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An icy, prickly shiver ran down Wil’s spine. Because, of course, just a few months after she left the high school building behind, Katie had met Ben Adelsward.
“I’m sorry we didn’t understand,” Wil said. “I’m sorry we sat in that class as the beneficiaries of something that should not have been happening.” Wil stroked Katie’s foot.
Katie tucked her foot more firmly into Wil’s hand, an old gesture that meantmassage my foot, you tease,and shook her head. “It’s all why I had the fantasy about getting to the bottom of his secret affair with you. So I could tell both of those women about him. I wanted them to know what a gross insect he is.”
“We don’t have to bring all that stuff into our getting back in touch now, you know.”Ben,she meant. But couldn’t quite bring herself to say. “I don’t need an excuse to want to talk to you.” Wil pressed her thumb into the arch of Katie’s foot. There was a blustery red mark right under the pinky toe that made Wil think about all the gravity-and physics-defying shoes Katie wore.
Because she was a world-famous actress.
Right.
Katie looked out the window again. Her eyes were too bright in the dim cab of the Bronco, her hand full of pretzels that she’d forgotten to eat. She drew in a shaky breath and exhaled slowly until her shoulders sank down to their usual position. “I want to talk to you about it. I don’t think I can right now, but yes. Sometime. What Icansay is that it got hard for me, after Mr. Cook, and after Ben, to tell the difference between imagining and pretending and acting and—and deception, I guess. Tricking people. Being someone who can do a trick to get what she wants. Not even anespecially good trick, just a trick that I was born being able to do, like being double jointed.”
Wil stopped herself from blurting out meaningless reassurances. She was holding onto Katie’s ankle now, and Katie’s ankle felt the same as it always had against the palm of her hand. It was so utterly clear to Wil that this was Katie. The Katie she’d known.
Which meant she’dnever not been.
Which meant it wasWil’sKatie who’d gone through all that. It wasWil’sKatie who’d been drawn into a relationship with a much older, much more powerful man, who had probably treated her terribly, and who had never stopped using the media to harass her. It wasWil’sKatie who was still going through the kind of thing Wil had seen for herself in Chicago when the press showed their fangs.
Katie had apologized for losing touch, for not being there when Wil’s dad died, but Wil hadn’t expected Katie to come to the funeral because she’d no longer thought of Katie as anything but a wonderful memory. Someone she sometimes felt angry she didn’t know anymore, or wasn’t allowed to know.
Do you ever feel like you’re not real?
One of Katie’s biggest fears. And Wil—along with the rest of the world—had done that to Katie Price. Done it and done it.
“I’m sorry,” she started. “I’m sorry I didn’t stay in touch and wasn’t available to you, if you had wanted me to be, when you were going through something hard. I wasn’t a good friend, and all the feelings I had about being mad that I somehow wasn’t supposed to talk to you anymore were actually me feeling guilty and regretful and not getting it. I’m so, so sorry. You deserved better from me.”
Katie sucked in a breath, and Wil felt her body get very still. Then Katie met Wil’s gaze, tears streaming down her face. “Oh, fuck, Wil Greene! I didn’t even know I needed to hear that!”
Wil brushed away a tear alongside her nose. “Then I’m extra glad I said it.” Wil thought of something else she wanted to say.“You know that everything about you is real, right? You’re fucking smart, you’re a genius, actually. You have something, but it’s not a trick, and you weren’t born with everything you know how to do. Remember, I watched you learn it.”
“Say more about that.” Katie pushed her foot into Wil’s hand, and Wil squeezed it.
“You worked so hard. You were always working. Remember when Beanie and me and Diana drove down to see you play Alice in Milwaukee?”
Katie shook her head and wiped away a last tear.
“Of course not, why wouldn’t you? But I do. That was junior year, and I didn’t want to go. I’d never minded seeing your stuff, but this was children’s theater, and I thought that meant it would be three hours of checking my watch, wishing I was in the backseat of the quarterback’s car investigating the contours of my sexuality, because who cares?Alice in Wonderlandis a kids’ story. But I guess there was a way I could love a kids’ story. You made me love it. It was all Beanie and I could talk about on the drive back, wondering how you’d done it, how you pulled it off, and mostly what we talked about was how hard you’d always worked.”
Katie nodded. “All right. Yes. That’s all true, I mean, logically, I know this, and in fact I have a lot of, frankly, arrogance around the work I bring to the table. It’s rough, though, when I can’t get my screenplay I’m supposed to be writing to do what it’s supposed to.” Her hands flew up then, floated around in the air in a gesture that shouldn’t have meant anything but somehow expressed the three-dimensionality and texture of how the world felt in her imagination. “Igetthe story, I know these characters as well as I know my family. And then I try to make it be on paper, in scenes, with action and dialogue that is right for these people to tell this story, and then I can’t. I can’t.”
She held out her hand for a Twizzler. Wil gave her one. She ateit, looking somewhere into the space between them that was deep inside her head.
“Sometimes I end up petting cats all day,” Katie said. “I count that as a good day.”
“What kinds of things have you written? Other than yourGrey’sfanfic.” Wil was interested in this. She was always interested in problems that she found easy to solve.
“Not a ton,” Katie said with a shrug. “Mostly things for school, and my mom had to check everything. If it was worth a lot of points, I took it to one of my college student tutors.”
“Do you have a disability?”
“No, I don’t think so. My parents got me tested a couple times because I was an early reader and early talker, but school didn’t work. I can memorize full scripts like it’s nothing. I can focus. I love reading. I have no problem understanding complex contracts. I can learn things I have to do, like how to operate cameras and digital products. I like editing. But I struggle to make what I see and feel, even if it’s simple, be writing that communicates what I see and feel to other people.”
“See? That’s such a very beautiful way to put that, and one hundred percent accurate in every way.”
“It is?”
Wil slid forward. “Yes. It means that your only problem is the building blocks—mechanics, process, synthesis—and identifying the right way for you to approach them. This is something you can learn. If you want, I can teach you.”