by Stacey Kade
“Can you, uh, talk to me?” Amanda asks, her voice sounding strangely small.
“What?” I ask, startled. Looking over, I find her clutching tight to the armrest as if we’re speeding along at ninety instead of a very sedate, and legal, forty-five miles an hour. We haven’t even made it to the freeway yet.
“Just talk to me,” she says again. In the blue glow of passing streetlights, she seems paler than earlier, her forehead pinched with effort.
“Is something—”
“I haven’t been more than a few miles from my house in a long time, and I’m kind of having a hard time thinking about anything else right now, so can you please just talk about something?” she asks, enunciating each word with precision. “Anything,” she adds, with a hint of temper, before I can ask. “The economy, who really slept with who on Starlight, or whatever. Just words, please.”
“Okay, okay,” I say quickly. But it feels more complicated than that. Like navigating a conversational minefield. Are there certain topics that act as triggers for her? I won’t talk about Starlight, not that kind of stuff, anyway. But if I bring up anything I know about her, is it a reminder that I, along with most of the country, have details about her life that we normally wouldn’t?
“Chase,” she says through gritted teeth.
“What did ‘we’ talk about before?” I ask and immediately want to kick myself. Talk about reminders. I set off the minefield without even taking a step.
But Amanda gives a strangled laugh. “You were a figment of my imagination and not exactly a sparkling conversationalist.”
“So not much different than reality,” I mutter. I’m great with crowds or in front of a camera. But one-on-one, as a person, I kind of suck at it. I always have. Probably one of the reasons I feel more comfortable being someone else.
She lets out a slow, controlled breath, her feet jouncing on the floorboards with anxious energy, then inhales with that same deliberate effort. Obviously some kind of calming technique. “How about this? I’ll ask you questions,” she says.
“Yes, I can do that,” I say, relieved. Press junkets. I’m used to those. Nothing but questions. Usually the same ones over and over again. Only this time, of course, there’s no list of off-the-table topics.
“Brothers and sisters?” Amanda asks, hitting one of the forbidden topics on her first try.
But refusing to answer feels stingy, considering what I’m asking her to do. “One brother, younger. Aidan. He’s…” I pause and do a quick calculation in my head, and then I have to double-check because it doesn’t seem possible.
The memory of his small, pale, scared face peeking out between the banister spindles is so clear in my mind. But I haven’t seen him since the night I left six years ago.
Which means the kindergartner I left behind, the one who followed me around everywhere, who begged for boots like mine, who watched silently from above as everything went down that night, is practically a teenager now. Probably sullen as hell and secretive, if I was any example.
“He’s twelve,” I say finally. I wonder if Layla stopped sending me the notes and the pictures he drew for me or if Aidan stopped creating them for me.
“Hometown?” Amanda asks quietly.
I wrestle my thoughts away from Aidan and my family to answer her question. “Tillman, Texas. It’s a speck on the map, like a smudge on your screen. A few thousand people. Way more cows.”
“Most disgusting thing you’ve ever seen.”
A memory immediately leaps to mind, one I haven’t thought about in years. It’s like her questions have cracked open a dark closet in my mind where I’ve shoved everything from my life before.
I half-laugh, half-groan, remembering the smell, the warmth, and the splattering sound, all equally gross and exponentially terrible in combination. My grandfather’s booming laugh had echoed through the whole barn when he saw me. “I can’t … give me a second to think.”
“No, no censoring,” she says. “Let’s hear it. I’m intrigued.”
And when I glance away from the road to her, she does seem to be sitting up straighter, her grip on the armrest not quite as punishing.
“Okay.” I sigh. “Let’s just say it involves being in the wrong place at the wrong time and a cow with too much grass.”
She frowns, and I realize that the daughter of an engineer and a former preschool teacher is not going to understand what that means.
“Too much grass in a cow’s diet has really nasty digestive consequences. Usually, uh, explosive consequences. And if you happen to be bent down nearby, mucking out the barn…” I shrug, feeling my face grow hot. Why, exactly, did I bring up diarrhea in this conversation?
Amanda twists in her seat to face me, her eyes bright with amusement in the dashboard lights and her mouth open in disbelief. “Seriously?”
I raise my eyebrows. “You think I’d make that up?”
She shudders. “I hope not. Did it get on you?”
“No way to really avoid that. The ears were the worst, though. So many places for it to get to.”
“That is disgusting!” She’s laughing, but she sounds delighted, more impressed than grossed out, as if she’s ranked my answer against the others she’s gotten for that question and I’ve come out ahead. “What were you doing that close to the business end of a cow?”
“Occupational hazard. It’s the family business.” It was, anyway.
She tips her head to one side, and I’m bracing myself for a series of questions along that line.
But Amanda Grace is a natural interviewer, maybe from being on the receiving end of so many questions for so many years. Or maybe she’s just more perceptive than most.
After a quick glance at me, she pushes on to the next question instead. “Scariest moment in your life.”
The prepared response is easy, right there on the tip of my tongue. The second audition for Starlight. It wasn’t just the casting director, but a whole room full of studio executives and producers. My mouth had felt like it was coated in moss, and I thought I might literally choke.
I’ve told the story so many times it barely feels real anymore. But it is.
So that would be an honest answer. To a degree. And it would be the “official” answer.
But I’ve already strayed from official. My press sheet says very little about my family and absolutely nothing about cow diarrhea, both deliberate choices for entirely different reasons, obviously.
And the dark interior of the car is lulling, creating a false sense of security and encouraging confidences that I am probably better off keeping to myself.
“When I woke up in the hospital with three broken ribs, a fractured wrist, and no memory of what happened.” I keep my gaze fixed on the road ahead. We’re on the freeway now, and the rhythmic flash of the white center lines is soothing.
That’s not quite the whole truth, but it’s as close as I’m willing to get, right now. Which is still closer than I’ve ever come with anyone else.
“Bar fight,” Amanda says.
I blink. “Yeah, that’s the official … how did you know?”
“I was out by then,” she says easily, as if talking about her release from prison, which, I suppose in a way, she is. “Someone must have told me. One of the therapists, maybe. They read it online or saw it on TV.” She glances over at me. “After the interview when I talked about the poster, everyone went out of their way to share the latest Chase Henry rumors. I’m a warehouse of gossip about you.”
I wince. “Really?”
“Yep.” She hesitates, sliding a speculative glance in my direction. “Did you really have a … I don’t know what to call it when there are four people involved. A foursome? With some Cirque du Soleil performers?”
“No,” I say with a groan. Did someone really say that?”
“What about losing one of your cars in a bet?” she asks.
“That is true,” I admit. I still miss that Audi. It was the first vehicle I bought with my own money. And
to lose it playing High-Low with Eric? Stupid.
“What about you buying all the presents for the charity trees at, like, six Starbucks?”
“Yeah.” I shift uncomfortably. Elise suggested that I pick one location and buy all the gifts, but once I got started, I didn’t want to stop. It felt so good to focus on someone else besides myself and the current fuck-up I was trying to make up for.
“Was any of it spin?” Amanda asks.
I frown. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, from what I remember, Brody Taylor was always quick to pound someone’s face in and he had … issues with alcohol, too.”
Interesting that she hadn’t chosen to question me about that last part. Then again, mug shots made public tend to eliminate a lot of doubt.
“Not spin,” I say. “Just art imitating life this time instead of the other way around, unfortunately.”
That reminds me of something, though. I’m not sure how to bring it up without offending her, but it has to be said. “Listen, I should have mentioned this earlier, but this agreement, all of this, what we’re doing, you can’t tell anyone. If word gets out that I’m trying to manipulate the media, it would be bad.” Speculation is one thing; a tell-all interview from Amanda would be something else entirely. She would be the innocent victim, and I, the exploitive asshole using her, which is kind of true. And it would destroy what remained of my career. Way worse than anything they might print from today’s fiasco.
Just thinking about it makes my stomach hurt. Telling Amanda the truth—well, most of it—was a huge risk, one that feels riskier by the second.
She frowns at me, her expression serious. “Yes, because I feel the deep and abiding need to explain to a bunch of reporters that I willingly went along because I missed my imaginary friend who happens to look a lot like you. That’ll go over well.”
“Fair point.” We both have something to lose.
Amanda smiles to herself. She seems a little calmer, so something in this completely bizarre question-answer session is working for her.
“Okay,” she says, settling back into her seat. “Next question. Most embarrassing—”
“Wait,” I say, lifting one hand from the wheel to stop her words. “Why is it always your turn?”
“You want to ask me questions?” she asks, sounding surprised.
And exactly in that instant, I realize the inherent fallacy of that endeavor. “Oh. Uh…”
Amanda shrugs. “Anything you can think to ask me, I’ve already answered and probably on record. Most of it I can talk about, as long as it doesn’t bother you to hear it.” Her voice holds the emptiness of someone used to poking at an old scar, repeatedly.
I don’t know what to say. “What’s your favorite color?” I blurt finally.
She makes a face. “Really? That’s what you want to know?”
“Yes?” It seems a relatively safe topic.
“Sometimes I think it’s harder for people to listen. Like maybe I should just have a name tag that says, ‘Amanda Grace, abducted and raped.’” She lifts her hands, blocking out the square space of the proposed label. “Gets the ugliness right out there, using the words no one wants to hear, so we don’t have to dance around them anymore. I mean, it’s all there anyway, underneath the surface of every conversation. Avoiding it, pretending it never happened, just makes everything else feel fake, forced.”
Which is exactly what I was trying to do—pretend that part of her life never happened. I wince.
Amanda looks at me, a challenge in her gaze. “So come on,” she says. “If you’re going to do it, then ask something you really want to know.”
Words run through my head, but none of them makes it to my mouth except the two that have been circling relentlessly since I read Elise’s folder on Amanda. “Why me?” I’m the last person anyone should ever imagine in a life-or-death crisis. I can barely keep myself together, let alone help someone else. “The poster, I mean. Was it the only one there?”
Amanda turns her head to stare out the side window, her breath moving across the glass in a fog. “No. But that’s the one that reminded me of home. And I think probably it had something to do with Brody and how real you made him seem.”
She sighs, and the fog on the window reveals a heart that someone has clumsily drawn on the glass on a previous outing in this car. “Do you remember the episode with the bus after Skye’s track meet?”
It takes me a second to make the leap. She’s talking about Starlight. First season sometime, I think. “All the episodes tend to blend together after a while,” I admit.
“The bus crashes on the way back from the track meet, and Brody saves Skye, as he always does,” Amanda says.
Now I remember. We shot on a bus set that week, the vehicle cut in half for easier filming, and on location on an abandoned stretch of road in the middle of nowhere. My biggest memory of that episode is freezing and trying not to let it show. Calista as Skye had it much worse in track shorts and a T-shirt.
“But then they learn that if he changes things in the crash to save Skye, these other three kids will die,” Amanda continues. “According to Brody, Skye needs to live to stop the apocalypse, and those other kids … they don’t have a role in saving the world. Skye and Brody try everything to find a work-around, but there isn’t one. She begs him to save the other kids and let her die because she doesn’t believe her life is worth more than theirs. She doesn’t believe Brody when he says she is important.”
It was the mid-season finale, bringing even more doubt to Brody and Skye’s future together. If he does what she wants, the world is doomed and he loses his chance at redemption. But he knows she’ll never forgive him if he doesn’t.
“Brody ignores her and does it anyway, of course,” she says with a laugh, but her voice sounds soft, vulnerable. “He saves her. Because he believes she matters. Not just to the world but to him.” She shifts in her seat. “I guess … everybody wants to be the one worth saving,” she says with a wry twist of her mouth. “When you were there, talking to me, telling me I needed to keep fighting, I felt like it mattered, like I mattered. And I wasn’t alone.”
My throat is tight with emotion. “Amanda—”
My cell phone rings then, loud and shrilly, disrupting the quiet and making me jump, even though the meditation-chime setting is supposed to be soothing.
“Shit. Sorry.” I fumble for it in my pocket to shut off the noise, but the screen is flashing Elise’s picture, one she took from my bed one night and set for her contact on my phone. It’s obvious what was going on immediately before the picture, from her rumpled hair to the bedsheet wrapped under her arms.
Amanda would have to be blind not to see it, and she most definitely is not blind.
I swipe the answer button. “I can’t talk right now,” I say curtly. “I’m driving back to the hotel.” Then for good measure, I add, “And I fired you, remember?”
“Oh.” It’s more of an exhalation than a word from Elise, but that’s it, enough to assure me she gets it, then a click as she hangs up. Shortest conversation I’ve ever had with her, but then again, Elise is nothing short of dedicated when it comes to one of her schemes.
I set the phone to silent and dump it in the cup holder by the gearshift. “Sorry about that.”
“You don’t need to apologize,” Amanda says. But I can feel that something has shifted here in the darkness, creating a distance that wasn’t present a few seconds ago. “That was your publicist? The one who took your car?”
I have the feeling she’s asking more than that, but that ground is far too dangerous to tread at the moment. “Yeah, that’s her.”
“Ah. Okay.”
“So I think it’s your turn for a question,” I prompt, trying to steer the conversation back on track. It feels, oddly, like we lost something in that interruption. We’re back to being strangers in the dark.
Amanda shakes her head. “No, it’s not important. We should talk about the plan.”
“Th
e plan?”
“How we’re going to get them to take pictures,” she says pointedly.
“Right, yes. Okay.” I have to shift gears mentally, running through my schedule. “There will probably be a couple of photographers and reporters hanging around the hotel tomorrow, especially after what happened today. If you leave with me in the morning, when I go over for hair and makeup, that’s probably a good start. Then we can—”
From behind me, I hear the very familiar opening guitar and banging piano chords of a song that they will probably play at my funeral. The Starlight theme.
I stiffen. “What the hell—”
“It’s my phone,” Amanda says with a grimace, shifting in her seat, squeezing past me, so close I can smell the light scent of peaches or nectarines in her hair, to reach into her bag on the backseat. “My sister’s idea of a joke. She downloaded a bunch of songs and attached them to certain numbers.”
“Liza?” I ask.
Amanda snorts. “No,” she says, her voice muffled as she rummages. “Mia. Starlight is no joking matter to Liza.”
Amanda returns to her seat, phone in hand. “It’s Dr. Knaussen.”
“You have your therapist programmed into your phone?”
She raises her eyebrows at me. “You don’t?”
“Touché,” I mutter.
“If I don’t pick up, she’s going to keep calling.” Amanda stares at the screen as if consulting it for wisdom. “Maybe set my parents off in a panic.”
“Okay, so answer.” But clearly there’s more to it than I’m aware of, especially given how reluctantly she lifts the phone to her ear.
“Hello?” she says.
“Amanda, it’s Dr. Knaussen. Are you all right?” The woman’s voice is low and smooth but pitched to project confidence, like one of those radio-show-host doctors. I can hear her as clearly as if she were on speakerphone.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Amanda says, fidgeting with the button on her shirt cuff.