Page 9 of Sleeper: The Palisades Edition

Before he let go of my hand, I lifted his hand to my mouth and kissed the back of it. I didn’t make a kissy sound or anything, I just kissed his hand like I was some actor in a Jane Austen movie. I had never done anything like that before, but it just felt like the thing to do. I wasn’t even embarrassed about it. I let go of his hand, looked up into his stunned face, shrugged my shoulders, and said, “Okay well, bye.” Because I knew I’d see him again. We’d have our life together, eventually.

“Yeah,” he said, cocking his head to one side and staring at me quizzically. “Okay. Bye.”

He turned and jogged away, past my brother, swatted him on the arm with his script, and disappeared from my view as he was surrounded by makeup and costume people and other crew members.

My brother was now the one who couldn’t move. Because he was doubled over laughing so hard. He covered his face and shook his head. “That was the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.” He sighed and wiped a tear from the corner of his eye. “I am never introducing you to my friends again.” He finally walkedover and patted me on the back. “But that was awesome. Let’s get Grams, and then I gotta do a big scene, and we will never speak of this again.”

I didn’t care what he thought, or if we never spoke of it again.

I clutched the magazine to my heart and waited until I was alone in the foot doctor’s waiting room to read what Shane had written.

He had drawn a cartoony speech bubble above his photo, and the words inside it said,Hey Willa, you’re cool and you smell nice!with his autograph below, near one of his legs. He drew an arrow that pointed to the other leg and wrote,Faded blue jeans. Fave color.On the other page, he wroteNice to finally meet you! Hope you always get the smell you want when you mix things together. Is that weird? You know what I mean ;-)

Itwasweird. And Ididknow what he meant. He meant that he knew he was meant to be my boyfriend too.

I may have re-livedthat encounter one to five thousand times for a year—or five—afterwards. I wore nothing but faded jeans for the next few years. I only told a couple of my friends about meeting him, once I’d gotten home. It felt like every time I talked about it, it became less real.

So I’d kept it to myself, knowing that we were a match—the performer and the perfumer.

I knew that I would see Shane again.

But I didn’t.

Six years later, when I found out that Nico was going to be the best man at Shane’s wedding to his costar from that CW show, I burned the Tiger Beat magazine and gave away my V-card to the idiot who’d taken me to prom. Then I was off to college, and I never spoke the name Shane Miller out loud again.

Still, part of me believed that his marriage to Margo Quincey couldn’t possibly last.

When I heard that he had become a father, I tried so hard to make all thoughts of him disappear. I had met him one time. It was just an adolescent girl’s celebrity crush. He was just being nice to me, the way he was nice to everyone. But it’s like trying to remove the dried-down middle and base note scents of an oriental perfume from your skin once it has been absorbed at a pulse point. Even when you can’t smell it anymore, others can. I wore my heartache like an invisible veil.

When I heard that he had gotten divorced, well…I was in France. I was just starting to mix things and make them smell the way that I wanted them to. But the heat of my body still emits activated molecules of Shane Miller where he touched me, twelve years later.

It wasn’t love, but it was my imagination about what love could be that came alive when he took my hand. It bloomed and reacted with the warmth of my body, and suddenly I felt like the girl that I wanted to be. It’s chemistry. I’d tried to smash against the molecules of others, but they’d all been volatile top notes that faded and evaporated almost in an instant.

“Yo. Earth to space nerd.” My brother snaps his fingers in front of my face, bringing me back to the conversation.

I suddenly realize that I’ve been absentmindedly sniffing my wrist and the palm of my hand like a weirdo. “I just meant that I’d almost forgotten you guys were friends,” I say to Nico. “I haven’t thought about him in so long. But I’ll hang out with you guys, sure. Whatever.”

THREE

SHANE

The kitchen is now clean-ish, and I didn’t fall asleep facedown in hummus once, so that’s a win.

I still have to Skype my ex-wife and deal with the nanny situation, get in touch with my agent, get groceries, and maybe—maybe—I’ll have time for a grown-up shower and a nap before picking up the kids.

It’s around seven at night in Warsaw, so I might be able to catch Margo. There was a time in my life, long ago, when I couldn’t wait to Skype with her if we were in different cities. Right now I’m dreading it. We get along well, but she’s so predictable. I always know exactly how our conversations are going to play out before I start talking to her. It’s like that with most of the women I’ve dated, to be honest.

One thing I did not predict from Margo when we were dating—that she’d get pregnant. We had just found out that our CW showTwice Bittenwould not be renewed for a third season, and it was clear—in an unspoken way—that our relationship would endonce the show did. Then one day I was summoned to her trailer, found her sobbing, listened to her explain to me that she had made up her mind and I could be as involved or not involved as I wanted to be, but she would be having this baby. Then I calmly explained to her that I would be as involved a father as legally possible. That meant marrying her.

Was I just trying to do the right thing? Yeah. Were we in love with each other? No. Were we both hoping that at some point maybe we’d both magically fall in love with each other after saying our vows and enduring the trials and tribulations of parenthood? Probably. But we both hated the dating scene in LA, loved the idea of playing house, and to be honest…we did not mind that being young married parents would help casting directors to see us as more than just teenage vampires.

Once the babies came, we grew the fuck up almost overnight and not much else mattered. We both fell head over heels in love with these little people we had created, but…it wasn’t enough to keep our marriage together.

We tried.

No breakup is easy when there are kids involved. There’s always guilt. But we really did always want what was best for everyone.

I think people have this idea of child actors growing up wild and spoiled rotten, completely out of touch with reality, in and out of rehab. Obviously there are a few of those out there, but every single one I’ve known is extremely disciplined and maybe even a little hungrier for a stable life than most people—and protective of what we have once we’ve found some semblance of it. Which is why my ex and I are on the same page when itcomes to raising our kids with as much consistency as possible.