Spiral (38 page)

My mom won’t stop apologizing, even after I tell her it’s okay and that I know why she didn’t believe me. She babbles on and on, shaking her head at her own failures. “
Danika and Carl and Betsy, they had everyone fooled, even Derek the reporter. How were we supposed to know these people, who had been in Cherie’s life all this time, would go to such extremes just because she wanted to quit the industry?”

“People will do anything to squeeze one last buck out of a celebrity like Cherie, even endanger them,” says an officer who comes to question me. He asks a few questions about last night to corroborate Cherie and the twins’ stories about the events at Caz’s beach house. He doesn’t interrogate me too much because I don’t really make a lot of sense with the painkillers I’m on. My memories are sort of hazy and broken into puzzle pieces that I can’t connect properly.

“It’s okay, son,” he says as he gives up and turns to leave. “We have all the evidence we need to move forward with an investigation for now. Maybe we’ll catch up a little later, when you’re feeling better.”

They won’t let Cherie see me yet, even after the doctors and the officer leave my room. I wonder if I look that bad, or if they just don’t want us around each other. When my mother steps out to talk to the doctors about whether or not I need to stay in the hospital overnight, a young nurse comes in to introduce herself and tells me she’s my night nurse. I have no idea what time it is, but I’m guessing I’ve been here almost a full day.

“Can I have a mirror please?” I ask with as much charm as I can muster. Her lips form a tight, pitying smile, but she complies.

“Here you are,” she says gently. I take it in my good hand and prepare myself to be horrified by my own reflection.

But it’s not so bad. It actually feels a lot worse than it is. The right side of my lip is busted and blackened with dried blood and a few stitches. Purples and reds cover my right cheekbone, and a deep, red and black wound stretches from my forehead down across my left temple. My hair is kind of messed and even has some dried blood in it, too. It’s kind of badass, even better than having a beard. I look a little like the guy at the end of an action movie who walks out of the burning building, wrecked but alive and victorious.

All I need now is the girl
, I muse to myself. I put the mirror down and try to lay still. The doctors weren’t concerned about my face. They were more worried about the internal bleeding, two broken ribs and cracked left collarbone. I guess I should be, too.

Someone knocks on the hospital room door, and I raise my head weakly to look over. Cherie steps inside hesitantly, peering toward the bed. As our gazes meet, she tries to smile through tears that immediately begin to fall.

“Hi,” she sobs. She covers her mouth as if the sight of me is too much for her to handle.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I say quickly, wincing as I try to turn more in her direction.

“Don’t move!” she scolds, quickly rushing to the chair at my side. She runs her eyes over my body and sighs, “Oh, Jack.”

I follow her gaze down my bruised and bandaged torso and shrug my good shoulder. “Eh. I’ll live.”

She shakes her head. “I am so sorry. This is all my fault.”

“No, it’s not,” I say. “Things just got out of hand. You actually saved me for once.”

I smirk, but Cherie just locks eyes with me. “No. I caused this. Don’t give me any more free passes. I’ve spent two months making messes that other people clean up. This time, all it did was get you hurt, and you deserve better than that. You deserve better than me. I am so sorry.”

I shake my head. “You know I don’t care about this,” I say, gesturing to my bandages. “I’d fight for you any day. I’d take a bullet for you, Cherie, and you know that.”

Her face falls and I continue, adding, “I know now that Danika was the one leaking everything to the media. At first I thought it was you, but now it makes so much more sense – ”

She puckers her lips as if she’s about to speak then pauses and thinks for a silent moment.

“What?” I press.

“I – It wasn’t all Danika.”

I swallow hard. “Huh? What do you mean?”

“I did a very bad thing, Jack.”

My stomach twists. “What is it?” Her eyes dart away from mine. She stays quiet. “Tell me.”

She leans back in her chair. “Danika…yes, Danika did tell the press a lot of stuff the last few weeks. She was responsible for most of the stories the media knew. I had no idea. But…the phone call between us the other day… You see, sometimes, when we need to do damage control, we stage things with reporters we trust. They call it a ‘very close source,’ but it’s really just us telling them.”

The sun rises on the awful memory of our phone call. “So when you said we couldn’t see each other…”

She nods. “Carl and Betsy arranged a meeting with Derek Santos, and they made me wait for you to call. They knew you would. They wrote down my responses and everything.”

I nod. “I thought so. I knew that wasn’t real.” I stare into space for a minute before searching her eyes for reassurance. “Why would you do that to me?”

She looks up as two tears stream down her cheeks. “I didn’t want to say any of that, Jack. I wanted to come home the second you told me you wanted to see me! And you told me you loved me – I knew you meant it because I could hear it in your voice, in how you yelled at me. No one has ever talked to me like that. Please believe me; I didn’t want to let Derek listen in and hear you – ”

“Then why did you let them? You have the right to say no to people, Cherie. Do you have any idea how much it hurts to be stabbed in the back like that?”

She sniffles and wipes her tears. “I thought Carl and Betsy were just trying to clean up the image I was getting in the press, and they told me you’d be the best person to pin it on after what happened at the club. They told me I had to or I was going to bring bad press to everyone; Kidz Channel, the movie, them. I – I didn’t know what to do. Carl said you wouldn’t be there forever, that I was only hurting one person who might be out of my life in a year instead of hurting everyone who’s been there for me all of this time.”

“A year?” I guffaw. “What – where is he coming up with that?”

She shrugs. “You’re going to go off to college soon. You said so yourself last week. Carl said – ”

“I don’t care what Carl said!” I snap, irritated. Getting angry is becoming painful as parts of me start to throb. I try to calm down and soften my tone. “Look, Cherie, I’m not going anywhere, no matter what anyone says – Carl, your uncle, Danika – they didn’t know what was happening between us. They still don’t, right?”

She nods quickly. “I haven’t said anything about that night.” She blushes a little and looks down.

I breathe deeply. “Well, maybe it’s time we tell them.”

“No, Jack! We can’t!” she whispers, her green eyes wide and frightened.

I shake my head. “You need to decide what you want. If you want me around, I’ll stay, and I’ll never leave you. But I won’t be a secret anymore. I want you to get the help you really need and go back to your normal life, and I want to be by your side every step of the way.”

“You have always been there for me, and look what’s happened,” she whimpers. “I didn’t want this – I didn’t want to drag you into my drama! Don’t you get it, Jack? You’re going to get tired of it eventually and leave, and then where will I be?”

I sigh and reply, “Cherie, don’t you see the pattern here? Every time you push me away, I come back. I’m always going to be here for you. I’m not just giving up and leaving you alone. If you don’t want me, I’ll respect that and live with it. But if you’ll have me, I’m going to be there for you no matter what you do to me.

“But it’s your choice to make. Not Carl’s, not my mom’s, not the producers of your movie. I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere unless you say you don’t want me around.”

Cherie rests her eyes on mine and then looks down at my bandages, her lips pressed tightly together. A fresh tear rolls out of the corner of her eyes.

“Of course I want you around – you’re the only person I’ve felt truly safe with. I just…I thought you’d walk away once all the publicity got too hard, and then I’d be all alone again.”

Her words hit below the belt, and my chest tightens. “It’s going to take a lot more than some stress to push me away, Cherie. I’m not my father; I’m stronger than him, and I know what it means to take care of the people I love,” I say, hearing my own voice waver a little. I fight the emotion that I feel coming on. “I love you. Look at me. You can be sure I’ll fight to the death for you before I will just walk away.”

She replies, “This is crazy. We’re kids. It’s crazy for us to feel this way about each other –we barely know each other. I’m broken right now, Jack. And you, you’ve spent so much time hiding from how you really feel about your dad that you can’t even talk about him with me. We’re probably only attracted to each other because we’re both so messed up – two unstable kids like us shouldn’t be together!”

I watch her rant herself into exhaustion. When she falls back in her chair and quiets, I lean forward as much as I can. “I know I’ve got my own issues, Cherie. I won’t pretend to be whole in any way, and it’s going to take some time for me to really open up about that stuff. But I can tell you that you’ve already broken down more of my walls than anyone else. I’ll let you in if you stop making me your dirty secret.”

She stares at the floor for a long time before saying, “I have really young fans. I – I don’t really feel comfortable telling people everything. Do we have to tell everyone we had sex?”

I shake my head. “Of course not. We never have to tell people what goes on behind closed doors, even when we’re fifty. That’s between us.

“But it’s what you let them see on the outside that matters to me. I want to be able to hold your hand and kiss you and take you places, and I don’t care who doesn’t agree with it or who takes a picture of it.”

“Being in the public eye doesn’t matter to you?” she asks softly, as if she can’t believe what she’s hearing.

“Not if it means I get to be with you,” I reply. “Besides, aren’t you quitting acting? All of this attention is going to go away eventually.”

“Yeah, but what about all the things they’ll say about us before it goes away?” she whispers. “We’re supposed to be family – ”

“But we’re not family, Cherie, and anyone with half of a brain knows that.” I shake my head and sigh. “Maybe you care about all that stuff, but I don’t. I won’t feel bad about loving you.”

Cherie nods slowly. The silence pools around us and threatens to drown me. It’s the moment of truth: Either she will stand up and walk out of my life forever, or she will agree to tell the world about us. I feel like I’m about to start sweating from the tension. I never realized how much the threat of losing her would panic me, even last night when I thought she was with Caz. Up until now, I knew she was a helpless puppet to people older and savvier than her. But at this moment, it’s just her and me and the words she chooses. The decision she makes is entirely hers.

Finally, she looks up and whispers, “I don’t want to feel bad about loving you either.”

My voice is hoarse. I just need to hear her say it. “Then don’t.”

She shakes her head. “I won’t. I want everyone to know that we’re together,” she says, and I can finally breathe again. “I love you Jack.”

This time I can say it back. “I love you, too.” I laugh because I can’t find the words to express how happy she’s just made me.

Her lips spread into a smile as she reaches for her cell phone. “I’ll call Derek right now and set up an in –”

“No, hold on,” I say, reaching out for her phone just as she begins to turn it on. Her big green eyes stare at me, wide and innocent. I take a deep breath and try to keep my tone gentle. “This isn’t damage control, Cherie. We don’t need a staged interview and phony prepared statements. This is real life. We need to be real with each other, always. Okay?”

Her smile fades and she lowers her phone. I can see by the confusion on her face that this is a foreign concept to her. She’s spent so much time carefully crafting every part of her life, every relationship, and she doesn’t understand what it means to be real anymore.

“Well, then, how will they know we’re together?” she asks softly.

I take her hand in mine and smile as much as my bruised lip will allow. “We just have to be together. That’s all. They’ll get the picture.”

“Oh.” Her face scrunches. “Really? You want to stage a photo shoot?” She grins and adds slyly, “You do photograph well…”

I force myself to take another deep breath, suppressing my frustration. I can tell this is going to be a long road to travel with her.

But one glimpse of her smile tells me it’s a journey worth taking.