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“Sure,” April said. “I’m powerful because I literallyneverwalked off my own path. The one without irony and with sugar and romance and cats and nerdery. I let it get bigger and bigger, what was already inside of me, until I became the powerful boss bitch you see in front of you today. And I only deal with the people who respectme, and so it follows that the general opinion is that ‘everyone’ respects me. This means my life is pretty good, Katie. I don’t have to spend time leaning against doors keeping people out. I can just be me, to my highest degree, and I keep my door open, and the people who need me and who I need tend to walk through it.”
“You are trying to teach me a lesson,” Katie guessed.
“I am trying to tell you that I have enjoyed watching you every single time you went on Busy’s show to talk about your cats, because that was the path you had to walk on. But you’re on a new path now. It’s a scary path, I’ll bet, but it’s the right one. I need you to keep walking that path.”
“I think I’m going to bring Wil with me to Los Angeles.” Katie heard herself say the words with no plan or intention to say them. April gasped.
“In a few months,” April said. “A year.”
“No. When I see you next. Wil will be there. Probably.”
April’s head started to shake back and forth.
“Youjustsaid a lot of stuff about walking my own path!” Katie had only meant to mildly call out April’s denial, but then she realized April’s denial made her angry. “Unless,unlessyou want people like Ben, et al, to stop pushing me around becauseyouwant to be the one to push me around, all for yourself, and are afraid I’m going to ruin my career a second time by making a debut on the coattails of someone I’m fucking.”
“Are you—”
“That’s none of your business! But I want Wil to come to LA with me if she wants to.” That was easy to say. So easy to say. “And Madelynn says I have to trust her, trust both of you, and I’m working on that, but it also means you have to trustme,not only because we’re friends and we love each other”—Katie took a breath and checked April’s expression quickly, because she’d never said anything like that to April before, but it was okay, April wasnodding—“but also because if no one trusts me tobeanything more than the Katie Price you’ve known since Ben, I’m not going to make it. I will diminish and go into the east.”
It would kill her. That was what Wil had said.
It would kill her not to figure out how to be herself.
“I don’t—” April started, then shook her head as if to dislodge a wrong idea. “I thought I was riding the rocket of your video as a viral declaration of your creative intentions. I didn’t think—I’m sorry, but I didn’t think it was a declaration of your relationship with Wil. Listen, forgive me, but that is a dilution of what this could be. Not just for you.” April closed her eyes. “But for me.”
Katie rubbed her palms down her thighs and gripped both of her knees, hard.
She was so angry. Instantly, completely enraged by April’s comment.
A dilution.
She made herself take a deep breath. Katie understood that April had been focused on the video as an expression of abstract artistry. She understood, too, that expressions of abstract artistry which made people feel things were acommodityin Hollywood. April was her business partner, not just her friend, and so of course, ofcourseshe’d watched that video and seen dollar signs.
And Katie had told her nothing, next to nothing, about Wil. Why would April know her feelings? How could April guess at what was in her heart? Katie herself was still figuring it out!
“I don’t even know where it’s going with Wil.” Katie shook her head. “I do know. But I don’t know if I can have it, even if I want it more than anything. And, look, this is scary! I’m justhere,writing this script and falling in love—”
April gasped again.
Katie held up her hand. “No. Not right now. Maybe falling in love again, or maybe I never stopped, I don’tknow. My point is,if you can go all over Los Angeles and find out if this production company is happening and if people with money are going to take me seriously as a director, then I can go all over Green Bay, Wisconsin, in my high school best friend’s Bronco and imagine us in an alternate life, with four cats, making out on a sofa with mallards on it.”
“What?!”
“It doesn’t matter.” Katie took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “Listen, I get how you want to use this video. To be honest, I can be grateful that it’s a Hail Mary against the likelihood that I’ve tanked more traditional sources of funding.”
“Katie.” April sighed.
“No. Hold on. Do it. Let that video take on the cachet of something intentional. Let it be a way to capture the attention of America and convince them I have something new to offer. And I’ll—” Katie pushed away an angry tear. “I’ll keep it quiet with Wil. So the video means just that, and it’s not some…dilutedthing that the Nun of Hollywood did with her new girlfriend as a lark.”
Phil hopped down from where he had been napping with Trois in the cat bed and sauntered over to Katie. He had always been sensitive to her feelings. He jumped into her lap. Sue had decided to lie by Katie’s thigh.
“I’m sorry. Katie, look, I’m sorry.”
“Itwasn’t,you know. A lark. Or some impulsive thing I did that happened to get out.” Katie could feel the heat rising into her cheeks from her neck. “The first person I was ever in love with was Wil. She never made me do anything, I just wanted to be with her all the time. I wanted to ride around in her Bronco and listen to everything she had to say about everything.”
April leaned forward with her head on her hand. “If you could bottle Wil Greene’s presence, it would be a weapon of mass destruction.”
“Yes, but you haven’t met her in person. Wait until you meet her in person. I don’t know what kind of truly enormous tolerance I had built up in high school, but it was gone when I ran into her at my mom’s holiday party, and I was confessing to her about how I masturbate within fifteen minutes.” Katie took a deep breath, trying to locate herself in the wild drift of her feelings. “Wil asked me to, butIwant to take her to Los Angeles. Without knowing what’s going to happen between us. Just to see if I might, maybe, have enough to offer her.”