“Chloe!” she says.
She immediately pulls me into a tight hug. When she steps back, I try to smile, but I’m suddenly aware of every dirty thought I’ve ever had about her son.
“It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Sheldon.”
“Oh, call me Lori. It’s nice to finally meet you. Patrick’s only been going on and on about you for the past six months.”
“Mom,” Patrick says, giving her a playful push.
She grins and swats at him with her towel.
“More like a year,” says his father as he enters the room. “Nice to meet you, sweetheart,” he says.
I immediately fall in love with Brian Sheldon. Not in a creepy way, but in an I-wish-you-were-my-dad kind of way. He’s tall, like Patrick, and has the same piercing eyes. He looks like I thought a professor would (tortoiseshell glasses, tweed jacket), which makes sense, since he teaches law at the university. I shake the hand he offers me.
“You too. Um. Thanks for having me. I know it’s the holidays and—”
“Nonsense,” Brian says. “It’s just us three, anyway. Lori’s making tacos. You guys hungry?”
Patrick looks at me, and I nod. “That’d be great,” he says.
Lori gestures to the tiny dining room table, which is already set for four. I can’t even comprehend such a small number of people in one family.
“You guys want Cokes?” she asks. “You must be thirsty after your infamous mall adventure.” She says this in a melodramatic way, which makes me laugh. I wish my mom had time to do voices.
“Yeah, thanks, that’d be great,” I say.
My eyes drift around the cozy furnishings and family photos. God, this house is so quiet. I keep expecting to hear something break or kids shouting down the hall, but everyone who lives in the house is here, speaking in soft voices, focused on one another.
Patrick pulls out a chair for me, and my heart skips a few beats when he catches my eye and smiles before sitting next to me. His we-have-a-secret smile makes me feel like I’m the only thing he sees.
Brian settles in beside Patrick, a glass of wine in his hand. “How’d all the cloak-and-dagger stuff go?”
I shrug. “Pretty well, actually. My brother and his … um … his friend, got away, too. Patrick’s pretty good at this—I’m sort of convinced he’s an international spy.”
Lori and Brian laugh.
“I’d tell you,” Patrick says, “but then I’d have to kill you.”
I stick out my tongue at him, and he responds in kind. I can’t believe how natural it feels to be sitting with his family. They are so not dysfunctional at all. It makes me feel warm and sad and something else I can’t quite name. It’s the opposite of last night. Patrick grabs my hand, like he knows what I’m thinking. I’m surprised how affectionate he is, with his parents right here. They don’t seem to mind, though.
“Well, I’m glad he’s putting his CIA training to good use,” Lori says.
They’re being so nice about all of this, but there’s no way they could want their son mixed up with my hot mess of a life. I need them to know that I would never endanger what they have—their peaceful dinners, their enjoyment of one another.
“I promise we wouldn’t have come here if— I mean, I would never let the paparazzi know where you guys live. And I swear, MetaReel won’t know anything about Patrick—”
Brian shakes his head. “Don’t worry about that, Chloe. I’m just glad my son finally got the guts to ask you out.” He gives me a wink and Patrick rolls his eyes.
“Thanks, Dad. I think she fully realizes how pathetic I am. Appreciate it.”
Brian grins. “Anytime, son.”
They banter like this during the whole meal, passing food, chatting about this and that. They absorb me into their routine without question. Without judgment. All throughout, Patrick does little things that make me internally shiver—a hand on my knee, insisting on feeding me a piece of avocado, finding moments to give me private glances that hold all manner of messages and promises. Through it all, his parents talk and laugh and make me feel like I actually belong here. They deftly avoid mentioning the show in any way, but they ask about Benny and school and our government class. Finally, Lori claps her hands.
“Okay, you two. Get outta here.”
I crumple my napkin. “That was delicious. Can I help—”
“No,” she says. “You two have a date. We’ll be in the den if you need anything.”
Patrick stands up. “You kids be good now,” he says to his parents. Lori swipes at him, and he jumps out of the way, laughing.
They start clearing the table, and Patrick tugs on my hand, leading me up the stairs. We go by the family photos I remember from when I was here the last time, and each step closer to his bedroom increases my goose-bump-to-non-goose-bump ratio.
“I told you they’d love you,” he says.
“They’re great. Really. You guys were cracking me up.”
He puts his arm around my waist, pulling me against his hip in a half hug. “You know, what they said was true. About me not being able to shut up about you all these months.”
We’re at his bedroom door, which is closed.
“I’m glad you finally asked me out,” I say.
“Me too.” He traces his finger along my collarbone, his eyes pensive.
“What?”
“It’s just…” He sighs. “I hate to think of you in that house. My parents were good about not mentioning it, but I was not … okay … watching.”
My body goes cold, and I try to step away. “If this is too weird or hard, I totally under—”
“No!” He reaches out his hands and trails them along my neck, drawing me close again. “I meant that I wasn’t okay seeing all the shit you had to deal with. And I couldn’t do anything. I just had to sit there.”
I lean in and kiss the end of his nose. I’ve secretly wanted to do that for, oh, a year. “It was worse last night because it was live. And, you know, my dad showing up.”
Patrick’s eyes darken, and his body goes tense. “Can’t you get out of it? I mean, it’s got to be illegal for them to be filming you when you don’t want it.”
Right now, I need an escape from Bonnie™. I don’t want to be in that headspace. “Let’s not talk about it tonight, okay? I just want to be with you.”
He looks like he wants to say something else, but then he smiles.
“Okay.” He clears his throat and gestures toward the door. “So, I know we’ve never actually gotten to go on a date date, but I’m still trying to work out a strategy for that. In the meantime, since we couldn’t go to the theater, I brought the theater to you.”
Patrick opens his door and pulls aside a white sheet that hangs from the ceiling.
“My lady,” he says, motioning me forward with a gallant twirl of his hand.
I giggle and move past the sheet into his room, which he has transformed into a private cinema. Movie posters cover the walls, and a tiny projector sits on top of his bookcase.
“Be right back. Take a look at the movies while I grab concessions,” he says, shutting the door behind him.
A beam of light littered with dust motes streams from the projector to the sheet, the only light in the room save for his desk lamp. Patrick’s stacked a bunch of pillows on his bed, making a sofa. A pile of DVDs sits on his desk. I flip through them, a mix of every genre and time period. Something glints beside his desk—when I look closer, I see it’s an origami-like design made out of Wrigley’s gum wrappers. I smile, imagining Patrick sitting at his desk, folding each wrapper.
A few minutes later, there’s a knock on the door, and when I open it, Patrick’s holding a bowl of freshly popped popcorn, a shopping bag full of candy, and a mini cooler with sodas.
“You’re amazing,” I say, helping him set everything down.
He looks at me for a minute and then reaches for something in his closet.
“This is for you,” he says, handing me a box wrapped in the comics sect
ion of the newspaper.
“Patrick—”
He puts a finger to my lips. “Just open it, already.”
I tear along the paper and hold the box up to the light from the projector.
“You got me a cell phone?” I ask. It’s one of those prepaid ones.
He nods. “Guaranteed not bugged by MetaReel.”
I wrap my arms around him. “Thank you,” I whisper.
He tightens his grip on me. “Now I can hear your voice more.”
I set the box on his desk and lace my fingers behind his neck, letting my lips fall into his. We stand like that for a long time, just kissing, until we hear laughter downstairs, and I pull away.
“Um.”
He shakes his head. “My parents would never come up here and bother us. Besides, they’ve started an I Love Lucy marathon—they’ll be on the couch all night.” Privacy—how novel. “But we might as well pick a movie and keep up appearances, huh?”
I laugh and we look through his movie selections. We finally opt for Raiders of the Lost Ark, but as soon as the opening music starts, Patrick is feeding me Red Vines and his makeshift couch turns back into a bed. It is, I think, surprisingly easy to make out to the sound of treasure hunting. For two hours, we alternate between attempting to watch the movie and giving up entirely.
“This is a vast improvement on the janitor’s closet,” I whisper, about halfway through Indy’s adventures.
Patrick nuzzles my neck, his breathing heavy. “Agreed.”
His lips travel to my ear and along my jaw. My hands snake under his shirt, and he pulls it over his head in one deft movement. I hear it fall on the ground a second later. He leans over me again, one hand reaching for the buttons on my shirt. (I totally took Mer’s advice about the button-down.)
“Okay?” he asks, his fingers hesitating on the top button.
Yes Yes Yes. I nod and his lips come back to mine. His fingers fumble with the buttons on my blouse, but I keep mine in his hair. I don’t know what else to do with them. I can almost hear Mer saying something cringe-inducing like, “Put them on his man parts!” But the thought of trying to undo his belt buckle fills me with more fear than the red carpet on Emmy night. That horribly embarrassing episode of season seven pops into my head—the one where my family was on the Kaye Gibbons Show and Kaye Gibbons asked me if I’d heard of the birds and the bees yet. And I’d made that stupid comment that I didn’t like bees because they had big stingers, and everyone had laughed because little Bonnie™ Baker didn’t get the double entendre.
“What’s wrong?”
I blink. “What? Nothing.”
Patrick’s looking down at me, and I can’t believe how MetaReel managed to sneak into the negative space between us. “You sure?”
“I’m sure.” I pull him to me and close my mind off to my family, to the past, to the nothings before this something.
We don’t go far or anything, but it feels good just to have my skin against his. To have his eyes travel down the length of me. I like how his fingertips make shapes against my stomach and how mine clutch at his bare shoulders when I pull him closer. And I like how for a lot of the time, he just holds me and listens while I tell him about last night in whispers and sighs and silence.
SEASON 17, EPISODE 18
(The One with the Autograph)
“Coffee?” Benny asks.
I hold up our two thermoses and make a sad face as we leave the kitchen. “Got it. I miss Starbucks.”
Lexie™ brushes past us on her way out the door. “Why are you guys not going to Starbucks?”
“Um, so we don’t spend the first half of our morning dealing with the Vultures?” I say.
The paparazzi have doubled since the live episode. Now wherever we go, it looks like we’re part of a caravan. Which is why we only go to school, then come right back home. It’s like we’re under house arrest. Movies? Forget about it. Shopping? Strictly online. Dates? Impossible. I don’t think I’ll ever see the Tower District again, which sucks because, A) I love it and it’s where Tessa, Mer, and I used to go almost every weekend, and B) I wanted to do that girlfriend thing where you go visit your boyfriend at work and bring him treats whilst looking cute. This is shaping up to be the worst senior year in the history of senior years.
“Girls!” Mom calls from the living room. “Don’t forget to come home right after school. We have our mani-pedis, remember?”
How could I forget? Mom decided that all the girls in the house were in dire need of some R and R. I suspect this is the core of this week’s episode, where Beth Baker-Miller tries to reconnect with her daughters after a stressful weekend. I can’t help but feel like anything my family does from here on out is at the suggestion of a producer.
“Okay,” I mumble.
I ignore Puma Guy as he gets in my face, his camera trying to steal a sip of my coffee, and tuck myself into the car. Once Benny and I are on the highway, we commence with our early morning bitch session about MetaReel. The Complaint of the Day: Frosty Fun™ cereal is one of our sponsors, so we had to say good stuff about it every other bite (“Wow, Mom, this Frosty Fun™ cereal is so yummy!”) and do a few retakes of us pouring it into our bowls, and it just sucked because now we’re running late and my stomach is full of soggy, nasty cereal. Also—and this is really shallow, but I don’t care—Lexie™ mentioned the zit on my chin in front of one of the cameras and asked if I wanted to borrow some concealer. I take that as a sign that she’s still holding Dad’s favoritism against me.
Bitch session over, I spend a few minutes looking out the window. There’s something simultaneously comforting and depressing about the abandoned fields. We pass the orchard where I used to go to collect my thoughts. I haven’t been able to go there since we started shooting. Longing for that little corner of the world I could call my own pulses in me—it would have been nice to have a place I could run away to. I hear Lex’s voice on Saturday morning: Do what you always do when someone wants to talk about something uncomfortable. God forbid you actually have to deal with your problems.
“Benny.”
“Hmm?”
“Lex said something that kind of got under my skin.”
“And this strikes you as unusual?”
I frown. “She said I always run away from my problems.” My orchard, after I first saw the cameras. Sprinting upstairs the night of the live taping. Taking the pills. “Is that true? Do I have trouble, you know, dealing?”
Benny gives me a sidelong glance, probably trying to figure out if I’m really angsting or just feeling contemplative. He must have guessed the former, because he lets out a long sigh.
“Well,” he says, “I think maybe … yeah. A little.”
I take a sip of coffee, and Benny turns onto the road that leads to school. Trees and vineyards give way to suburbia: chain stores, gas stations, cookie-cutter houses.
“I don’t mean to. I’m not trying to be a drama queen.”
I wonder what the tabloids are saying about me now, after this weekend.
Benny shrugs. “We all run away from stuff in our own way. I mean, when things get too intense, I know I can always see Matt or at least call him.”
“Cantaloupe,” I say. He smiles.
My voice grows soft. “But this weekend, when Dad came … why did you stay in the dining room?”
Benny steers with one hand while he takes a long drink from his thermos. “I honestly couldn’t tell you. Maybe I’m a yes-man. They told me to be there, so I was there.”
I shake my head. “No. You’re pragmatic, maybe. But not a robot.”
“Whatever you want to call it.” He shrugs. “I guess I figure we’ve got six more months until graduation. After that, I’m out.”
“I can’t even imagine being free of it all,” I say. What would life be like without my family, without this albatross around my neck?
“I can,” Benny says, his voice quiet.
We’re pulling into the parking lot, and on instinct, I keep my head dow
n as the Vultures surge toward us. How much are our pictures worth? One Vulture jumps in front of the car for a good shot, and Benny lays on the horn as he slams on the brakes.
“Idiot! Move the hell away!” he shouts.
The Vulture smiles and snaps an angry Benny and surprised Bonnie™ photo. I can see the caption now: Inseparable brother and sister team Benton™ and Bonnie™ Baker caught mid-fight on their way to school. Sources say the pair have been growing apart ever since their father’s Thanksgiving visit.
That’s what it would be. Some big, stupid lie because they can’t have the caption say we were yelling at a Vulture for almost making Benny guilty of vehicular manslaughter. When we drive onto the black asphalt of the student parking lot, I immediately relax. Thank God for the principal’s strict policies about who can and cannot be on school property.
Benny pulls into our usual spot next to Jason Calloway’s massive truck and turns off the ignition.
“What were we talking about?” he asks.
“Me. Running away.”
He nods. “Yeah. So…”
I get to the thing that’s stressing me out, maybe even more than the show itself.
“So if I run away so much, then why am I the only one of us who doesn’t know what to do after graduation?” I ask. “You’d think I’d have some grand escape plan, but I don’t. Lex is going to Hollywood, you’ve sent in your college applications—”
“Chloe. You told me you already mailed the UC applications.” Benny stares at me, and I get a hint of what he’ll look like when he’s a father someday. “The deadline—”
“I know. I know.” I hold up my hand to keep him from saying more. “My boyfriend’s applying early decision to Columbia, and you’ll be at USC or wherever, and I’m going to be stuck here forever, running and not going anywhere.” My voice gets rubber-band tight, straining against the lump that’s growing in my throat. I close my eyes and swallow until I don’t feel like I’m being strangled by my own anxiety.
Benny puts a hand on my knee. “Hey. It’s okay. We’ll figure something out.”