Happy Again

by Jennifer E. Smith

  Six

  After a while, the spaces between e-mails grew longer—not so much because it wasn’t the same as it used to be, but because it wasn’t enough anymore.

  They knew now what it could be like when they were together. And so being apart—even when connected by the thin thread of an e-mail chain—just wasn’t good enough.

  Besides, they were both busy. Ellie was applying to colleges, and Graham’s tour meant long days filled with press junkets and photo calls, followed by long plane rides to do the whole thing over again in the next city. Ellie read about all of it in Quinn’s magazines as they sat together in the ice-cream shop where they both worked after school.

  “It’s not like we promised each other anything,” she said one day, tossing a magazine aside. It slid along the counter, then fell onto the floor in a heap of crinkled pages. Neither of them moved to pick it up. It was a cold, rainy day in October, which was the off-season for tourists. Nobody was coming in for ice cream.

  “Stop being so sensible,” Quinn said, leaning against the counter. “You’re allowed to be frustrated.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do?” Ellie asked. “Hop on a plane to Sydney or London or Vancouver? Tag along like some kind of weird groupie while he gets interviewed and goes to parties and hangs out with Olivia Brooks?”

  “Now you’re just being dramatic.”

  “I can’t be too sensible and too dramatic at the same time,” she pointed out with a sigh. “All I’m saying is that it was probably doomed from the start, right?”

  “Still overly dramatic,” Quinn said, raising one eyebrow. “But I take your point. It’s admittedly a little easier when your boyfriend sits behind you in physics.”

  “You sit behind him,” Ellie said, laughing in spite of herself, “so you can look at his answers.”

  “Yeah, well,” Quinn said, flushing a little, as she did whenever the subject of Devon came up, “that’s not the point.”

  But more weeks slipped by, and the fewer e-mails that passed between Ellie and Graham, the more ordinary they became. Instead of their sharing secrets, trading intimate thoughts and feelings, the correspondence started to feel like an activity log, nothing more than a generic report on what they were each doing from day to day.

  The week before Christmas, Ellie learned she didn’t get into Harvard after applying early action. She couldn’t have known then that she’d be accepted only a few short months later; at the time, it felt like the worst kind of failure, and she was absolutely crushed. Her first instinct, of course, was to write to Graham, who was traveling back to L.A. for the holidays. But when she sat down to e-mail him, she found she couldn’t.

  Google had just helpfully alerted her about an award he’d been nominated for and a big role in an action movie he’d won over two other popular young actors. Compared to those things, this seemed minor.

  With all his success, it was harder to share her own failure.

  And so she didn’t.

  Instead, she waited another week and then sent him an e-mail wishing him a merry Christmas.

  By the time he wrote back, it was January, and his e-mail said only this: Hi, stranger. Sorry it’s taken me so long. Things have been crazy. How are you?

  It could have been written to an old friend from fourth grade, or a girl he’d once met at a party, or even his dentist.

  It could have been written to anyone.

  Ellie didn’t even bother to reply.

  It seemed to her that there was nothing more to be said.

  Seven

  As they walked toward the theater, Ellie’s heart was so loud in her ears that she could hardly hear the excited murmurs of her friends.

  “Do you think he’ll be there?”

  “Is it supposed to be good?”

  “Is he still dating Olivia Brooks?”

  “Was he ever?”

  Beyond the crowd, they could see a row of black town cars pulled to the curb on one side of the street, and on the other, a wall of photographers and reporters and screaming fans. A long red carpet had been rolled out over the sidewalk in front of the theater, and the crowds were pressed up against the metal barricades that surrounded it, straining to get a better look.

  Ellie trailed blindly after the other girls, feeling numb and weak-kneed and a little bit dizzy. She was still shocked to have stumbled across this of all movie premieres. She’d known the film was coming out soon; back home, everyone was giddy about it. Last summer, they’d spent a month shooting at various locations around town: the harbor and the beach, the main street and the shops, even the one shady-looking bar in the middle of all those postcard-perfect storefronts. And because of this, the movie seemed to belong as much to the town of Henley as it did to anyone else.

  There was supposed to be a special screening on the village green at some point, in the same spot where she and Graham had watched the fireworks that Fourth of July, the explosions overhead not nearly bright enough to make them look away from each other.

  “Everyone’s been asking if you’ll come back for it,” her mom had said the last time they talked. “But I told them you’re a very busy and important college student now, and you don’t have time to be jetting in for small-town celebrations anymore—”

  “Mom.”

  Her mother’s voice had softened. “I just thought you should know.”

  “Thanks,” Ellie said, thinking that it was pretty much the last film she’d ever want to see. She’d gone to the final Top Hat movie when it came out last fall, and it had been hard enough watching him on the big screen without having her hometown as the backdrop.

  “Well, if you change your mind—”

  “Honestly, I’d rather sing karaoke in front of everyone I know,” she said. “I’d rather go swing dancing. I’d rather get punched in the face.”

  Her mom laughed. “You know, El,” she said, “you really shouldn’t bottle up your feelings like that…”

  Ellie had laughed too, but she was serious. In the wake of the filming, even after the whole circus had packed up and left town, she’d become a minor celebrity of sorts, at least in Henley. She’d hated everything about it: the unwanted attention and curious questions, the pointing and whispering and undisguised stares, all of which had forced her to spend the remainder of the summer darting nervously around the town where she’d lived most of her life.

  Quinn, of course, had loved it. “This is your moment,” she kept saying, reveling in all the reflected glory. “You might only get fifteen minutes, so enjoy it.”

  “I don’t want fifteen minutes,” Ellie told her. “I don’t want any minutes.”

  “Well, you don’t have a choice. So you’ll just have to run out the clock.”

  And she had. It only took a few weeks for the excitement to die down as the memory of the shoot faded and school started up again. But now, walking back into the thick of it—the noise and the lights and the great flashy drama of it all—Ellie was once again wishing she were anywhere else.

  Ahead of her, Kara was elbowing a path through the knots of people, working her way from the casual observers in the back—who, like them, had simply wandered over to see what was going on—up toward the front, where the most devoted fans had been lined up along the barricades for hours. Farther down, the press was waiting, their lenses all angled toward the line of black cars, and each time someone stepped out, there was a flurry of flashes and a deafening round of cheers.

  As the other girls pushed forward, Ellie found herself backpedaling. It wasn’t a decision she could remember making, exactly, but her legs seemed to be moving all the same. She stumbled over the woman just behind her, then tripped over someone else’s shoe, drifting farther away from her friends, allowing herself to be squeezed to the back of the crowd.

  When she caught a glimpse of Mick—the director—hurrying past the line of cameras with a tight-lipped smile, she froze, and then ducked. After a moment, she straightened again, feeling self-conscious and overly dramatic
, especially given that they’d never actually met and there was practically no chance he would remember her. But the sight of him had caught her off guard, and she was still feeling startled and a little bit shaky when Lauren appeared, grabbing her elbow with an impatient look and dragging her toward the front.

  “The key is to sort of post up,” she was saying, demonstrating by throwing out an elbow as they passed a group of younger girls. “Protect your space.”

  “I’m not great with crowds,” Ellie muttered, and Lauren rolled her eyes.

  “You’ve gotta be more aggressive,” she said, half pulling Ellie into a spot just behind Kara and Sprague, who were so fixated on the sight of Olivia Brooks getting out of her car that they didn’t even notice. The noise from the crowd rose as Olivia—who had eyes only for the cameras—began to pose with a hand on her hip and a pouty smile on her heart-shaped face.

  Ellie stared ahead unseeingly, her thoughts jumbled. She knew it was only a matter of time before Graham would also appear, handsome and smiling and achingly familiar, and she didn’t feel remotely prepared for it. Everything seemed dreamlike and surreal, as if she might snap awake at any moment and find herself back in her dorm room in her ducky pajamas.

  “I bet he’s next,” Kara said, and Ellie felt her breath quicken, wondering if it was too late to try to leave again. She wasn’t aggressive. She didn’t know how to post up. And she certainly didn’t belong here. Maybe there was no such thing as a new Ellie; there was only this one, the one who had once gotten an e-mail from a boy in California, who had—without knowing what might happen—written him back, and who had then stood by and simply watched as it all slipped away.

  “Do you think he’s really that hot in person?” Sprague asked, half turning to them with a dreamy look. “I mean, his eyes can’t be that blue, right?”

  Kara shrugged. “I heard he wears contacts.”

  “I heard he never washes his jeans.”

  “I heard he has six cars, and that he’s always paying off cops when they stop him for driving too fast.”

  “I heard that too.”

  “I heard he has his own racetrack in his backyard.”

  “I heard he got a special car seat made for his pet monkey.”

  “Pig,” Ellie said quietly, and they all turned to look at her. She blinked back at them. “It’s a pet pig.”

  But nobody answered. Because that’s when a car door opened, and a roar went up, and a series of flashes lit the sky, and just like that, all eyes were on Graham Larkin.

  Eight

  The only truly crazy thing Ellie had ever done in her life was to fall for a movie star.

  And now, all these months later, it didn’t seem quite real to her anymore. It felt like something an entirely different person might do, someone she didn’t even recognize.

  It was like when she was little, and she refused to go anywhere without her stuffed rabbit. She slept with it every night, propped it on the chair next to hers at the dinner table, dragged it to school and in the car and to her mother’s shop. Once, she accidentally left it in a restaurant, and she didn’t realize it until they were already home and the place was closed. She spent a sleepless night sobbing into her pillow, and in the morning, her mom drove her—puffy-eyed and still hiccupping—back to the restaurant, where she was reunited with the little bunny, who had spent the night in a lost-and-found box beside a Velcro wallet and a single mitten.

  Just last year, Ellie had found the bunny again in a box in the attic. She’d sat on the dusty floor and stared at the thing, trying to summon up those same feelings. It was nubby and bald and worn, the seams coming apart on one of the ears and an eyeball missing from when their dog, Bagel, had gotten hold of it. There was definitely something sweet about it, and she certainly felt nostalgic, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember why she’d ever been so obsessed with it.

  And that’s kind of how she felt about Graham now.

  Like the little bunny, he, too, was stored away, tucked between the shiny pages of all those magazines, his life playing out in the endless depths of the Internet, a never-ending series of photos and interviews and rumored girlfriends and fast cars, all of it so far away from her own life—so far removed from the guy on the beach that summer—that it was almost impossible to recall why she’d ever been so attached in the first place.

  Nine

  The figure in the distance stood alone in the middle of the red carpet.

  There was a constellation of people orbiting around him—assistants and publicists and hairstylists, reporters and photographers and security guards—keeping a thin cushion of space between them, as if he were electric, as if at any moment he might start throwing off sparks.

  When Graham turned to wave at the crowd, a collection of high-pitched screams split the Manhattan night, and even from this far away, she could see his smile shift from the stiff, guarded one he was always wearing at these types of things to something more real, something bordering on genuine amusement.

  “He’s gorgeous,” Kara breathed, and the other two nodded in agreement, straining to get a better look.

  But Ellie said nothing. It felt to her like the rest of the world should be disappearing right about now. It felt like at any moment, he should look over and spot her there, and their eyes should lock, and he should start moving in her direction, and everything else should fade away, and then…and then, what?

  Even if it were to happen this way, she wasn’t sure she’d want that. Or that he would. After all, she was the one who’d stopped writing—who had ignored the last few e-mails he sent this past winter, all of them wondering where she was, asking if everything was okay—and he had every right to be angry with her.

  So it almost didn’t matter what happened next. Too much time had gone by, and this particular chapter was long over now. Graham was packed away in some dusty corner of her heart, and even if she found him again, there was no way it would ever be the same.

  How could it?

  He was closer now, maybe twenty yards away, making his way down the line, shaking hands and signing autographs and taking photos with fans. His movie-star smile had returned, his face friendly but vacant, his eyes a little glazed, and to her surprise, Ellie felt suddenly desperate to see his real smile again. The thought made her chest so tight it was almost hard to breathe.

  She reached between Kara and Sprague, gripping the cool metal barricade with one hand to steady herself as he approached, not sure whether she was waiting anxiously or bracing herself, whether she was trying to hide or be seen. Her palms were sweaty and her vision was blurry from the flashes and the noise, the press of bodies and the nervous energy. It almost felt like something was short-circuiting inside her as she stood there, completely paralyzed, watching him approach as if in slow motion.

  “Get your phone out,” Sprague said under her breath, her eyes still glued to Graham, who was only ten yards away now. Obediently, Lauren dug through her bag, fumbling to capture the moment, to leave with some sort of proof that they had been here.

  And then there he was: only a few feet away, half-bent as he scrawled his name across a piece of paper while a little girl—no more than eight or nine—stared, dumbstruck, from the other side of the makeshift fence.

  “Hope you like the movie,” Graham said as he handed it back, and the girl burst into happy tears. Everyone around her laughed, but Ellie understood. Something about the moment made her want to cry, too, because he sounded like Graham just then—not the guy in the interviews, or the one on-screen, but the one on her porch in Maine: humble and hopeful and human.

  “So cute,” Sprague said, snapping a few blurry pictures on her phone. A girl with an earpiece walked over and whispered something to Graham, and then he lifted his hand and grinned apologetically at the crowd, which broke into feverish applause, before he was steered sharply toward the entrance of the theater.

  As they watched him disappear, Kara sighed.

  “I love him,” she said, and
Ellie nodded miserably.

  She was pretty sure she did too.

  Ten

  Once he was gone, the crowd seemed to wilt.

  A few people began to leave, while others shifted restlessly, still looking off toward the line of cars as if a surprise guest might step out at any moment. But with the departure of the film’s two stars, the red carpet was now mostly filled with publicists and producers and assistants.

  “I wish we’d gotten a selfie,” Kara said, spinning around.

  “Or at least something better than this,” Sprague said, thrusting her phone at them. Ellie leaned close to see a muddled picture of the back of Graham’s head. But even that was enough to make her throat go thick, and she stared at it for a beat too long, blinking fast, still shell-shocked by the nearness of him.

  “You okay?” Lauren asked, and Ellie realized there were tears in her eyes.

  “I’m fine,” she said quickly, brushing them away. “Just a little cold.”

  Once she said it, she realized it was true. It was only September, but with the sun gone, there was a chill in the air, and she rubbed at her bare arms, wishing she were wearing more than just jeans and a T-shirt. She could picture her gray hoodie in the backseat of Sprague’s car, and was annoyed she hadn’t remembered to bring it.

  “Dinner?” Lauren asked, raising her eyebrows at the others. Sprague shrugged, and Kara gave the red carpet one last hopeful look before agreeing.

  But just as they turned, ready to make their way toward Seventh Avenue, Ellie heard her name.

  She hesitated, her whole body tense, before swiveling around.

  She hadn’t realized how high her heart had lifted until she felt it fall again. For a moment, she’d thought it might be Graham. But instead she found herself staring at the round, bearded face of his manager, Harry Fenton, who was standing a few feet away, in the middle of the red carpet, wearing a look of confusion that made it seem like she’d been the one to call out to him.