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Given all of that, Katie guessed, if she indulged her pessimism, she had about four days before she started seeing paparazzi, as much as she wanted to believe she had a luxurious month. Shemighthave had a month, but then she’d asked her mom to have that party. She wouldn’t have asked, except that she’d seen Wil in the audience in Chicago. If she were just anyone, she could’ve asked someone on her team to get her Wil’s number. But if she did that, it would have definitely leaked. Maybe not right away, but at some point, probably at a moment when it would make a very not-cute anecdote.
Diana would have given her Wil’s number, but there would have been questions, or, minimally, concern. No, thank you.
But! A lot could happen in four days. All those kissing videos told Katie that a lot could happen in one minute. Wil knew all about it. Wil had almost made Katie come in the truck when she’d pressed her fingers into her upper arm at the same time Mandi’s tongue finally, finally touched Wil’s in that video.
Katie was walking back into her suite after using her multi-head shower when her phone chimed with a text, and her heart stuttered.
Because Katie didn’t text much. Only Katie’s parents and a few friends had her direct number.
She went through her mental list of whodidhave her real number at the moment. Her team, but they knew not to text. Her friends, but most of them were on California time, and busy anyway with holiday travel of their own.
That left Wil. Who didn’t even know that Katie didn’t text, because Katie hadn’t told her.
So Wil had broken the rulesalreadyand texted her. It made Katie’s entire pelvis literally go hot inside of her body.
She tiptoed over to the coffee table where her phone was lying screen-up. When she saw the text still illuminating the lock screen, she had a brief flash of her hand curled around her purple flip phone, shoved under her pillow, just in case Wil texted her sometime in the night or Katie wanted to text her.
Why the fuckhadn’tthey always had each other’s numbers?
But then Katie remembered when she and her mom were staying in the hotel that Katie had fled to from Ben’s, after she left in the middle of the night with nothing. The first day, Diana had gone out for a few hours to get Katie some things she’d need, and she’d come back with a brand-new phone that had a brand-new number. Her mom had sat at a desk in the suite and programmed her ownnumber and Katie’s dad’s number into that phone, and then she’d told Katie that it was going to be important that she be really, really careful who she gave her new number to.
That expensive, shiny phone, feather-light with only two people who could reach her, had given Katie such a sense of safety and freedom after years of Ben knowing where she was and what she was doing at every moment, making her FaceTime him with the background captured in the camera so he knew she wasn’t lying, getting calls in her car if the phone tracking didn’t line up exactly to where he thought she was supposed to be, and being certain that no matter what she was doing, whatever he wanted would be more important.
The phone her mom gave her had been a magic phone.
Katie forced herself to delay gratification. She ran into the bedroom to get dressed. She put on jeans, a very big flannel, and snow boots. Taking her time, she put product in her hair and braided it into two very tight tiny braids.
None of this was how she dressed in Los Angeles or how she was ever photographed. When she went out in Green Bay, she would put on a hat and a big coat her mom had bought her at Kohl’s. She didn’t wear her signature winged liner and pink lippie in Green Bay. Or jewelry. She moved her body differently.
Katie could act so that people thought she was shorter, her body shape different. Familiar, but not famous, even when they looked right at her.
It was necessary, but also, a little bit, it was hard.
If she had gone to Winston-Salem, if she’d done all of those student films and crashed Chicago Groundlings auditions, taken road trips for pilot season in LA, started a YouTube channel of acting reels and impressions, Katie might still be an emerging actor, or she might be well-known and famous but in a way that was utterly embraced by her hometown because they had watched her knuckle through Hollywood. Or maybe she would have discovered how much she loved directing sooner, and she would have been, right now, on the cusp of running a show or getting a dream project greenlit.
When she left for Chicago, Katie hadn’t known exactly what she wanted, only that she wanted to make stories for audiences. She was eighteen. How could she have known more than that?
But Ben haddecidedto introduce Katie to the world.
He’d set the terms, he’d taught her how to “deal” with the media, he’d taught the media how to look at and think about and talk about her. It meant that Katie hadn’t had a chance to make any decisions for herself about what she wanted until after she broke up with Ben, and by then, there were patterns established that she didn’t know how to change.
It was one reason why, when she talked to someone like Busy Phillips, Katie preferred to talk about her cats.
No matter how long this trip home was, it was supposed to be about admitting that she was ready for more. Katie had thoughtmoremeant professionally.
Maybe more was more.
Once she’d finished getting dressed, she sat on the sofa, her babies arranging themselves around her, and picked up the phone, smiling.
I’m not supposed to text you
But I had an idea for you to try today, with writing, and keep things very low-pressure
So forgive me
If you’re interested, lmk
Katie smiled.