“Oh,” the mom said with a shocked exhalation, “you are . . . tall. You can’t tell that on TV.”
“Nathan,” Everett said, focusing on the boy, “I’m glad you’re wearing a helmet on your scooter. Gotta keep that big brain safe, right?”
“That’s what Mom says,” Nathan agreed.
“Well, your mom’s a smart woman,” Everett said, and Teddy could swear the woman looked like she was about to faint.
“Okay,” Nathan said, losing interest. “We’re gonna go get hot chocolate. I’ll see you in your TV house.”
“Bye, Nathan!” Everett said, waving as the boy scooted away. He nodded at Nathan’s mom, who tucked her hair behind her ears and stealthily looked Everett up and down.
“Uh, wow,” Teddy said once they were out of earshot.
“What?” Everett asked, taking her hand again.
“I never thought I’d see a message board mom come to life,” Teddy said, shaking her head in wonder.
Everett frowned. “Really? All she said was that I was tall. That’s an indisputable fact.”
“It was the way she said it,” Teddy said. “There was a lot of subtext in that indisputable fact. What she said was ‘You’re tall,’ but the unspoken part was ‘like a tree I’d love to climb.’”
Everett threw his head back and laughed, that unselfconscious, unbridled laugh that made Teddy’s whole body shimmer like a disco ball. “That was not what I heard. I think this one might be on you. You might just have an incredibly dirty mind, assigning sexual-tree subtext to a woman who was simply noting my height.”
Teddy shrugged. “All I’m saying is, maybe next time you ought to play to your mom audience a bit more when you meet a fan. Shake her hand. Compliment her hair. Give her one of those Everett St. James smiles.”
They stopped walking and sat down on a bench by the pond, where they could watch the elephants on the fountain shoot water out of their trunks. “Teddy, are you suggesting that my success is merely a product of my devastating good looks and not a combination of talent and hard work?”
“Yes.” Teddy nodded. “You’re all style, no substance. But what can I say? It makes me feel good to have some eye candy on my arm.”
Everett laughed.
“Okay, can I be serious for a second?” Teddy asked.
“Thank you for admitting you weren’t being serious before,” Everett said. “I think my feelings were about to get hurt.”
“How often does that happen?”
“You mean, getting recognized?”
Teddy nodded.
Everett shook his head. “Not every day or anything. Most people I run into over the course of the day don’t watch local children’s television, you know? But every once in a while, a kid knows who I am.”
“Wow,” Teddy said. “That must make you feel amazing, to have someone run up to you just to tell you that you’re awesome.”
Everett shook his head. “Believe it or not, children usually don’t tell me I’m awesome. Most of the time they want to tell me long, involved stories about their pets or their imaginary friends. And anyway, I don’t want them to tell me I’m awesome. That’s not the point of doing the show.”
“What is the point of doing the show, then?” Teddy asked.
“I think . . . ,” Everett said, staring at the water. “I think we all have a calling. I know that sounds like I’m speaking from a spiritual place, and you can look at it that way, but that’s not what I mean. I just think that all of us have a way we can best help the world, you know? Everyone has a gift. And as much as I might wish I could be—I don’t know—a doctor who saves lives, the truth is that I’d be a pretty shitty doctor. I don’t like blood and I don’t like hospitals and I can get distracted, so I’d probably take out the wrong organ when doing an appendectomy.”
Teddy laughed.
“But I am good with kids, and I’m good at being on television, and when I do those things, I can help the most people. For whatever reason, I can talk to kids and they listen to me. I can help kids understand their feelings and try to figure out what to do with them. I don’t want to sound like I think my work is any more important than what other people do, because it’s not. But it’s my work, and it’s all I can do, so I just . . . I don’t know. I just do it. I guess that’s the whole point.”
Teddy watched him watching the fountain and thought about the nonchalant way he’d talked about his talents. The way he’d said “I’m good at being on television” and managed not to make it sound like he was bragging . . . because he wasn’t. It wasn’t a measure of his importance or his worth, the way Richard used his career to justify everything he did and the way he treated other people.
Everett turned to look at Teddy and laughed. “Oh, no. Why are you looking at me like that? Am I being insufferably pretentious over here, talking about my work? You can tell me to shut up. Just say, ‘Everett, please stop—’”
Teddy leaned over and pressed her mouth into his.
“Okay, this works, too,” Everett muttered, pulling her to him.
Teddy put her hands on his face, feeling his warm skin under her fingers as the wind blew and cold air swirled around them. We are in public, she reminded her logical brain, but her logical brain responded with an out-of-office message. Her libido was steering the ship now, and it had charted a course for the land of public indecency.
She felt Everett’s hand move farther up her thigh and her logical brain stepped back into the office. There could be viewers around. Children. Anyone.
“Wait. Stop,” Teddy said, breathing hard.
Everett pulled back. “You’re right. We’re on a bench in a public park. We should stop.”
“Can we go to your place?” Teddy asked, her hands still on his cheeks.
Everett blinked a few times. “I mean . . . yes. Yes, we absolutely can.”
Teddy paused for a moment, trying to remember dating advice she’d read in an ancient issue of Cosmo when she was in high school and trying to act more like a normal girl. Most of it had been sex tips that were supremely irrelevant to her life back then, but there was one piece of advice she remembered: don’t sleep with a man too soon.
“We can play Candy Land,” she said forcefully.
Everett paused. “Is that . . . a euphemism? Because I don’t understand it. Can I look it up on Urban Dictionary before I agree to anything?”
Teddy laughed. “The board game. I just bought it for my niece and nephew and it’s in my car. I thought maybe we could give it a test drive.”