Happy Again (This is What Happy Looks Like #1.5)(5)
“Mom.”
Her mother’s voice had softened. “I just thought you should know.”
“Thanks,” Ellie said, thinking that it was pretty much the last film she’d ever want to see. She’d gone to the final Top Hat movie when it came out last fall, and it had been hard enough watching him on the big screen without having her hometown as the backdrop.
“Well, if you change your mind—”
“Honestly, I’d rather sing karaoke in front of everyone I know,” she said. “I’d rather go swing dancing. I’d rather get punched in the face.”
Her mom laughed. “You know, El,” she said, “you really shouldn’t bottle up your feelings like that…”
Ellie had laughed too, but she was serious. In the wake of the filming, even after the whole circus had packed up and left town, she’d become a minor celebrity of sorts, at least in Henley. She’d hated everything about it: the unwanted attention and curious questions, the pointing and whispering and undisguised stares, all of which had forced her to spend the remainder of the summer darting nervously around the town where she’d lived most of her life.
Quinn, of course, had loved it. “This is your moment,” she kept saying, reveling in all the reflected glory. “You might only get fifteen minutes, so enjoy it.”
“I don’t want fifteen minutes,” Ellie told her. “I don’t want any minutes.”
“Well, you don’t have a choice. So you’ll just have to run out the clock.”
And she had. It only took a few weeks for the excitement to die down as the memory of the shoot faded and school started up again. But now, walking back into the thick of it—the noise and the lights and the great flashy drama of it all—Ellie was once again wishing she were anywhere else.
Ahead of her, Kara was elbowing a path through the knots of people, working her way from the casual observers in the back—who, like them, had simply wandered over to see what was going on—up toward the front, where the most devoted fans had been lined up along the barricades for hours. Farther down, the press was waiting, their lenses all angled toward the line of black cars, and each time someone stepped out, there was a flurry of flashes and a deafening round of cheers.
As the other girls pushed forward, Ellie found herself backpedaling. It wasn’t a decision she could remember making, exactly, but her legs seemed to be moving all the same. She stumbled over the woman just behind her, then tripped over someone else’s shoe, drifting farther away from her friends, allowing herself to be squeezed to the back of the crowd.
When she caught a glimpse of Mick—the director—hurrying past the line of cameras with a tight-lipped smile, she froze, and then ducked. After a moment, she straightened again, feeling self-conscious and overly dramatic, especially given that they’d never actually met and there was practically no chance he would remember her. But the sight of him had caught her off guard, and she was still feeling startled and a little bit shaky when Lauren appeared, grabbing her elbow with an impatient look and dragging her toward the front.
“The key is to sort of post up,” she was saying, demonstrating by throwing out an elbow as they passed a group of younger girls. “Protect your space.”
“I’m not great with crowds,” Ellie muttered, and Lauren rolled her eyes.
“You’ve gotta be more aggressive,” she said, half pulling Ellie into a spot just behind Kara and Sprague, who were so fixated on the sight of Olivia Brooks getting out of her car that they didn’t even notice. The noise from the crowd rose as Olivia—who had eyes only for the cameras—began to pose with a hand on her hip and a pouty smile on her heart-shaped face.
Ellie stared ahead unseeingly, her thoughts jumbled. She knew it was only a matter of time before Graham would also appear, handsome and smiling and achingly familiar, and she didn’t feel remotely prepared for it. Everything seemed dreamlike and surreal, as if she might snap awake at any moment and find herself back in her dorm room in her ducky pajamas.
“I bet he’s next,” Kara said, and Ellie felt her breath quicken, wondering if it was too late to try to leave again. She wasn’t aggressive. She didn’t know how to post up. And she certainly didn’t belong here. Maybe there was no such thing as a new Ellie; there was only this one, the one who had once gotten an e-mail from a boy in California, who had—without knowing what might happen—written him back, and who had then stood by and simply watched as it all slipped away.
“Do you think he’s really that hot in person?” Sprague asked, half turning to them with a dreamy look. “I mean, his eyes can’t be that blue, right?”
Kara shrugged. “I heard he wears contacts.”
“I heard he never washes his jeans.”
“I heard he has six cars, and that he’s always paying off cops when they stop him for driving too fast.”
“I heard that too.”
“I heard he has his own racetrack in his backyard.”
“I heard he got a special car seat made for his pet monkey.”
“Pig,” Ellie said quietly, and they all turned to look at her. She blinked back at them. “It’s a pet pig.”
But nobody answered. Because that’s when a car door opened, and a roar went up, and a series of flashes lit the sky, and just like that, all eyes were on Graham Larkin.