Happy Again

by Jennifer E. Smith

  “Ellie, right?” he asked, taking a few steps closer. “Ellie O’Neill?”

  Ellie glanced nervously at the other three girls, who were all staring at her.

  “Yeah,” she said eventually, in a voice that didn’t quite sound like hers.

  She’d never properly met Harry Fenton—she’d only seen him from afar during some of the shoots in Henley—but she knew enough to know that he hadn’t been a fan of hers. Even before she and Graham got in trouble for a scuffle with the paparazzi and that incident with a stolen boat, Harry had been worried that Ellie was a distraction for his biggest client.

  So it was no small surprise to see him smiling at her now, holding out a hand, and Ellie had to inch past Kara to greet him.

  “I thought that was you,” he said, pumping her hand up and down. “Does—”

  “No,” she said quickly. “We were just walking by, and—”

  “Oh, well, you have to come in then,” he said, gesturing at the theater behind him with the friendly enthusiasm of a game-show host. “You probably haven’t seen it yet, have you?”

  Ellie shook her head, wondering how he thought she might have seen it, given that this was the world premiere. Her face was burning now for no real reason except that she could feel everyone watching her, and she wished she had the power to make herself invisible.

  “I can’t,” she finally managed to say. “I don’t…I’m not dressed for it, and we’ve, um, got dinner plans, and…”

  Harry’s gaze shifted to the semicircle of girls standing behind her with what Ellie could only assume were mystified expressions. “Bring your friends. There’s popcorn inside.”

  Ellie had just opened her mouth to refuse once more when Lauren appeared at her side, jabbing her hard in the ribs.

  “We’d love to,” Lauren said, beaming at Harry. “That’s so nice of you.”

  “Well, great,” he said, looking pleased. “How many are you? Four? Super. Let me just…”

  He held up a finger and then spun around, walking over to a girl with a headset, who nodded immediately and started punching at her phone.

  “Whoever that is,” Lauren said, her eyes still trained on Harry, “he’s my new favorite person.”

  “Who is it?” Kara asked, unable to hide her excitement. “What’s even happening right now?”

  “We’re going to a movie premiere,” Lauren said triumphantly. She gave Ellie a little slap on the back. “This night just got much more exciting.”

  “Yeah, but how do you know him?” Sprague asked, staring at Ellie. “This is so random…”

  “He’s a…family friend,” Ellie lied, her stomach churning. But it would be impossible to sum up the whole story without sounding ridiculous. Even the long version was pretty hard to believe.

  Besides, she had bigger things to worry about right now. Already, she was making frantic calculations about the odds of seeing Graham in there. Harry would probably have to find seats for them somewhere way in the back, and surely they’d be getting there so late that the movie would start almost immediately, which meant the chance of her running into Graham was tiny.

  When Harry motioned them forward, a huge security guard with a wire in his ear lifted the barricade and swung it open just enough for them to slip through. The other girls whispered excitedly as they walked past jealous fans, but Ellie just stared at her feet, taking in the grubby flip-flops and chipped nail polish on her toes.

  As they passed a life-size cutout of Graham near the entrance to the theater, Harry handed over their tickets with a half smile. “So how’ve you been?”

  “Fine,” Ellie said, glancing around nervously as they made their way into the lower lobby, which was filled with women in cocktail dresses and men in suits and silk ties. The walls were velvety red and trimmed with gold, and there were huge crystal chandeliers hanging overhead; the whole place had an elegance that made Ellie feel even more out of place.

  “He’ll be excited to see you,” Harry said as they stepped onto the escalator. The other girls were behind them, and Ellie checked to be sure they weren’t listening before shaking her head.

  “No,” she said, and Harry looked surprised. “I don’t want to…I mean, it’s just that…you know, we haven’t really talked in a while, and I don’t think…”

  “Look,” he said, ignoring her confused stammering as they stepped off the escalator and into another lobby, this one just as crowded. “I owe you an apology for last summer. You might’ve noticed that I wasn’t too thrilled about the two of you. But ever since you…well, ever since things ended, I think Graham’s been a little…”

  Ellie held her breath, waiting for him to continue.

  Graham’s been a little too preoccupied with other girls.

  Graham’s been a little too out of control.

  Graham’s been a little too busy.

  But instead he said this: “Graham’s been a little bit lonely.”

  Ellie stared at him. “Oh.”

  “Yeah,” he said, rubbing at the back of his neck. They were standing in the middle of the upper lobby now, though Ellie couldn’t remember when they’d stopped walking. “I think you were actually a good influence on him,” Harry continued. “He’s just not himself lately, and he’s always taking off in these cars, and…I don’t know. I guess I’d just hate it if anything I did—”

  “We’re gonna head in, okay?” Lauren said, appearing at Ellie’s side. Behind her, the other two girls were waiting near the entrance to the main theater.

  “Hey, don’t let me keep you,” Harry said, reaching out to take Ellie’s hand and giving her a meaningful look. “But it’s really, really good to see you.”

  “You too,” Ellie managed to say, her head spinning.

  “And enjoy the movie.”

  “We will,” Lauren said, hooking her arm through Ellie’s and leading her into the cavernous theater, where they paused for a moment at the top of the aisle, taking it all in. The seats were almost entirely filled with people, though many of them were still standing, leaning across rows to say hello to old friends or business associates. Their voices bounced around the red walls and the huge gold curtains surrounding the screen. Behind them were more seats, which rose up like bleachers toward the ceiling, but Ellie followed Lauren down the far left aisle of the mezzanine, where they found their seats, only a few rows from the back.

  “I can’t believe you got us in here,” Lauren said as they scooted by a couple on the end, and then past Kara and Sprague, who had sat down nearest the aisle, leaving Ellie a seat closer to the middle. “This is just completely insane...”

  “Seriously,” Kara said. “It’s beyond.”

  “Beyond,” Ellie agreed absently, her eyes raking the front of the theater for Graham. She assumed there’d be a cluster of people around him, the way there’d been outside, but she couldn’t see him anywhere. Maybe the actors snuck in after the lights went down, or maybe they didn’t come at all. Or maybe it was just that the sort of people invited to an event like this were simply too cool to gawk at celebrities.

  Above them, the lights blinked twice, and a hush fell over the audience as the stragglers hurried to find their seats before the theater went dark.

  Ellie leaned back and let out a long breath. All she wanted to do was close her eyes and attempt to process all of this: that she was presumably in the same room as Graham, that Harry seemed to think he was lonely, that she was about to see the movie they’d filmed in her hometown, and that she was in a ritzy New York theater with three girls from school she hardly knew, who had no idea of the real reason they’d been invited inside.

  “You okay?” Lauren asked, and Ellie nodded.

  “Fine.”

  “You just seem a little…off. Are you mad we said yes?”

  “No, it’s fine,” she said again, though her voice sounded oddly tense, even to her. “Who wouldn’t have?”

  She wanted to mean it. In fact, she wanted to revel in it, the fact that they were all here becaus
e of her. That after weeks of tagging along and wishing she fit in, she had turned out to be their ticket into such an exclusive event. But she was too nervous to enjoy it, too fidgety to relax.

  “Really?” Lauren asked, and this time, Ellie attempted a smile.

  “Really,” she said, and this seemed to satisfy Lauren, who bumped her shoulder against Ellie’s with a grin just as the lights snapped off.

  For a moment, just before the screen winked to life, it felt to Ellie like they were floating in the dark. But then the image appeared, a landscape shot of the Henley harbor at sunrise, and Ellie felt such a gut punch of homesickness that she nearly lost her breath. There was scattered clapping as the first credits appeared at the edge of the screen, the shot panning to reveal the docks and the boats—including the Go Fish, which she and Graham had once stolen to sail north on an ill-fated quest—and all of it was so painfully familiar that she felt for her phone in her pocket, wanting to text her mom.

  When the title appeared in bold letters across the screen, everyone in the theater clapped again, and then the camera moved through the center of town, landing on a boy making his way through the gray dawn, his head bent and his back to the camera, and all at once, Ellie was struck by a thousand memories of last summer, of seeing this very boy in these very places:

  Watching him walk into the ice-cream shop on that first day.

  Talking to him near the gazebo while the cast and crew waited for him to return to the set.

  Stepping off the bus with him over by the post office.

  Staring at each other across the lawn on the Fourth of July as the fireworks went off overhead.

  And then, just like that, he was there.

  Not in her memory and not on the screen—though he was both of those places, too—but a few feet away, a shadowy figure squinting at her from the aisle.

  “Ellie?” he whispered, and she sat up a little in her seat, her heart hammering.

  Behind them, a few people made shushing noises, and of the other three girls, only Kara—who was closest to the aisle—was looking up at the boy hovering at the end of the row.

  “Ellie,” Graham whispered again, leaning over a little bit. The middle-aged couple nearest him—whose gazes were fixed on the screen, where another version of Graham was climbing into a boat—turned in his direction too.

  It only took a second for them to recognize him, and their surprise seemed to travel down the row.

  “Oh my god,” Sprague said, clapping a hand over her mouth, and then she leaned across Lauren to jab Ellie, who had sunk down low in her seat.

  “Can we talk?” Graham asked from the aisle, and the other three girls whipped their heads back and forth between them as Ellie hesitated. She’d forgotten what it felt like to be with Graham in public, the way the attention settled over her like snow, blanketing everything, freezing her in place.

  After a moment, Lauren grabbed her arm and gave it a little shake. “Go,” she said through gritted teeth, her face a picture of astonishment, and then she swung her legs to the side to leave room for Ellie to pass, which she did, awkwardly scooting by her friends, trying to ignore the curious stares of the people in the row behind her.

  As she neared the aisle, moving past the confused couple, Graham stepped back to let her out. But she still couldn’t bring herself to look at him directly. He nodded at the back of the theater, where a faint light shone through from the lobby, and together, they walked toward it, hurrying up the aisle as the music swelled behind them: a sure sign that the girl had finally appeared on-screen and the love story was about to begin.

  Eleven

  In the quiet of the lobby, they stood staring at each other for a moment.

  “You’re here,” Graham said finally.

  “I am,” Ellie said.

  He frowned, his expression hard to read. He was the same, but he wasn’t. His eyes seemed bluer than ever, and his hair was a little bit shorter, but not by much. The shape of his mouth, the way he slouched a little, the scar above his left eyebrow: all of it was as it had been last summer. But still, there was something different about him, something hardened, a wariness he carried like a weight, and she was once again uncomfortably aware of just how much their lives had diverged over the past year.

  Here was Graham in his designer suit, the pants so tight she wondered how he’d managed to sit down in the theater. His hair was combed to the side in a way she’d never seen before, and he had a little handkerchief folded in his pocket the way men often did in old-fashioned movies.

  He looked like someone from the pages of a magazine.

  Which, of course, he was.

  “How did you…?”

  “It wasn’t planned,” Ellie said quickly. “I’m just down with some friends for the weekend, and we were walking past, and—I didn’t know it was your film, and I never expected to see—it was just that Harry spotted me in the crowd, and then he—”

  Graham held up a hand. “It’s okay,” he said with a hint of his usual smile. “I was just surprised when he told me. I had to see for myself.”

  “See what?”

  “You,” he said, his eyes going soft. “You’re the last person I expected to run into tonight.”

  “Honestly, I didn’t really count on seeing you, either.”

  He tilted his head to one side. “So how are you?”

  Across the lobby, two women in black dresses were leaning against the counter of the concession stand, pretending to look at their phones, though Ellie could tell they were really watching Graham. Behind him, a huge security guard with a thick neck and a shock of red hair had a finger on his earpiece, and he was speaking softly, his eyes trained on them. From the theater, a roar of laughter went up, muffled by the doors.

  “I’m fine,” Ellie told him, sounding brusquer than she’d intended. Above them, a chandelier the size of a small car was hanging from the ceiling, and in the corner, a few assistants were setting up a table full of lavish-looking gift bags, sneaking glances at the handsome movie star standing with one hand in his pocket, talking to a girl in a blue T-shirt and jeans with a hole in the knee.

  “I’m sure you have to get back,” she said after a moment. “I know it’s a big night for you.”

  He looked stung by this. “It’s fine. It just started.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t want you to miss it because of me.”

  His eyes traveled over to the popcorn counter, and then back to Ellie. “Can I tell you something?” he said, and his voice was so serious that she felt her stomach drop.

  “What?” she asked nervously.

  “I’m starving.”

  In spite of herself, she laughed. “The popcorn is free.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not popcorn hungry. I’m, like, burger-and-fries hungry. I’m Wilbur-level hungry.”

  Ellie nodded. “That sounds serious.”

  “It is.”

  “Don’t they ever feed the celebrities at these things?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Otherwise, how would they ever fit us into these pants?”

  “Good point,” she said. “So what are you proposing?”

  “I propose,” Graham said, glancing around furtively, like a robber about to case the joint, “that we make a break for it.”

  “Don’t you have to be here?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve already seen it. And they won’t miss me as long as I’m back in time for the Q and A.”

  “There’s a Q and A?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “So you better start thinking up some questions…”

  “Oh, I’ve got questions,” she assured him. “But I suppose I could probably ask them over some food.”

  “Great,” he said, his face brightening. “What are our chances of finding a whoopie pie around here?”

  Twelve

  It was fun watching Graham work his magic to get them out of there. To Ellie, he was always more attractive when he was trying not to be famous, and seeing him shake hands with the various secur
ity guards, slap the back of an usher who lent him a Yankees cap, thank the girl from the concession stand who told them about the back staircase where the deliveries came in: all of it gave her a little thrill.

  It wasn’t exactly a major operation. All they were doing was trying to walk out of a movie theater, which to most people wouldn’t have seemed like anything extraordinary. But by the time they spilled out into the alley alongside the theater, Ellie was feeling almost giddy at their newfound freedom.

  “Where to?” Graham asked, clapping his hands, equally elated. There was a small floodlight on the brick building, and standing there in its glare, he almost looked like he was onstage.

  “I thought you had a plan.”

  “You just saw it,” he said. “Now it’s your turn.”

  “I’ve been in New York for, like, six hours,” she said, but even as she did, she remembered a diner she’d passed on the walk over from the museum, and once Graham had shoved the Yankees cap onto his head—an odd contrast to his designer suit—they headed back out of the alley, turning east on Fifty-Fifth Street.

  In the dark, nobody seemed to notice Graham, who walked with his head low, his face shadowed by the brim of the cap. Neither of them spoke as they wove around metal grates and mailboxes and piles of trash bags, picking their way past people walking in the opposite direction.

  When they reached the diner, Ellie stopped and gave Graham a little shrug. She’d only walked by it quickly before, so she hadn’t really gotten a chance to tell what it looked like inside. Now, peering through the window, she could see that the booths were mint green with pink accents, and the walls were lined with signed pictures of movie stars and comedians and athletes in grease-spattered frames. There was an elderly man eating a piece of pie by himself at the counter, and a family of four up front near the window. Otherwise, the place was empty.

  “I can’t vouch for the menu, obviously,” she said, “but I’m willing to bet it’s more exciting than popcorn. Though probably less exciting than whoopie pies.”

  “I can live with that,” Graham said, swinging open the door for her.