Famous in Love (2 page)

I can hear
my niece, Annabelle, crying as soon as I walk in the door. I don’t know what it is about that kid, but she’s always bawling. Her sheer unwillingness to be ignored is actually kind of impressive. She’s not even two yet, but it’s like she already knows that in order to make it in this house she’s going to have to announce herself, and if she knows that much, she’s way ahead of the game.

“Anyone home?” I drop my bookbag down on a stool in our kitchen.

“Paye!” Annabelle yells.

My sister, Joanna, comes running down the stairs, Annabelle tucked underneath her arm like a football. “Have you seen Mom?” Joanna asks. Her face is red, and her hair looks damp.

“No, just got home.” I turn my head upside down and look at Annabelle. “Hey, you.”

Annabelle puts on this goofy grin and reaches out her tiny, chubby arms. I swing her out of Joanna’s arms and into mine.

My sister seems to crumble as soon as I take Annabelle, her shoulders sagging down by her collapsed sides.

“What’s up, Jo? You okay?”

“Okay!” Annabelle parrots.

My sister and I are the two siblings left in the house. Both of our older brothers have moved out. There is talk of Bill, my sister’s boyfriend and Annabelle’s father, moving in, but he recently started community college and his parents’ house is closer to school. His family won’t let Joanna move in with them, so for now he visits her and Annabelle on the weekends. Here’s a fun fact: When you’re nineteen and have a kid and no money, your parents control a lot more than you’d like them to.

My sister ignores the question and looks me up and down. “Where have you been?”

Ever since she got pregnant, Joanna has considered herself to be totally grown up. She had this huge belly at her high school graduation, and yet she was instructing me on how to clean my room and how not to come home after curfew. As if becoming a mom made her my mom, too.

I shrug. “Trinkets n’ Things.”

She eyes me. “What were you doing?”

“Selling drugs out the back door.”

Joanna rolls her eyes and flops onto the couch. “Mom was supposed to come home an hour ago.”

“I’m not sure what to tell you.” I rub my hand in small circles over Annabelle’s back, but she just blinks a few times and then starts crying again. Joanna picks herself up off the couch and snatches Annabelle out of my hands.

Joanna sighs. “Look, just tell Mom I left.”

She hooks her bag over her arm, shifts Annabelle, and heads out the door. Annabelle waves as they go, her hand like a duck beak, a tear rolling down her cheek.

After they leave, the house is dead silent. The quiet feels strange to me. When I was growing up, our house was filled with kids, and the older I got, the more people were around. My brothers always had friends over, and by the time I got to fifth grade, Joanna was already attached to Bill.

I hoist my bag on my shoulder and plod my way upstairs. Once I’m in my room, I take the flyer out of my pocket, smooth the edges down flat on the carpet, and look at it.

There is a black-and-white picture of a girl on the front, but she’s in silhouette, so it’s hard to make out any details about who she is or what she looks like. Printed across the top of the page are the words O
PEN
C
ASTING
C
ALL FOR
L
OCKED
. They give me goose bumps. It’s the same feeling I get in an auditorium or a movie theater right when the lights go down. Like maybe that could be me up there. That someday people might know my name, even recognize me. That I wouldn’t be little Paige, the runt of the Townsen litter. I’d just be Paige Townsen: the one and only. That feeling of possibility. Of the fact that right here and right now, everything could change.

The odds of my getting this part are practically nonexistent, I know that, but still, someone has to. Why not me?

My cell phone lights up. It’s Cassandra. She’s talking even before I say hello.

“… I think I fell asleep halfway through.”

“The movie?”

She huffs, like
duh
. “What are you doing tonight?”

I fold the flyer over in my hands, embarrassed to even be holding it. What I’m doing is practicing. What I’m doing is reading that book cover to cover.

“I’m kind of tired,” I say.

“Laurie make you stock shelves?”

“Yes,” I lie. The truth is I did nothing but play thumb war with myself behind the register. We had only two customers come in today, and neither one bought anything.

“Jake is here,” Cassandra says. I hear some rustling and whispering, and then she comes back on the phone. “Maybe we’ll stop by later?”

I picture Jake turning down the cell. He’s petrified of radiation and refuses to even carry one, which makes meeting up kind of difficult. Luckily he’s usually with one of us already.

“Sounds good,” I say.

Jake shouts good-bye—Cassandra must have held the phone out—and then it clicks off.

I hear my dad’s car pull into the driveway. I don’t have to look out my window to know he’s opening the car door, walking around the back to get his briefcase, checking both car mirrors, then the tires, then clicking the lock twice, and walking in the door. He does the same routine every day and has been probably since he could drive. I imagine my dad going through the whole thing when they pulled into the hospital on the nights my siblings and I were born. Did my mom yell? In all my years of seeing my dad’s parking regimen, I’ve never once heard her try to hurry him up.

I walk out onto the landing and see him come in. My dad wears a bow tie every day. He even has some of those tweed jackets with the elbow patches on them.

“You look like a teacher,” I tell him.

He looks up and smiles. “Funny you should say that. I just came from school.”

“It’s summer vacation,” I say, making my way downstairs, “haven’t you heard?”

“Curriculums rest for no man.”

My dad is the only member of my family who gets me. He’s also the quietest person I know. I never realized he was a morning person until I joined the swim team sophomore year and had to wake up early for practice. I came downstairs one morning at five
AM
to find him sipping from a coffee cup. He was so still the air around him could have been water and he wouldn’t even have made a ripple.

He smiles at me when I reach the last step. “Where’s your sister?”

I try to remember where she said she was going. I shrug and follow him into the kitchen. “Dunno.”

Unlike the rest of my family, my dad doesn’t discourage my acting ambitions. My sister thinks I’m too self-involved; my brothers don’t understand it because it’s not a team sport. My mom thinks acting is best reserved for daydreams and the occasional community production, not for “real life.”

My dad, though. My dad has never told me outright what he thinks, but I feel his support. I’ve often heard him say that parenting is like a building. One person has to be the height; the other, the foundation. My dad isn’t a tall man, but he’s a solid one. With four children, if you’re the base, you’re pretty well cemented in there.

He gives me a little nod and heads into his bedroom. He’ll spend the afternoon fixing whatever is broken around the house. He does all the upkeep himself, always has.

I crane my neck to make sure my sister isn’t pulling into the driveway, and then go to her bookshelf and run my hand across the spines until I find her copy of
Locked
. I don’t know why I’m being so sneaky about it. It’s not like she wouldn’t let me borrow it or anything. It’s just that I feel like if she saw me she’d somehow know. She’d put it together and then when I didn’t get the part it would be further confirmation that my dreams are stupid and shallow and totally unrealistic. I don’t really need any more of that in our house. And yet—

What would you sacrifice for love?

The one line, printed across the top of the back cover, makes my heart speed up to a sprint. I take it to my room and close the door. I pull the flyer out from underneath my bed and hold them both in my hands. The girl on the book cover has her back turned, but unlike on the flyer, you can tell her hair is red. It tumbles down her back and looks like it runs right into the waves of the ocean. They surround her, about to swallow her whole.

I open to the first page, and then I start to read.

Saturday goes by
absurdly slowly. There are even fewer people in Trinkets n’ Things than there were during the week, and Laurie has decided to take the day to lead an aromatherapy workshop in the back room. I wonder if anyone has ever died from a sandalwood overdose.

I finished the first book yesterday morning—read it straight through in one sitting. And the truth is I get why Cassandra hasn’t been able to stop talking about the romance, and why it seems the entire world hasn’t put the books down. They’re phenomenal. And the love story is just so, so good. It’s the ultimate fantasy. August and Noah, her longtime crush and boyfriend’s best friend, are the only surviving members of a plane crash that had her boyfriend and younger sister on board. They learn
Noah is a descendant of the island and its people—a position that comes with power. The power to heal August after she’s almost killed by the crash and—I won’t ruin it for you. Let’s just say love isn’t easy, even when you’re the sole survivors of a plane crash and you have the hots for each other.

I jump back in and make it halfway through the second book before asking Laurie if I can head out a little early. She says yes, of course. Actually what she says is, “It’s Saturday. No one comes in on Saturday.”

I close the door to the back room behind me and loop the keys around the hook by the tarot card shelf. I grab my bag from behind the counter, and as I’m leaning down I catch a reflection of myself in the mirror—my hair whipped around my face, my cheeks flushed and red. For just a moment, I don’t recognize myself. I could be anyone. Even August.

Droves of girls are wandering around when I get there. It’s not surprising, but the sight is pretty spectacular. There must be a thousand people outside the Aladdin. The last time I saw this many people in one place was when my brother took me to a Muse concert freshman year. We don’t really spend a lot of time together. My brothers and I, I mean. There was a period when my sister was kind of
close with them, but I think by the time I came around the novelty of having a sister had long worn off. I remember being really surprised Jeff would want me to go. It turned out, once we got there, that he just wanted me to watch the car, because free parking was really hard to come by. “You can sit here and listen to the music,” he said. I didn’t even say anything, totally afraid I’d burst right into tears, and afterward, when he dropped me off at home and my mom asked me how it was, I lied and said great. Telling her the truth somehow seemed too humiliating.

I work my way inside the audition space. There seem to be two lines. One for people who have registered and one for people who haven’t. The nonregistered line is way, way shorter. The majority of people, unlike myself, have prepared for this. Everyone else already has their forms, and they are filling them out on clipboards. They’re sitting in chairs, lining the floor, leaning against the walls.

Most of the girls are with their mothers, and for a slight second I feel a wave of familiar sadness. My mom and I have gone to exactly two auditions together. The first was for a cereal commercial when I was seven. I remember I saw the flyer in the grocery store and begged her to take me. She didn’t want to, but eventually my father convinced her it wasn’t a terrible idea, and maybe I’d make a little money in the process. I got all dressed up in my best
dress and the shoes my mom had bought me for Christmas that year, and we went, hand in hand.

We didn’t even make it into the audition, though. My mom took one look at the other girls and decided we weren’t going to “play,” as she put it. “It’s a beauty pageant,” she’d said. “There is absolutely no way we’re participating.”

I’ve always gone to auditions alone, and in secret. She supports school- and theater-related projects, mostly because she thinks they are somehow “academic,” but anything with film she’s been against pretty much from the beginning.

I make my way to the reception desk, where a woman with a smile like a line hands me a sheet of paper. I take the form and fill it out on the edge of the table, careful to hand it back to her with a smile. She gives me a number in return and waves me off. There are no seats available, so I lean on the wall and put in my headphones.

For my birthday this spring, Jake made me audio recordings of all my favorite films. He even put them on my iPod. I can listen to
Empire Records
while I’m biking home from school or walking to work.

Today I choose a recording of
Singin’ in the Rain
. It’s corny, but I’ve always loved classic movies. There is something about seeing the screen without a ton of CGI or
animation that just feels so cinematic. Important. Like the work those actors were doing meant something.

The sound of Gene Kelly’s voice sweeps over me, and I sit back against the wall, knees tucked up to my chest. I let myself think about what it would be like to get this part. To be in a real film. To prove to my family that this is more than an adolescent fantasy.

I let myself think about what it would be like to actually live my dream.

And just like that, I’m Debbie Reynolds. My eyes slip closed, and when she speaks, it’s me. On the stage. In the spotlight. So much so that when they call my name and I hand over my number, hours later, I’m still singing my heart out. And when I read the lines, it’s like I’m Debbie Reynolds reading the lines. And when they call this man in, this beautiful, tall, blond guy to read with me, it’s like he really is Gene Kelly. And when they ask us to do the scene together, it’s like we’re in the film and it’s raining all around us. A soft, steady pitter-patter.

“I’m Rainer.” He holds out his hand to me, and I take it. He pulls me toward him, and before I’ve had time to even say my name, we’ve begun. We’re August and Noah. And it feels right. No, it feels better than right. It feels perfect. It feels like every moment of my life has been leading to this one.

It’s not until the audition finishes, what feels like days later, and I go outside that I realize it’s actually raining. And the funny thing is I’ve lived in Portland my entire life and this is the first time I can remember ever forgetting an umbrella.

Three months later, we’re on the set.