Just One Wish (6 page)

He was good-looking enough that I automatically cringed inside. I’d randomly shoved all my hair into a hairnet, which undoubtedly made me look like an angry blond beaver was attacking my head. He was that handsome—but the most striking thing about him was the blue Ballard Productions pass that hung around his neck.

I wanted it.

I gazed at his dark brown eyes, trying to calculate his personality as he came toward me. It’s hard to do this with really attractive people because sometimes I get caught up in who I want them to be instead of who they are. This guy definitely made it hard to concentrate, but he did have a familiar feel to him. Like an old friend. I could tell he was a decent sort of guy, one who would stop to help someone stuck on the side of a road. And I was about as stuck as I could get.

I took several steps toward him so I intercepted him before he got within earshot of the security guard.

“Are you going up to the box?” I asked him.

He glanced at me, surprised. “Yeah.”

“You work for the TV studio?”

He shrugged. “When I have to.”

My gaze went back to the pass lying against his jacket. I couldn’t think of how to best ask him, so I blurted out, “This will seem like a strange request, but I have a perfectly legitimate reason for asking. Can I borrow your pass for a few minutes?”

Madison had joined me by this time but didn’t say anything. She kept casting nervous glances back at the security guard.

An intrigued look passed over the guy’s face. “And what’s your perfectly legitimate reason?”

I hesitated, not sure how much of the truth I should tell him. I lowered my voice. “I need to talk to Steve Raleigh.”

“Really?” The guy cocked his head, an amused smile on his lips. “What are you: fans, writers or . . .” His eyes traveled over our black pants, white shirts, and hairnets. “I’m guessing hopeful actresses.” He made a move as if to walk past us. “Sorry, Steve doesn’t have anything to do with casting.”

“Wait.” I stepped into his path so he couldn’t get around me. “That’s not it. I’m just a fan. A huge fan, really, and I have this favor I need to ask him—it’s a charity thing, but it would be good publicity for him too, and—”

He held up a hand to cut me off. “You’re a huge fan?” He eyed me over, clearly doubtful.

“Yes.” To prove it I added, “I can tell you he performs most of his own stunts.” That had been one of the facts Madison had recited to me. “He’s done two Broadway shows and three movies.” I rattled off the titles, even though I’d never seen any of them. Then I picked two more facts I could remember off the top of my head. “He owns a couple horses, and he did his first commercial when he was nine years old. A toothpaste commercial. They paid him in dental floss. Well, not really—I made up the last part, but the rest of it’s true. So you can see I’m a huge fan. Can I please borrow your pass?”

He looked up, thinking, then returned his gaze to my face. “How about we make a deal? I’ll ask you a Steve Raleigh trivia question. If you can answer it correctly, I’ll stay down here and let you borrow my pass so you can go up to the box.”

“Okay.” Eagerness itched inside of me, and I nearly bounced on the balls of my feet. A part of my mind was already racing ahead to plan out the next step. I’d have to change into something else so the guard wouldn’t recognize me. Putting on my normal clothes probably wouldn’t be enough. Could I get a hold of some sunglasses? A hat?

“Here’s the question,” the guy said. “What does Steve Raleigh look like in real life?”

I hesitated because it was such an obvious question. “He has . . .” I meant to say blond hair, but suddenly I wasn’t sure. I’d just assumed it was blond because that’s how I’d seen him in
Robin Hood
. But in one of the pictures I’d seen in my internet search, he’d had shoulder-length black hair and a mustache—that had been when he’d had a part of a gunslinger in a Western. And he did have brown eyes. But in the pictures of him from that Civil War movie, he’d had blond hair. Ditto for the Viking flick. On his website they’d had photos of him as Robin Hood, photos from his movies, and one of him sitting in a chair holding a guitar—he had brown hair in that one, but I’d figured that was a photo from one of his plays.

Suddenly I wished I’d done more research. Madison had been the one going to all the internet sites about him. I’d spent my time during the road trip memorizing names off the DVD, learning movie lingo, studying sets, and trying to find the outside location.

I glanced at Madison for help, but she was gazing wide-eyed at the guy and not looking at me at all.

Since the guy was waiting for me to finish my sentence, I stammered out, “He has . . . brown eyes.”

The guy stared at me silently, waiting for me to say more. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. Madison let out a sound that was half gasp, like I’d said the wrong thing, which annoyed me since he did have brown eyes. Unless he wore contacts in the Robin Hood series. I decided not to consider that possibility, and I went on, ignoring the whole hair question. “And he’s tall, and has this chiseled jaw—”

Madison gasped again. I wasn’t sure why. I knew I had that part right.

“And he’s in good shape. He has, um, really nice arm muscles, and—”

“Blond or brown hair?” the guy asked me.

I glanced at Madison again. She was still staring at the guy, her mouth half open like she was going to say something, but she didn’t. I decided to guess. It looked so good blond; it must be his natural color. “Blond,” I said.

He shrugged and gave me a conciliatory smile. “Sorry, you failed the huge-fan test. It’s actually brown.” He pushed past us before I could protest or think of anything else to say.

I watched him go, with a “But . . .” hovering on my lips. Before he’d gotten more than a few steps away, the security guard approached us. He grunted at Madison and me, then turned his gaze to the guy.

“I hope these girls aren’t bothering you, Mr. Raleigh.”

The guy sent us another smile—the same arrogant smirk, I now realized, I’d seen time and time again on
Teen Robin Hood
. “No, we were just talking. They’re huge fans of mine.”

And with a very Robin-Hood-like nod in our direction, he disappeared into the elevator.

Chapter
5

Madison lay on one of the beds in our motel room, and I lay on the other. I had suggested sleeping in the van because we’d already spent most of our cash, but Madison had brought her parents’ credit card with her. They gave it to her to use in emergencies, and she figured having to sleep in a van in a parking lot in California constituted an emergency. By the time her parents noticed the charge, we’d be home to explain it.

Still, we’d gone to the cheapest motel in LA we could find. The walls were dirty, the carpet was matted, and the sheets were so worn and thin you could have used them for tracing paper.

It was late, but I couldn’t bring myself to get in my pajamas or brush my teeth. I lay there fully dressed staring at the ceiling. I wished I could have a good, long crying jag, but for some reason I can’t cry.

My mom cries. She cries a lot now. You can say something perfectly normal like “Have you seen my math homework?” and she will burst into tears and rush into her room. It is no use trying to comfort her. She has to get it out of her system before she can emerge and be upbeat again.

Leah is an expert at crying. I have seen her weep when Mom and Dad yelled at her, and then stop as soon as they left the room. And I’m not talking about whining, which anyone can do, I’m talking actual tears dripping down her cheeks.

As kids, whenever we got into fights and my parents heard her sobbing side of the story and then my clear-eyed one, I always got into trouble. So I definitely see the benefit of crying. It’s just when something goes wrong in my life and I’m overwhelmed by frustration, there is a moment where I teeter between anger and tears. I can feel it, but somehow my emotions always slide toward anger.

I didn’t really want to cry as I lay there thinking about my meeting with Steve Raleigh. I wanted to scream, loudly and repeatedly. But I couldn’t. That’s a thing about our society; we totally understand when a person breaks down and cries, but if the same person were to scream at the top of her lungs in a motel room, it is fairly certain the other guests would flee from the building and the hotel manager would call the police.

“If you thought it was him,” I said to Madison for the third time, “why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you stop me?”

For the third time, she answered me patiently. She sat on the edge of her bed coating her legs with lotion and hardly looked at me. “Because I wasn’t sure, and wouldn’t we have looked even stupider if halfway through his quiz I’d said, ‘Hey, aren’t
you
Steve Raleigh?’ and it turned out it wasn’t him? Besides,” she added more quietly, “when I realized it might be him, I lost all ability to actually speak.”

I spread my fingers against the stale bedspread. Instead of being soft, it felt vaguely like wax paper. “Well, I’d rather look stupid in front of a guy who turned out
not
to be Steve Raleigh than one who turned out to be him.”

She finished up her legs and began spreading lotion on her arms. “I still can’t believe it was
him
. Steve Raleigh. Standing right in front of us. He
spoke
to us.”

“Yeah. And we made fools of ourselves.” I winced as I said this. It hurt to remember it.

“Yeah, but we made fools of ourselves in front of
Steve Raleigh
,” she said dreamily. “I didn’t think he’d be so good-looking in real life, did you?”

“I obviously didn’t give a lot of thought to what he looked like in real life, or I would have recognized him—but you, Madison, you saw all those pictures of him on the internet, why didn’t you say something?”

She set the lotion bottle down with a thud, and her voice took on a sharp edge. “Yeah, because that way he would have given you his pass so you could go up to the box—where he clearly wasn’t. We were doomed as soon as you talked to him without knowing who he was.”

She was right. I should have recognized him. Hair color, hat, and glasses aside, I’d seen him enough times as Robin Hood that I should have known who he was. But one doesn’t expect to see celebrities, unannounced and wearing normal clothes—suddenly there—in the ordinary world. Besides, I’d been concentrating so hard on getting a pass, I’d been so busy figuring out the next step of my plan, my mind just hadn’t processed what it should have.

I pulled myself over to the side of the bed and put my hand to my temple. “I’m sorry, Madison. I know it was my fault, not yours. I should have known it was him, and I should have made it clear it was my little brother who was the huge fan.”

Silence filled the room, and I wasn’t sure if Madison accepted my olive branch or not. After a moment, she turned so she could see me better and her voice softened. “Even if you had, it might not have turned out differently. He didn’t seem all that interested in doing anybody any favors.” She pulled back the covers and slid under them. “At least we can say we tried. Think of it this way, you’ll have a really funny story to tell your brother about how we met Steve Raleigh.”

Only Jeremy wouldn’t think it was funny. I couldn’t go home and tell him I’d lied about everything and there wasn’t really a genie to help him make it through surgery. I just couldn’t.

I turned over on my back and stared at the ceiling again. “I’ve got to try one more time to see him. We’ll go to the set tomorrow and try to talk to him there.”

Doubt flashed across Madison’s face. “Annika, it was a miracle we saw him tonight. How are we going to get into the set?”

How, yes. It was time to decide on that. I thought back to the website about all the lingo TV people used, letting it stream through my mind. It seemed they had a different name for everything. They didn’t even call caterers
caterers
. They were
food craft.
But they probably all wore some sort of uniform. Who had access to the place that wouldn’t be in uniform? And then I thought of it.

“We’ll have to find a pet store before we drive to the set,” I told Madison. “We’ll be animal wranglers. That will get us past the security guards. Once we’re on the set, we’ll—”

“If Steve Raleigh didn’t want to help us tonight,” Madison said, breaking into my thoughts, “what makes you think he’d want to help us tomorrow?”

“We never got a chance to explain anything to him. If I could talk to him, I could convince him to visit Jeremy. Besides,” I propped myself up on my elbows, “we were wearing food service uniforms and our hair was shoved into hairnets. I’d be willing to bet he won’t be any better at recognizing us than we were at recognizing him.” I held up a strand of my long blond hair. “How do you think I’d look as a brunette?”

Madison held up her hands in protest. “Oh, no—I’m not dyeing my hair. Don’t even ask.”

“You can change it back afterward,” I said. “Let’s go to the store right now. Do you want to be a brunette, platinum blond—or you could try jet black.”

“I’m tired,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere tonight but across the room to turn off the light.”

I conceded that part to her. The nice thing about Madison is that as long as I let her win some of the battles, she lets me win the war. I changed into my pajamas, climbed into bed, and tried to go over all of the details in my mind so I’d be prepared for anything tomorrow.

After a few hours of listening to the room’s heater turn on and off, I eventually fell asleep. My mind returned to my neighborhood: to rows of pale stucco houses, to cactus and palm trees, to little oasis circles of grass growing among sun-bleached rock yards, to all things average, familiar, and comforting. I was in my living room now, its usual clutter surrounding me, lulling me with a feeling of security.

And then I looked out the window and saw the Grim Reaper.