Jane Austen Goes to Hollywood (29 page)

Hallie waved her off. “I’m fine. Go, have fun.”

Alone, she turned her attention back to the pressing issue in front of her: cheesecake. But the lure of those magazines was too much, and despite her every instinct, Hallie found herself reaching for them. Dakota’s face stared back at her from the glossy cover of the latest
Us Weekly.
talia’s new love heats up! the headline screamed, above a photo of them together on the red carpet. Dakota looked dashing and hot, and Talia was gazing up at him with such a giddy expression of bliss that Hallie had to hurl it through the open French doors into the backyard so she didn’t have to look at them another moment longer.

There was a muffled yelp, and then a crash.

“Hello?” Hallie went outside to investigate, and found Brandon collecting a box of small canisters, now scattered over the lawn. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t know you were out here.”

Brandon laughed. “You sure it’s not just payback for making you watch
Hellfire 3
?”

“There was no plot!” Hallie cried, for what felt like the fifth time since going to the movies with him. “It was just two hours of stuff blowing up!”

“Yeah, well, what did you want us to see, that French thing?” Brandon curled his lip. “I don’t do subtitles.”

“Philistine,” Hallie declared, helping him pick up the canisters.

“Snob,” he teased back. She shook her head in despair.

“One of these days, you’re going to raise your cultural awareness higher than robots and zombies.” Hallie straightened up, handing him the final roll. “What are you doing with all this . . . ?”

“Film,” Brandon finished. He showed her the box, full of canisters like the ones Hallie remembered from when she was a kid, and cameras came with film and negatives and trips to the drugstore, instead of digital memory cards and USB cables. “I’ve been taking a bunch of new shots,” he explained. “Now I get to spend the week in the darkroom, getting high off chemical mixes.” There was a pause. “That was a joke.”

“Duh.” Hallie weighed a roll in her palm, amused. They’d been hanging out more, but Brandon was still awkward sometimes, fumbling his words or jolting if she brushed against him. She guessed he wasn’t used to people these days, period: Amber said that when he came back from Iraq, he barely left the house for months. “Can I come see your stuff?” Hallie asked hopefully. “It’s OK if you don’t want to,” she added quickly. Brandon hadn’t offered to show her yet, and she knew some of it might be personal. “But, you did always say you’d help me with my headshots. . . .”

To her relief, Brandon didn’t seem reluctant. “Admit it,” he teased. “You want to see if I’m up to the job.”

“Well, sure.” Hallie smiled back. “I need to have complete creative synchronicity with my artist.”

“I don’t even know what that means.” Brandon laughed. “But sure, step into my office. . . .”

He led her across to the far side of Amber and Auggie’s house, and a small side door that led into a windowless passage. Hallie looked around at the unfamiliar walls. “What is this place? I can’t believe I’ve never been out here.”

“Servants’ quarters, storage, I don’t know.” Brandon opened another door into a small, dark room. He flipped on a lone lightbulb, revealing trays laid out on a bench, and walls lined with shelves of chemicals and paper. Photographs hung across the room, pegged to a laundry line. “Auggie had it light-proofed a few years back, but no one ever used it, so he said I was welcome.”

Hallie reached up to look at the photos, drying on the line. The line nearest to her was a series from the beach. Surfers preparing for the waves: pulling on wet suits, waxing down their boards. Brandon had captured their focus, a calm concentration painted in black and white against the far gray sky. “These are good!” she exclaimed.

Brandon gave her a twisted smile. “Don’t sound so surprised.”

“I’m not! I mean”— Hallie caught herself —“OK, I am. But come on: everyone calls themselves a photographer these days. They just point and snap, and post everything online.”

“But there’s so much more to it than that. Here.” Brandon set down his box and pulled out an old-school camera with all kinds of knobs and settings. He passed it to her, almost reverently. “See, this is a Pentax, from the eighties.”

Hallie held it up to look through the viewfinder at him. For a moment she was caught, looking into his eyes. They were a dark shade of blue Hallie had never noticed before, almost gray. . . .

She lowered the camera quickly. “It still works?”

“Sure. These things last forever, if you take care of them. The hard part is finding the film,” Brandon explained. He took the camera back, and showed her how to twist the lens to focus. “I get it off auction sites online, and at estate sales around town. Last month, I found a whole lot of untouched film: sealed, no damp, nothing.”

He snapped the cover shut, and handed it back to Hallie. “Go on, take something.”

“Now?” Hallie paused, the camera an unfamiliar weight in her hand. “OK . . .” She held it up quickly and snapped a shot of Brandon before he had a chance to cover his face.

“Not me!”

“Why not?” Hallie kept clicking. She had to wind the film between shots, and only got in a couple more before he took the camera back.

“I’m not that kind of guy,” he said, and under the harsh light, Hallie could swear he was blushing. “I don’t like being the center of things. I’m more a behind-the-scenes kind of guy.”

“I think that’s a good thing,” Hallie decided, hopping up on one of the counters. He started shooting her, and she struck a pose, blowing kisses until the film ran out. “I mean, people who want to be in the spotlight, they have this hunger, you know? Like they’ll do anything to make it, even if it means crossing the line.”

“Oh, yeah?” Brandon raised an eyebrow.

“Not me!” Hallie protested. “But, you know, people.”

“I know.” Brandon looked at her carefully, so carefully that Hallie shifted, uncomfortable.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He turned back to the camera. “Just, you seem different now.”

“Different bad or different good?”

Brandon smiled. “We’ll see. Now, turn off the light, we have to do this next part in pitch-black, so we don’t wreck the film.”

Hallie stayed in the darkroom for the rest of the day, watching as thin spools of negatives were transformed into actual prints under Brandon’s careful hands. “We made them, from scratch!” she exclaimed, delighted, looking at the final print of her photos of Brandon.

He groaned, trying to snatch them away. “You can’t keep those! The exposure’s all wrong, and the focus is smudged —”

Hallie held them close to her chest, out of reach. “But they’re mine!” She paused, looking around the tiny room, pictures dangling at every turn. “It’s pretty cool, what you do here: taking moments and making them last.”

Brandon looked bashful. “My therapist says it’s supposed to remind me how everything is fleeting, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real, in the moment, you know?”

“I know.” Boy, did she know.

Hallie followed him out onto the back lawn. It was dark now, she was surprised to see, the house silent in the glow of the security lights. “I guess nobody’s home. Amber said something about a charity thing. . . .”

“Want to come over?” Brandon suggested. “We could get pizza and watch something.”

“You mean,
Hellfire 4
?” Hallie grinned.

He laughed. “Nope. That doesn’t come out until next year. You can pick.”

“Ooh.” Hallie clapped, heading around to the front of the house. “There’s that new Russian movie . . . or did you see
The Artist
? It’s a French movie —”

“No subtitles!”

“There aren’t any, silly,” she reassured him, with an evil grin. “It’s a black-and-white silent movie!”

Brandon stopped dead.

“It’s good, I promise,” Hallie told him. “It won a bunch of Oscars, and . . .”

The words died on her lips. Standing in the driveway, with his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, was the one face she’d never expected to see.

Dakota.

“Hey,” he said, with that familiar smile. “Brandon.” Dakota gave him the guy nod. “How’s it going, man?”

Brandon didn’t respond. He was frozen next to Hallie, tension radiating from his body as he glared at Dakota. Dakota stared back, his expression changing as he looked from Brandon to Hallie and back again.

Hallie nudged Brandon, breaking the face-off. “You go ahead,” she told him. “I’ll be over in a minute.”

He gave her a searching look. “You sure?”

Hallie nodded. “Order extra-crispy,” she said, amazed to find her voice emerge steady and sure. “But no —”

“Anchovies,” Brandon finished, finally relaxing. “Got it.” He glared one last time at Dakota and then sauntered past.

Dakota cleared his throat. “So . . .” he started, moving closer. “Hey.”

Hallie stared back evenly. “Hey.” She expected a rush of feeling — anger, longing, regret,
something
— but instead, she felt nothing. Nothing! As if the months of pained longing and fervent sobs had burned all her emotion away.

“You guys look pretty friendly.” Dakota tried a teasing smile. “Is there something going on I should know about?”

“I don’t think so,” Hallie said coolly. “I don’t think you have the right to know anything about my life anymore.”

Dakota’s smile dropped. “I guess I deserve that,” he said quietly.

Hallie sighed. “What are you doing here?”

“We’re back in L.A. now,” Dakota explained, “doing final mixes and promo for the album.”

“And going to movie premieres.”

He looked away. “Yeah. I’m, sorry about that. I wanted to warn you, about the photos, and events, but —”

“It’s fine.” Hallie bit out the words. “It’s nothing to do with me anymore.”

Dakota looked back at her, eyes full of something she could swear was regret. “I never meant . . .” He trailed off. “What I mean is . . . I’m sorry, about the way everything went down. I should never have treated you like that, or even ended it at all.”

Hallie was still trying to process those last words, when Dakota stepped forward. “You have to know,” he said, pleading, “it wasn’t because I stopped loving you. Hallie . . .” He clutched her hand. “Things just got so confusing, and then the label, and Talia . . .” He held on, as if for dear life. “Please, I loved you. I still do.”

Hallie stood there, still numb. His words seemed to drift somewhere, just out of reach — not connecting, not making her feel anything at all. But that made sense, she realized, looking at that face that had consumed her every thought since the night she first laid eyes on it — nothing so desperate as the way she’d felt about him could ever last for long. She’d exhausted every last ounce of love for this boy, blazing through it like a wildfire, and now Hallie was left with nothing more than a small, empty place in her heart where he used to be.

It was over.

Hallie sighed, feeling the last breath of devotion leave her body. “I hope it’s worth it,” she said quietly. “I hope you picked right.”

Dakota’s face seemed to slip for a moment. His eyes were pained, and as his hand held on tight to hers, the touch took Hallie back: to those nights driving around downtown, her fingers laced between his.

Nothing else in the world had mattered. She’d belonged to him, completely.

That was the problem.

“Good-bye.”

Hallie kissed him gently on the cheek, and walked away.

It was March; the tree-lined streets of Beverly Hills were bright with blossoms, and Grace was turning seventeen.

“Are you sure you don’t want a party?” Amber asked hopefully as they sat over coffee in the sun-drenched kitchen. “Just something small. A hundred people, top DJs, a cake in the shape of the periodic table . . . You know, intimate!”

Grace shook her head vigorously. After the dramas of the past year, she would have happily chosen a quiet evening in with a book, but Amber, she suspected, would keel over at that suggestion. “I want to keep it simple,” Grace said instead. “Just family, and maybe Palmer.”

“And Brandon too,” Amber added, with a meaningful grin.

Grace turned, following her gaze out to the back lawn, where their neighbor sat running lines with Hallie. It looked like a death scene, but every time Hallie fell to the grass in her final writhings, Brandon would say something, or poke her with his toe, and Hallie would fall about in hysterics.