Selfie (34 page)

“Better.” I took it and held on tight. “Better.”

“Better.”

There was silence then, and we all, I think, absorbed the implications of what was charging down the time stream. And then I remembered my priorities.

“And Jilly, I’m going to need someone early to do my roots. Noah says you can totally see my natural color.”

She swore. “What’s that kid’s name? The one who smoothed over your road rash?”

“Junior.”

“Yeah, him. I’ll text you with the time he’ll stop by. Good call, by the way.”

I grunted. “Well, you know, can’t go showing your property when it’s not up to spec.”

She laughed for a moment, then sobered. “Love you, Con.”

“Love you back, Jilly.”

We both ended the call, and I looked at Noah and gestured forward. “Lead on, my white knight—” Noah snorted at the obvious flaw in the image. “Okay, knight on a white charger—”

And
now
he laughed like a twelve-year-old boy.

“Yeah, I’ll put you on my charger!” I grumbled. “Just lead on. And feed me a cookie—we still have a few and your grandmother has put the fear of cookies in me.”

Noah kept laughing, and I munched on the last cookie while I tried to figure out how what I’d said came out dirty.

Noah’s younger sisters, Ky and Trina, didn’t mention their mother once during lunch. But they
did
show a whole lot of interest in me.

“Did they have real monsters in that
Jupiter
movie?” Ky asked, still mostly child at fourteen, her dark eyes round and wide like Noah’s and Viv’s.

“Some of it was people in makeup,” I told her honestly. “And some of it was CGI, and some of it was like
Jaws—
you’ve seen the fake shark?”

Both girls nodded. They wore their hair scraped from their oval faces, the tight curls fighting for freedom until they met the elastic band and exploded into Viv’s ringlets on the crowns of their heads. Trina was a little taller, and Ky was a little rounder, and Ky still had braces while Trina was fighting the indignity of acne—but there was no denying that they were sisters, or that once they cleared the horrors of adolescence, they’d both be stunners like the rest of their family.

“But how did you talk to them?” Ky persisted. She was the most vocal, which explained why she’d had the guts to have a conversation and a whole relationship with Annette that the rest of the family had been kept in the dark about. Fearless, this one—and she appeared to be certain that she was as adult as the rest of them.

“Well, mostly there was a ball on a stick,” I told her, smiling. “They held it and moved it where the Jupiter monsters were going to be, and I spoke to the ball—”

“But you didn’t
act
like you were talking to the ball!” Trina burst out passionately. “I saw the trailer!” Oh, not for the first time, I really wished there were such things as Jupiter monsters and werewolves.

“Yeah,” I said simply, “but that’s why it’s acting. Because in my
head
there’s a Jupiter monster, and in my
heart
I’m talking to a Jupiter monster, but my
eyes
actually see a ping-pong ball painted fluorescent green.”

“Why green?” Ky took a drink of milk while I answered, and worked on some truly tremendous spaghetti in a homemade sauce that Gran (she wouldn’t let me call her Helena) had apparently been working on all day.

“Because they use a special shade of green that makes it easier to erase from the shot, so they can put the CGI monster in,” I told her, and both girls looked at each other and shook their heads.

“Who’d want to be an actor?” Trina asked practically. “
I
want to draw the monsters!”

Noah, Viv, Samuel, and Gran all laughed indulgently.

“You keep working at it,” Noah said in complete familial support. “Maybe someday you will.”

“Well
I
don’t want to be in Hollywood at
all
,” Ky said wisely. “No offense, Mr. Montgomery, but I don’t think I could talk to a
ball
.”

“It’s demeaning,” I confirmed, and Noah’s hand on my knee let me know that
he
didn’t think so, and that’s all I needed to know.

The girls excused themselves and cleared their plates, and Samuel took another piece of garlic bread and waited for them to leave.

“So, you two talked to your mother?” he asked, looking at Noah and Viv.

“I told her to fuck off,” Viv said bluntly, and Samuel grimaced.

“Darlin’—”

“No. I’m not in the mood for her today. I may never be in the mood for her. She came at me with the big hug and the ‘baby girl’ and I said, ‘I’m Dad’s baby girl, and don’t talk to me.’” Viv shrugged. “She let it stay at that—I think Noah was her big fish anyway.”

Noah rolled his eyes and muttered, “And then she tried to blackmail me.”

There were gasps, and the story came out, and then everybody realized that
I
was coming out, and I—

Stood up and started to clear the table, because I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

I made it to the kitchen and was rinsing dishes in the big farm sink when Noah’s grandmother came in to help me.

The kitchen was done in orange and green—and the tile was bright sunshine yellow. There were prints on the walls, van Gogh actually, to match, and I wondered if they’d let me come over and just sit in this kitchen after Noah gave up on me for good.

“You’re acting like this isn’t a big deal,” she said quietly, pulling plates out of the rinse basin and stacking them in the rack. “It’s a big deal for a twelve-year-old kid who only needs to tell his father—why isn’t it a big deal for a grown man who has to tell half the civilized world?”

“It shouldn’t be,” I murmured, starting in on the silverware. “I mean . . . who cares who I sleep with—in the movies, I always get the girl, right?”

She didn’t laugh. Why did I want to love these people so much if nobody laughed at my jokes? “It’s a big deal—and you’re doing it for someone you’ve known for a month and a half.”

I sighed and pulled my hands out of the dishwater before I got to a knife or something that could hurt me.

“I’m doing this for the guy I knew for ten years,” I said to the wall behind the sink. It had been washed so often it was a lighter green than the rest of the room. “Because . . . because you can talk all the time about how it shouldn’t matter what the world thinks—but it . . . it hurts things when you lie all the time. It hurts the person you’re with. It hurts the thing between you. It’s . . . it’s hard enough having a thing. That thing is so fragile. Viv and Cheddar. Noah’s mom and dad—their things should have worked. There’s not a single good reason for them to not be together. But they’re not. They won’t be. Lying to the world is a huge reason for people to not be together. It’s just time I took it off the table, you know?”

She’d reached for a towel while I was talking, and she handed it to me in the silence that followed. I dried my hands automatically and then looked at the towel.

“I’m not done,” I said in surprise.

“Yes, you are.” She regarded me soberly. “We’re going to open my present, and we’re going to have cookies and ice cream.”

“You clean
my
house all the time,” I said, trying one more time for the joke.

“Bend down,” she ordered, and I did. She reached up and put her hands on my cheeks and looked me in the eyes. “You don’t have to entertain us,” she said, scowling. “You don’t have to be funny. You don’t have to be the good boy. You’re good enough for Noah—that’s really all that matters.”

My eyes burned. “I’m the good boy?” I said wistfully. I’d never been the good boy as a child—I’d been a dreamer, and a slacker, and the kid who went for drama and not sports.

Her hands on my cheeks grew gentle. “Yeah.” She nodded. “You’re already the good boy. Go sit in the living room and charm Ky and Trina some more. Don’t listen when they say they don’t want to be actors. They’re just trying to be—”

“Smart,” I said dryly.

She didn’t laugh, and I straightened up and sighed.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to—”

“Gran! Con! Get in here! It’s present time.”

“During the week, we clean other people’s houses to feed our family,” Gran said matter-of-factly. “During the weekend, our family comes first.”

“I like that,” I said, and gestured her out of the kitchen.

She laughed like a child when she saw the lawn ornament, and I glowed under that much delight. When Noah said I’d picked it out, she actually graced me with a huge, ear-to-ear smile. “Of course. He’s got the heart for this.”

The rest of the afternoon was a blur of people telling excited stories in the living room, and of eating more cookies, but this time with ice cream.

Noah finally called time around five o’clock, saying that I had a big day tomorrow. Viv was staying the night with her family—her gran would drop her off when she visited to clean the house.

“Oh God,” I muttered, as we climbed into the car.

“What?”

“We need to change the sheets in the morning.”

“Oh God,” Noah said, his eyes growing enormous. Somehow it was reassuring that he had the same inhibitions. “Absolutely. And definitely break out the air freshener.”

I grinned at him, content for a moment, and then he took a spear to my little bubble of happy.

“You don’t have to, you know.”

“Don’t have to what?”

“The interview tomorrow.”

Oh. “Noah?”

“Yeah?”

“Can we not talk about it?”

“Baby—”

“Look, it’s no big—”

“Do
not
lie to me!” he snapped angrily.

I retreated into wounded silence.

Vinnie—

I have nothing to say about this.

I’m just so tired.

You promised my parents didn’t have to know.

We’re not kids anymore, Vinnie!

Sure we are. You’re a needy child who just melted over a woman who likes toys and gave you cookies.

I just need—

Whatever. Talk to your new lover. He’s got the fucking say, right?

“Connor, talk to me.”

I turned my head and was almost surprised to see Noah driving. Who was I talking to again?

“Noah, I . . . My head is so screwed up by lying about this shit for so long. If I’m going to fix it, I need to do this one lousy fucking thing to start making it right.”

He steered one-handed for a moment and reached across the console to grab my hand. “I’ll be right there,” he said softly, and I squeezed.

It was a nice thought, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him that for this thing, I was going to have to be totally and completely alone.

Junior was actually waiting for us at my rental so he could do my roots that night. Noah was both amazed and offended on Junior’s behalf.

“Now see—if you’d given them a
day
, Junior could have done them after you were done shooting, but no. You had to change your life in a weekend, didn’t you?”

“I was probably going to do it the week before Comic-Con if it makes any difference,” I retorted. “Because seriously, you’re the only one so tall you can look down and see where they’re growing out right now, and because they’re going to fancy me up and have me pose naked in the wilderness or some shit. But you had to point out that they’re growing and now we’re stuck.”