It was only then that the photographers appeared, seemingly from nowhere, six of them, with enormous black cameras and bags strung over their shoulders, each of them rushing to press against the window, where they began to snap photos with frantic intensity. From inside the store, Graham Larkin didn’t even turn around.
Ellie stood there for another moment, her eyes flicking between the window, where Quinn was smiling behind the counter as he approached, and the photographers, who were jostling one another for better angles. Those milling around in the streets nearby started to drift closer, drawn to the scene by some sort of magnetic pull, an irresistible mixture of celebrity and spectacle. But as the crowd grew, Ellie took a few steps backward, making her escape around the side of the building before anyone could notice she was gone.
From: [email protected]
Sent: Sunday, June 9, 2013 10:24 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: what happy looks like
Visiting new places.
Graham had been visualizing this moment for weeks now. And so the way it was all unfolding—the town looking just as he’d imagined it, the rows of shops and the salty breeze at his back—almost made it feel like he was in a dream.
The sun was gauzy behind a thin film of clouds, and his head was pounding. He’d taken the red-eye to Portland and, as usual, hadn’t slept at all. Graham had never flown when he was growing up, and even with things like first-class seating and private jets, he was still restless and anxious in the air, unaccustomed to the rhythms of this type of travel, no matter how much of his life seemed to be spent on a plane.
But it didn’t matter now. As he walked to the shop, he felt more alert than he had in ages, wide awake and burning with conviction. It had been a long time since he’d felt this way. In the past two years, as his life had become increasingly unrecognizable, Graham had grown as malleable as a piece of clay. He was now accustomed to being told what to do, how to act, who to see, and what to say when he saw them. Casual-seeming conversations on the couches of talk shows were pre-scripted. Dates were set up for him by his people. His clothes were chosen by a stylist who was forever trying to wrangle him into V-neck shirts and skinny jeans, things he’d never have been caught dead in before.
But before felt like a million years ago.
And this is how things were in the after.
If someone had told him two years ago that he’d be living on his own at seventeen—in a house three times the size of the one he’d grown up in, complete with a pool and a game room and the necessary precaution of a state-of-the-art security system—Graham would have laughed. But like everything else that came on the heels of his first movie role and the unexpected feeding frenzy that followed it, this just seemed like the next logical step. There had been a momentum to the whole chain of events that struck him as inevitable. First there was a new agent, then a new publicist; a new house and a new car; new ways of acting in public and new tutors to help him finish high school while filming; new rules for social engagements; and, of course, new and previously unimagined possibilities for getting into trouble.
Even his parents were different. Now, whenever he stopped by, they were both oddly strained, choosing their words carefully, as if they were all on camera. Every once in a while, Graham would do something that used to drive them nuts—leave his dirty dishes on the counter or his shoes strewn in the middle of the hallway—but instead of barking at him like they used to, they’d only exchange an unreadable look and then pretend not to see it. The whole thing was so disconcerting that Graham had, for the most part, stopped going home at all.
He thought this must be what whiplash felt like. It wasn’t long ago that he was just a high school sophomore acting the part of Nathan Detroit in the dim auditorium, after having tried out on a lark for the same reason he did most things: to impress a girl. A few days later, he’d been shocked to actually discover his name on the casting list.
His school was located in a suburb so affluent that Graham often felt like a visitor to some strange and well-groomed planet, but its proximity to L.A. meant that most of his classmates, and certainly those in the drama club, dreamed of Hollywood. They’d spent their lives at dance lessons and voice lessons and acting lessons. They studied Variety to keep up a certain level of industry knowledge, and they viewed shopping as an important opportunity to cultivate their image.
But then Graham, lanky and off-key and a little bit awkward, had sauntered onstage with a goofy grin directed at some girl he’d never even spoken to, and somehow, he’d managed to get the part. And yet, nobody else seemed to find this odd. That’s just the way things had always worked for him. He’d never had a problem making sports teams or the honor roll, collecting awards for everything from Most Valuable Player to Exemplary Citizen. For better or worse, he’d always been that guy.
And so there he was on opening night, plowing his way through the lyrics in a costume that was perhaps a size too small, his eyes watering from the glare of the lights, feeling less certain about his plan to ask the girl playing Adelaide to the spring formal afterward. As it turned out, he didn’t have the chance. A classmate’s father was trying to cast an unknown to play a teenage magician in a movie—not the lead, but the one who makes the love interest doubt her feelings for the hero—and afterward, he cornered Graham to discuss the possibility of his coming in for some screen tests. His parents, as clueless as he was about just what it might mean if he got the part, agreed that it could be a good opportunity, a fun experience, maybe even something to put on his college applications—and if things worked out, to help foot the bill.
Later, all the magazines would describe his emergence as a star in ways that made him sound like a cartoon character, how he’d been “plucked from obscurity” or “skyrocketed to fame” or “catapulted into the limelight.” And that was sort of how it felt. He enjoyed the acting part of it more than he thought he would, and at first, he found the world of Hollywood intriguing, a welcome distraction from the smaller melodramas of high school.
But what nobody ever told him was that once something like this happens to you, there’s no going back. In hindsight, this seemed like it should have been obvious, something he might have realized before everything was already in motion, but there was a slow inertia to the whole process that made it feel less like a catapult and more like a tumble down a hill. And as with most cartoon characters, once the ground ran out beneath him, he continued to hang there in midair, legs churning, hoping that if he just kept moving, maybe he wouldn’t fall.
It was lonelier than he ever could have imagined. There were agents and managers and directors, costars and tutors and wardrobe specialists, publicists and hairstylists and image consultants. But none of them seemed quite real to him, and when the cameras stopped rolling, they faded away like opportunistic ghosts. He tried to keep up with his friends from high school, but something had shifted between them, and in this strange and uncharted territory, they didn’t know how to act around him anymore. He’d drifted too far beyond the world of curfews and homework and soccer practice, and once he stopped offering up his house for parties, there was little reason for them to see one another anymore.