We needed a grand gesture. The tropiest of tropes. The heart and soul of every eighties rom-com. The very thing I’m pretty sure had turned my mom into a lifelong romantic. And I had the best/worst idea on what to do.
I went down to the basement and dug out Gram’s old boom box from the 1980s, and blessed her for never throwing anything away. It probably didn’t work since it had been rotting in the basement for at least twenty years, but it didn’t matter. I had Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” already downloaded on my phone. It would have to do. I’d stand in front of Paxton’s bedroom window like Lloyd stood outside Diane’s in Say Anything, and it would be cheesy and sweet and awful enough that he would have to talk to me.
I went out the front, around the house, and cut through the woods to Paxton’s. Bumblebees hummed over wildflowers as the morning sun cast a greenish glow through the canopy of leaves. The world still rolled on peacefully, while my insides twisted worse than the summer storms that would blow our kiddie pool into the next neighborhood. This had to work. I wanted him, I missed my friend, and I was tired of waiting for him to figure out how much he missed me too. Besides, I’d already been humiliated, shamed, lost all sense of right and honesty, so it wasn’t like I had a whole lot more to lose. Like Midnight had said, sometimes you just had to go through it before you figured out what you were really made of.
I’d just reached the top of the hill, when I spotted an unfamiliar car in the driveway. Lisbeth stood on the front porch in her nursing home uniform. Loose tendrils of gray hair had come undone from her bun. Gigi was next to Lisbeth, her arm around Paxton, who kept his head down, as if waiting for the ground to swallow him up. The three of them stood before a middle-aged couple. The woman had soft brown hair, the same shade as Paxton’s, and she was crying. The man next to her frowned, and the familiar expression stirred something in me. Even though the man was years older, I’d seen the same look on Paxton’s face the night I’d told him about my arrangement with Eric. Same nose, same jawline, same downward tilt of his mouth.
A lead weight dropped in my stomach as the realization set in. I was looking at Paxton’s parents. The ones everyone assumed were dead.
A twig snapped under my foot and everyone turned to look at me standing at the edge of the property line. Paxton lifted his head, and when he caught my gaze, the fear pouring out of him nearly knocked me over. It was a million times worse than the day he’d shown up at my house when the bloggers were there. A worry line creased across Gigi’s forehead as she looked between the two of us. My palms were sweating so bad, I nearly dropped the boom box. Then I hurled the boom box into the woods, because I suddenly realized how immensely ridiculous I must’ve looked. I didn’t know what to say or what to do with my body.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I choked out. “I’m not really here. You didn’t see me. I’m so sorry.”
Without waiting for anyone to respond, I backed away and disappeared into the trees.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
PAXTON’S PARENTS WERE ALIVE. I had no idea what that meant. He’d been living with Lisbeth and Gigi for nine years, wouldn’t drive, wouldn’t talk about why. Everyone in town assumed his parents had died in a car accident and he had some kind of survivor’s guilt.
Maybe his parents were drug addicts, even though they didn’t really look like it, but Eric hadn’t looked like a vampire, and Midnight certainly didn’t look like the fresh-faced farm girl I knew from school either. Looks were super-deceiving. Or maybe they were horrific abusers. The thought of that made my heart ache. Whatever had happened when Paxton was nine was bad enough that he still didn’t want to talk about it, and I’d just interrupted a very intense family meeting with my boy drama.
I flopped onto a beach recliner in the Hamptons and nearly took off my sandal to dip my feet in the water, when I remembered that Gram had had her raptor foot in there and Mom hadn’t gotten the chance to bleach the pool yet. My next movie review was due to be uploaded tomorrow, but I didn’t have anything prepared, and I didn’t care. I had no energy.
“Hey.” Paxton stood at the edge of the Hamptons, his hands in his pockets.
I nearly fell off my beach recliner. “Hi.”
We stared at each other for what felt like a full minute, not saying anything. I didn’t know if he was waiting for an invitation into the Hamptons. It’s not like I’d ever bothered to ask permission before I’d wandered into his backyard.
“You can sit down,” I said. “Don’t put your feet in the pool.”
“Okay.” He took the lawn chair I’d sat in when Gram and Peg had gotten high. “Do I want to know why you showed up at my house at eight in the morning with a boom box?”
“I was trying to be cute.” I hit play on the Peter Gabriel song on my phone and held my arms over my head where the boom box would’ve been if I hadn’t thrown it into the woods. When he cracked a smile, I shut the song off. “An important moment in cinematic history.”
“You don’t need gimmicks to be cute.” He stared at his hands. “I think you’re cute all the time, just the way you are.”
My face heated. “You do still?”
“I’m sorry.” He knotted his fingers together with his head bent low, as if in prayer. “I’ve been a complete asshole. I know you saw right through my date with Strawberry, but I still shouldn’t have brought her to movie night. Seeing you go viral triggered a lot of things for me, and seeing you embrace it is hard. But you were right. It is your life, and your decision, and my personal issues shouldn’t get in the way of the things you’re trying to do.”
All the lingering doubt I had about keeping things going with Eric vanished. I didn’t need gimmicks or the Fly Ball Girl persona. I just needed to be me. And if that wasn’t good enough for the Twitter masses and my recent subscribers, then I didn’t need their approval anyway. The people I knew, the ones I cared about, liked me just fine.
They were the only ones who mattered.
“I miss you,” I said.
Paxton’s gaze was blazing. “I miss you more than you can possibly know.”
“I’m going to do a thing, and I want you to watch.” And wow, inuendo. Judging by Paxton’s smirk, he hadn’t missed it either. I fumbled with my phone as I strived to recover from my awkward wording. “I’m shutting down the Baseball Babe stuff.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to. It’s not good for my mental health.” The constant scrolling, the sleepless nights, the anxiety, the nightmares … I couldn’t do it anymore. Twitter was slowly eating me alive, and the more I engaged, the hungrier it became.
I proceeded to delete every tweet I’d sent in the last week. Next I flipped over to the Video Manager in YouTube. With only a small pang for the lost revenue, I deleted both of my Eric videos. I also deleted the Dirty Dancing video for good measure. The movie my mom had used to teach me about reproductive rights deserved better. And so did the subscribers who’d been with me before Baseball Babe.
“I’m done with all of it.” I stood and Paxton watched me with increasing intensity as I sat on his lap and wrapped my arms around his neck. “I don’t want to be the person who gives away their entire sense of self for clicks. I never wanted to be that person.”