I hear Will snort from the passenger seat. “Oh, come on,” he says.
I turn and look at him, my face like stone. “I’m serious, Will. It’s like a drug seeps out of your pores. It’s like opium. I put that thing on and I’m a goner.”
“Shut up and put it on, Annabelle,” Will says.
Surprised by his tone and freezing to death, I obey. And I’m right. His smell seeps down into my chest. It makes me think of warm fires and Will’s shoulders.
“You’ve never been so firm with me before,” I say.
“Maybe I’ve just been on my best behavior with you,” Will says. “Maybe I’m not the nicest guy on earth.”
We sit in silence for a moment, and then I say, “Yes, you are.”
“Well, I don’t always want to be,” he says quietly.
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t always want to be perfect.” He shrugs. “I’ve tried to screw up before, you know. I won’t study for a test, but somehow I’ll just know all the answers. I’ll sneak out of my house and nobody will even notice. I tried to get a cool old car like Elliot’s, not my sensible eco-hybrid crap, and nobody would sell one to me. Sometimes I want to lie or cheat; sometimes I want to punch a guy in the face for being a jerk on the soccer field. But when I go to do it, I just . . . can’t.”
Something about this strikes me. “Will, I think that means something big,” I tell him.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“It’s not new that you want to be more rebellious, or that you’re trying,” I say, and I can’t help think of weird little Napoleon even being capable of change. “But I think it means something that you can acknowledge it like this. That both of us can. I think it must mean we have a shot. Of taking over our own stories. Of not just accepting things as they are.”
“I really hope you’re right,” Will says. “I don’t want to live like this forever.”
Suddenly, I’m burning up in his sweater, and it feels like it weighs a thousand pounds. I go to pull it off, but despite it being six sizes larger than me, it gets stuck around my head.
“Um, a little help here?” I plead, my voice muffled in the wool.
Around the other side of the fabric, I hear Will chuckle, and the sweater starts to move off my head. But then, for some inexplicable reason, amidst all the twisting and tugging, it seems to get stuck on the other side of his head, too. And there we are, trapped at a stop sign in Laurel Canyon, the stars sparkling down at us, the misty back roads on either side, and Will’s face is two inches from mine.
“She’s doing this,” I say quietly.
“I don’t care,” he says, his voice husky. He leans down toward me, and I breathe him in. And I think how easy this would be, for just a moment. It doesn’t have to mean anything. It could just be a kiss.
But then I think about Elliot. What he said outside Little Boots. How that made me feel something more, and swiftly, I pull my head out.
“I think it’s just up on the right,” I say. And without a word, Will puts the car in drive.
24
Would You Change Anything?
1250 LAUREL Canyon Boulevard sits at a curve in the road, hidden behind a large wooden gate. We ring the bell, but nobody answers.
Will hops up and down a few times to see over the top. “There’s a car in the driveway,” he says. “She’s home; she’s just ignoring us.”
I lean against the fence, dismayed, and something above us catches my eye.
“When did the stars come out?” I ask. “Shouldn’t it be, like, ten A.M.?”
“She’s messing with us again,” Will says. “Hoping this will draw us together.” He gives me a sidelong glance. I think I must be crazy to have rejected someone as beautiful, as kind, as awesome as Will Hale. But apparently, that’s just not how love works.
“Is it just me, or are the stars unusually bright?” I ask.
“You’re right, it looks like Christmas tree tinsel up there,” Will says, looking up, too. And as soon as he does, a shooting star moves overhead.
“Did you see that?” we both ask each other at the same time. And then we laugh.
Will studies the keypad. “If only we knew the code,” he says. “She wouldn’t have a choice.”
I think hard. “Try her birthday, October tenth,” I say, looking at her Wikipedia page on my phone.
“One-oh-one-oh. Nope,” Will says.
“Try her birth year, nineteen eighty-four,” I say.
“No dice,” Will says again after punching a few keys.
“Try MORTY; that’s the name of her first dog.”
“Morty is not our man,” Will says after giving it a shot.
I think for a second. “Try HAPPY,” I say.
Will gives me a funny look, but punches it in nonetheless, and magically, the doors open . . . only to reveal another fence.
“Oh come on! This is ridiculous!” I cry. “Now you’re just being a child.”
At first nothing happens, and then, as though Lucy is once again willing to admit things have gotten out of hand, these doors open begrudgingly, too. Will and I give each other a surprised look, and walk into the compound.
“She wouldn’t hurt us, would she?” Will asks suddenly.
“No way. Remember? Then she wouldn’t have a book, and this isn’t a tragedy,” I tell him.
As soon as we enter Lucy’s estate, something is off. Over on the right side of the property, a bunch of old cars are piled on top of one another, like they’ve been discarded in the trash. I recognize every single one from Elliot’s dad’s shop. But what are they doing here? On another end of the property, Malibu-style cliffs edge around the side, where they don’t belong. And now that I look closer at Lucy’s house, pieces of it look a lot like mine. And Will’s. And Cedar Spring.
As we get closer to the front door, it opens on its own, and Mathilda Forsythe hurries out into the yard, her black portfolio clutched under her arm, her tape recorder in her hand like always. When she sees me, she doesn’t look surprised; she just nods and keeps walking out the gate.
“Who is that . . . ?” Will asks.
I watch Mathilda go, my face filled with confusion. “That’s the woman who might be buying our house.”
“This is so much weirder than I expected,” Will mutters as Lucy Keating appears in the doorway of her home. She’s in jeans and a black cashmere sweater, three scruffy-looking dogs by her side.
“Annabelle, William.” She greets us coolly while beckoning us inside. “Mathilda was just having a chat about her role. She wanted to talk about whether I could find another place for her in the book. I told her I would think about it. Some characters actually like being told what to do.” She puts a hand on her hip.
We move a few steps onto the smooth oak floor of the foyer. Light streams through a giant window on the other side of her living room, over a pile of what looks like the contents of my closet. I can see my favorite ice-blue skirt sitting on top of the pile, and my white Vans sticking out from under the couch.