“Ah, the Thorne legacy.”
I frowned. “Everyone compares his writing to my grandmother’s, even though it’s not the same genre. He tried to publish with a pseudonym, but that left him invisible.”
Eamon tapped Annie’s case. “Are you going to ride the Thorne name into being a rock star then? Sold out concerts and platinum records?”
This boy had a lot to learn.
“Mind, I don’t blame you. Everyone wants to be Taylor Swift. I wouldn’t mind being Taylor Swift.” He started singing “Bad Blood” in an unfortunately decent voice.
“Stop.”
He grinned, and I dared to trust him with the truth.
“I’m a songwriter.” There was something tricky about that sentence. Like the person I was saying it to might disagree—and maybe they’d be right.
“Can I hear a song?”
“No!” I was starting to feel nauseous, and it wasn’t the windy roads. “I write songs for other people to play and sing.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Says the guy who gets paid to read lines someone else wrote.”
“Touché, love.” He shrugged, crystal eyes on the road. I knew people said things like that here, but it didn’t make it any less strange.
The horizon was a patchwork of greens sewed up with zigzagging stone walls. It was pretty but rural. “So where are we going? And when do we get to a hotel with beds and showers?”
“How many showers does one young Los Angelino like yourself need?” His comebacks had amazing speed, but I gave him a side-eye instead of a compliment. “My orders are to bring you to Doolin, and then onto the ferry to Inishmore, where they’re filming this week.”
“Ferry?”
“It’s grand. And wait till you see the set. It’ll steal your breath.”
“I like breathing.”
Ryder’s face popped up between the front seats, gleefully woken by the sounds of my horror, no doubt. “We’re going on set? Today? In a boat?”
“Well, no,” Eamon said, surprising me. “We’re only going if your sister is up to it. After all, it’s been a long night for both of you.”
“Hotel,” I said.
Ryder wriggled around the passenger seat, breathing in my ear. “Please, oh please, Iris? I will sit so still and not do a single thing I’m not supposed to.”
I checked my brother’s eyes for sincerity. He was eight now, and yet he still looked like the six-year-old who’d started screaming from the other side of the playground—a man’s arm around his waist, dragging him toward a van. I’d never run so fast. I’d never been so scared.
I rubbed at the raised hair on my arms. Two years later, and I still got chills, which were always followed by my dad’s voice in my head saying, That’s cliché description, Iris.
Ryder’s baby dragon breath was all over me—stale ketchup and bologna.
“You don’t leave my side,” I said. “Promise?” He nodded; I wasn’t the only one who remembered every detail of what had happened that day.
• • •
Hours later, the frigid Atlantic sprayed my face every time the ferry crested a swell. Eamon and Ryder were overjoyed, skittering across the deck together, already brothers in mischief. At least the cement sky had cracked apart to reveal a striking blue.
“Cate reserved this vessel for the entire shoot. The captain said he’d take us ’round to see the filming,” Eamon yelled over the engines. “Then we’ll dock and meet up with the crew.” I held the rail and tried not to breathe the dank mold smell of the ancient life preserver around my neck just as Ryder cried out, pointing at a great cliff wall topped by an ancient stone formation. “Dun Aengus,” Eamon yelled. “It’s a prehistoric fort dating back to the Iron Age.”
But I wasn’t looking at the ruin.
On top of the cliff, I squinted at a few dozen crew members, towers of equipment, a camera on a crane, and a woman wearing what can only be described as a Gandalf bathrobe. At the water level, a girl with massive hair gripped the sides of an old-world rowboat. It was tethered by bright-green ropes to a high-tech raft that ran its motor hard to keep the waves from pressing all of them into the rock wall. A helicopter buzzed overhead, and I whipped my head back to see a cameraman and his equipment leaning out of the open side door.
“That’s so dangerous,” I breathed.
“This will be the remains of Manifest,” Eamon explained with a mischievous grin that actually made him look like an elf. “Imagine the CGI! There will be pieces of fallen towers and castles jutting up from the water like a watery graveyard of a city.” Eamon pointed to the Gandalf woman atop the cliff. “And that’s Maedina!”
“Who?” I yelled over the sound of the circling helicopter.
“What?” he yelled back.
“You’re wasting your time, Nolan,” Ryder said, most of his head swallowed by his life preserver. “Iris won’t read the books. She doesn’t know about any of it.”
“No, serious?” he asked, crystal eyes wide and mouth gaping.
“Geez, I don’t have cancer,” I shouted. “I’m just not into fantasy.”
“But your grandma—”
“Only met her once. She died when I was eight.”
“But—” Eamon cut himself off this time, still peering at me like I’d told him I had two months to live. The ferry pulled away from the raucous shooting, and the thundering ferry engines no longer felt loud enough to fill the quiet.
I turned to the rail, gripping the bitingly cold metal and trying not to look back at the chaos of the filming, trying to stop the truth that now buzzed in my mind like that helicopter.
This wasn’t going to be eleven days.
This movie was going to alter the rest of my life.
I now understood what had gotten my dad so fiery when we had first met with Cate Collins. Movies blew stories up. There would be posters, sequels, GIFs. Merchandise! Hot Topic would produce a trail mix of Thornian crap overnight. And that’s if the movies were well received.
What if they were horrible?
I’d have a huge joke attached to my last name.
TROUBLES
