Earth to Iris. Walk away, Iris.
“I’m…seventeen.” I stepped back, oddly relieved to bump into Eamon. “Have to go.”
The guy pulled out his wallet and handed me a business card. “Shoot me a message around your birthday. I’ll take you out, and we can talk about the movie, or the books, if you prefer.”
Neither, thank you. “I live in LA.”
“I’ll make the trip.” He smiled at the person he thought was me. He walked away. And I hated M. E. Thorne more than usual, which, to be honest, was already a lot.
We walked toward the parking lot, and I kept my head down.
“You work fast, Lady Iris,” Eamon said, low enough that Ryder couldn’t hear.
“No way,” I muttered back. “That guy has the hots for my dead grandma.” He glanced at me, concerned. “I’m fine,” I added, hoping I looked annoyed—bold and unflappable—but from the way his expression fell, I think maybe my sad was showing.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN “WE’RE GETTING ON A BOAT?”
Eamon stuffed my duffel into the hatchback trunk of the smallest vehicle I’ve ever seen. Its color was rust red, by which I mean that the rust was eating all the red. It also only had two doors.
“We’re not going to fit in there.” I glanced around the parking lot filled with cars exactly like the one before me. The big, shiny SUVs I was used to were nowhere to be seen.
“Sure you are.” Eamon propped the front seat forward so Ryder could scurry into the back. He shoved Ryder’s bag in too, smooshing my brother against the far side.
Ryder’s delight was palpable. “Hey! These seats are buckets!”
“Did my dad tell you to pick me up in this?” I asked.
Eamon stopped shoving to peer at me. “What would I have to do with your da?”
Good question. I glanced at my watch, exhaustedly disoriented. It was 4:46 a.m. back in LA. In a few hours, the sun would wake up, brilliant and hot. In Ireland, the clouds were cement. Thick and gray. Or grey. Whichever of those words means the color plus the emotion. And it was chilly. Which meant I’d completely bungled my packing. “I… My dad likes to mess with me.”
Ryder craned his head out the passenger window. “Dad made us fly coach. He said it was good for us. He calls Iris ‘Jaded Iris’ because she acts so old.”
“That’s not very kind,” Eamon said.
“Says the guy who called me a mountain troll,” I snapped. “And what do you plan on doing with Annie?”
“Say, who?”
“Her guitar!” Ryder yelled.
“Your guitar is called Annie? That’s fairly cute.” He smiled, and part of me was tempted to smile back. I told that part to sit down and don’t even think about it. Instead, I focused on his scrappy hair—I mean, really, it was the scrappiest dirty-blond argument of a hairstyle I’d ever seen. At least it flopped over his elf ears in a way that slightly camouflaged their weirdness.
Eamon held up some rope. “Let’s tie Annie to the roof.”
“Are you insane?” I cried out.
He laughed, slammed the trunk, and held open the driver’s side door, which was actually the passenger door, because the car was inverted. “Annie’ll have to ride on your lap.”
I folded myself in and pulled my guitar after me. “Eleven days,” I murmured, Annie pressed between my knees, my chin propped on the top of her case. “Ten after today.”
Eamon’s driving was all jerky gear adjustments on the serpentine, narrow roads, a problem exacerbated by Ryder’s endless questions. Within minutes, I’d found out Eamon was eighteen, grew up in Dublin, and wasn’t planning on going to college in the fall. Huh.
“So what are you going to do? For money and stuff?” I asked.
“Dunno,” he said. “I’ll figure it out when I get there.”
Double huh. “Are teenagers allowed to do that here? In America, it’s like, ‘You’re going straight to college, young lady, or you’ll fail out of life.’”
Eamon laughed. “That’s massive stupid. How’re you supposed to know what you want to do as fast as that?”
I bristled at his use of “massive stupid,” even if he seemed to be using both words differently—and even if he was right.
After singing the praises of every cow, sheep, and half-crumbled stone tower, Ryder started snoring. I craned my neck to look back at him. He was sweet and fragile when he was asleep, but even then, I could hear him chirping Jaded Iris. To be honest, I was feeling bad about being a giant grump. That’s the thing about negativity—it gives you control and makes you ugly in one fell swoop. By that logic, my father was the ugliest, most powerful man in California.
And also the real reason I was crammed into this clown car.
“I want you to take Ryder on that Hollywood excursion to Ireland,” my dad had said only a week ago, as if he were asking me to make dinner instead of cross the Atlantic. He didn’t even bother to look up from his laptop. “I’ll make it up to you.”
“But you told Cate Collins we wouldn’t be part of her movie,” I said, stunned. “You swore at her.”
“Yes, well, she won’t stop calling, and your brother won’t stop asking. Today I received a written notice that he’d like to trade”—my dad grabbed a piece of paper and read—“‘five birthdays and Christmases for the trip to see the Elementia filming.’” He dropped the paper. “Also his therapist thinks it’s a great idea. I’m overruled.”
I was speechless. Particularly because my dad had spent the last seventeen years listing reasons why I should hate the nerd fantasy written by his mother and the last year monologueing about how much he loathed the film adaptation that was in development.
“I’m serious, Iris,” he said through my shocked silence. “My book is overdue to my editor, your mom is deep in her writing, and I can’t deal right now.”
“Ah, the truth comes out,” I muttered.
“Take him. Have one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences. But no alcohol or flirting. Your job is to watch your brother.”
“Watch Ryder? What’ll that be like?” I snipped sarcastically. “However will I manage?”
“Don’t give me that crap. Make the arrangements.”
I took a deep breath. He was asking me to do something huge; I was going to ask for something huge in return. And I was ready. “I want to access my trust fund when I’m eighteen instead of twenty-five. I know you can change that.”
My father finally looked up from his screen. “That money is purpose money. Tell me, Jaded Iris, do you have a purpose?”
“Yes.” I did my best to sound as certain as he did. “I want to buy recording software and equipment. For my songs.”
“Are you going to play for me?”
I paused. “No.”
“Well then, I can’t help you. If you’re not ready to let me hear you play, you’re not ready to record. I’m not letting you turn into one of those entitled, skip-the-hard-work-to-get-to-the-top, ‘oh look at me, I’m a YouTube sensation’ teenagers.”
“Then I’m not taking him.” I’d backed up, nearly out of his office before he replied.
“Speaking of your trust fund, Iris, you should thank Cate Collins. In person. Grandma Mae’s book sales, a.k.a. the funds in your trust, are growing exponentially because of those films. Once you’re done with college and find a real purpose, you can live however you want. Your kids can live however they want. Your grandkids can live however they want.” He said that like it was a bad thing. Like it’d been a terrible idea for him to live however he wanted: writing ill-received detective novels all day and night in the darkest room in the house.
“Maybe I need money to help me find my purpose,” I’d argued.
“I’ll think about it,” he said, “if you bring Ryder there and back again. Safely.” He’d waved me away, leaving me to wonder if this was a real deal we’d made.
He jerked the car back to the left. “You’re a writer?”
“No.”
“I hear your dad’s a writer. Never read his stuff though.”
“That puts you in the category of most human beings,” I said. He looked at me askance. “No one reads his books, but he keeps getting contracts because of his last name.”
“Ah, the Thorne legacy.”
I frowned. “Everyone compares his writing to my grandmother’s, even though it’s not the same genre. He tried to publish with a pseudonym, but that left him invisible.”
Eamon tapped Annie’s case. “Are you going to ride the Thorne name into being a rock star then? Sold out concerts and platinum records?”
This boy had a lot to learn.
“Mind, I don’t blame you. Everyone wants to be Taylor Swift. I wouldn’t mind being Taylor Swift.” He started singing “Bad Blood” in an unfortunately decent voice.
“Stop.”
He grinned, and I dared to trust him with the truth.
“I’m a songwriter.” There was something tricky about that sentence. Like the person I was saying it to might disagree—and maybe they’d be right.
“Can I hear a song?”
“No!” I was starting to feel nauseous, and it wasn’t the windy roads. “I write songs for other people to play and sing.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Says the guy who gets paid to read lines someone else wrote.”
“Touché, love.” He shrugged, crystal eyes on the road. I knew people said things like that here, but it didn’t make it any less strange.
The horizon was a patchwork of greens sewed up with zigzagging stone walls. It was pretty but rural. “So where are we going? And when do we get to a hotel with beds and showers?”
“How many showers does one young Los Angelino like yourself need?” His comebacks had amazing speed, but I gave him a side-eye instead of a compliment. “My orders are to bring you to Doolin, and then onto the ferry to Inishmore, where they’re filming this week.”
“Ferry?”
“It’s grand. And wait till you see the set. It’ll steal your breath.”
“I like breathing.”
Ryder’s face popped up between the front seats, gleefully woken by the sounds of my horror, no doubt. “We’re going on set? Today? In a boat?”
“Well, no,” Eamon said, surprising me. “We’re only going if your sister is up to it. After all, it’s been a long night for both of you.”
“Hotel,” I said.
Ryder wriggled around the passenger seat, breathing in my ear. “Please, oh please, Iris? I will sit so still and not do a single thing I’m not supposed to.”
I checked my brother’s eyes for sincerity. He was eight now, and yet he still looked like the six-year-old who’d started screaming from the other side of the playground—a man’s arm around his waist, dragging him toward a van. I’d never run so fast. I’d never been so scared.
I rubbed at the raised hair on my arms. Two years later, and I still got chills, which were always followed by my dad’s voice in my head saying, That’s cliché description, Iris.
Ryder’s baby dragon breath was all over me—stale ketchup and bologna.
“You don’t leave my side,” I said. “Promise?” He nodded; I wasn’t the only one who remembered every detail of what had happened that day.
• • •
Hours later, the frigid Atlantic sprayed my face every time the ferry crested a swell. Eamon and Ryder were overjoyed, skittering across the deck together, already brothers in mischief. At least the cement sky had cracked apart to reveal a striking blue.
“Cate reserved this vessel for the entire shoot. The captain said he’d take us ’round to see the filming,” Eamon yelled over the engines. “Then we’ll dock and meet up with the crew.” I held the rail and tried not to breathe the dank mold smell of the ancient life preserver around my neck just as Ryder cried out, pointing at a great cliff wall topped by an ancient stone formation. “Dun Aengus,” Eamon yelled. “It’s a prehistoric fort dating back to the Iron Age.”
But I wasn’t looking at the ruin.
On top of the cliff, I squinted at a few dozen crew members, towers of equipment, a camera on a crane, and a woman wearing what can only be described as a Gandalf bathrobe. At the water level, a girl with massive hair gripped the sides of an old-world rowboat. It was tethered by bright-green ropes to a high-tech raft that ran its motor hard to keep the waves from pressing all of them into the rock wall. A helicopter buzzed overhead, and I whipped my head back to see a cameraman and his equipment leaning out of the open side door.
“That’s so dangerous,” I breathed.
“This will be the remains of Manifest,” Eamon explained with a mischievous grin that actually made him look like an elf. “Imagine the CGI! There will be pieces of fallen towers and castles jutting up from the water like a watery graveyard of a city.” Eamon pointed to the Gandalf woman atop the cliff. “And that’s Maedina!”
“Who?” I yelled over the sound of the circling helicopter.
“What?” he yelled back.
“You’re wasting your time, Nolan,” Ryder said, most of his head swallowed by his life preserver. “Iris won’t read the books. She doesn’t know about any of it.”
“No, serious?” he asked, crystal eyes wide and mouth gaping.
“Geez, I don’t have cancer,” I shouted. “I’m just not into fantasy.”
“But your grandma—”
“Only met her once. She died when I was eight.”
“But—” Eamon cut himself off this time, still peering at me like I’d told him I had two months to live. The ferry pulled away from the raucous shooting, and the thundering ferry engines no longer felt loud enough to fill the quiet.
I turned to the rail, gripping the bitingly cold metal and trying not to look back at the chaos of the filming, trying to stop the truth that now buzzed in my mind like that helicopter.
This wasn’t going to be eleven days.
This movie was going to alter the rest of my life.
I now understood what had gotten my dad so fiery when we had first met with Cate Collins. Movies blew stories up. There would be posters, sequels, GIFs. Merchandise! Hot Topic would produce a trail mix of Thornian crap overnight. And that’s if the movies were well received.
What if they were horrible?
I’d have a huge joke attached to my last name.
TROUBLES IN NERD PARADISE
We disembarked from the ferry, my legs an odd combination of relieved and rubbery as we stepped onto the cement “quay,” as Eamon called it. I would have said “dock” or “marina.”
The quay ran quite a way out into the water, and we had a nice view of the small harbor village. The tight streets were crowded with brilliantly colored cottages huddled before the edge of a green and gray rise of stony land that spread out epically in all directions.
Moors, I thought moodily, caving to my Jane Eyre daydreams. Maybe I was about to become entangled in some brooding love affair. Or maybe I was here to suffer, to build my character before going back to LA, where my curse of a father waited to put me back in my place. Maybe I’ve always been a melodramatic soul…
“Did she get you?” Eamon eyed my no doubt enchanted expression. His hair was being manhandled by the wind, and at some point he’d slipped on a cable-knit, wool sweater, turning himself into a stock photo of an Irish boy—with fake elf ears.
“Get me?” I asked.
“Ireland. She looks like she got you.”
“I don’t know what
you’re talking about,” I said fast, hiding a smile beneath the sudden bite of cold that came with twilight. “It’s so quiet here.”
“It’s magic,” Ryder added. “Can’t you feel it?”
I smiled at Ryder. After all, this experience was his next five birthdays and Christmases.
At the end of the pier, Eamon loaded our luggage into a van parked on the street, groaning under the weight of my duffel. “There didn’t even used to be cars on the Aran Islands. Not sure what we’d have done if we’d had to lug all the filming stuff by horse and cart. We’ll walk from here. It’s not much to the restaurant.”
“Food,” Ryder moaned. My stomach agreed; it’d been a long time since we’d eaten.
I wouldn’t leave Annie behind to be stolen, so I hauled her past rows and rows of rentable bikes that weren’t even locked up. What a strange place. Eamon and Ryder walked together in front of me, both of them overloaded with spritely enthusiasm. Ryder looked close to skipping. Eamon, well, I wasn’t entirely sure about anything related to Eamon yet.
I lagged farther behind as Annie grew heavier.
Eamon stopped to stare back at me. “You want me to carry your girl there for a bit?”
“I got it.” I switched my guitar to my other hand. “Why do you keep staring like that?”
“Anyone ever told you how much you resemble your grandmother?”
“Yes.”
“It’s that dark hair and the bright, almost otherworldly, dark eyes. You know, I think your eyes match your hair color. How often does that happen?”
I squinted my quite worldly eyes at him. He took the hint and turned around. I tied back my hair. Grandma Mae’s author photos always showed her long hair down, so this was all I could do to set myself apart.
The sunset filled the sky with shadowy colors, and I finally felt more awake, most likely because it was now a valid time to be conscious back in LA. Still, I had to admit that Ireland had a strange charm. The night’s glow had more greens and blues than the dry, red-orange sunsets I was used to, and the lack of people made the whole island feel like it was stuck in slow motion.
Now a Major Motion Picture Page 2