Gone

“You’re accident-prone.”

“My mom used to say I was an accident waiting to happen. I’d get her to buy me good jeans, and then I’d rip the knees and she’d get upset and promise never to buy me anything anymore.”

She touched her left temple. Caught some hair between her fingers and twisted. Pouted. That reminded me of someone. I watched her fidget and it finally came to me: young Brigitte Bardot.

Would she know who that was?

She said, “My head’s been spi

“The legal system can be overwhelming.”

“I never thought I’d be in the system! I mean, I don’t even watch crime stuff on TV. My mom reads mysteries but I hate them.”

“What do you read?”

She’d turned aside, didn’t answer. I repeated the question.

“Oh, sorry, I spaced out. What do I read…Us magazine. People, Elle, you know.”

“How about we talk about what happened?”

“Sure, sure…it was just supposed to be…maybe Dylan and I took it too far but my acting teacher, her big thing is that the whole point of the training is to lose yourself and enter the scene, you really need to abandon the self, you know, the ego. Just give yourself up to the scene and flow.”

“That’s what you and Dylan were doing,” I said.

“I guess I started out thinking we were doing that and I guess…I really don’t know what happened. It’s so crazy, how did I get into this craziness?”

She slammed a fist into an open hand, shuddered, threw up her arms. Began crying softly. A vein throbbed in her neck, pumping through cover-up, accentuating a bruise.

I handed her a tissue. Her fingers lingered on my knuckles. She sniffled. “Thanks.”

I sat back down. “So you thought you were doing what Nora Dowd taught you.”

“You know Nora?”

“I’ve read the court documents.”

“Nora’s in the documents?”

“She’s mentioned. So you’re saying the false abduction was related to your training.”

“You keep calling it false,” she said.

“What would you like me to call it?”

“I don’t know…something else. The exercise. How about that? That’s really what it started out as.”

“An acting exercise.”

“Uh-huh.” She crossed her legs. “Nora never came out and told us to do an exercise but we thought- she was always pushing us to get into the core of our feelings. Dylan and I figured we’d…” She bit her lip. “It was never supposed to go that far.”

She touched her temple again. “I must’ve been whack. Dylan and I were just trying to be artistically authentic. Like when I tied him up and wrapped the rope around myself, I held it around my neck for a while to make sure it would leave marks.” She frowned, touched a bruise.

“I see it.”

“I knew it wouldn’t take long. To make a bruise. I bruise real easily. Maybe that’s why I don’t do pain very well.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m a crybaby about pain so I stay away from it.” She touched a spot where the scoop neck of the T-shirt met skin. “Dylan feels nothing, I mean, he’s like stone. When I tied him up, he kept saying tighter, he wanted to feel it.”

“Pain?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Not his neck at first, just his legs and arms. But even that hurts when you go tight enough, right? But he kept telling me tighter, tighter. Finally I screamed at him, I’m doing it as tight as I can.” She gazed up at the ceiling. “He just laid there. Then he smiled and said maybe you should do my neck the same way.”

“Dylan has a death wish?”

“Dylan’s a freak…it was freaky up there, dark, cold, this emptiness in the air. You could hear things crawling around.” She hugged herself. “I said this is too weird, maybe it wasn’t a good idea.”

“What did Dylan say?”

“He just laid there with his head to the side.” She closed her eyes and demonstrated. Let her mouth grow slack and showed a half inch of pointed, pink tongue. “Pretending to be dead, you know? I said, ‘Cut it out, that’s gross,’ but he refused to talk or move and finally it got to me. I rolled over to him and touched his head and he just flopped, you know?”

“Method acting,” I said.

Puzzled stare.

“It’s when you live a role completely, Michaela.”

Her eyes were somewhere else. “Whatever…”

“How soon into the exercise did you tie him up?”

“Second night, it was all the second night. He was okay before that, then he started punking me. I was letting him because I was scared. The whole thing…I was so, so stupid.”

She folded wings of golden hair forward, masking her face. I thought of a show spaniel in the ring. Handlers manipulating the ears over the nose to offer the judge a choice view of the skull.

“Dylan scared you.”

“He didn’t move for a long time,” she said.

“Were you worried you’d tied him too tight?”

She released the hair but kept her gaze low. “Honestly, I can’t tell you, even now what his motivation was. Maybe he really was unconscious, maybe he was punking me a hundred percent. He’s…it was really his idea, Doctor. I promise.”

“Dylan thought the whole thing up?”

“Everything. Like getting rope and where to go.”

“How’d he pick Latigo Canyon?”

“He said he hiked there, he likes to hike by himself, it helps him get in character.” The tongue tip glided across her lower lip, left behind a snail-trail of moisture.

“He also says one day he’s going to have a place there.”

“Latigo Canyon?”

“Malibu, but on the beach, like the Colony. He’s crazy intense.”

“About his career?”

“There are some people who put everything into a scene, you know? But later they know when to stop? Dylan can be cool when he’s just being himself, but he’s got these ambitions. Cover of People, take the place of Joh

“What are your ambitions, Michaela?”

“Me? I just want to work. TV, big screen, episodic, commercials, whatever.”

“Dylan wouldn’t be happy with that.”

“Dylan wants to be number one on the Sexiest Man List.”

“Have you talked to him since the exercise?”

“No.”

“Whose decision was that?”

“Lauritz told me to stay away.”

“Were you and Dylan pretty close before?”

“I guess. Dylan said we had natural chemistry. That’s probably why I got…swept along. The whole thing was his idea but he freaked me out up there. I’m talking to him and shaking him and he looks really…you know.”

“Dead.”

“Not that I’ve ever seen anyone really dead but when I was young I liked to watch splatter flicks. Not now, though. I get grossed out easily.”

“What’d you do when you thought Dylan looked dead?”

“I went crazy and started untying the neck rope, and he still wasn’t moving and he held his mouth open and was looking really…” She shook her head. “The atmosphere up there, I was getting freaked out. I started slapping his face and yelling at him to stop it. His head just kept flopping back and forth. Like one of those loosening exercises Nora has us do before a big scene.”

“Scary,” I said.

“Scary-terrifying. I’m dyslexic, not intense dyslexic, like illiterate or illegible, I can read okay. But it takes me a long time to memorize words. I can’t sound anything out. I mean, I can memorize my lines but I really work hard.”

“Being dyslexic made it scarier to see Dylan like that?”

“Because my head felt all scrambled up and I couldn’t think straight. And then being scared blurred it. Like my thoughts weren’t making sense- like being in another language, you know?”

“Disoriented.”

“I mean, look what I did,” she said. “Untied myself and climbed up that hill and ran out to the road without even putting my clothes on. I had to be disoriented. If I was thinking normal, would I do that? Then, after that old guy, the one on the road who…” Her frown made it as far as the left side of her mouth before retracting.