My phone rings over the speakers. I hit answer. My father’s voice wipes away my smirk.
“Logan,” he says. “You’re a fucking disgrace.” I lean my head back and close my eyes, swirling the vodka around in a circle. “Are you fucking kidding me, Logan, with that fucking tape? You’re twenty-four. You’re not a child. Stop acting like a piece of shit. Get yourself the fuck together.”
He hangs up. I sigh and drain the glass. This might be my last chance to relax before filming begins. Filming’s from August to November, according to the schedule I was sent. Twelve-hour workdays. At least it’s here in LA, but I’m going to stay at a hotel in Studio City so I don’t have to bother driving back and forth. I’ve been stressing about this character. Quinn Evans. He’s me, basically. A fuckup. Arrogant. I read the book. It was fucking awful, but that doesn’t matter. Studying his character for the last few months has forced me to look in the mirror a lot more than I usually would. I don’t think about it very much, how much I hate myself, but it’s been a good fact to focus on and pull me deeper into my role.
I haven’t been in a film for the past couple of years, after my last time at rehab. It’ll take me a second to get back into the flow, remember what life is like on set. I feel an extra pressure to prove I haven’t lost it. I’m still fucking talented. The stress of all that, plus this bullshit relationship with Matthew Cole. Fuck. At least Willow had enough of a personality to keep things interesting.
I pull out my phone and head to messages. I text Willow. A simple hey. We used to text all the time, when we were pretending to date. Nothing serious. Sarcastic banter at how social media was reacting to our relationship. I see the bubbles appear and disappear. Left on read.
I scroll through messages until I find Briggs. I try again. Hey. Bubbles appear. His response is quick. You all right? Kinda in the middle of something. I spin the phone around and around. Yeah. If only the blogs could see me now. Even worse, I think, that I actually fit the overprivileged asshole stereotype, feeling sorry for myself.
Willow’s response buzzes. No point in continuing to text, right? We’re not pretending to be together anymore.
I take another sip.
Fuck it. I’m bored.
I look up Matthew Cole on my phone and begin to scroll.
Happily Ever After: A Memoir
by Matthew Cole
By the time I was twelve years old, I had some inkling that I was interested in other boys, though I was afraid to acknowledge this fact even to myself.
One memory that stays with me to this day is the moment I sat with my father and we watched a queer film together for the first time. I’d scoured the LGBTQ+ section in Netflix, but I had never watched a film with queer characters with another person before. My father and I weren’t close. We struggled to communicate, to find ways to hold conversations. If I said something, he would only be silent. “I had fun at school today.” Silence. “I joined the drama club.” Silence. I didn’t know how to talk to him about anything that really mattered. I couldn’t tell him about my fears, my dreams. And if he ever said something, it was only an instruction. “Don’t walk like that, Matthew. Don’t talk to adults unless they speak to you first. Stop laughing so loudly. You’re embarrassing yourself.”
Movies were the one way we connected, because we didn’t have to speak. We would sit together to watch a film once a week. Now that I look back on those days, I suspect my mother was the one who pushed my father to spend more time with me.
This particular memory, though—well, I can’t even remember which film it was. It wasn’t a movie with overtly queer characters. It was an action, something my dad usually enjoyed. There were two men who were close throughout the film. They didn’t do anything, not in the way queerness is much more openly accepted now, with kisses and long, romantic embraces, and sexually graphic scenes that don’t fade to black. The men only touched each other’s hands, just barely, just enough for the audience to understand who they were to one another as they fought off the end of the world. It was still a time when even this was groundbreaking, but this touch made me explode with embarrassment and curiosity and just a touch of pre-teen longing, a wondering of whether I could ever touch another boy with that sort of tenderness. My father scowled. He spoke more than he usually would. “Disgusting,” he said. That was all he said, but it was enough.
I would go to church on Sundays with my family. I called myself a Christian, then, in the sense that I believe there is a force that we humans can’t comprehend, a force that has different names across languages and cultures—but I’d always believed, even as a young child, that this force didn’t understand our human definitions of sin. This force would not understand why one man could not love another. This force only knew love and compassion. It was painful that my father couldn’t understand the same.
Mattie
Paola did an amazing job, negotiating for me to be put up in the Winchester, a small luxury hotel near Studio City. One bedroom, kitchenette, pristine white walls and marble countertops. Still, it can be lonely in a city like Los Angeles, even when I have little ways of distracting myself. I bought a little pothos at a garden shop that I water when the leaves look wilted. I play Stardew Valley on my laptop （I’m trying to marry Elliott）， and I’ve been slowly making my way through the Louise Penny series to keep my thoughts from spiraling. I’ve even recently started listening to podcasts on my phone, just so that the other voices make me feel like I’m not in an otherwise empty room. It started with me typing into the search bar how to not feel so alone and, over the past few days, the podcasts have ended up in attachment style theory and healing queer trauma. These kinds of topics would’ve made me cringe, once, but that doesn’t stop me from playing a new episode every night.
The only people who have visited me in my hotel room are from the wardrobe department, to fit me for the costumes they’re preparing, and the makeup and hair folks, to let me know what they’re planning. I stand on the balcony, watching the pale blue sky turn pink and gold as I dial my sister’s number on FaceTime.
Emma picks up on the first ring. “Mattie!”
“God, I miss you, Em.” So much that I might just start to cry. Every time I feel tears well up, I hear my father yelling at me to be a man. He never believed that men should have emotions.
“I miss you, too. Mom’s stalking you in the news. She tells me every time her Google alert for your name goes off. Which is, like, every five minutes.”
Emma and I look a lot alike in facial features, but that’s about it. We had a white person somewhere in our lineage, like most Black families, so my skin tone turned out different. She has medium brown skin with thicker black hair and dark brown eyes. I have golden-brown skin that’s covered with freckles and the sort of curly-wavy texture of hair that makes most people assume that I’m white with a strong tan, like Ariana Grande or a Kardashian when they were still in their appropriate-Black-culture phases. Either that, or they’re not sure of my race at all. The “look” of ethnically ambiguous has been trendy in LA for a while now.
I know it’s because of colorism and racism that I’ve even made it this far. The characters in the novel Write Anything were both white, but the studio decided to take a risk and let me and other people of color audition instead. I lost out to Gray for the lead, and I thought that was the end of it—until they rang me up two months later and asked if I wanted to be the love interest.