The Rom-Commers(13)

“That’s better,” she said, patting me on the butt. Then she continued off across the lawn and I tumbled down into the grass.

“Mom!” I shouted. “I was performing Shakespeare!”

“Perform with your clothes on!” she called over her shoulder, just as a spindly kid cartwheeled into the frame. Sylvie.

“I want to perform Shakespeare!” Sylvie said, her voice like a chipmunk’s.

But I was up now—and running toward the camera with a goofy grin on my face. “Cut! Cut!” I called, making the “cut” gesture across my neck. And then, just as I collided with Logan, the video ended, going still at the last frame: my mom across the yard, on the back steps, with the door halfway open, heading into the kitchen to make dinner.

What did we have for dinner that night? I wondered, and it suddenly felt so heartbreaking that now I’d never know.

For a minute, there in Charlie Yates’s yard, the phone lay quiet in my hand. I was somewhere out of time.

And that’s when I realized I was crying. The ragged kind of crying that overtakes you without your consent.

I was just about to play the video again—sensing I could watch it forever on an endless loop, gulping down that forgotten moment nonstop without ever quenching my longing to see it again—when Charlie Yates’s present-day front door slammed open, and the present-day Logan came charging out of it, yanking me back to present-day reality.

Which suddenly, in contrast, didn’t seem so important anymore.

“Emma, you’ve got to—” he started.

But Logan stopped at the sight of me—at, I’m guessing, the gully washer of tears on my face. I looked back at him, blinking—my heart tied up in a fist, my throat thick, and my face overtaken with reawakened grief.

For a second, we were in a standoff.

And then I realized he must’ve been thinking I was crying like this over Charlie, over a person who, apparently, saw me as nothing but an amateur.

Which sparked me into action.

“This,” I said, drawing an imaginary circle around my face with my finger, “is not about this”—and I drew a much-larger circle around Logan, and the house behind him, and—what the hell—the whole city of LA.

Then I held up Logan’s phone to him—frozen on that final image—until he saw what this was about.

Logan’s shoulders dropped. “Emma, I—”

Just then, Charlie barreled out the front door with an air like he was about to make a proclamation.

He was—and I realize this goes without saying—bigger in real life.

It was my first—and possibly last—time to ever lay eyes on Charlie Yates, and I confess, it hijacked my attention for a second. Because there he was. That was the hair he always grabbed with his fist. And those were the wide-wale corduroys I’d seen in so many videos. And there was one of his trademarked rumpled Oxford shirts. And that was the signature stubble on his neck that he forgot to shave more often than not.

He certainly hadn’t been fretting over his appearance in an airport bathroom.

Of course, in his defense, he’d had no idea I was coming. But this, I knew from YouTube, was how he dressed all the time—whether he was on a conference stage or getting snapped by the paparazzi in a five-star restaurant. He was constantly showing up to industry events in flip-flops and shorts, or with bags of takeout food because he’d been writing all day and was famished. He once ate a cheeseburger and a large order of fries during a panel discussion at the Paley Center for Media—ripping little ketchup packets and squirting them onto a napkin on his knee.

That’s how huge this guy was. Nobody cared.

Nobody even complained in the comments.

He was famously unorthodox onstage. He once took a nap during a roundtable. And it wasn’t just forgiven because he was a legend. It was part of what made him a legend in the first place. Only later would I wonder if it was a power move. Like he was too cool to play by anyone’s rules. Like having to try was a sign of weakness.

Point being: Here he was. Ten feet away.

At the time, all I could think was: It’s him. It’s really him.

And despite everything, seeing him in real life like that had a seismic effect on my body.

Like the nearness of him was causing fractures and fissures at deep, subterranean levels.

Like the presence of the living, breathing Charlie Yates was somehow … fracking my soul. Or something. The sight of him, for just a second, took me deep inside my own body. Where everything suddenly felt radically different. Like I might go to turn on some internal faucet and watch fire come out instead of water.

Am I overstating it?

Probably. But I know what I know.

The sight of me seemed to affect Charlie Yates, too.

What would Charlie have seen in that moment? A random, weeping female in his yard. Blotchy face. Eyes red from crying. Tear-smeared, shiny cheeks. Puffy pink nose. And so angry. Angry like a person with lightning bolts shooting from her eyes. Not to mention the hair: I always have to remind myself how carefully I had definitely clamped my hair back into a sensible pom-pom before we arrived—because my imagination always wants to say that, in Charlie’s first-ever sight of me, I had fire-orange medusa snakes writhing around my head.

How often do you step out of your front door in life to find a sight like that?

Poor Charlie.