Everything Leads to You(51)

She stares hard at the house.

“I used to spend the night over there a lot. With her.”

“Her parents didn’t know?”

“They thought I was sleeping on the air mattress.”

“Oh.”

“It lasted for about a month. I’ve never been so sleep deprived.”

I smile, but feel a tightness in my stomach, over what I’m not sure. Probably over a lot. Like the way I could say the same sentence and mean it about the few nights I was able to spend with Morgan by telling my parents I was somewhere else.

But also, maybe, the tightness is a little bit hopeful, a little bit over Ava and the possibility that the two of us could be sleep deprived together one day. It’s a thought that I push away, though, because I am beginning to understand Charlotte’s hesitation. She doesn’t want me to get hurt again, and let’s face it: I am just a small part of Ava’s potential rise to stardom. I’ve been around enough young actresses to know that an amateur production designer, an intern, really, would never hold her attention for long.

So I try to pull myself from fantasies of someday, back to this still-warm ground and cool night air and clear sky and bright stars and company of a girl who is telling me part of the story of her life.

“It was the strangest thing. One morning I woke up in Lisa’s bed and I had that feeling that came on all the time: that our time together was going to be over. Soon we would have to pull our clothes back on and go, one by one, into the bathroom. We wouldn’t sit too close at the breakfast table. We wouldn’t look at each other for too long at any moment, even when we were the only two people in the room, because at any time, without warning, someone could walk in and see that look and find us out. The light was coming through the curtains and it was too soon. I wasn’t ready to get out of bed with her yet. So I lifted the sheet to cover our heads and I said that I thought we should tell people. ‘Tell people what?’ Lisa asked. I should have known that was a bad sign. Tell people what. But I didn’t. I just said, ‘About us. We shouldn’t have to hide it.’ The sun was coming up fast; not even the blinds and the sheet could keep it out, and I could see Lisa’s eyelashes and the curve of her ear. I could see her lying awake and not answering me. Finally she moved away from me and reached for her pajama pants and the sheet fell away and we were there, in the sunny room, and everything was bright. She told her parents that night, but not in the way that I’d hoped. She told them that I had been coming on to her, that I had tricked her into all of it.”

“And they believed that?”

Ava sighs. “I made it easy for people to believe bad things about me,” she says. “It’s something the counselors at the shelter have helped me understand. I gave Tracey all these reasons to reject me so that I could stop feeling so powerless.”

I wait, but she doesn’t tell me anything more.

“Well, Lisa’s going to regret it,” I say. “When she hears about you. She’ll probably want you back.”

“I doubt it.”

“No,” I say. “You don’t understand. Your life can change as soon as you want it to. All you have to do is tell people who you are, and soon Lisa will be in line at the grocery store and she’ll see you on the cover of Vanity Fair. She’ll buy it and read the interview and find out along with the rest of the world. The interview will be all about Clyde and Caroline, and your upcoming movies and your lunch dates with famous people on the Chateau Marmont patio. Your portraits will be shot by Annie Leibovitz and you’ll be wearing Yves Saint Laurent or whatever. You’ll be so far removed from this place that Lisa will wonder if you even remember her.”

Ava doesn’t respond at first, but she’s really thinking about it. Her face is so serious in the moonlight, her eyes fixed on me, taking in every word.

“Maybe,” she says, but I can’t tell if she means it.

So I keep trying.

“Even if we leave Clyde and the movies out of it,” I say. “There’s still this thing that happens after you break up with someone. It barely takes any time to work. All you have to do is continue with your life, and then when you find yourself in a room with her again it’s as if you’re a different person. Maybe your posture is a little more confident. Maybe your laughter is louder. You’re wearing perfume she’s never smelled before and you have a new way of pinning back your hair. You don’t even have to say anything because your presence alone is enough to say Look at who I am without you.”