I started breathing too fast. Why didn’t he understand? He’d seen that gross, old Thornian try to touch me at the airport—and I’d told him about Felix Moss. “Google my name, Eamon. In a world where every girl has posted a thousand selfies, my face doesn’t exist on the internet. Ryder too. You don’t understand how nervous I am that you have a picture of me.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“I want to, but it’s not that easy. I don’t even take pictures with my school friends because I’m too scared of losing my phone and someone finding it. Which makes it hard to open up enough to even make friends. My family has to be private for good reason.”
“And what is that reason exactly?”
“I already told you,” I snapped. His inability to understand was making me boil.
“Remind me.”
“So you fantasy freaks can’t hunt us down!” I’d whispered the words, but it sounded like someone was holding a knife to my chest. My voice rumbled with deep aches, the kind of held-back feelings that caused earthquakes…or lightning storms.
Eamon looked away, stunned and burned, like I’d struck him.
And in a way, I guess I had.
• • •
We walked back on the cliff in silence, heading for the circle of trailers. The tension between us was dead weight, and when Eamon finally spoke, it didn’t lift in the slightest.
“Cate didn’t tell me to flirt with you, and if she did, I wouldn’t have.”
“But she told you to get me involved. To help with the movie.”
“Before you even landed. Before we found out about your history with kidnapping psychos, Iris. And you know it was hard for me to ask for that favor, because I knew you’d blow your top. I thought we were…starting to like one another.”
“And you were happy to use that advantage, huh?”
He threw his hands up. “Things are going downhill for the movie. The producers have been on Cate, checking her dailies like they’re waiting for her to screw up. I’ve been trying to get the blog up and make it popular. I’m trying to help. Don’t you want to help?”
I thought about that day on the beach with Julian, talking through his character with him. It had felt good, sort of. “I do want to help but not online.”
We paused in a shadow between two large trailers. Several yards away, the picnic tables were full of celebrating crew members beneath white, hot flood lamps. I held myself back in our shaded, secluded spot, not wanting to leave Eamon until we were done fighting. He paused too, and I hoped it was because he felt the same way.
“Sorry, Iris,” he said, his shoulders hitched toward his ears. He touched my wrist with careful fingers. “Sorry. Truly.”
I leaned closer, his hand traveling up my arm in a way that warmed me straight through the chill of the night. When my face was an inch from his neck, I stopped. I heard singing.
Strange singing.
“Eamon, do you hear that?”
He looked toward one the trailers beside us. “The bad music?”
The sound grew louder. Sharper. I started to recognize it as if I were slipping into a nightmare. I walked to the doorway, looking up the steps of the makeup trailer to where Ryder was holding out his iPad.
And there was laughter—lots of laughter—but it wasn’t loud enough to drown out my strangled voice coming from the video. I was singing my worst song. The one that had been too influenced by Florence Welch, and in which I screamed “absent” at the top of my lungs. I stepped up behind Ryder and looked at the screen. The video had been taken through a cracked open door, and you could see me wailing my heart out on my bed.
“Ryder,” I said.
He jumped, trying to hit pause, but wasn’t fast enough. I ripped the iPad from his hands and threw it out the door and over Eamon’s head. Far enough to barely hear the glass break.
“Hey!” Ryder yelled and scurried out of the trailer after it, leaving me with the worst feeling I’d ever had. I didn’t even know how to describe it.
Julian and Shoshanna were giggling, sitting in captain’s chairs and still wearing their fantasy garb. Roxanne was there too, using a Q-tip to loosen the scalp line of Julian’s Frodo wig. She wasn’t giggling, and that kind of hurt more than if she had been. She knew this was bad.
“Don’t get mad, Iris.” Julian sat forward, and Roxanne hissed. “We wanted to hear you play.”
“Can’t believe I liked hanging out with you guys yesterday,” I managed, feeling choked. Shoshanna quit giggling first; she smacked Julian until he stopped.
I left, running straight into Ryder. He was pouting over his broken iPad. “I can’t believe you, Ry! I can’t even…” I broke inside with one of those ugly hiccup sobs, and then Eamon was there, trying to touch my back, and I snapped, “Leave us alone!”
I grabbed Ryder’s arm and hauled him away. When we were inside our trailer, door shut tight behind us, he pulled out of my grip. “Stop dragging me around, Iris! I’m not your baby!”
“Of course not! You’re my responsibility. And how could you?”
He shrugged, avoiding my glare.
“So you wanted to embarrass me because I embarrassed you, is that it?”
He kept looking away.
“That’s such a stupid, little-kid thing to do,” I said even though I knew it wasn’t. It was a very teenage, backstabbing thing to do. “Why do you have that video?”
“I came home early with Dad, and we heard you playing, and he said, ‘Let’s tape her.’”
My hands shook as I picked up Annie and put her in her case. I wanted to break her. To never pick up a guitar again after hearing that terrible hate strumming and my harpy wailing. Was I really that bad? No. That video had to be six months old, but still… I thought about the melody I’d fingerpicked on the cliff earlier. I’d thought it was
