chapter 4
CHRIS
Pretty much everything in my office is broken an hour after I get back from my little trip to her hotel. There’s not a piece of glass that isn’t shattered or an object that’s intact. Some poor intern is going to draw the short straw and spend the next three weeks gluing things back together. I make a mental note to check their pay scale and double it.
I’m muttering incoherently to myself, and I wind my arm back to throw another gaudy statue against the wall, but I stop suddenly.
Jeff is standing in the doorway with his arms crossed.
“What the hell, Chris?” he asks. “Now, I’ve heard of celebrations before, but this doesn’t look much like a party.”
I am not in the mood for this. I called him in here for one reason, and it wasn’t so that he could give me a frank opinion about my choice of festivities.
“What?” he asks, peering at me closely. “Seriously, what the f*ck? We got the movie. We paid a little more on the back end than we wanted, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t warrant throwing a fit.”
I glare at him, and he looks suitably humbled.
“My secretary said that you needed some background on the deal.”
“That’s right.”
I need to hear every gory detail. I still have some hope that maybe the image of her face, sad and wistful and lost, will remove itself from my brain. There’s another option, one that I can’t bring myself to own up to, the tiny little voice that’s telling me that maybe everything is not so perfect in the Ellison marriage. I mean, he couldn’t even bring himself to show up today. I need more information.
“What do you need to know? More numbers? I mean, the budget…”
I don’t give a shit about numbers. “Not that. Why was she here?”
“I’m assuming that you mean the smoking hot writer that you couldn’t keep your eyes away from. Not that I blame you. That’s a piece of grade-A ass right there.”
“Yes, that’s who I meant.” My voice is a growl, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
“Well, it’s her screenplay, so we needed her to sign the paperwork.”
“It’s his screenplay.”
I can’t say or even think his name. His words come rushing back anyways.
“You’ll never be good enough for her…I’ll be there to pick up the pieces…”
He had been right on both counts.
“Ben Ellison didn’t write the whole thing. He didn’t write any of the screenplay, actually. I mean, maybe bits and pieces, but I don’t think he managed to get very far into it before...” Suddenly, he turns to stare at me. “Didn’t Marcus tell you all of this?”
So, Ben and Hallie were a team, then. A little husband and wife writer team. Cute. It was just so f*cking cute. I ignore the question about Marcus, who’s probably cursing my name right now.
“Why didn’t he write it? It’s his brainchild, right?”
“Well, who the f*ck else was going to write it?”
I am utterly confused.
“You really didn’t know, did you? Jesus.”
“What?”
“He’s dead.”
I’m out of my chair and on my feet. What is he talking about? Why didn’t someone tell me? Why didn’t she tell me?
“Who’s dead?”
“Ben Ellison.”
“Ben Ellison is dead?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said.”
My brain can’t process that information. That means…
“Don’t you think that’s information that I should have had, I don’t know, maybe when you sent the screenplay?”
“I assumed that you knew. Of course I assumed that you knew. The dude was f*cking hero teacher, man.”
I give him a blank stare, even though the phrase rings a faint bell.
“He was plastered all over the news. His face was everywhere. For weeks. Months. If you turn on CNN right now, there’s probably a story running on it.”
“Hero teacher?”
“Seriously?”
I shrug. “Tell me.”
“All right, man. I think it was about a year ago. Ben Ellison is this stand-up guy. I think he’s even teacher of the year, a basically a saint by anyone’s standards. He and the hot writer are the golden couple in this small town in Michigan and they’re both so saintly that they spend all their weekend volunteering and building houses and shit on the weekend. They have the perfect life, you know, the kind of life that makes you wish you never heard the word Hollywood.”
I close my eyes. I didn’t need to hear that.
“So, he decides to take some kids from his school on a college visit, and they’re driving to some no-name college in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, traveling on some deserted road with not a soul in sight except for maybe a stray lumberjack or two. Then, wham! Their bus gets blindsided by a semi. Everyone’s screaming and bleeding and shit, and then someone realizes that the truck has a sign on it that says, ‘Explosive Materials.’”
Jeff’s taking pleasure in telling the story, dragging it out. I close my eyes again.
“The worst part is that the door’s blocked, so everyone has to crawl through a window. I think someone calls 911 right away, but this shit is so far out in BFE that none of the emergency crews could get there in time to help. So, the amazing Ben Ellison starts pulling dozens of kids out of that bus, one by one. He’s like Superman, at least according to some of the kids that survived. Before the rescue crews can even get there, one of the TV helicopters shows up, just before the bus blows him and a couple of the kids into a million pieces. So, it’s all recorded for the world to see.”
Oh, God. So, Ben Ellison actually was Gandhi and the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa all rolled into one. And now he’s dead.
“It would have been a big story anyway, but some genius in the copy room at one of the publishing houses released this crazy story to the tabloids—that Ben Ellison had a pen name, and that hero teacher was actually the same guy that had written the Carson Sellers books, the Rage books. The craziest thing is that the whole story turned out to be true.” Jeff shakes his head. “It’s rotten luck for him, really. He’s like the van Gogh of the literary world, you know, without the whole cutting off the nose scenario. He never really got to relish his own success or even to spend any of the money that he made. Sure, some of the literati were already calling him some kind of wunderkind, even before the bus incident happened. But the fame and fortune? He got none of that.”
“He wouldn’t have wanted any of it,” I say, so quietly that I don’t think that Jeff even hears me.
“What’s that? Chris?”
I don’t answer, so Jeff keeps talking. “I mean, you could look at it another way and say that the guy had great timing. The second Rage book had come out just a few days before the accident. After the hero teacher story broke, the publisher rereleased them under his real name, and the first two sold a few million copies in record time. Hero teacher, boy genius superstar writer. You should have seen it, man. Caused a firestorm among the big studios. That’s why I didn’t think we were ever going to have a chance at it.”
My breath is caught in my throat, but I manage to gasp out the question I need answered. “And her?”
“Hot writer wife?”
“Don’t call her that.”
He gives me a curious look, but he answers anyway. “She was on the bus with them when they got hit. I think she was the school counselor. Psychiatrist. Something. She became the other story. Hero teacher’s wife. There were pictures of her and the two of them all over the place. They were high school sweethearts, I think, which only made people crazier for her. The press went nuts. It’s got everything—tragedy, heroism, romance.”
A light comes into the corner of Jeff’s eye, and he stares at me, eyebrows raised. “Someone should make a movie about it. Really. I mean, we already got her on the hook for the press junket. All we need to do is pay someone to do a mock-up of a script…”
I certainly don’t have the patience for this. “No. Absolutely not. We are not parading her around and making some pathetic movie of the week about her life. Don’t ever mention that idea in my presence again. Ever. Do you hear me?”
The menace underlying my words makes Jeff take a step back. He holds his hands up in surrender.
“Sorry, Jensen.”
“Never mind. What else do you know about it?”
“That’s about it. You can look it up online, but fair f*cking warning—even I don’t want to see those pictures again. They never found more than pieces of his body, or those kids’ bodies. Terrible stuff. The bus got charred in the explosion, and they kept replaying it on CNN, with the smoke rising and then the investigators digging through the rubble. Honestly, the worst shots are the ones of her, from after she got out of the hospital. That shit will make your blood curdle.”
“Why?”
“She got hurt pretty badly, which of course only made her more of a tragic heroine. Reporters and photographers and everyone else followed her around for months. I was actually surprised that she didn’t have her own little paparazzi train here today.”
Hallie, with her own paparazzi army?
Jeff corrects himself. “I guess not, though. She’s been in hiding for ages. That’s probably how come she looks hot again. Plastic surgery or something. Right after it happened, the big studios sent their best guys out, because they wanted to get the deal done right away. They wanted the sit-down with Oprah. Strike while the iron’s hot and all that jazz. I’m not saying that the sit-down is off the table, especially since people are still curious about her, about what happened, but I am saying that some of the heat’s died down a bit. There’s always another story. That one is three tragedies ago.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, it’s shit. Especially since she is totally f*ckable. I was going to think about making a real move, man, but I just kept thinking about her face when she got out of the hospital. It was enough to turn me off.”
“Don’t even think about touching her.”
My voice is a growl, and under it lies a ferocity that Jeff recognizes immediately. I buy myself a few seconds to think as Jeff holds his hands up innocently.
How did I miss this? What had I been doing?
Right.
Michele. On a beach in France.
I’m the world’s biggest a*shole.
“Hands off, man. I still can’t believe you didn’t know about any of this. I figured that was why you wanted that script so badly. Hell, it’s why everyone else wanted it so badly. I mean, the writing is good and all, but that’s not really the story. To be really crass, everyone’s going to go nuts over the movie. Add in the press, and you have a bonanza. Hero teacher’s wife, selling her story to fulfill her husband’s last wishes. The fact that the writing is dynamite, better than we could have ever hoped for, is really just a bonus.”
The stony look that I give him is enough to send him scrambling for the door, and he pauses only long enough to give my obliterated office a quick look. “I’ll send someone in after you leave to clean this shit up.”
I bury my head in my hands and try to will my brain into working again.
I can’t come up with a plan to steal her away from Ben Ellison, because he’s already been taken.
I need to see it for myself. I type in “hero teacher” into the search bar on my computer. There are millions and millions of hits. I click on images first, because photographic evidence will give me what I need the fastest.
Each one is, in its own way, devastating.
The first one, the one that’s repeated in a thousand different crops and angles, shows Ben pulling a bloodied kid from the rubble as flames start to lick at the bus.
The next is an abstract image of the gaping hole in the earth after it exploded.
However, the ones that I linger on the longest are the thousand fractured images of Hallie’s face staring up at me.
Most of them show her leaving the hospital, and she’s angry and sad and some other emotion that I can’t quite read, probably because her flawless skin is covered in gauze bandages and red-streaked scars that curl angrily at the edges.
I keep clicking through the pages, unable to tear my eyes away. As I get further down, the pictures are less sensational, but no less painful. She and Ben look happy and beautiful on a beach, at a football game, from a school dance. In the last few, Hallie’s wearing a long white dress and staring up at Ben and the two of them look disgustingly elated.
I pass over those last ones quickly.
The last image I see, on the twentieth page of results, seems vaguely familiar, and when I click on it, I realize it’s a video clip.
I know instantly that I absolutely do not want to see this, and that it holds its own kind of pain. My finger hovers over the little red x, but every impulse towards self-destruction takes over instead.
Free from the constraints of time, a much-younger Hallie moves towards the camera, shaking her fist and grinning.
“Tell me, oh mysterious lady, what are your plans, now that you’ve captured the hearts of millions of lovers of art who’ve looked upon your beautiful face?”
She pulls her little black mask onto her forehead, revealing wide blue eyes under exaggerated black eyebrows. Of course. It was Sam’s annual masquerade, the summer after Hallie and I had met. She had insisted on da Vinci and Mona Lisa.
She gestures wildly at Sam, and he lets out a low chuckle.
“Tell me, Sam. What are your plans, other than becoming a New York bum who occasionally goes to clubs to show off your dancing talents? Cheater. You didn’t even wear a costume to your own party.”
“Baby, who needs a costume when you’ve got a face like this?”
Hallie leans back her head and releases long peals of laughter. The camera shakes as Sam takes another step towards her. Her eyes are full of mischief as she opens her mouth, but Sam shushes her.
“Mona Lisa, right now, my plan is to take our little show on the road. You know, we’ll find some sort of dance contest in each city and we’ll just make our way from coast to coast. No responsibilities, no obligations. Whenever you realize that Jensen is a total clown, I’ll be here.”
Before she can offer a quick retort, another voice cuts in. It’s a younger, happier version of my own.
“In your dreams, asshat.”
I breathe a sigh of relief when I see myself step into the frame. At least I’m wearing a black mask that obscures my face. Thank god for small mercies. Otherwise, the press would have found this one a long time ago. But even though my face isn’t visible, there’s no disguising the fact that we belong to each other.
I watch as the other version of myself moves quickly to her side and lifts her off her feet after casually throwing a middle finger in Sam’s direction. Despite the bulk of our costumes, Hallie and I are entwined together, dancing and staring into each other’s eyes. Sam mutters something about the shot being ruined by my presence, but he keeps the camera zoomed in on us anyways as we begin to spin amongst the sea of elaborate costumes.
We are dazzlingly happy.
Correction. We were dazzlingly happy.