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  I pulled up a stool. “Auto focus is for amateurs.”

  “That’s the spirit.” He shook out his hand, cringing.

  “Is it the arthritis?” I took the screwdriver and camera from him.

  “Hang on.” He limped to the bathroom, calling out from the rectangle of light down the hall. “Damn meds wear off all at once. It’s like these little men in my joints wait to ambush me.”

  I worked out the screws. “I think I’m going to go old school and see how I like it.”

  “You can’t do what you do without the auto. You’d have one guy in the pack with something to use and a bunch of part-time editors going through seven submissions a day if it wasn’t for autofocus. The technology created the business.”

  I heard the click of him shaking out pills and the slap of the medicine cabinet closing.

  “So, this guy?” he called from the bathroom.

  “Michael? He’s not a guy. He’s a star,” I said.

  “Is this a relationship?”

  “We have a relationship. He runs away, and I chase him.” I had the camera open, its guts spread across the table like a heart patient’s.

  Irving stood in the doorway. I was thankful I’d never told him about the bleachers, or the young varsity tennis player, or anything.

  “Are you going to press charges?” he asked from the doorway.

  “For breaking my camera? I should sue Tom.”

  “I think he’s serious about that quiet girl.”

  “You know what she does onstage? Screams like a banshee and pees into a plastic cup,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Yep.”

  “And Tom likes this girl? Our Tom?” He moved a pile of old negatives from a chair and sat down, cringing as he bent and relaxed.

  “Irv, can we talk about you?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Can I be honest?” I said.

  “No.”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “Oh, shit—”

  “No, listen—”

  “Laine—”

  “Stop it, okay? You need help,” I said. “And before you start, I’m not talking about cleaning this place up. Forget that. It’s a hopeless case. You need someone to assist you.”

  He waved his lame hand at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “What, nothing. Assistants are for people who have work.”

  “You could get someone in to go through this shit. You have pictures of celebrities going back thirty years. I can’t even imagine what the crap in this house would be worth if everything in it was filed right and sold.”

  “No one cares about old shit, Laine. People want new stuff. I haven’t taken a worthwhile picture in… I don’t know how long.” He looked out the window, or more accurately, he looked toward the window. He was depressed.

  I knew his deal. He had plenty of contacts he was afraid to call, because he felt they’d left him behind. He had students surpassing him in every aspect of their careers. He was breaking down physically, and his methods were so dated they were near obsolete. I could count on my fingers the number of my colleagues who knew that stop bath came before fixer.

  “How about I make you dinner?” I said.

  “I thought you cared about me?” he joked.

  But I could cook. Maybe not gourmet meals, but I could put something edible on the table every night, because Jake had added that to my list of responsibilities after a month. So after I fixed my camera, I made him enough food for the week and wrapped it up while he told me about the old days of Hollywood.

  The sun went down, and my phone didn’t ring. Not Tom with a twenty on Fiona. Not a single tip. And not Michael.

  “I have to get out tonight,” I said, packing Irv’s freezer with meals. “Nothing’s come in, and I’m not sitting around. I won’t be ignored.”

  “Maybe you could go to bed,” Irv suggested. “You know, take a night off since one’s being handed to you?”

  “Never.”

  But once I got in the car, I was bone tired. I went home, showered, paced, and told myself it would all be okay. I went to bed not believing it.

  I didn’t know what to do with myself. Go out. Watch TV. Pace the loft. I had a feeling, like a vibrating thread through every thought, that something was going to change. With change came hope and hurt.

  Every new foster family had that thread. Every time I was let go because another kid was coming on or because I kept going off in the middle of the night, I felt it.

  The hippie couple in Malibu, Sunshine and Rover, had been more than a thread. They’d been a thick rope of optimism. At five, I still had the bad habit of hoping for the best. They read me stories with pretty pictures, and when Sunshine pulled me to her I smelled patchouli and sandalwood. Everything they owned was made of beautiful colors. They laughed together and took me walking on the beach in the early morning in winter.

  I didn’t care when they lost the apartment. I didn’t mind the van. It was big enough for us. I would have lived anywhere with them. But the caseworker came and ended it. Rover said they’d come for me when they got a place. He promised.

  I’d grabbed his beard and said, “Okay, Daddy. I’ll wait.”

  I’d kept that hope alive through three more homes, avoiding connection with any family because Sunshine and Rover were coming back. I couldn’t let myself love another Mommy and Daddy, and most of them didn’t want to be loved. They wanted me to do stuff, or go away, or replace a dead thing in themselves.

  I crawled under the covers and tried to talk away that thread of hope. I didn’t need it. I shot it down, shooed it out the door, burned it away with laser-beam intensity. By the time I fell asleep, it was a thin line of black ash.

  Chapter 20

  Michael

  Brad was an introvert. You’d never guess it from his entourage or his public persona, but in the strictest sense of the word, he was as much an introvert as I was. When he was tired and overwhelmed and needed energy and strength, he retreated into his music, which he’d never share with anyone.

  I respected that, and I understood it. Whenever we were seen together, the sober, straight-laced Michael Greydon and bad boy Brad Sinclair, people always noted how different we were. We were more the same than they could see.

  Of course, when he felt good and there was fun to be had, he had fun. Tonight, it was a simple dinner and whatever else the night brought. He planned on being out all night without actually making plans.

  Me, I was just hungry. I was going to eat and bail.

  When I got out of the car, the valet took the keys, and I was subjected to the usual flashes and catcalls. This restaurant in particular was low-hanging fruit for the paps, and I wondered if Brad had chosen it as a joke.

  I waved and smiled as usual, but I also did something unusual. I looked at the paps directly, frustrated by the fact that it was too dark, too backlit for me to catch the people behind the cameras. They were all men’s voices, but they always were. Laine was stealth silence in her heels.

  The feet. I looked at their feet as I walked toward the back of the restaurant. All boots and run-down sneakers. No heels. How many years had she been in those packs and I’d never said a thing to her because it would be too awkward?

  I faced them, and the flashes popped like a lightning storm.

  “Mike! Mike!”

  “You love us now!”

  “Over here!”

  “What happened with you and Laine?”

  “Wanna kiss me?”

  The voice on the last pap was deep baritone, and everyone laughed. I caught myself before I said, “Are you going to put out?” That would imply Laine had, and it wasn’t anyone’s business.

  In that second of thought, the pack of them propositioned me.

  “Kiss me!”

  “Give me a squeeze right here!”

  “I kiss better than him!”

  “I just brushed my teeth!”

  Squeaky kiss noises fell like rain,
and I couldn’t turn away. I walked right into the pack with my arms out. I grabbed a short guy with a beard and planted one on his cheek. Another guy came at me with his arms out and kissed my cheek. Another just hugged me. We laughed, and the shutters went on and on. With every handshake and testament to my coolness, I looked for Laine, hoping she’d be at the back of the pack, but of course, there were a thousand little stakeouts in the city, and she’d be wise to avoid me.

  But still, I looked for her. I didn’t know what I expected, but I knew what I wanted.

  When the last willing pap had been smooched and the last picture taken, I waved and went into the restaurant. The speeding traffic along Sunset was replaced by music, the hum of conversation, and good acoustics.

  Brad sat in the center of a long table in the back with his usual dirty dozen. Guys from his hometown and whatever girl they were with. His manager. A stylist. I knew their names, but they belonged to Brad. He saw me immediately, from half a room away, and waved.

  “You!” he shouted. “I want to talk to you!”

  After much reseating, shifting, arguing, and joking, I sat next to Brad. He kept one hand on the knee of a German ten-thousand-dollar-a-day runway model who was already half drunk. I said my hellos, using names when I remembered them, and ordered something to eat.

  One guy, an obnoxious friend of Brad’s from his hometown, held up his phone. A picture of me kissing a bearded pap had already been tossed up. “Too far, Mikey baby. Too far.”

  He looked like a Hollywood player, with his thick gold chain and carefully placed hair product, but his Arkie accent still hung around the corners of his vowels. Three of Brad’s entourage were from home, but this guy was the only ass. I’d forgotten his name, because I couldn’t stand him.

  “Letting them think you’re their friend is too far.”

  “He was cute,” I said. “Here, I’ll kiss this asshole too.”

  I grabbed Brad’s head and kissed his cheek. Brad laughed and dunked his napkin in his water to wipe his face.

  “Not cool,” said Arkie. “These people, they’re parasites. You talk to them, and they think they’re your friend. They think they have access.” He flopped the phone down, angry. “They’re animals, and they don’t have access to us, okay?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “To who? Access to who?”

  Groans went up, and heads shook. Everyone at the table could feel the tension. Brad’s model got up to go to the bathroom.

  “Arnie, man,” Brad said, reminding me why I called the guy Arkie, “cool it.”

  But Arnie-slash-Arkie was a sheet to the wind and belligerent even sober. “You cannot fuck paps, okay? That shit is scary. That bitch is scary.”

  “You didn’t—”

  “You got fooled by her tits or whatever. Maybe she sucked your dick like a pro, but she’s an animal just like the rest of them.”

  “Shut up, Arnie,” Brad groaned.

  I said nothing, because the half of my brain that wanted to kill him was arguing with the half that had been trained to be a civilized member of society.

  “You can get a blow job anywhere, man,” Arnie said while I tried to keep my hands under the table. “Half the girls at this table would suck your dick. Why you gotta get head from a lowlife hooker pap is like—”

  I grabbed his gold chain and twisted it so fast, he didn’t know what was happening. I tightened it and pulled him over the table. Plates crashed. Girls screamed. Food went flying as I pushed his head into someone’s dinner.

  “You no-talent piece of shit,” I growled, watching his face get red. “You’ve done nothing your whole life. No one cares what you think.”

  “Dude.” Brad’s voice. A hand on my arm.

  I looked up to a huge restaurant packed with people standing, phones up. A dance of rectangles, some with flashes, captured me in the act of choking someone with a gold rope. I let the chain go. Arnie hacked, and Brad yanked me away.

  I pulled him off me and got my finger in Arnie’s face. “Stay away from me.”

  “With pleasure, motherfucker.”

  His friends made a show of holding him back, but he wouldn’t come after me. He was a coward.

  Brad pulled me, navigating the chairs and camera phones, into the kitchen. The adrenaline in my blood made me sensitive to the bright lights and the ambient noise, which was more of a crash bang than a loud hum.

  “Dude?” Brad said. “What the fuck?”

  I held up my hands. “I’m done with him.”

  “Cool. Totally cool, but then what? He’s always trash talking. That’s what he does. Remember what he said about Harriet when you were with her? And you didn’t care, dude. You laughed.”

  “The tone of this was a little different.” Was I defending myself? What a waste of time. Choking him with his gold chain was indefensible.

  “Sure, sure, I get it,” Brad said. “But who cares what Arnie says?”

  “I do, all right? I care.”

  “Duh.”

  I rubbed my eyes, coming off the adrenaline rush. My apology would have to be public, and the pictures would be discussed by over-coiffed entertainment jockeys in TV studios and insiders over lunch on Wilshire.

  The kitchen had quieted, as if the staff had made room for us.

  “I knew her in high school,” I said, backing into the refrigerator room door. “She scared the hell out of me then, and she scares me now.”

  “Hey, I get why she scares you now. She’s pretty scary with that camera.”

  “The camera? Fuck the camera. She’s got something explosive in her.”

  “You’re the one with the explosive side.”

  “It’s just…” My hands were in front of me, as if clutching something I couldn’t explain. Some desire to make things happen, to change, to break the status quo into a million pieces and live in the center of an unknowable, unplanned, unpredictable, boundary-free universe. “I can’t keep away, and I won’t. Maybe she’s going to screw me, but that’s my problem.”

  Brad shoved me into the metal door in a gentle, brotherly way. “You know what? Go for her. ‘Cause you’re not the guy who gets his balls in a twist for any woman. You feel like this, whatever this is, and I’m cool with it. She seems all right from here. I’ll take care of Arnie. I got your back. Just hear this.” He held up his finger. “She starts some shit I don’t like, I’m gonna tell you. Don’t try to choke me across the dinner table. Got it?”

  “I got it.”

  We shook on it.

  Chapter 21

  Michael

  By six thirty the next morning, my night out had been broken apart, analyzed, chewed, digested, and regurgitated. The photos of my affection toward the paparazzi at the back door of the restaurant got the least press, naturally, because I was having fun. The fight was front and center in still and video. Arnie and I had shaken hands over the upturned table. It hadn’t been photographed as extensively, but by the time I got up, it was as if the handshake had never happened.

  The places that had had enough time to write more than a hundred words about the fight speculated that I was losing my shit because of the break in the Bullets schedule. They attributed my rooftop kiss of a paparazza to my tension. I was a workaholic, they said, and without my drug of choice, I was snapping.

  I admitted I felt as if I was bending, but it wasn’t the schedule as much as what the schedule break might cause. My father would start drinking if the movie fell through. Brooke and I knew it. He was on a thread.

  I didn’t usually look at the media’s reaction to me and what I was doing. It had always been bland and boring. Just me walking or drinking coffee. There had never been any bad behavior to get distracted by, so it had been easy to follow a simple rule… don’t look.

  The rule was easy until Laine, in that dress, her hair unpinned, her fingers gripping my elbow as I kissed her. I felt alive. And that was a cliché, of course. A phrase directors used that I tossed off as meaningless, representing a feeling that had something more
at its core. I had tried to capture it a hundred times by linking it to other feelings that were closer to delight.

  But this wasn’t delight. It wasn’t joy. I’d gotten it all wrong. Life, yes, but inside it sat a precarious tilt toward death, oblivion, pain, and danger. Alive didn’t mean happy or joyous. It meant that my relationship with my own existence was unstable, and only in the nearing loss of it did I realize I wanted it so badly.

  How had Laine come to represent that? Was it when she nearly fell off the roof and I grabbed her, or was it the look on her face when her brother took those pictures at NV? Or maybe I’d made that connection with her on the tennis court bleachers. Knowing who and what she was, so different from me, brought close enough to touch the side of the world that I never got to see. Was it her survival that caused my fascination?

  I sat on the back patio, flipping through the news on my tablet. The pictures of Laine and me still attracted my eye. The LA Post piece was ridiculous, because they didn’t get it. They didn’t know the half of it, but they pretended to until the end.

  “It’s seven in the morning,” Ken said, sounding as awake as always, when I called. “I was waiting another half an hour to call you.”

  “What the fuck is in the news today?”

  “You beating the hell out of a poor kid from Arkansas?”

  “How did they find out I knew Laine from before?” I asked.

  “What the hell are you doing reading the papers? We have a deal. You don’t read the papers, and I tell you what’s in them. One, you choking—”

  “How did they find out who she was? Her history?” I wasn’t quite shouting, but I was using a bitch of a tone that only worked through my teeth.

  “It’s their job.”

  “No.” I pointed at the view of the city below because Ken wasn’t in front of me. “The Almanac cherry-picks what’s easy.”

  “Jesus Christ, Michael, Britt breaking her shoulder is the worst thing that could have happened to you. I’ve never met a guy who needed time off so badly and couldn’t handle it when he got it.”

  I knew Ken. He’d deflect until I was apologizing for Arnie, for not being productive on my days off, for not strictly maintaining my image. That wasn’t going to wash anymore.