“Am I now?” Cue mischievous grin. “You don’t seem alarmed.”
I definitely wasn’t alarmed, but I wasn’t cool and calm either. Every time his fingers tightened around mine, I felt a bit overcharged. “So…she kills the deer?” I redirected, hearing the nervousness in my own voice.
Eamon nodded. “It’s awful. She runs away behind this waterfall. Evyn follows her, feeling rightly wretched, but before they can make up, a sinister hand comes through the water and grabs him. Evyn vanishes from Cerul, and no one believes Sevyn. Her father and the whole kingdom think she killed her brother. The king banishes her to the Draemon’s island, only she hijacks the boat and ends up in Elementia, looking for her brother for the rest of the story.”
“Does she find him?”
“You’ll have to read to find out.”
I pushed him in the shoulder. “You know I won’t do that.”
“Suit yourself.” He stole the hand that pushed him and now we were double holding hands. His head dipped into the space between us, face hidden by his wild hair, as if he were nervous too, and I couldn’t stop staring over the line of his neck to his ears.
“Iris, do you ever wonder how much literature resembles real life?” Eamon asked, starling me out of daydreaming about lips on skin. “Like with your dad’s twin sister, Samantha?”
My ears popped like my mind had tuned itself. “Samantha? My aunt? They weren’t twins.”
“According to my biography of M. E. Thorne, she had twins. Michael and Samantha.”
I felt a little snarled inside. “Why didn’t my dad tell me he had a twin?”
Eamon bit his bottom lip. “I feel like I shouldn’t have said that.”
“What else don’t I know about my own family?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Well, I know she’s dead. She died when she was a kid. Sick from birth.” I sat up. “Cystic fibrosis.” I’d heard my dad begrudgingly talk about how we had CF in the family with my pediatrician, but I’d never put it together until now.
Eamon nodded, so still and silent that my feelings burst. “I hate that he doesn’t trust me to know any of this! It’s like he’s the asshole king father, and I’m Sevyn locked up in my bedroom with a guitar and permanent babysitting gig.” I looked at my hands, woven with Eamon’s. “But I’m touchable. I’m not Sevyn.”
“Not by half. You’re your own kind of power.” He risked a smile. “But angry, ambitious Shoshanna? That was good casting.”
My mind slipped back to the scene on the pinnacle. To a cursed girl who burns down that tree simply by screaming out her pain. “The feminist answer to Tolkien indeed, Cate,” I murmured. “Eamon, why is that tree so special?”
“It’s Maedina’s mother,” Eamon said. “Maedina is part elf. And the elves are in the trees. The trees are the elves. Sevyn runs after the fire and ends up lost in the woods.” He brought our conjoined hands to his chest to point at himself with both thumbs. “That’s where I come in.”
“Wait, you’re a tree?” I laughed. “What kind? Poison oak?”
“That’s a vine, but yeah, I’m a tree. Definitely oak or ash, aged and mighty.”
What a ridiculous boy, and yet I could see why Cate thought he’d make a great love interest. He couldn’t help but be his earnest, mischievous self, no matter what. Eamon smiled at me with such an intense expression that I couldn’t help but stare at his lips. “I’m going to ask you for a favor now, Iris Thorne. And I don’t want you to say no straightaway, per your usual candor.”
“No,” I said. He gave me a pleading, sweet look and tugged me closer.
Holy crap, he’s going to ask to kiss me.
My lips tasted salty, and my pulse sped. “Okay…what?”
“Will you be on my video blog?”
I blinked long and hard, my brain coming back from kissing daydreams with sluggish effort. “What?”
“Please? It could help us so much.”
“Help us? The movie, you mean?” I pulled my hands from his, growling, “Oh, I get it. You want video of me smiling on set so all the fans think M. E. Thorne’s family is on board, huh?”
“Well, it was Cate’s idea. And it didn’t sound half so bad before you said it in that Lex Luthor tone of voice.”
“Did she tell you to flirt with me too? Did she tell you that’d make it easier to convince me?” The words sounded angry, but all I could feel was pain. It pulled every muscle tight and made each breath prick at my throat. I got off the rock, dropping straight into knee-high water. The tide had been coming in while we sat, and now we had to sludge our way out.
“Iris, what’s so terrible about a minute of video if it helps people?” he asked, following as I trudged my way back to where we’d climbed down.
I started breathing too fast. Why didn’t he understand? He’d seen that gross, old Thornian try to touch me at the airport—and I’d told him about Felix Moss. “Google my name, Eamon. In a world where every girl has posted a thousand selfies, my face doesn’t exist on the internet. Ryder too. You don’t understand how nervous I am that you have a picture of me.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“I want to, but it’s not that easy. I don’t even take pictures with my school friends because I’m too scared of losing my phone and someone finding it. Which makes it hard to open up enough to even make friends. My family has to be private for good reason.”
“And what is that reason exactly?”
“I already told you,” I snapped. His inability to understand was making me boil.
“Remind me.”
“So you fantasy freaks can’t hunt us down!” I’d whispered the words, but it sounded like someone was holding a knife to my chest. My voice rumbled with deep aches, the kind of held-back feelings that caused earthquakes…or lightning storms.
Eamon looked away, stunned and burned, like I’d struck him.
And in a way, I guess I had.
• • •
We walked back on the cliff in silence, heading for the circle of trailers. The tension between us was dead weight, and when Eamon finally spoke, it didn’t lift in the slightest.
“Cate didn’t tell me to flirt with you, and if she did, I wouldn’t have.”
“But she told you to get me involved. To help with the movie.”
“Before you even landed. Before we found out about your history with kidnapping psychos, Iris. And you know it was hard for me to ask for that favor, because I knew you’d blow your top. I thought we were…starting to like one another.”
“And you were happy to use that advantage, huh?”
He threw his hands up. “Things are going downhill for the movie. The producers have been on Cate, checking her dailies like they’re waiting for her to screw up. I’ve been trying to get the blog up and make it popular. I’m trying to help. Don’t you want to help?”
I thought about that day on the beach with Julian, talking through his character with him. It had felt good, sort of. “I do want to help but not online.”
We paused in a shadow between two large trailers. Several yards away, the picnic tables were full of celebrating crew members beneath white, hot flood lamps. I held myself back in our shaded, secluded spot, not wanting to leave Eamon until we were done fighting. He paused too, and I hoped it was because he felt the same way.
“Sorry, Iris,” he said, his shoulders hitched toward his ears. He touched my wrist with careful fingers. “Sorry. Truly.”
I leaned closer, his hand traveling up my arm in a way that warmed me straight through the chill of the night. When my face was an inch from his neck, I stopped. I heard singing.
Strange singing.
“Eamon, do you hear that?”
He looked toward one the trailers beside us. “The bad music?”
The sound grew louder. Sharper. I started to re
cognize it as if I were slipping into a nightmare. I walked to the doorway, looking up the steps of the makeup trailer to where Ryder was holding out his iPad.
And there was laughter—lots of laughter—but it wasn’t loud enough to drown out my strangled voice coming from the video. I was singing my worst song. The one that had been too influenced by Florence Welch, and in which I screamed “absent” at the top of my lungs. I stepped up behind Ryder and looked at the screen. The video had been taken through a cracked open door, and you could see me wailing my heart out on my bed.
“Ryder,” I said.
He jumped, trying to hit pause, but wasn’t fast enough. I ripped the iPad from his hands and threw it out the door and over Eamon’s head. Far enough to barely hear the glass break.
“Hey!” Ryder yelled and scurried out of the trailer after it, leaving me with the worst feeling I’d ever had. I didn’t even know how to describe it.
Julian and Shoshanna were giggling, sitting in captain’s chairs and still wearing their fantasy garb. Roxanne was there too, using a Q-tip to loosen the scalp line of Julian’s Frodo wig. She wasn’t giggling, and that kind of hurt more than if she had been. She knew this was bad.
“Don’t get mad, Iris.” Julian sat forward, and Roxanne hissed. “We wanted to hear you play.”
“Can’t believe I liked hanging out with you guys yesterday,” I managed, feeling choked. Shoshanna quit giggling first; she smacked Julian until he stopped.
I left, running straight into Ryder. He was pouting over his broken iPad. “I can’t believe you, Ry! I can’t even…” I broke inside with one of those ugly hiccup sobs, and then Eamon was there, trying to touch my back, and I snapped, “Leave us alone!”
I grabbed Ryder’s arm and hauled him away. When we were inside our trailer, door shut tight behind us, he pulled out of my grip. “Stop dragging me around, Iris! I’m not your baby!”
“Of course not! You’re my responsibility. And how could you?”
He shrugged, avoiding my glare.
“So you wanted to embarrass me because I embarrassed you, is that it?”
He kept looking away.
“That’s such a stupid, little-kid thing to do,” I said even though I knew it wasn’t. It was a very teenage, backstabbing thing to do. “Why do you have that video?”
“I came home early with Dad, and we heard you playing, and he said, ‘Let’s tape her.’”
My hands shook as I picked up Annie and put her in her case. I wanted to break her. To never pick up a guitar again after hearing that terrible hate strumming and my harpy wailing. Was I really that bad? No. That video had to be six months old, but still… I thought about the melody I’d fingerpicked on the cliff earlier. I’d thought it was beautiful, but how could it be? I was a hack. I sat down, holding my stomach. Too stiff to cry.
Suddenly, my music wasn’t about the music. It was Shoshanna’s and Julian’s giggling faces. And Eamon’s oh shit expression. It was even Roxanne and her stupid, half-shaved hipster haircut. They were all talking about me, no doubt. About how funny that video was…or how I’d freaked out.
But honestly, only one person mattered. The one who’d made it all happen. I looked at my tiny, skinny brother. “What’d Dad say when he saw it?”
Ryder shook his head.
“Tell me!”
“He said you’ve got a lot of secret anger in you. He thinks you should see my therapist.”
I squeezed my eyes and rocked a little. The whole world was burning inside. “Sometimes I hate you,” I said to my dad.
“What?” Ryder asked.
My eyes popped open, and I sighed. “I didn’t mean you, Ry.”
His face erupted in that devastated-kid way. His eyes welled up and his cheeks flashed scarlet. “Maybe I hate you too!”
I stood. “Hate me? I’m not the one who ruined your life. You ruined mine!”
“It’s just a stupid song,” he said, sounding exactly like a miniature version of our dad.
“I’m not talking about the song. I’m talking about me and Dad. Before you, we had plans.” I couldn’t believe the door I’d opened—or the fact that I was now stepping through it. “We were going to leave Mom to her poems and start a real life in New York City. Dad was going to get me real music lessons. We were looking at apartments when Mom found out she was pregnant with you. And now look at me! I can’t write a decent song, and I can’t even go to college because who will take care of you? You’ll starve or get stolen by a psycho.”
I regretted the words in a bright, silver flash.
Ryder stood frozen. I thought he’d break into pieces, but instead he puffed his chest like a tiny Tarzan. “I know how much I’m not wanted, Iris! I’m not in your club with Dad!”
He left, slamming the door behind him.
I collapsed on the bed, hands over my ears, trying to drown out my own voice screaming that damn song. In the imposed quiet, my dad started talking. What’d I say the day you bought that guitar, Jaded Iris? You’ll never be as naked as your feelings set to words. It’ll make you hate everyone who hears them.
He’d never been so right, and I didn’t want to face any of them again. Not Julian or Shoshanna. Not Eamon. I found my phone and typed a fast email.
Dad—I can’t believe you told Ryder to video me. You cold, mean, negligent asshole. I’ll never forgive you.
I shook for a minute before deleting the words. If I sent that, he’d only taunt me about being Jaded Iris. Honesty never worked with him. I blinked back my tears and wrote a new message.
Dad—When you buy your ticket here, get me one home.
I’m done with these people.
I hit send.
IRIS & RYDER
Film: Elementia
Director: Cate Collins
On Location: Day 4
Aran Islands & Killykeen Forest, Ireland
Filming Notes:
No filming today.
Etc. Notes:
A.M.: Moving house to Killykeen Forest. The ferry leaves on the hour until noon. Leave nothing behind but footprints!
IN WHICH FLORENCE SAVES THE DAY...WITH MY HELP?
I planned to lock myself in the trailer until I heard back from my dad, so I could pack up, hold my head high, and leave. Ryder had gotten up in the morning and left to help Mr. Donato without saying a word. I wanted him to apologize for the video, but I think he wanted me to apologize for smashing his iPad—and for telling him he’d ruined my life. Impasse.
I slumped on the bed, listening to Florence + The Machine on repeat, full volume. Maybe I should have been peeved at Florence for inspiring the song that had swiftly ended my music career, but I couldn’t. She was too great. And boy, did she sing anger well. I got up and read the film side for the day. Nothing but moving locations.
Someone knocked on the door hard, but instead of answering, I checked my email. Nothing from Dad. Why hadn’t he responded? Did he break the router again? Sometimes when he was on deadline and couldn’t keep himself off-line, he broke the internet for the whole house. The knocking grew louder, and I peered through the shades at a burly man.
I looked down at my pajama pants and slippers. My hair was in a state of wild disaster. “Sorry, buddy. I don’t answer the door when I look like this,” I muttered.
The guy hollered something, and the ground rumbled. The whole trailer lurched, and I yelled in a panic and flung the door open to leap out.
The burly man laughed and slapped his thigh. “Told you that’d get her out, Sol!” he yelled to the driver of a huge truck that was now hooked up to my trailer.
The other trailers were gone. Only the picnic tables remained. There were no people either. I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at Mr. Burly. “Where is everyone?”
“Gone,” he said. “Packed and moving on to Killykeen. We left you last because we heard
you were having a tantrum in there.”
My mouth hung open. That was it, huh? I was going to be Jaded Iris, no matter what country I was in. “Don’t move,” I said, pointing a finger at him. “I’m going to get dressed and then you can haul this trap away.”
“You have two minutes.” Mr. Burly sat on the picnic table and smirked. “And I mean two. I’ve got a fifteen-year-old daughter who could challenge you in attitude, girl. And let me tell you, she doesn’t win with me.”
I slammed back into the trailer. Why did everyone act like I wasn’t mature? I was the most mature teenager I knew. I was raising my brother, wasn’t I? Speaking of, where was Ryder? It wasn’t like me to forget about him even when I was having a tan—no. This was not a tantrum. It was a serious infraction on my mental well-being.
Mr. Burly hollered out, “One minute, sass pants!”
I threw on some jeans and kept on my black shirt that said “NO!” It was a pajama top and not my usual, carefree invisible style, but I didn’t care. My hair was a bigger problem. I’d need at least ten minutes to detangle and straighten it back out. I tied it into a wild knot and stared at Annie in her sleek, black case.
I didn’t want to leave my guitar in the trailer; she could be stolen. But I didn’t want to touch her either. To be honest, it hurt to look at her. The trailer jerked into motion again, and I jumped out, pushing my headphones into my ears so that Mr. Burly knew I wasn’t going to talk to him.
I walked to the quay. The ocean was a brag artist of sparkles beneath a bright sun, and the production crew was loading up the huge ferry with equipment vans and trailers. I found Shoshanna siting on a rock wall down by the water, skipping stones and watching an eighty-year-old skinny dip in the near distance.
“Is that really happening?” I asked, popping out my earbud in slight shock.
“Yes,” Shoshanna said without looking at me. “I’m disgusted and yet I can’t turn away. Who knew skin could drape like that?” Shoshanna glanced over her perfect shoulder and motioned to my clothes and hair. “That’s a good look on you.”
Now a Major Motion Picture Page 10