And, worse still, when had she become a girl who would even consider it?
“It’s late,” Brandon told her. He slipped off his hoodie and draped it over her shoulders. “We should get back.”
Brandon headed for the Jeep, but Hallie lingered a moment, thinking back over the last months of listless wallowing with fresh shame. All the time that had slipped past; all the agony Hallie had clung to — holding on for dear life, as if her misery were somehow noble. As if weeping for hours in a dark room were the only way to make her wretched love mean anything at all.
She hadn’t been the brave heroine, in the play of her life. She’d been the fool.
Hallie finally joined Brandon back in the car. “I need you to know, I wouldn’t do anything like that,” she told him. “I know I said some stuff . . . but I was just being dramatic. I didn’t mean it. I promise.”
He nodded, but didn’t start the engine; instead, he sat in silence, staring straight out into the valley. She could tell he wanted to say something, so Hallie waited, seconds ticking past before he finally cleared his throat.
“I thought about it,” he said in a low voice, still not looking at her. “When I first got back. When I was out, surfing sometimes.” Brandon paused. “A wave would break over me,” he told her, “and I’d think about not swimming. Just, going under.”
Hallie caught her breath. His tone was so matter-of-fact, but that was Brandon all over: he didn’t exaggerate, or make a scene, even when his words were the most dramatic thing she could imagine. Hallie instinctively reached to cover his hand with hers. “What stopped you?” she asked quietly.
Brandon shrugged. “A bunch of stuff. My family, the guys we lost out there. They would have kicked my ass for even thinking about it.” He gave her a wry smile. “In the end, I guess it was just . . . hope. That I wouldn’t always feel that way. That the world would start making sense again.”
Hallie nodded slowly. “And does it?”
Brandon glanced down at their hands, then back to her. “Sometimes.”
Hallie looked at him, really looked: the square of his jaw beneath the five-day stubble, the harsh red line of his scar. For the first time, she recognized his quiet self-possession: not creepy, or unnerving, but something stronger. A hard-won calm after the storm.
“Good,” she said, giving his hand a brief squeeze before releasing it. “I mean, who else would come get me from my . . . knitting parties?”
Brandon laughed. “Sure. Priorities.”
“Exactly.” Hallie smiled, just to cover her shame. Priorities. She hadn’t had any; she’d been so deep in self-pity, she hadn’t seen anything at all. She changed the subject quickly. “And don’t forget Amber’s big plans for the holidays. She’s talking about some Hanukkah-slash-Kwanzaa party, with a ten-piece carol choir and a hog roast stuffed inside an ox. You want to be around for that.”
“It’s the simple things, that make life worth living,” Brandon quipped back. Hallie gave him a look to let him know she didn’t mean all this joking; that she understood the weight of what he shared. Brandon nodded slightly, then started the ignition. “You won’t say anything, will you, about —?”
“No!” Hallie exclaimed. “I promise, that’s just between us. And if you ever need to talk,” she added, “I’m here. Anytime.”
“Right next door.” Brandon smiled slightly.
“Exactly,” Hallie agreed, surprised to find that thought reassuring. “Right next door.”
After all the drama of New York and her return to L.A., Hallie was relieved to find Christmas and New Year’s pass uneventfully — save, of course, for Amber and Auggie’s blowout holiday party. Two hundred of their closest friends crammed the house and backyard, partying until dawn under the vast swathes of Christmas lights and inflatable reindeer perched on every square foot of roof.
Hallie didn’t mind. It was good to be surrounded by noise and laughter — rather than stuck alone wondering what exclusive party Ana Lucia hadn’t invited her to. Besides, half those friends of Auggie’s turned out to be producers and casting agents, who offered Hallie their cards the minute Amber started gushing about what a talent she was, and about how she had just this very minute decided to try her hand at acting.
“You don’t have to say that.” Hallie pulled Amber aside, embarrassed. Ana Lucia’s comments were still burned in her memory; the last thing she wanted was to make a nuisance of herself. “Please, let’s not even talk about me acting at all. These are your friends.”
“Exactly!” Amber cried, flushed and tipsy as the party whirled on around them. She wore a silver-sequined minidress, reflecting the holiday lights like a walking mirror ball. “And I bet every one of them got where they are today because someone helped them starting out.”
Hallie wavered. “Are you sure? I don’t want to make things weird, or uncomfortable —”
“Honey, no!” Amber cried. “You’re doing them the favor. They’re all looking to find the next big thing. Trust me!”
So Hallie let Amber sweep her off on another round of the party, throwing her in the path of every available agent and manager she could find, until Hallie was weighed down with a confetti of business cards.
It felt good, Hallie realized, to have some purpose again, and as the weeks passed, and she chased down her new leads — turning e-mails into meetings, into afternoons spent waiting in the bland back hallways of every audition in town — she was reminded again just how much she had let fade away in the face of her grief over Dakota.
What had she been doing?
It had been her mistake too, she could see that now: not the end, but everything that came after. The further Hallie got from it, the clearer it became, like those paintings that are just a blur up close but take on new shape and meaning from across the room. Sure, it still hurt; she still missed him, but when his absence hit her at night with a hollow ache in her chest, Hallie climbed on out of bed and went to watch TV with Brandon, or pulled out her latest audition script to memorize. She didn’t sit around, thinking about the time they spent together, anymore. No, the key was not to think of him at all.
“How’d it go?” Grace met her at the door after Hallie’s latest audition.
“Good!” Hallie dumped her bag and kicked off the heels Amber had insisted she wear. “Socialites-slash-cat-burglars don’t wear sneakers!” she’d cried, and she’d been right: the waiting room had been filled with girls in their best stilettos. Hallie massaged her poor arches. “Actually, I think I nailed it, but you never know.”
“This was for that cable crime show, right? Dead Sorority Girl Number Three?” Grace followed Hallie into the kitchen, where she made straight for the fridge full of — yes! — cold pot roast and Rosa’s famous cheesecake.
“No, that was this morning,” Hallie replied, her mouth already full. “This was the big one, it’s one of the main parts on a new heist show. I wasn’t even supposed to be there, but Amber does her strip-hop dance class with one of the executives’ wives and managed to get me in for a first read.” She collapsed at the table and began to eat, straight from the Tupperware containers. God, that was good! The months she’d spent limply wasting away, barely eating a thing, were a distant dream. If there was one thing she could say for sure about mental health, it made her hungry.
“And a first read . . . ?” Grace joined Hallie at the table, pushing aside the stack of Amber’s magazines. Hallie forgot, her sister didn’t read the trades like she did.
“Is like the very first stage,” Hallie explained. “Then you get callbacks, until you make the short list, then cast reads — where they have you try out with the other people they’ve already hired — and then you get test shoots, in front of the camera. And then, if you’re still in the game, you read for the producers and network heads.”
“Wow.” Grace blinked. “That’s . . . a long process.”
“Yup.” Hallie scooped up a spoonful of creamy topping. “But I made it to the third round of callbacks on the last thing
I went out for, remember that cough syrup ad?”
“The taste to chase your tickles away,” Grace quoted. “You were saying nothing else for two days straight. Believe me, it’s burned into my brain,”
Hallie laughed. Sure, these weren’t the Oscar-worthy roles of her dreams she was trying out for, but everyone had to start somewhere. These were the bit parts that would get her an agent, which would get her speaking roles with more than five seconds of screen time. Who knew? By the end of the year, she might even have more than ten lines of dialogue in a major network show!
Grace glanced absently at the pile of magazines, then froze.
“What?” Hallie asked.
“Nothing!” Grace yelped, flipping the magazine over.
Hallie sighed. “It’s OK. I know they went to that premiere of hers together. The photos are all over the Internet.”
Grace looked at her cautiously. “You can talk about it, if you want. You haven’t really said anything for a while about . . . him.”
Hallie rolled her eyes. “You can say his name. Or just call him the Heartless Sellout with No Soul. Either way, talking won’t help. Double-double-chocolate cheesecake, on the other hand . . .” She took another mouthful. “What about you? Have you heard from Theo since New York?”
There was a pause. Grace took a spoon, carved out a chunk of dessert, and then shook her head, mouth full. “Lucy’s e-mailed a bunch of times, though,” she said, swallowing. “You know she quit to go work for Portia? Portia looooves her theories on organic early-childhood education. They’re practically new BFFs.”
“Bitch.”
Grace didn’t disagree.
“So what now?” Hallie asked.
Grace shrugged. “I don’t know. Back to normal, I guess. School. Work. Friends. The usual.” She glanced at her phone. “I should go meet Palmer. We’re going to go see a movie at the Grove, maybe get some food.” She paused, looking at Hallie again. “You can come, if you want?”
Hallie waved her off. “I’m fine. Go, have fun.”
Alone, she turned her attention back to the pressing issue in front of her: cheesecake. But the lure of those magazines was too much, and despite her every instinct, Hallie found herself reaching for them. Dakota’s face stared back at her from the glossy cover of the latest Us Weekly. talia’s new love heats up! the headline screamed, above a photo of them together on the red carpet. Dakota looked dashing and hot, and Talia was gazing up at him with such a giddy expression of bliss that Hallie had to hurl it through the open French doors into the backyard so she didn’t have to look at them another moment longer.
There was a muffled yelp, and then a crash.
“Hello?” Hallie went outside to investigate, and found Brandon collecting a box of small canisters, now scattered over the lawn. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t know you were out here.”
Brandon laughed. “You sure it’s not just payback for making you watch Hellfire 3?”
“There was no plot!” Hallie cried, for what felt like the fifth time since going to the movies with him. “It was just two hours of stuff blowing up!”
“Yeah, well, what did you want us to see, that French thing?” Brandon curled his lip. “I don’t do subtitles.”
“Philistine,” Hallie declared, helping him pick up the canisters.
“Snob,” he teased back. She shook her head in despair.
“One of these days, you’re going to raise your cultural awareness higher than robots and zombies.” Hallie straightened up, handing him the final roll. “What are you doing with all this . . . ?”
“Film,” Brandon finished. He showed her the box, full of canisters like the ones Hallie remembered from when she was a kid, and cameras came with film and negatives and trips to the drugstore, instead of digital memory cards and USB cables. “I’ve been taking a bunch of new shots,” he explained. “Now I get to spend the week in the darkroom, getting high off chemical mixes.” There was a pause. “That was a joke.”
“Duh.” Hallie weighed a roll in her palm, amused. They’d been hanging out more, but Brandon was still awkward sometimes, fumbling his words or jolting if she brushed against him. She guessed he wasn’t used to people these days, period: Amber said that when he came back from Iraq, he barely left the house for months. “Can I come see your stuff?” Hallie asked hopefully. “It’s OK if you don’t want to,” she added quickly. Brandon hadn’t offered to show her yet, and she knew some of it might be personal. “But, you did always say you’d help me with my headshots. . . .”
To her relief, Brandon didn’t seem reluctant. “Admit it,” he teased. “You want to see if I’m up to the job.”
“Well, sure.” Hallie smiled back. “I need to have complete creative synchronicity with my artist.”
“I don’t even know what that means.” Brandon laughed. “But sure, step into my office. . . .”
He led her across to the far side of Amber and Auggie’s house, and a small side door that led into a windowless passage. Hallie looked around at the unfamiliar walls. “What is this place? I can’t believe I’ve never been out here.”
“Servants’ quarters, storage, I don’t know.” Brandon opened another door into a small, dark room. He flipped on a lone lightbulb, revealing trays laid out on a bench, and walls lined with shelves of chemicals and paper. Photographs hung across the room, pegged to a laundry line. “Auggie had it light-proofed a few years back, but no one ever used it, so he said I was welcome.”
Hallie reached up to look at the photos, drying on the line. The line nearest to her was a series from the beach. Surfers preparing for the waves: pulling on wet suits, waxing down their boards. Brandon had captured their focus, a calm concentration painted in black and white against the far gray sky. “These are good!” she exclaimed.
Brandon gave her a twisted smile. “Don’t sound so surprised.”
“I’m not! I mean”— Hallie caught herself —“OK, I am. But come on: everyone calls themselves a photographer these days. They just point and snap, and post everything online.”
“But there’s so much more to it than that. Here.” Brandon set down his box and pulled out an old-school camera with all kinds of knobs and settings. He passed it to her, almost reverently. “See, this is a Pentax, from the eighties.”
Hallie held it up to look through the viewfinder at him. For a moment she was caught, looking into his eyes. They were a dark shade of blue Hallie had never noticed before, almost gray. . . .
She lowered the camera quickly. “It still works?”
“Sure. These things last forever, if you take care of them. The hard part is finding the film,” Brandon explained. He took the camera back, and showed her how to twist the lens to focus. “I get it off auction sites online, and at estate sales around town. Last month, I found a whole lot of untouched film: sealed, no damp, nothing.”
He snapped the cover shut, and handed it back to Hallie. “Go on, take something.”
“Now?” Hallie paused, the camera an unfamiliar weight in her hand. “OK . . .” She held it up quickly and snapped a shot of Brandon before he had a chance to cover his face.
“Not me!”
“Why not?” Hallie kept clicking. She had to wind the film between shots, and only got in a couple more before he took the camera back.
“I’m not that kind of guy,” he said, and under the harsh light, Hallie could swear he was blushing. “I don’t like being the center of things. I’m more a behind-the-scenes kind of guy.”
“I think that’s a good thing,” Hallie decided, hopping up on one of the counters. He started shooting her, and she struck a pose, blowing kisses until the film ran out. “I mean, people who want to be in the spotlight, they have this hunger, you know? Like they’ll do anything to make it, even if it means crossing the line.”
“Oh, yeah?” Brandon raised an eyebrow.
“Not me!” Hallie protested. “But, you know, people.”
“I know.” Brandon looked at her carefully, so carefully that Hallie
shifted, uncomfortable.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He turned back to the camera. “Just, you seem different now.”
“Different bad or different good?”
Brandon smiled. “We’ll see. Now, turn off the light, we have to do this next part in pitch-black, so we don’t wreck the film.”
Hallie stayed in the darkroom for the rest of the day, watching as thin spools of negatives were transformed into actual prints under Brandon’s careful hands. “We made them, from scratch!” she exclaimed, delighted, looking at the final print of her photos of Brandon.
He groaned, trying to snatch them away. “You can’t keep those! The exposure’s all wrong, and the focus is smudged —”
Hallie held them close to her chest, out of reach. “But they’re mine!” She paused, looking around the tiny room, pictures dangling at every turn. “It’s pretty cool, what you do here: taking moments and making them last.”
Brandon looked bashful. “My therapist says it’s supposed to remind me how everything is fleeting, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real, in the moment, you know?”
“I know.” Boy, did she know.
Hallie followed him out onto the back lawn. It was dark now, she was surprised to see, the house silent in the glow of the security lights. “I guess nobody’s home. Amber said something about a charity thing. . . .”
“Want to come over?” Brandon suggested. “We could get pizza and watch something.”
“You mean, Hellfire 4?” Hallie grinned.
He laughed. “Nope. That doesn’t come out until next year. You can pick.”
“Ooh.” Hallie clapped, heading around to the front of the house. “There’s that new Russian movie . . . or did you see The Artist? It’s a French movie —”
“No subtitles!”
“There aren’t any, silly,” she reassured him, with an evil grin. “It’s a black-and-white silent movie!”
Jane Austen Goes to Hollywood Page 21