Страница 13 из 60
“Hello?” she called out, laying her book down on her lap. Her voice sounded strange even to her, wavery and thin. She heard the person take another step forward, and though she was blinking hard, her eyes still hadn’t adjusted enough to see who it was. “Qui
This time, there was the sound of a throat being cleared, and Ellie realized it wasn’t Qui
“Sorry, I didn’t meant to scare you,” the person said, a deep male voice that carried across the lawn as the blurry figure approached. “It’s just… me.”
He took a few steps closer, and like someone emerging from the water, he seemed to appear in pieces; first his eyes, then his mouth, then finally the rest of his features, coming into focus all at once as the light fell across him to reveal the familiar face of Graham Larkin.
He’d been in only two movies so far—the highly anticipated final installment of the Top Hat series wouldn’t be out until later in the summer—and though Ellie hadn’t seen either one of them, she was still aware of his usual range of expressions from the many times she’d seen him on talk shows and red carpets. There was always something brooding about him, an edge of impatience. But now, standing here on the bottom step of her front porch, he looked nothing if not sheepish, and it was all so unexpected, so entirely unlikely, that her first instinct was to laugh.
He said nothing, but his mouth turned down at the corners, and he reached up and rubbed at the back of his neck. He was wearing a blue-and-white-checked shirt with a pair of sunglasses dangling from the pocket, looking oddly uncertain, and it almost felt to Ellie like the whole thing was staged, like she’d fallen into a scene from a movie.
“Sorry, I’m—”
“I know who you are,” she said. “Where’s Qui
He looked at her blankly for a moment, and then his eyes seemed to snap into focus. “Oh,” he said. “She told me where you lived.”
Ellie tilted her head at him. “Why? And if it didn’t go well, how come you’re here and not her?”
“There was kind of a mix-up, actually,” he said, coming up to the middle step. He smelled of mint and something else, something soapy. It was intoxicating, in a way, being this close to him. He looked like he was waiting for her to ask what he was talking about, but she remained silent, pressing her back against the screen door, and after a moment, he cleared his throat. “She was wearing your shirt.”
Ellie frowned. “What?”
“Earlier today,” he said. “At the ice-cream place.”
“Okay…” she said, unsure where he was going with this.
“So I thought she was you.”
“Why?” she asked. “You don’t know me.”
“That’s why I thought she might be you.”
Ellie gave him a hard look, then turned to scan the darkness behind him. “Are you filming a reality show or something? Is this some kind of joke?”
Graham jerked his head from side to side. “No, why?”
“Because I’m really confused,” she said. Behind her, the dog—a little beagle with floppy ears—had appeared at the door, his black nose pressed against the screen, his tail wagging. Ellie ignored him, her eyes trained on Graham, who seemed equally thrown off; he was either a really good actor or he was just as confused as she was. “Did Qui
“No,” he said as the dog began to whine. “I swear.”
“Then what?” she demanded. “What do you want?”
He looked slightly taken aback by this, and Ellie suspected it wasn’t often that people spoke to him that way. But it had been a long day, and she was tired, and having a movie star on her front porch was feeling less like some kind of sweepstakes prize and more like an unclassifiable problem.
“You’re E. O’Neill,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but a simple fact, and Ellie eyed him suspiciously.
“Aren’t movie stars supposed to have stalkers?”
For the first time, his face slipped into a smile. “Yeah, I guess this must seem pretty weird,” he said. “I’m just excited to finally meet you.”
She let out a short laugh. “Again, isn’t that something I should be saying?”
The dog began to paw at the screen door, his whimpers turning into full-fledged howls, and Ellie knew that it wouldn’t be long before Mom emerged to let him out.
“Shush,” she muttered, and he sat back on his haunches and fell abruptly quiet.
Graham leaned to look past her. “Hey, Bagel.”
Ellie had been half turned to face the dog, but now she whirled back around again. “How do you know his name?”
“You told me,” he said, and then paused before continuing, as if this were a matter of no real importance. “It’s a great name for a beagle. Really clever. I was a lot less creative with Wilbur.”
Her heart was beating fast now, her thoughts tripping over themselves, but when she spoke, her words were measured. “You have a dog named Wilbur?”
Graham’s eyes met hers, and he shook his head. In the dim lighting, his face remained neutral, but there was a smile just below the surface, and his eyes were giving him away.
“Nope,” he said, and Ellie’s head felt suddenly light. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing emerged.
Graham was smiling now as he watched her. “Wilbur,” he said quietly, “is my pig.”
Ellie nodded. “Wilbur is your pig,” she mumbled, trying to force her mind to catch up. She drew in a shaky breath and looked at him carefully. It was like the simplest of math problems; the answer was right there in front of her, but even so, a part of her was still having trouble believing it.
All this time, it had been him. All those e-mails, all those late-night conversations. All those silly details about school and her mom and everything else. All that thinly veiled flirting. All this time, she’d been writing to Graham Larkin.
She’d told him about the poems in the frames, and how she liked to pretend to be a tourist sometimes, falling into step behind large families with cameras. She’d written about how she learned to juggle this winter when there were no customers at the shop. She’d babbled on about the location of her locker and the unfairness of her chemistry teacher, the reasons she liked winter better than summer and her failed attempt at planting flowers this spring. She’d confessed that she loathed her freckles and that she hated her toes. She’d even admitted that she didn’t really like lobster.
And now here he was, standing on her front porch with his thousand-watt smile and his perfect hair and those eyes of his, which seemed to go right through her, and she knew what she was supposed to do. She’d seen the movies. But to her surprise, Ellie didn’t feel ecstatic or lovestruck or even incredulous.
What she felt instead was embarrassed.
“You should’ve told me you were you,” she said, her cheeks hot. “Were you trying to make me look stupid?”
Graham stared at her, unable to hide his surprise, and Ellie couldn’t help taking a small amount of pride in this. Most girls probably tiptoed around him, but she wasn’t one of them. She might have been duped, she might have been made to look like an idiot, but at least she wasn’t some kind of groupie.
“No,” he said, and then he said it again: “No. Not at all.”
“Then what?” Ellie demanded, meeting his gaze with a level stare.
“It was just an accident, and then I didn’t say anything because—”
“Well, you should have,” she told him. “If you had, I never would have…”
Graham raised his eyebrows. “You never would have told me all that stuff?” he said with a little nod, then lifted his shoulders. “Exactly.”