringing, and the smell of smoke lingered in her nose. She remembered in bits and pieces getting out of the soundstage, though most of them made no sense. The castle catching on fire, the fire spreading to the rest of the building. Cedric carrying her out. Kat and Rafe showing up out of nowhere to cut her hands free. She remembered asking what they were even doing there, though she didn’t remember if they’d answered her. She remembered Shannon pulling her into a giant hug, and Peter looking at her with worry in his eyes when they reached the van.
They were all in the van now, silent as they drove through morning with its skies turning slowly from rust-brown to lighter rust-orange. Liv was alone in the far backseat, the movement of the van gently rocking her back and forth. She wished it could lull her to sleep, the way it used to when she was a child. But she couldn’t even shut her eyes.
Now that Liv’s hands were free and she was relatively safe, the reality of the night began to sink in in sharp, jagged pieces. But her memories of the last few hours kept getting tangled up with older memories. She saw the black, soulless eyes set inexplicably in the middle of Joe’s—her Joe’s—face. She saw the creature from Pan’s Labyrinth, its own eyes facing out from the middle of its black-tipped hands. She saw her own small hands covering her face as she sank lower into the movie theater seat (or was she now sinking down for real in the van seat?) She saw an orange sky passing by the window near her head. She saw Joe sitting next to her in a blue bucket seat as he leaned down and whispered, “Don’t worry—it’s not real.”
His long-ago voice rang in her head along with the echoes of fireworks set off in a closed space. The movie had been fake, but it had felt real. What happened to Joe had really happened, but it felt unreal, like a dream. Movies and memories got tangled up inside Liv’s head, and she couldn’t pull herself out. She didn’t want to pull herself out. Because there was that dread, at the bottom of her stomach, that seemed to know the truth.
Joe was now a monster who wanted to hurt her. Just like the monsters in the movie. But now there was no one sitting beside her to remind her that it was all fake, that even if it felt real, even if she was terrified for real—she was safe. She forced her eyes shut, trying to hear Joe’s voice telling her she was okay, pulling her out of this nightmare world like he’d pulled her up from her belief in the movie monsters. . . .
Her strong, unwavering belief . . .
Liv shot straight up in a flash, the top of her head nearly colliding with the roof of the van. In front of her, both Rafe and Merek jumped. Merek put his hand over his heart as he scowled at Liv.
“Hell alive, Liv, I thought you were asleep back there.”
“What is it?” Cedric asked, catching sight of Liv’s white face in the rearview mirror. “What’s wrong?”
Liv flinched, gutted by the question. Everything was wrong. Everything.
But she focused on Cedric’s eyes in the rearview mirror. She steadied her voice.
“I know how to do it. I know how to fix the world.”
Six heads swiveled back to face her, six sets of eyes looking at her as if she’d just grown an extra arm out of her neck. But Liv ignored their incredulity.
“We’re going to make a movie.”