Map to the Stars (14 page)

Wynn indulged me with a rare serious moment. “Is it bad? I know you emailed me all the stuff about him not being allowed to date. Are you guys in trouble?”

I filled her in on Ellis's new directives and how they left me out of the equation entirely.

“I'm sorry,” Wynn breathed quietly. I had to give her credit. She was handling my “cheating” with her crush with surprising grace.

“This doesn't weird you out, does it?” I asked her.

“Well, I have had to say good-bye to an integral part of my sweet, innocent girlhood,” she joked. “Seriously, though, I might be crazy jealous, but it's not like I'm genuinely hurt. I'm putting on my big girl panties here. I hardly had any actual claim over him. Besides, I fell for the
fantasy
of Graham Cabot. You fell for the real person,” she said. Her voice was soft when she added, “And you did, didn't you? I could tell from your email the other day. In all the years you've spent listening to me dissect every single thing a random cute boy has said in passing to me, you've never gone all girly-girl like that before. By the twenty-seventh time I read ‘and then he said, and then I said,' I knew you had it bad.”

I sighed like the world was coming to an end. At least my world. A series of moments played like a movie in my mind. Graham winking at me while messing with the reporter. Graham calling me Pickles. Graham looking into my eyes while the plane bounced around in the sky. Graham in the pool, wiggling his obscene third toe at me. Graham pulling me up the hill to the Basilica, Graham's voice in my ear at the market, Graham fastening the rabbit's foot onto me, Graham kissing me, Graham kissing me, Graham kissing me. That last one was on a loop in my brain.

“I think I have it pretty bad,” I told Wynn.

“How bad?” she asked.

“I think I might have . . . feelings.”

She squealed loud enough to wake not only her entire household but the rest of Shelbyville as well.

“Oh my God, Annie! You LOVE Graham Cabot.”

How many times had I heard Wynn say, “I love Graham Cabot so much”? A hundred? A hundred thousand? And how many times had I uttered those words? Not even once.

“Slow down,” I protested. “It's way too early for that. But there's definitely
something
there.” Which was crazy. I mean, we'd just met. But still. I sank my head into my hands, cradling the phone on my upper arm. How was this happening to me?

Wynn was still babbling away, unaware of the scope of the Shakespearean drama I was living out. “Well, this no-dating thing will all blow over. It has to. I can't WAIT to meet him when I come to LA. Do you think he'll have us over to his mansion? He has to live in a mansion, right? Seriously, does he smell amazing? He looks like he'd smell amazing.”

She was feeling every bit as giddy as I should have been, but the key difference was that she hadn't just been issued a publicist restraining order.

“Wynn. It's not like that. I can't . . . we can't . . . we're not allowed to date.”

Wynn calmed down on the other end and resumed normal best friend duties. “Yeah, but do you think they'll really stick to that? I mean, if you guys are actually in love, they can't do that to you, right?”

“Well, for one thing, I don't know what either of us is feeling just yet. For another, his publicist was really clear about the fact that dating me would mess with Graham's brand. The same way he wasn't supposed to be seen with a girl before this, because they thought his
fans would have a hard time accepting him as off the market, now she's decided he should show the world he's grown up and he should date.”

Wynn interrupted, “Okay, but that's great, right?”

“Not great. She wants him to be a ladies' man. Different date every night kind of thing. She thinks his fans will be okay with that. One thing he definitely cannot do is date a nobody like me,” I said, letting bitterness creep into my voice.

“Annabelle Mae Shelton, you are NOT a nobody and you better not let anyone over there call you that or they'll have me to deal with!”

I had to smile. I could picture Wynn, sitting upright in her bed, punching at the air. In kindergarten, when Marcus Riley called me a fartbutt, Wynn had stuck out her foot to trip him in the cafeteria, sending his whole lunch tray up to meet his face. In fifth grade, when Summer Alito invited all the girls in our swim club to her sleepover but me, Wynn skipped it in protest. I could always count on her to have my back in any confrontation I was too chicken to do anything but run from. Which made me ache all the more. My throat closed over a hard lump.

“I miss you,” I told her, plain and simple.

“I miss you too,” she said. I heard the same notes of sadness in her voice. “You know, when I read your weekly horoscope it said you would surprise people and cause them to see you in a whole new light. But I never suspected this is what it would mean.”

The fact that Wynn was still reading my horoscopes, despite the fact that I was thousands of miles away and had only ever rolled my
eyes when she talked about anything to do with Virgo's moon rising or Capricorn being in the twelfth house, made my heart squeeze with love.

She continued. “Listen, let's not focus on the going-forward stuff right now. You haven't told me anything about Graham and I want to hear everything, leading right up to that delicious-looking kiss I watched on my computer about a bajillion times last night.”

So I told Wynn everything. She stopped me right at the kiss and insisted we didn't need to spend one second talking about anything that came after his lips tasting a little like the cinnamon that had been sprinkled on his crepe.

And it helped. Wynn always helped.

As if my summer weren't essay-ready already, rolling through the French countryside in a forty-foot RV could headline its own chapter.

I could picture a private plane, a yacht, even, maybe a deluxe tour bus. But a brown-and-orange RV with a zigzag racing stripe around its belly was not where I'd ever expect to find someone who apparently had “marquee value” out the wazoo.

Which was sort of the point, I guess.

The press for
Triton
that Graham had been doing had been a little too effective. He'd put the spotlight right on himself and then gone and kissed a mystery girl before disappearing. His fans were all atwitter and whatever info the fans craved, the gossip magazines burned to provide. Melba and Ellis had formed an exploratory search party and scoped out the airport. They reported it crawling with tabloid reporters hoping for an interview with Graham, me, or preferably Graham-plus-me. Likewise the train station. And so they hopped on a jet to do advance recon in Barcelona and arranged for the rest of
us to travel to Spain Midwestern-retiree style. Quite the disguise. I'd grown up in rural Georgia, so I knew plenty of people who lived full-time in these things and, for once on this trip, I was in my comfort zone while Graham was the fish out of water.

Roddy was steering us along the A20 and Mom was in back with a bad headache, which left Graham and me to fill out the small “kitchen” table in the center of the bus. We'd started a card game, mostly to avoid talking about everything we couldn't talk about, but it hadn't gone so well. Probably because of all the tension between us.

For my part, I had no idea where his head was. Was he mad at me for causing him to potentially mess up his career? Was he upset with himself for letting his guard down? Or was he, like me, replaying our Eiffel Tower kiss over and over to the point where he could almost feel the warmth of our lips pressed together?

His stupid trained-actor face wasn't giving anything away.

After we'd abandoned the game, Graham muttered, “Homework time” and hauled out an obscenely high stack of
Triton
posters. He began signing away. Nearly an hour later I flipped closed my guidebook to Barcelona and sighed loudly into the silence. Graham swung his eyes to mine, eyebrows high. I looked over his shoulder to the closed door that led to the bunk beds in the back of the bus where Mom was resting, then checked behind me to gauge how far out of earshot Roddy was. Determining we were about as alone as we were ever going to be allowed again, I whispered, “Wanna talk about it?”

“About what?” Graham said, trying to be funny, but with only a halfhearted effort before his face fell again. “I'm sorry.”

“Me too,” I answered. “Are you mad?”

“Mad?” He looked genuinely confused. “At you?”

I hung my head.

“Annie, look at me.”

I didn't move. Graham reached across the table and lifted my chin with his finger. I wanted to freeze time at the small touch. “Pickles,” he murmured. I raised my eyes to his, blinking a little to keep them from watering.

“I'm not mad at you. Are you insane? You should be mad at me. It's my fault I dragged you into all my baggage. I should have just left things alone after the other night at the pool. I've been so disciplined for so many years and I just wanted a chance at a little bit of normal. It was stupid of me to think it would be that easy.”

“It wasn't stupid,” I told him. “You deserve a little bit of normal.”

“Actually, I don't. My mom always tells me how I'm special. And it's usually when she's telling me something I can't do. ‘No, Graham, you can't go to the football game your friends are playing in. You're special and people would mob you.' ‘No, Graham, we can't go cut down a Christmas tree. It will be much less of a scene to get one delivered. Because you're special, baby.' But I want the career and this is what the sacrifice is. Has always been.”

“I don't get it. I watched you talk to all the reporters at the press junket and you were so confident and easy with them. Why can't you be the same way with your mom or with Melba and tell them how you feel?”

Graham looked far away for a moment and answered, “I just can't.
It's different than with the reporters or the people on a movie set. Mom's tied her whole life to me and I can't let her down. Melba's just following orders. Besides, what would be the point?”

I slid my fingers through his. There wasn't really anything to say. It flat-out sucked, but he didn't need me to tell him that.

We sat like that, holding hands but lost in our own thoughts, for a while longer, with the French countryside whizzing by outside the window. The scritch-scratch of Graham's free hand signing posters and pushing them aside was the only noise.

When I shouted, “Stop!” it shattered the quiet and almost made Roddy swerve off the road.

“What the hell, Annie?” Graham exclaimed.

“Pull over,” I ordered Roddy, who complied without any pushback.

“We have a bathroom on board, you know,” called Graham, as I grabbed my bag and swung the door open. While I backtracked along the highway, I was vaguely aware of Graham and Roddy gaining on me. But I was on a mission.

About an eighth of a mile back on the road, I stood in front of my big score.

“Look at it,” I directed Graham as he caught up to me.

I pointed to the road sign. It was round with a bright red outline, and inside the center of the circle was a drawing of a car. Fairly normal. Except on top of the car was a giant red, yellow, and white jagged lightning bolt. It looked like a “BAM!” explosion from a comic book.

I had a giant grin on my face and Graham's matched it. “What do you think it's trying to tell us?” he asked.

“I have absolutely no idea!”

“We have to Google it when we're back in the family roadster.”

Roddy had not batted so much as an eyelash all day yesterday as Graham and I had goofed our way around the entire city of Paris, but he was looking at the two of us like we'd just sucked up an entire balloon of helium and were now trying to sing the national anthem.

“You people are off your rockers,” he said, turning to make his way along the shoulder to the RV. I could see Mom's figure now, just pushing out the door.

“Here, take one with me in front of it,” I instructed Graham, handing him my phone. He snapped me holding my hands up as if I were cradling the sign. I grabbed my phone back and took a picture of just the sign. Graham even shot a few on his phone as cars streaked past us. When we got back to the RV, Mom and Roddy were still outside, leaning against the side.

“Find a good one?” she asked. Mom wouldn't need to be told why we stopped. She'd gotten used to never getting from point A to point B without a shoulder stop like this. “Like father, like daughter.”

My first impulse was to shut down, but instead I just shrugged.

“I'm glad to see you're softening,” she told me, leaving Graham to wrinkle his brow as Mom and I talked in code.

Without another word, we all piled back into the RV and resumed our positions as if our little break hadn't ever happened. I ran cool water over a washcloth I found in the bathroom and brought it in to Mom for her forehead. She was already lying down again, with eyes closed.

When I joined Graham, he shoved his phone across the table. “I Googled it. It means ‘No flammable material.'”

We laughed for a second and then he asked, all serious again, “What did your mom mean just then? About you softening?”

“Can we not?”

“Sure. We can ‘not.' But it occurs to me that I've spent the last few days dumping all my crap on you and you've been awfully quiet about offering any truly personal info of your own.”

I picked up the deck of cards we'd been playing with at the start of the trip and began shuffling them over and over. I refused to lift my eyes.

“It's about my dad,” I began, flipping cards onto the table.

“Well, yeah, I figured as much. I assumed the picture was for his sign collection . . .”

“Yeah. It's just that we're not exactly talking these days.”

“Oh.” He didn't ask a follow-up question or give me pointed looks. He just waited for me to be ready. And somehow that did the trick. Once I started talking it was like I turned on a faucet and the handle came off in my hand—I couldn't stop.

“My dad, he's, well he
was
, this awesome dad. Like really awesome. I'm an only child so I got a lot of attention anyway, but my dad always gave me even more. My mom helped run the salon my grandmother owns, so she worked a lot of weekends and it was just Dad and me most of the time. I didn't mind. He always made up adventures for us so I wouldn't miss Mom. When I was little he would draw letters with his finger on my back every night while I tried to fall asleep. I
always felt like he was the person in the world, besides Wynn and my mom, who I could trust completely. And then he fucked it all up.”

Graham's head jerked up in surprise. He looked at me for a beat, then asked, “What did he do?”

“It's more like what he didn't do. He didn't tell us that he'd been laid off from his job. He was a restaurant supplier. And when the recession hit, restaurants were dropping like flies. Eventually it caught up with the company Dad worked for. It's not like he did anything wrong. He wasn't fired or anything. Just laid off. But for some reason he didn't tell us. Actually, he says he didn't tell us at first because he thought he'd find another job in a matter of days and he didn't want to worry us. And then he said when days turned into weeks, he was too ashamed.”

“Wow,” said Graham. When he looked at me his eyes were sympathetic. “So how many weeks was it before you guys found out?”

I took a deep breath. “Nine months.”

“Nine
months
?”

I nodded and raised my shoulders in a shrug. His reaction mirrored mine when I'd found out, minus about a thousand times the shock.

“He would shower and get dressed every morning and leave for work the same way he always had. Except then, without us suspecting a thing, he would drive to a Panera Bread three towns away and send résumés out from his laptop all day.”

“For
nine
months? How was he hiding the fact he wasn't making a salary all that time?”

I stopped flipping cards and tugged at a piece of cuticle on my thumb.

“He used my college savings. All of it. It was only when it ran out that he was forced to tell my mom.
That
was a red-letter day,” I said with a snort.

“She had no suspicions at all?”

“None. She handled all the finances for the Curl Up and Dye.” Graham smiled slightly upon hearing the salon name. Most people did. “It made sense for him to be the one in charge of all the household finances, so she wouldn't be stuck with both. But even if she had studied the bank balance, it would have looked the way it always did because the college account was a totally separate one. Obviously, I found all of this out after the fact. The only thing I ever knew about our money situation before this was that we had plenty for me to be on the swim team and buy new shoes for school, but not enough to go to Disney every year. When I was old enough to work, I got paid to be the shampoo girl at the salon and that was my spending money. Talk about being in a bubble.” I snorted again.

I couldn't believe I was having this conversation with someone who probably ranked on the
Forbes
Richest People in America list, but Graham made it possible to forget about that part of him completely. He wasn't making a move to touch me, but his body leaned toward me and he gave every indication of listening intently.

“Anyway, when he finally confessed, everything sort of hit the fan.” I picked the cards back up. “Well, that's an understatement. Mom had been helping out on hair and makeup for this movie that was filming near us and the producer kept encouraging her to move to LA, so she decided it would be a chance to get a little space from
everything. Except I'm not so sure she still thinks that. She and my dad have been talking.”

Graham made a sympathetic noise in his throat, but didn't add any commentary of his own. Somewhere he'd learned to be a really good listener. And I was turning out to be a pretty good talker, considering I'd never told anyone but Wynn about any of this. My other friends thought my dad was just staying behind until he got a job offer in California.

I swiped at a stray tear that had escaped my eye. “I don't even know how to feel about that. On the one hand, I don't see a way to forgive him. But I miss him.”

With that, I broke down. Graham slid swiftly across the bench to wrap me in his arms and I cried into his T-shirt, not even having the presence of mind to be embarrassed about it. I was vaguely aware of Mom's voice asking what was going on, but Graham must have waved her off because I didn't hear her again.

We stayed like that for a long time. As we sped down a foreign highway in a foreign country, I felt protected and at home with this near stranger who somehow wasn't a stranger at all anymore. He smoothed my hair and whispered that things would be okay, and I was so comforted that I fell asleep in his arms.

When I woke, we were stuck in traffic amidst a cityscape. Mom was still tucked away in the back room and Roddy was busy trying to maneuver the huge beast through gridlock.

Graham smiled at me as I picked my head up and looked around to get my bearings. When I remembered what landed me in his arms in
the first place, I ducked my head in embarrassment.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

“Don't be,” he said, strangely intent. I tilted my face up to his to gauge his expression.

It was a good one.

He whispered, “Hey, so, I heard everything they said this morning and I don't want to mess up my career. But . . . I don't want to lose you either. Or this. Whatever it is.” He gave me something that was a cross between a smile and a grimace. “Would you . . . I mean, would it . . . would I be a total ass to ask you to stick with me, but behind the scenes? Until I can figure out how to fix things? You deserve someone who can give you more than that and I would totally get it if you—”