Not in the Script (41 page)

“It's a big hairy pig with razor-sharp teeth.”

“Whoa!” Levi says. Logan has already slipped out the back door.

Mom puts a hand on her hip. “You should've told them about the lizards instead. They'll be looking for snakes and tarantulas all day.” Levi takes off after Logan.

“Then they better have supervision,” I say, scooting my dad
outside. It feels so good to smile—out of all my fans and famous friends, it's my
family
who showed up when I needed them most. I turn back to my mom. “I'm glad you guys came. Surprised, but glad.”

It's only now that I recall the last time I spoke to her.

She takes out chicken and potatoes from a grocery bag. “You haven't answered your phone for two days.” She stops still, with just her eyes moving to look at me. “Emma, we've been worried sick. We had no idea what to expect when we got here.”

I hurry over to the sink, which is filled with dishes. “It doesn't usually look this bad,” I say, hoping to dodge the real issues. “And neither do I. It might be nice if I showered, huh?”

“That isn't what I meant,” she says, and I look back when I hear the catch in her voice. She pushes aside the groceries and comes to my side of the counter. “If you can forgive me for not being here for you in the past, I'd … well, I'd like to be here for you now.”

I nod, taken aback. “I'm sorry I worried you. I haven't answered
anyone's
calls. And the one person I really need to talk to isn't calling.” I can't fight my tears anymore. “Mom, I have to work with Jake in just a few days. And Brett too. How am I supposed to do that?”

Time has completely stopped this weekend, and I don't want it to start again.

“We've had far too many arguments for me to notice how happy you've been these past few months,” Mom says. “Your dad noticed it, though, every time he talked to you. So if Jake had anything to do with that, I can understand why you're so upset right now.”

I try to push my doubt aside. Could my mom really understand
any
of this?

“For once I felt like someone saw past the characters I play, both on and off set,” I reply. “I'd convinced myself that Jake didn't care that I'm not as perfect as everyone expects me to be.”

“Emma,” Mom says, still seeming sincere, “you've turned out remarkably well for pretty much raising yourself. How many girls your age would spend a literal fortune of her own money to start a foundation for the disabled? Or worry so much about a friend's dream that she would put her own happiness in jeopardy?”

I don't answer.

“Trina told me what happened with Jake,” Mom continues. “She's actually more upset than Rachel is, and she had planned to expose it all to the tabloids.”

My stomach twists. “What did you tell her?”

Mom pulls a wicked face that I've never seen before. “I reminded Trina that the influence she's seen you have in getting Rachel
in
to auditions, can work in the opposite direction as well.”

“You didn't!”

“I did,” she says, entirely serious. “And I'll threaten her with worse than that if Trina whispers so much as your middle name to the press.”

“What's wrong with my middle name?” I like it.

“Nothing,” Mom replies, “except that you were named after your aunt who later tricked us into buying her daughter a new nose.”

My laughter is cut off by a hiccup. “Oh yeah.”

“As for returning to work. I have a suggestion, if I'm still your manager.”

I hesitate for only a second. “I appreciate all you've done, Mom, I really do. But—”

“It's not working anymore,” she says, and I nod. “I've been
thinking the same thing. It's just … difficult for me to hand you off to someone else's care. But believe it or not, I have exciting things planned for my
own
life—raising your brothers, for example. Perhaps even traveling with your dad. I hope, however, that you and I can still find …
time
for each other?”

“Yeah, of course,” I reply, a wave of relief passing through me. “In fact, I've been wondering if maybe … you'd want to help more with my foundation? I need a really good organizer—someone who can take care of the details.”

She would actually be perfect as the foundation's
director
, but we'll take it one step at a time. And this way, she can still be involved in my life without supervising my every move.

“Sure, I'd love to help,” Mom says. Then we're both silent for a bit while we just smile at each other. Sort of awkward. But she eventually says, “Now, as only your mother, I have just a
thought
about Jake.”

“Okay,” I reply, the tightness in my throat returning.

“Simply put, even nice guys can be idiots,” Mom tells me. “So if you're confident you didn't do anything to betray him, then this is his problem, not yours. And if he's worth all these tears, he'll figure things out and come back on his own.”

A knee-jerk reaction. Isn't that what Jake had said sometimes happens to him? Is this all that's going on? Or has he heard, as Devin hinted, one too many excuses from me?

“You don't think I should try to talk to Jake before we go back to work?” I ask Mom. She has to know how crazy things might get on set if I wait. “I've already left a ton of messages, and I asked his best friend to tell him what happened, but—”

My dad opens the back door and pokes his head in. “Emma, do
you have a bucket?” he asks. “We'll also need a hose. And a few towels.”

Mom and I walk around the counter to get a better look at him. He's wet all the way up to his waist. “I don't even want to
see
the boys,” Mom says with a hand over her mouth.

I peek outside, too curious to resist. Logan and Levi are plastered in mud—from their toes to the top of their heads—and are chasing a flopping fish down the running path.

It's better to just be numb, to forget about it.

I've been staying in a hotel since Friday night and plan to stay here as long as I have to. It's a given that I'll have to move, but my job is a serious problem. I can run all I want to from Sabino Canyon, but seeing Emma—being told to kiss her on cue, like I know will happen in upcoming episodes—will be impossible to pull off without losing my mind.

She's been right all along. We never should've crossed that friend line, so this is the angle I use when I e-mail her the day before returning to work:

I don't want you to feel like you owe me an apology. I'm the one who pushed you into something that you told me, over and over again, you weren't ready for. So let's just remember the good times and move on. It isn't worth fighting over.

That one paragraph took me a full day to write. It's the easy way out, but I don't have time to handle it like a man. I'll have to work with her at least once before our hiatus begins, but it isn't until Monday night, when I get my schedule, that I know when that will be.

Tuesday and Wednesday, I'm working on some scenes without the principal cast. Thursday, I'll only be with Kimmi. Then Friday is the day: Emma and I are scheduled to be in a chemistry class scene together. The script features the early stages of dangerous flirting between our characters—art imitating life in the most agonizing way.

My only hope of getting through Friday is if I walk into the studio with a totally calloused attitude. But when I see Emma sitting in her cast chair, my heart detaches from the rest of me and starts thinking on its own. She doesn't look like herself. With her eyes lacking their usual brightness, she seems hollow. It's hard not to stare, so I head for the food instead.

Two crew members are already at the table and don't notice me before I overhear them talking about Emma. They say she's been despondent all week. McGregor catches me listening in, and says, “You look like you've been blindsided by a bulldozer.”

“I'm fine, okay?” I reply, but he knows I'm full of it.

A few minutes later, while McGregor explains how he envisions the scene, Emma and I are practically face-to-face, but nowhere near looking at each other. I'd sent her the e-mail so we wouldn't fight in front of everyone at work, but why isn't she even
trying
to explain herself? I guess she might've already done that in one of the messages she left me, but I was so pissed off that first day that I erased every one of them without listening.

We start rehearsal, and right off the bat, the script supervisor
corrects me on my opening line. “Jake, that's from the original script. Didn't you get a copy of the revised scene?”

“Uh …”

Tyler pushes stiff fingers through his hair. “It was delivered by express courier yesterday afternoon,” he says. “We missed you at the studio.”

I look down at my feet, but my eyes shift to Emma's instead. “Sorry, I haven't been home for a while,” I reply, then realize that I forgot to grab the sides—copies of my lines and what scenes are being filmed—from my dressing room.

Tyler walks over to mumble something to a fuming McGregor, then finally speaks into his radio. “We need sides of the revised lab scene for Mr. Elliott.”

“Copy that,” is the reply. A PA swears in the background, probably because his head is on the chopping block for not double-checking that I saw the changes. No one usually has to.

“Sides flying in,” comes from a nearby radio.

A PA runs onto the set and puts the miniature pages right into my hands. I scan the lines. “Wait, this is … totally different.” There's still a lot of friendly conversation, but none of the touchy-feely stuff from the original script. Is the love triangle being delayed? Or even cut?

“Back to one!” McGregor shouts.

Emma has wandered off, fiddling with a wad of electrical tape. We return to our marks behind a lab table. “We just need to get this over with,” I tell her.

“You made that clear when you broke up with me in an
e-mail
,” she says. “But, gosh, I loved the personal touch at the end: ‘Let's just remember the good times!' Where'd you get that line, your high school yearbook?”

“Quiet please, let's rehearse,” Tyler says, and the set falls silent.

“I meant the scene,” I whisper, almost knocking over a row of glass beakers. The whole table is covered with flasks and other breakable crap, all filled with neon-colored goo. It's a seriously bad day to be filming on this set.

McGregor doesn't take his eyes off us. “And action.”

I read my first line, tripping over it like it's written in a foreign language. Then Emma practically coughs through hers. Tyler glares at us both before turning to McGregor.

“Regain your focus,” McGregor says. “Let's go again.”

“You're being
stupid
,” Emma snaps, which isn't her line—it's meant for me. A mere second later she flubs her part again and looks to the script supervisor. “Sorry, what's my line?”

The script supervisor says, “Forget about
my
date, how was yours?”

Emma hesitates before nodding, and we start rehearsal over again. And again … and again. McGregor finally stops pacing the floor. “Let's add the Steadicam.”

Tyler raises his brows. “We'll need twenty minutes to set it up.”

“Just do it,” McGregor tells him. “We'll film this one line at a time if we have to.”

Adding a third camera isn't all that unusual, but the set has always been arranged for it in advance, and we only use the Steadicam when we're in a hurry to get a scene finished. I'd say this qualifies. We still have the other half of the scene to shoot with Kimmi and Brett later on.

The gaffer sends his lighting team running. PAs also race around the set, directed by radio commands. “You two, follow me,” McGregor hisses at Emma and me. As we obey, Emma rolls
the wad of electrical tape between her hands even faster. I need something to fiddle with too, like a stick of dynamite.