This Is What Happy Looks Like(28)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

When the answering machine picked up—the same recorded message that had been on there for years—he snapped back, clearing his throat. “Hey, guys,” he said, then hesitated. “It’s me. Just wanted to see if you had plans for the Fourth. If not, I was thinking maybe you could come out and visit the set. You’d love it here. It sort of reminds me of home. And it could be fun for you to spend the weekend. I’m in Maine, by the way. Can’t remember if you knew that. Anyway, let me know what you think…”

He trailed off, then hung up fast, already feeling less certain of his plan. His parents hardly ever traveled. When Graham was a kid, they took exactly one family vacation a year, driving two hours to an oceanside motel, where they’d stay exactly three days before returning home again, pink-cheeked and sun-drunk from their hours on the beach. It wasn’t that they weren’t curious about the world; it was just that it was all they could afford on two teachers’ salaries.

“We live in California,” they’d always say cheerily. “Our whole life is like a vacation.”

But the California that Graham had grown up in was very different from the one he lived in now. It was even different from the one where he’d gone to school, a twenty-minute drive from home that might as well have been twenty hours. Just before his freshman year, he’d managed to win a partial academic scholarship to a private school a few towns over, and his parents used the money his grandparents left him to make up for the rest. It was an amount that had seemed vast to Graham at the time, and he’d felt guilty about taking it when there were so many other things they could have done with it: make repairs on the house, replace their puttering car, pay off the bills that seemed to collect on his dad’s desk with alarming frequency.

Now, of course, Graham had enough money to do all of those things: he could buy his parents a brand-new home or a whole fleet of cars, send them on a trip around the world or pay down all their debt without even blinking. But the only thing they really wanted—the only thing they’d ever really wanted—was for him to go to college.

It wasn’t that they weren’t supportive of his acting, but they seemed to regard it as something to be tolerated, a stopover on the way to higher education rather than something that might shape the rest of his life. The only movies his dad ever watched were old black-and-white classics, and he didn’t consider anything made in the last few decades to count as art. When Graham took them to the premiere of his first movie, they clapped and smiled in all the right places, but he’d been acutely aware of how it all must have looked to them: the fight sequences strewn with high-octane special effects, the over-the-top dialogue, and, worst of all, the scene where he’d finally kissed the heroine, which had not until that moment struck him as unbearably cheesy.

Graham knew that even as they tiptoed around him, strangers in the foreign terrain of his new life, they were hoping he might come to his senses, get this whole acting thing out of his system. They had a habit of talking about his career as if it were a gap year of sorts, as if he were putting off college to run away for a season with the circus or spend a few months studying the mating habits of monkeys in Bali. But the truth was that Graham had no intention of going to college next year. Once he finished his high school equivalency with the help of his on-set tutor, that would be it for him.

Part of it was that he truly enjoyed acting, and he couldn’t imagine walking away from the ever-expanding opportunities in his future, all the actors he still wanted to work with and the roles he still wanted to play. And part of it was that he just didn’t see the point. The idea of college was to study hard in order to get a good job, in order to make a lot of money. But he already had plenty of money, enough to last him his whole life. And he could learn anywhere, couldn’t he?

But if he was being really honest, it was about more than just that. The way he’d always pictured college—hurrying to classes in ivy-leafed buildings and trudging up snow-covered pathways in the winter, sitting perched on the bleachers during football games and debating philosophy in rooms full of bright-eyed students—seemed hopelessly distant from his new life, where he’d completely lost the ability to blend in. And the last thing he wanted was to be one of those celebrities who fancied themselves a scholar, making a halfhearted effort at being a normal college kid while being trailed by cameras and gawked at by classmates, missing finals to jet off and shoot an indie film in Vancouver. Graham had no interest in being any more of a spectacle than he already was.

He knew his parents were quietly hoping he’d change his mind, and he hated to disappoint them. But he felt sure about his decision. And that had become just one more reason that they no longer seemed to understand one another, that they’d become less like a family and more like three people who had once lived together for a time.

What they needed, Graham was thinking now as he neared Ellie’s house, was an old-fashioned family vacation. What they needed was food and flags and fireworks in a place that was about as far from California as you could get. In just a few short days here, he already felt like a different person. Maybe Henley would work its magic on his parents as well.

But when the door opened and Ellie appeared—her long hair still damp from the shower, looking beautiful in a bright green sundress—he realized it wasn’t Henley at all.

It was her.

He leaned forward to kiss her—a movement so automatic it felt like tying his shoe or climbing the stairs, something you do without even thinking about it—and he was still several inches away when he wrenched himself back unsteadily, everything coming into focus with an abruptness that startled him.

They hadn’t even had their first kiss yet, and here he was, leaning in like it was something that happened every day, a motion like a ritual, like they’d kissed a thousand times before. It took a moment to right himself, and he pulled his shoulders back as he regained his equilibrium. He didn’t want to be half asleep the first time he kissed Ellie. For that, he wanted to be wide awake.

She was eyeing him with a look of confusion, and Graham couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Hopefully she didn’t realize that’s what he’d been about to do.

Hopefully she just thought he had terrible balance.

“Hi,” he said with a sheepish grin.

“Come on in,” she said, looking somewhat flustered herself.

She ushered him into a hallway that smelled of lemon cleaning solution, and Graham stooped to pet Bagel, who was sniffing his shoes with a businesslike air. They both followed Ellie into the kitchen, where the table was set for two. The room was dimly lit and there was still a hint of dish soap in the air. But Graham hardly noticed anything beyond that; his eyes were pinned to Ellie’s green dress as she moved between the cabinets and the refrigerator and back again, her face apologetic.