Catch a Falling Star (20 page)

He got the same look as when Hunter gave him notes after a

scene — interested, but wary. “How am I?”

I hurried to explain. “I mean, you have nice moments, but

mostly you’re aloof. Distracted.”

He nodded. “Fair enough.”

“Sometimes spoiled, selfish.”

He held up a hand. “Feel free to keep the list short.”

“Sorry.” I fiddled with a piece of broken-off crust on my plate,

not meeting his eyes.

His whole body sighed next to me, and after a moment, he

said, “I’m not in the business of trusting people right away. Kind of

the opposite.”

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I studied the curve of his chin. “Is that why you crash red

Corvettes?”

His smile deepened the curve. “It was a Porsche.”

“What’s the difference?”

He pretended to search the ground around him. “I think I

might have a brochure.” His voice teasing, he leaned his shoulder

into mine, sending a low hum of current between us. “Here’s a

shocking Hollywood secret. Tabloids lie.”

“So you didn’t crash a red Porsche and publicly humiliate a

beloved Disney actress at a Lakers game?” I took a bite of pie, the

buttery apple filling melting on my tongue.

Adam ran a hand through his hair, any stray bit of fun leaving

his eyes. “Okay, sometimes they lie, and sometimes they just need

a story, so they . . . embellish. Leave things out. Craft a version of

it the public will respond to. Or we
give
them a version we know

they’ll respond to. It’s entertainment.” His voice split into that

annoyed edge I was more used to hearing from him. “It’s what I do.

Entertain.”

“In your job or your life?”

“What’s the difference?”

“I might have a brochure.” I peeked under the pie plate. Feeling

him relax again next to me, I added, “It sounds awful.”

“It’s not so bad.” He leaned over and popped the piece of bro-

ken crust into his mouth.

“Careful, movie star. I’m not afraid to use this.” I wielded

my fork.

Swallowing, he used his thumb and finger to wipe the corners

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of his mouth and then gave me a stare, sad at its edges. “Not all of

us are fortunate enough to be born a Hobbit.”

“Chloe is overly dramatic.”

“Is she right?”

I studied the empty plate. “Yes.”

“Because of your brother?”

I looked sharply at him.

“I know, your rules. But I’m a movie star. I’m used to getting

my way. You know, spoiled, selfish.” He shrugged and shot a

Hollywood promotion smile my direction, which, despite know-

ing it was his Hollywood promotion smile, still landed its target.

“Maybe you’re not so nice.” Maybe not nice, but he had the

charm thing down. There was a reason he was paid a lot for that

smile.

“Sometimes it helps to talk about it.” He cleared my plate to

the side and took my hand, sending a flutter through me. Why,

when he touched me, did I feel like I was standing on the narrow-

est of ledges?

“This,” I said, gesturing to his hand, “is definitely not in the

script.”

I could tell he knew I was avoiding the subject because his eyes

fixed on me, the weight of their interest coaxing me to talk.

Tractor beam eyes. Another thing he was paid a lot of money

for — that stare. A stare that said,
The whole world just vanished, and

we’re the only ones here.

“You can stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re interested in my problems.”

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“I am.”

The weird thing was, he
seemed
interested. Without warning,

I had one hundred percent of Adam Jakes’s attention, and maybe

he was an excellent actor, but suddenly, I
was
the only other person

in the world with him. His spotlight eyes, just for me. Quietly, he

said, “You know, with my drug stuff and your brother’s addiction,

it was just a matter of time before the tabloids made that link. You

can’t worry about it.”

“I always worry about him.”

“Lucky guy.” My heart tripped. Who worried about Adam?

Not his parents. Not his little sister.

I’d never told anyone how guilty I felt that John had so many

problems and my life was so easy, but for some reason, I found myself

telling Adam Jakes. “My mom says that we’ve both been exactly who

we are since we were tiny,” I said, the tree house its own tiny galaxy.

“John was like a dog behind an electric fence who pushed through,

shook the electric sizzle off his coat, and headed out into the neigh-

borhood to see what sort of trouble he could get into. Me — I was

happy to sit on the lawn inside of the electric fence, knowing it was

there, never testing it, staring at dandelions.”

Adam studied me. “What if there’s no fence?”

“I always feel like there’s a fence.”

He squeezed my hand, leaving a tingling imprint. “You need to

get out into the world. When you do that, the fences get wider and

wider apart.”

I grimaced, pulling my hand away. “I think maybe we’ve

exhausted the fence metaphor.”

He watched the sky shift through the window, the web of pale

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cloud across the star-filled purple. “It can be good to see what else

is out there. If only just to see it.”

I didn’t answer, didn’t tell him that I was tired of people telling

me I should leave Little. That I should dance, that I should go off to

New York. Should. Should. Should. What if I didn’t want to go?

Not because I was scared or intimidated but because it didn’t sound

like something I wanted to do? Why did being a teenager give you

a sell-by date? People just assumed leaving was the best thing.

What if I thought staying was the best thing? When I thought of my

ideal life, it wasn’t something out on some blurred distant horizon.

It was here. Here with the café, teaching at Snow Ridge, taking

care of my brother. Not that he’d let me.

I didn’t harbor the big-city dreams so many of my friends

seemed to have, and I guess that made me some sort of provincial

freak or something.

“I have a question,” I finally said.

“Shoot.” His gaze slipped back to me.

“When something feels right, why, just because we’re turning

a certain age, do we have to toss it all out in the name of some sort

of adult success, in the name of growing up? Why do we always

have to want something else, something better? What if it doesn’t

actually get better? What if everyone out there is just lying to me

and it really doesn’t get better than this?”

Adam settled back against the wall, frowning, thinking, the

crickets filling up the tree house with their singing.

He didn’t answer me.

158

yesterday’s sightings

Things Are Looking Up in Little, CA

Morning, sky watchers. No blog about space would be

complete without talking once in a while about possible life

on other planets. Yeah, UFOs, aliens, weird lights in the sky —

that sort of stuff. We did some research (thank you, Google)

and found out that every day almost two hundred people

report some sort of UFO activity. Almost two hundred times a

day, someone, somewhere in the world, sees something in

the sky they can’t explain. It got us thinking about how we, as

human beings, always have a hard time with things we

can’t explain — UFOs, Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle. We’re

fascinated by the things we can’t figure out, by the things

that don’t have a right or wrong answer. Even when we can’t

explain them, we need to make some sort of sense out of

them — create lists, find connections, map it out. Maybe

that’s why, when we can’t seem to figure out all sorts of other

more commonplace mysteries (like why we all keep looking

at the sky as if it might talk to us), we still need to try.

We think maybe it’s a lot like love, that need to make

sense of the sky. We don’t know why we need it, we can’t

explain it when it happens or when it doesn’t, but we need it

like we need air or food.

So we keep looking for it.

See you tonight, under the sky.

159

thirteen

it was snowing again in downtown Little. True, two guys sprayed

it out of hoses, but when I arrived on set this morning, I couldn’t

believe how real it looked. Drifts of snow lined the edges of the

street, icicles hung from the eaves, and someone had fringed all the

parking meters in the shot with pine wreaths and red bows.

Probably Tiny Tom. That guy was
really
feeling the Christmas

spirit. When I arrived, I saw him over by the crafty table, slathering

a bagel with cream cheese, his head adorned with reindeer antlers.

I found my chair in Video Village, dumped my bag next to the

chair, and sipped some ice water, watching the setup. The tem-

perature was already in the low nineties so the crew was in tank

tops and cutoff jeans. It was disorienting, my town in Christmas

mode and everyone in shorts.

Adam stood in front of Baby Face, a day spa. Its sign had been

removed and its window display was now a charming kitchen store

someone had cleverly named Marley’s Host, with gleaming cop-

per pots hanging in the windows, multicolored Christmas lights

reflected in their shiny bodies.

Today, Adam was shooting the Ghost of Christmas Past scene.

The one where he bumped into a former classmate on the street and

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started to realize he’d been a huge jerk way back when and that his

life wasn’t the ski-boat-parties-and-toilet-papering-the-nerd-kid’s-

house bliss he thought it was. Epiphany, Hunter had explained this

morning, his face so close to Adam’s that the brim of his Sundance

hat almost touched him, wasn’t an instantaneous thing. Epiphany,

Hunter had explained, happened in tiny bits of realization that

swirled around one’s head until they formed into an
ah-ha
moment.

Epiphany, he assured Adam (clearly enjoying saying the word
epiph-

any
), like all good stories, had an arc. This scene, he’d said, was

“especially crucial to that arc of epiphany for Scott.”

“You ready?” Hunter asked Adam, settling into his chair.

“Yep.” Adam held still, frozen, something he always did right

before a scene started, like he was transporting himself from one

world to the next. Sometimes it seemed as if actors were time

travelers or astronauts. Or both.

Hunter called for quiet on the set.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have jurisdiction over the crowd of

protesters who had formed by the roped-off section of the street

behind us. They seemed to be multiplying, four times what they

were that first day. Clearly, Nora had taken me seriously about

organizing. A pack of people holding signs marched up and down

the rope, hoisting bold, bright signs that read what they chanted:

Go Home, HoLLywood!

No BiG HoLLywood iN LittLe

we’re
noT
stArstruCk!

Hunter craned his head. “Oh, jeez — not again?” One of his

A.D.s jumped out of her chair, rushing to the rope line. Tiny Tom,

who’d strung silvery strands of garland around the roped-off

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sections, tried to reason with the slim woman at the barrier. Nora.

Again. Tiny Tom and the A.D. were getting nowhere with her,

Nora casting her gaze straight past them, her sign held high.

I slipped out of my chair. “Hey, Nora,” I said, approaching the line.

She squinted at me. “Carter?” Her sign sagged a bit. “What are

you doing with these people?”

“I’m, well, I’m sort of dating the lead.” I pointed toward where

Adam stood waiting outside the faux kitchen store. He gave her a

charming wave.

“Carter, do you have any idea about the environmental impact

of that foam they’re spraying? It could be hazardous. And they just

keep shutting down the streets with no respect for our daily lives!”

Nora’s voice rose in pitch like a windstorm.

I listened, nodding, and tried to make eye contact with some of

the other protesters, giving them each a knowing smile. I recognized

most of them from the town hall meetings and various city protests

I’d gone to with Mom. One thing Mom always said a protester

wanted was to be heard, so I made sure to listen. When Nora was

finished, I told her, “They’ve done all the safety checks, and the city

approved all the materials. They’re not here long, and they’re paying

a lot of money for this space, which is good for Little, right? Can we

just let them get on with it, so they can clear out of here on schedule?”

I used the cool voice I’d seen Mom use with police or city councilmen.

Nora thought about it, her face darkening.

I bit my lip and added, “Besides, this isn’t a long-term prob-

lem. They’re out of here the beginning of July. You’ve organized

such an amazing group. Don’t you think it would be best to put

them on something long-term?” I racked my brain for a list of