Happy Again (2 page)

No matter how you looked at it, one year, two months, and twenty-one days was a very long time.

But sometimes it didn’t seem that way to Ellie at all.

Sometimes it felt like she was still in the middle of a conversation with him, that they’d only paused for a beat; that this was nothing more than the space between musical notes, the timeout on a playing field, the long, slumbering winter before an inevitable spring.

At other times it felt like the whole thing had just been a dream.

When Graham left the beach that morning last summer, Ellie didn’t go with him.

They agreed that they didn’t want to say good-bye in front of his trailer, or in the lobby of his hotel, or even at her own house, with her mother hovering nearby, pretending not to listen. They didn’t want to be on display in town, now that their secret was out, and they didn’t want to walk up the road together, each step heavier than the last, each one closer to good-bye.

Instead, Ellie wanted to remember him like this: at their spot on the beach, the pink-streaked sky behind him so brilliant it almost looked like a scene from one of his movies.

But it wasn’t.

If it had been one of his movies, they’d have been making promises right then. They’d have been making plans. They’d have been saying they loved each other.

But they didn’t do any of those things.

Graham was going back to his life, and Ellie was staying right there in Henley.

In two weeks, she’d be going to Harvard for a summer poetry course, while Graham would be on a soundstage in L.A., wrapping the film they’d been shooting all summer.

A few weeks after that, Ellie would be starting her senior year of high school, while Graham would be taking off on a worldwide publicity tour for the last movie of the trilogy that had made him a star.

Their lives would be a million miles apart in a million different ways.

Standing there on the beach, Graham had blinked at her a few times. He was already late for his last day on set, and would be leaving right after he finished his final scenes.

“Listen,” he said, clearing his throat. They’d spent the whole night on the beach, and he looked windswept and rumpled, his cheeks a little pink and his eyes a little watery. He didn’t look like a movie star. He looked like someone trying to say good-bye.

“Graham,” Ellie said, and his eyes flicked up to meet hers. “Let’s not do this.”

“What?” he asked with a frown. “Say good-bye?”

“No, I just meant…let’s not make any speeches,” she said, stepping into him so that his arms folded automatically around her. “We already said everything last night. I think now it’s just good-bye.”

He breathed out, ruffling her red hair. “I’m not sure I’m quite finished saying hello yet,” he said, and Ellie couldn’t help herself; she began to cry, sniffling into his shirt, remembering those words from their very first e-mail exchange, which had been sparked by the smallest of typos, unexpectedly connecting two complete strangers across all those many miles.

Somehow, that one mistake—that one missing letter in an e-mail address—had managed to start all this: first, the long correspondence between them; then the arrival of the movie set in Henley, which Ellie later learned had been orchestrated by Graham in an elaborate effort to meet her; and then his appearance on her porch that first night, looking hopeful and uncertain and decidedly unlike a movie star, and her realization that all that time she’d been writing to Graham Larkin.

She stepped back from him now with a wobbly smile. “How about we just go with
sayonara
then?”

Graham laughed. “Or
au revoir
.”

“Arrivederci.”

“
Hasta la vista
, baby,” he said, and then he stepped forward and kissed her again, sending a shiver through her in spite of the warmth of the early-morning sun.

“Good-bye,” he said, and Ellie felt her heart drop.

“Good-bye,” she said, holding his gaze—willing him to stay, wishing things were different—but he spun around and walked back up the beach toward the line of trees, turning only once more to wave before disappearing entirely.

For the first few weeks, it was just like it had been at the beginning.

They wrote to each other at all hours of the day, a frantic, feverish volley of e-mails that felt so urgent, so burning, so exciting, that they could hardly type fast enough.

Only now it was even better. The first time around, Ellie had no idea who was on the other end of all those notes. But this time, she knew the sound of his voice and the exact color of his eyes and the precise shape of his smile. This time, she had memories to go along with the words: the saltiness of that last kiss, the feel of his hand on her hip, the way his hair fell over his eyes.

Sometimes they talked on the phone or texted, of course, and they tried video chatting a few times too. But this whole thing had started with an e-mail exchange, and it just seemed fitting to continue that way. Besides, Ellie found she liked the anticipation of it, waiting to see his name appear in her inbox, each message crafted like a little gift. There was something more thoughtful about it, less hasty and dashed off. They weren’t just chatting; they were corresponding.

Graham wrote to her about the wrap party for the new movie (where his costar, Olivia Brooks, had impulsively decided to launch her singing career, to disastrous effect), and about the tour schedule for the final Top Hat film (which, to his delight, would take him to Paris for the very first time), and about the next project he’d decided on (a modern retelling of
Pride and Prejudice
, where he’d be playing the Bingley character), so that she knew about these things days before they started leaking into the magazines that Quinn was always reading at lunch.

He told her about how he’d invited his parents over for dinner as soon as he got back, and how his mom had ended up cooking enough meals to last him three weeks while his dad fell asleep on the couch with Wilbur, his pet pig, who was looking very dashing in the lobster bow tie Ellie had sent for him.

When Ellie was away at her poetry course, Graham insisted she send him every single poem she wrote, which she did, a little sheepishly, since some of them were quite obviously about him (particularly the one called “Him”).

Better than Wordsworth
was always his response, until one day she’d asked him to name a single Wordsworth poem, and he couldn’t.
That’s why you’re better than him
, he’d written back, and she couldn’t help laughing.

They mused about when they would see each other again, but Ellie was stuck in high school in a small town in Maine for another year, and once his press tour was over, Graham would be leaving for Vancouver to shoot his next film.

“Any chance his publicity tour will include Henley?” her mom had asked, unhelpfully, one night when she caught Ellie out on the porch swing, staring at the bluish screen of her phone.

“Unlikely,” Ellie told her.

Still, it was fun to imagine.

She took to daydreaming: sitting in a school assembly, wondering what would happen if Graham walked through the double doors of the gymnasium, or ducking through the branches on the way down to the water, picturing him sitting on the rock—
their
rock—with the ocean at his back and a huge smile, waiting there just for her.

But this wasn’t a movie. And things like that didn’t happen in real life.

Their lives had intersected briefly, here in this small corner of Maine, and maybe that was it.

After a while, the spaces between e-mails grew longer—not so much because it wasn’t the same as it used to be, but because it wasn’t enough anymore.

They knew now what it could be like when they were together. And so being apart—even when connected by the thin thread of an e-mail chain—just wasn’t good enough.

Besides, they were both busy. Ellie was applying to colleges, and Graham’s tour meant long days filled with press junkets and photo calls, followed by long plane rides to do the whole thing over again in the next city. Ellie read about all of it in Quinn’s magazines as they sat together in the ice-cream shop where they both worked after school.

“It’s not like we promised each other anything,” she said one day, tossing a magazine aside. It slid along the counter, then fell onto the floor in a heap of crinkled pages. Neither of them moved to pick it up. It was a cold, rainy day in October, which was the off-season for tourists. Nobody was coming in for ice cream.

“Stop being so sensible,” Quinn said, leaning against the counter. “You’re allowed to be frustrated.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do?” Ellie asked. “Hop on a plane to Sydney or London or Vancouver? Tag along like some kind of weird groupie while he gets interviewed and goes to parties and hangs out with Olivia Brooks?”

“Now you’re just being dramatic.”

“I can’t be too sensible and too dramatic at the same time,” she pointed out with a sigh. “All I’m saying is that it was probably doomed from the start, right?”

“Still overly dramatic,” Quinn said, raising one eyebrow. “But I take your point. It’s admittedly a little easier when your boyfriend sits behind you in physics.”

“You sit behind
him
,” Ellie said, laughing in spite of herself, “so you can look at his answers.”

“Yeah, well,” Quinn said, flushing a little, as she did whenever the subject of Devon came up, “that’s not the point.”

But more weeks slipped by, and the fewer e-mails that passed between Ellie and Graham, the more ordinary they became. Instead of their sharing secrets, trading intimate thoughts and feelings, the correspondence started to feel like an activity log, nothing more than a generic report on what they were each doing from day to day.

The week before Christmas, Ellie learned she didn’t get into Harvard after applying early action. She couldn’t have known then that she’d be accepted only a few short months later; at the time, it felt like the worst kind of failure, and she was absolutely crushed. Her first instinct, of course, was to write to Graham, who was traveling back to L.A. for the holidays. But when she sat down to e-mail him, she found she couldn’t.

Google had just helpfully alerted her about an award he’d been nominated for and a big role in an action movie he’d won over two other popular young actors. Compared to those things, this seemed minor.

With all his success, it was harder to share her own failure.

And so she didn’t.

Instead, she waited another week and then sent him an e-mail wishing him a merry Christmas.

By the time he wrote back, it was January, and his e-mail said only this:
Hi, stranger. Sorry it’s taken me so long. Things have been crazy. How are you?

It could have been written to an old friend from fourth grade, or a girl he’d once met at a party, or even his dentist.

It could have been written to anyone.

Ellie didn’t even bother to reply.

It seemed to her that there was nothing more to be said.

As they walked toward the theater, Ellie’s heart was so loud in her ears that she could hardly hear the excited murmurs of her friends.

“Do you think he’ll be there?”

“Is it supposed to be good?”

“Is he still dating Olivia Brooks?”

“Was he ever?”

Beyond the crowd, they could see a row of black town cars pulled to the curb on one side of the street, and on the other, a wall of photographers and reporters and screaming fans. A long red carpet had been rolled out over the sidewalk in front of the theater, and the crowds were pressed up against the metal barricades that surrounded it, straining to get a better look.

Ellie trailed blindly after the other girls, feeling numb and weak-kneed and a little bit dizzy. She was still shocked to have stumbled across this of all movie premieres. She’d known the film was coming out soon; back home, everyone was giddy about it. Last summer, they’d spent a month shooting at various locations around town: the harbor and the beach, the main street and the shops, even the one shady-looking bar in the middle of all those postcard-perfect storefronts. And because of this, the movie seemed to belong as much to the town of Henley as it did to anyone else.

There was supposed to be a special screening on the village green at some point, in the same spot where she and Graham had watched the fireworks that Fourth of July, the explosions overhead not nearly bright enough to make them look away from each other.

“Everyone’s been asking if you’ll come back for it,” her mom had said the last time they talked. “But I told them you’re a very busy and important college student now, and you don’t have time to be jetting in for small-town celebrations anymore—”

“Mom.”

Her mother’s voice had softened. “I just thought you should know.”

“Thanks,” Ellie said, thinking that it was pretty much the last film she’d ever want to see. She’d gone to the final Top Hat movie when it came out last fall, and it had been hard enough watching him on the big screen without having her hometown as the backdrop.

“Well, if you change your mind—”

“Honestly, I’d rather sing karaoke in front of everyone I know,” she said. “I’d rather go swing dancing. I’d rather get punched in the face.”

Her mom laughed. “You know, El,” she said, “you really shouldn’t bottle up your feelings like that…”

Ellie had laughed too, but she was serious. In the wake of the filming, even after the whole circus had packed up and left town, she’d become a minor celebrity of sorts, at least in Henley. She’d hated everything about it: the unwanted attention and curious questions, the pointing and whispering and undisguised stares, all of which had forced her to spend the remainder of the summer darting nervously around the town where she’d lived most of her life.

Quinn, of course, had loved it. “This is your moment,” she kept saying, reveling in all the reflected glory. “You might only get fifteen minutes, so enjoy it.”

“I don’t want fifteen minutes,” Ellie told her. “I don’t want any minutes.”

“Well, you don’t have a choice. So you’ll just have to run out the clock.”

And she had. It only took a few weeks for the excitement to die down as the memory of the shoot faded and school started up again. But now, walking back into the thick of it—the noise and the lights and the great flashy drama of it all—Ellie was once again wishing she were anywhere else.

Ahead of her, Kara was elbowing a path through the knots of people, working her way from the casual observers in the back—who, like them, had simply wandered over to see what was going on—up toward the front, where the most devoted fans had been lined up along the barricades for hours. Farther down, the press was waiting, their lenses all angled toward the line of black cars, and each time someone stepped out, there was a flurry of flashes and a deafening round of cheers.

As the other girls pushed forward, Ellie found herself backpedaling. It wasn’t a decision she could remember making, exactly, but her legs seemed to be moving all the same. She stumbled over the woman just behind her, then tripped over someone else’s shoe, drifting farther away from her friends, allowing herself to be squeezed to the back of the crowd.

When she caught a glimpse of Mick—the director—hurrying past the line of cameras with a tight-lipped smile, she froze, and then ducked. After a moment, she straightened again, feeling self-conscious and overly dramatic, especially given that they’d never actually met and there was practically no chance he would remember her. But the sight of him had caught her off guard, and she was still feeling startled and a little bit shaky when Lauren appeared, grabbing her elbow with an impatient look and dragging her toward the front.

“The key is to sort of post up,” she was saying, demonstrating by throwing out an elbow as they passed a group of younger girls. “Protect your space.”

“I’m not great with crowds,” Ellie muttered, and Lauren rolled her eyes.

“You’ve gotta be more aggressive,” she said, half pulling Ellie into a spot just behind Kara and Sprague, who were so fixated on the sight of Olivia Brooks getting out of her car that they didn’t even notice. The noise from the crowd rose as Olivia—who had eyes only for the cameras—began to pose with a hand on her hip and a pouty smile on her heart-shaped face.

Ellie stared ahead unseeingly, her thoughts jumbled. She knew it was only a matter of time before Graham would also appear, handsome and smiling and achingly familiar, and she didn’t feel remotely prepared for it. Everything seemed dreamlike and surreal, as if she might snap awake at any moment and find herself back in her dorm room in her ducky pajamas.

“I bet he’s next,” Kara said, and Ellie felt her breath quicken, wondering if it was too late to try to leave again. She wasn’t aggressive. She didn’t know how to post up. And she certainly didn’t belong here. Maybe there was no such thing as a new Ellie; there was only this one, the one who had once gotten an e-mail from a boy in California, who had—without knowing what might happen—written him back, and who had then stood by and simply watched as it all slipped away.

“Do you think he’s really that hot in person?” Sprague asked, half turning to them with a dreamy look. “I mean, his eyes can’t be
that
blue, right?”

Kara shrugged. “I heard he wears contacts.”

“I heard he never washes his jeans.”

“I heard he has six cars, and that he’s always paying off cops when they stop him for driving too fast.”

“I heard that too.”

“I heard he has his own racetrack in his backyard.”

“I heard he got a special car seat made for his pet monkey.”

“Pig,” Ellie said quietly, and they all turned to look at her. She blinked back at them. “It’s a pet pig.”

But nobody answered. Because that’s when a car door opened, and a roar went up, and a series of flashes lit the sky, and just like that, all eyes were on Graham Larkin.