Bloom (25 page)

Chapter 56

It’s still dark
when I wake on Friday morning with a stomach full of dread. I rest my hand on James’s chest, soothe myself with his even breathing and solidity. No matter how the interviews turn out, I have him. It may take a while, but as long as I’m with James I know everything will sort itself out eventually.

“You’re watching me again,” he says groggily.

“No, I’m not,” I whisper. “Go back to sleep.”

“What time is it?”

“Not even 6:00,” I whisper. “Go back to sleep.”

He pulls me into him, kissing my forehead. “Why are you up?”

“Nervous,” I sigh.

He rolls toward me, completely awake now, and pushes my hair back from my face. “I think it’s going to be okay,” he says. “I really do.”

I nod, wishing I felt as confident as he does.

“And worst case, we both drop out of school and go live in a cabin in the woods and forage for food until it all dies down,” he suggests. “And you’ll probably get pregnant because we have nothing to do in the cabin but have sex all day, and we end up staying there like that hillbilly family on
The Simpsons
.”

“And here I was thinking the worst case was divided public opinion.”

He reaches over to the nightstand and grabs his laptop. I wait, my heart pounding so hard that I swear I can feel it echo. My very best-case scenario here is that the article is relatively balanced. That it weighs my accusations against Edward and his against me equally. But as he pulls the article up, I feel increasingly convinced that my mother was right. That I just gave the reporter a chance to twist my words and reveal me to the world as an opportunistic slut.

He scans the article briefly before he slides the laptop over with a small smile. And from the very first line, where she describes me as a four-year-old spinning in Edward’s chair while I wait for my father, the world begins to right itself.

She’s relayed the story like I did, following chronologically a little girl who believes herself surrounded by trustworthy adults, who continues to believe it long after it ceases to be true. And she follows by describing a system in which celebrities evade restraining orders and a whole network conspires to keep their big money-maker free from harm.

It doesn’t just skewer Edward – it takes down the whole show, the network, even the justice system for failing to protect a citizen when there’s a celebrity involved.

If anything, Edward is almost unfairly vilified – he sounds like a pedophile who’s been targeting me since childhood.

Tears well up in my eyes as I finish the article.

“Why are you crying?” James asks, mystified.

“I don’t know,” I laugh. “It’s just … I’d stopped believing that things would ever be fair, that any part of the system still worked. And I’m so happy that it still does.”

Max makes us all breakfast and we wait impatiently for my segment to air on Rona’s show. Of course, they repeatedly promise the segment is “coming up” and instead we are forced to watch hard-hitting features about a Jurassic Park-themed wedding, an 80-year-old completing her high school degree, and a fashion show with babies dressing up like historic figures.

Rona does a live intro, putting on her Very Serious Face to let the viewers know this is important. “By now the whole country is familiar with the tale of Edward Ferris,” she intones, “accused of having an affair with Eleanor Grayson, daughter of journalist Andrew Grayson. Ferris acknowledged that he pursued Ms. Grayson. What he failed to admit was that he harassed and stalked her to the point that she feared for her life. What you’re about to hear next may shock you.”

I snort a laugh at this. “Personally, I’m shocked to hear that I feared for my life.”

Then the voicemails begin playing, the words transcribed on the screen in case anyone has missed a single crazy-on-top-of-crazy word.

I wish I hadn’t had to release them. It was necessary, but I could do without having the whole world know the things he thought about.

“Jesus. I can’t believe he was saying that shit to you,” says Ginny quietly. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

I raise a brow and she nods. “I guess I wouldn’t have told me either.” She pushes James’s arm off of me and puts hers in its place. “I’m so sorry.”

My portion of the interview airs, the camera going back-and-forth from me to Rona making her Very Serious Face and nodding a lot. All in all, it appears to be a slam dunk in my favor, even without Tommy’s new album playing in the background.

“That guy is so fucked,” says Max.

I wish that were true, but I’m not sure. Celebrities have come back from worse.

It’s announced that afternoon that Edward will take a “leave of absence” to deal with “addiction issues”. My guess is that they will wait to see if he can recover from the bad publicity, and it’s entirely possible that he will. But all that matters is that I will too.

Chapter 57

By the afternoon,
there are reporters in my yard again, and Kristy warns that they’re at the restaurant too. I refuse to be photographed in my Pink Pelican uniform – it would eradicate any good done to my image by the interviews.

“I think I’m going to have to quit,” I tell James, looking out into the yard. They’ve moved back to the sidewalk after James informed them they were on private property, but they look pretty damn comfortable there too.

“I’m not sure what Brian will do without you,” he says, serious for a moment before he starts laughing. He ducks my swinging fist, grabs it and pulls me toward him. “We’ve only got five days left. Maybe we should both quit.”

“Are you just trying to live out your trapped-in-a-log-cabin scenario?” I tease.

His mouth curves on one side. “Maybe not the ‘foraging for food’ part. But yeah, the rest of it sounds good.”

The story is still on TV. Every network except Edward’s seems to be discussing it around the clock. It’s a running gag on the late night shows. One comedian does an entire skit dressed as Edward pretending to hang outside a high school and ask girls to prom in his gravelly voice.

Edward might have stood a chance at recovering from the whole thing, if he’d followed the same advice that was given to me – if he’d laid low, waited for it to die down. But instead he insists he is coming into work, and has to be removed from the building by security. And then he stands in front and announces to all the camera crews outside that I’m a liar and that he never left those voicemails – not the best argument to make when the entire country recognizes your voice.

I hope he did a better job of saving than my parents did, because his days on television are over.

**

It seems safe to conclude that my gamble paid off. But there’s one last hurdle to deal with: my father. No news has been released about his correspondent’s position, and in this case, no news probably is
not
good news.

I brace myself, when he calls, for his anger and his threats. And possibly worse.

“Eleanor, I saw your interview and heard the voicemails,” he says. His voice is stern, emotionless. A newscaster voice.

“Yes?” I say quietly. I’m not going to apologize. His behavior this summer has shown me who he is. And if he refuses to pay for college now he’ll just be confirming it.
I’ll be okay I’ll be okay I’ll be okay
. I’m not entirely sure I believe it, but I repeat it just the same.

“You should have told me,” he says, and his voice loses its certainty. There’s a tiny unevenness to it. “How could you not have told me how bad it was?” And on that last word his voice cracks entirely. It’s a sound I’ve never heard come from him.

For some reason this unexpected shift, him acting like a parent for the first time in months, or even years, makes my eyes sting. “I figured you knew,” I whisper.

“How could I have known? People who knew him far better than I are shocked. How could I have known?”

“I didn’t think you cared,” I tell him, and my own voice begins to break. “I thought all you cared about was the effect on you.”

He pauses. “No matter what else is going on in my life,” he finally says, “you’re still my daughter and I love you.”

The network, as it turns out, has given him his job back. This, more than anything else, probably explains his sudden change of attitude and the fact that he’s finally invited me (and James) to his wedding. He’s already sold the wedding photos to a tabloid, so I have a feeling this is going to be a part of his image-rehabilitation campaign, which I really want nothing to do with. Then again, by November an all-expenses paid trip to Grand Cayman with my boyfriend might be pretty appealing.

It feels as if the world is finally beginning to shift the right way, that all the pieces are falling in place. Of course, many of those pieces – my parents, for instance, are far less stable than I once believed. But others – namely James – are so much more. They make up for anything I’ve lost.

Chapter 58

“You’re going to
chicken out,” James tells Ginny, saying what all of us think but aren’t brave enough to speak aloud.

She snorts. “You know a lot less than you think you do. I’m going upstairs to call him right now.”

Ginny decided to break up with Alex a week ago, but insisted she couldn’t do it until he was back in the US.

“You just can’t do that to someone,” she said, as if he was a soldier deployed to Afghanistan instead of a Dartmouth sophomore hanging out in Barcelona on his parents’ dime. I think we all assumed it was Step One of a strategy tentatively titled “Don’t Ever Break Up with Alex”.

We wait, expecting her to come downstairs sheepish and excuse-laden. Instead she comes down enraged.

“He’s an asshole,” she hisses.

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

“He cheated on me!” she shouts. “He cheated on me with some bitch from Stanford!”

“Uh, Ginny, you cheated on him too,” I remind her.

“Yeah, but he
slept
with her!” she shouts. “That’s different! And I asked him if he would have told me if I hadn’t broken up with him and he said, ‘probably not’. He could have given me a disease!”

“Uh, Ginny, you slept with someone else too,” I say, trying not to laugh.

“Elle!” she scolds. “Jesus Christ, do you have to say stuff like that with my brother sitting
right
there?”

“I already knew,” James says with distaste. “You had the whole conversation outside my door, remember?”

Max steps forward with an odd, pinched look to his face. “You slept with someone?” he asks quietly.

She puts her hands on her hips, suddenly defensive. “So?”

“I can’t believe you’d do something like that,” he says.

For a moment I assume he must be joking. But his voice isn’t teasing. It’s rife with bitter disappointment, like a father scolding a child.

“Seriously?” she rounds on him. “You, the biggest whore in the Tri-State area, are acting disappointed in
me
?”

He rises. “I thought you had more self-control than that,” he says coolly.

“You spent the whole summer buying me sex toys and talking about how I needed to ‘bloom’ sexually!” she gasps. “So what’s with the attitude?”

“It was a joke! I didn’t think you were actually going to do it!” he seethes.

“Are you shitting me?” she laughs. “How unbelievably sexist. Why would you hold me to a different standard than you hold yourself?”

“Because I
thought
you were a better person than that!” he shouts. “I
thought
you were a better person than me.”

He walks out the front door, kicking over a photographer who has his lawn chair set up in our yard as he goes.

Ginny turns to us in shock. “What the hell is wrong with him? He
never
acts like that.”

I remember the time James practically ran out of the kitchen after we first kissed, and find myself quoting Max verbatim. “Yes,” I say, with a smile just like Max’s. “Isn’t that interesting?”

Chapter 59

Our last few
days together are bittersweet. I’m as happy as I’ve ever been, as long as I can stave off the pressing sadness of leaving him. He’s happy too. I’ve never seen him so relaxed. I’ve never seen him laugh so much. He sleeps now, like the dead, and he no longer has that haunted look I saw so often before we got together.

I feel it coming, though, our impending separation. It pops into our conversations with increasing frequency. And as much as the distance bothers him, James is far more troubled by the fact that Ryan will be at Cornell with me all year, while he is not. “You know he’s going to be writing you songs and shit,” James grouses one day, looking even more glum than his words indicate.

“You act like he’s some kind of drug I can’t resist,” I tell him, plopping down onto his lap and kissing his neck. “You’re forgetting I was able to resist him even before I had you.”

“You didn’t look like you were resisting him during that concert,” he grumbles. There’s something awfully cute about an insecure version of James. I guess I just never dreamed it existed before this summer.

“It’s just one year,” I tell him, pressing my thumb to the lines in his furrowed brow and willing him not to worry. “And we’re only four hours apart.”

“But it’s not just one year,” he sighs. He’s applying to the FBI, which probably means he’ll be in DC after he graduates. No longer a quick train ride away.

“There are good schools in DC too,” I suggest.

His expression morphs from anxious to elated to earnest in two seconds. “You chose Cornell for a reason. You shouldn’t give it up for me.”

I laugh. “Yeah, and the reason was primarily because I didn’t want to be in the same city as my parents. Which clearly isn’t an issue anymore, since neither of them will be in DC by then. Do you really think there’s anything I wouldn’t give up for us to be in the same place?”

He tucks my head under his chin. “God I love you,” he says. I feel him relax beneath me. “So we just need to get through this year.”

“Yes, and this year will be fine. I have more to worry about with Allison than you do with Ryan.”

“With Allison?” he laughs. “Now you’re just making shit up.”

“She’s evil,” I insist. “Like soap-opera evil. I can totally see her drugging you and getting herself knocked up to trap you into marriage.”

“Never,” he says. “I’m going to suffer through the next year, and stay a million miles from her …  ”

“And all other girls,” I interrupt.

“And all other girls,” he continues. “Because someday I want to come back to this house with our kids just so I can tell them about the agony you put me through all summer … ”

“Agony I put
you
through?” I laugh. “What about my agony, Mr. ‘Elle is too young’?”

He continues as if I haven’t spoken. “And they’re going to know, just like I do,” he smiles, “that I’d live through the bad parts a hundred times just to find myself where I am right now.”

He kisses me, and I think of all of my imagined futures, and his. The days and months and years each of us spent working toward things that may no longer happen. But when James describes our future together, it doesn’t have that same ephemeral quality my other dreams had. It’s real, as solid as the memory of something I’ve already lived through, as palpable as the thing that’s tied me to him since I was child.

“Don’t forget about Max and Ginny and their kids,” I tease. “They’ll probably be here too.”

He shudders. “You’re destroying my fantasy.”

“I think maybe they’d be perfect together,” I argue.

“I really need you to stop talking,” he insists.

“But seriously, James, don’t you think that … ” His mouth closes over mine, as he stands, scooping me up as he heads for his room.

“What are you doing?” I grin.

“Shutting you up before I require years of therapy,” he says. “You forced my hand.”

“I’d apologize,” I sigh happily, as the door shuts behind us. “But I’m not really sorry.”

“Yes,” he laughs as he throws me on the bed and whips off his shirt. “I didn’t figure you were.”