I shake my head. “How?” I say.
Wyatt laughs. He clocks my shoulder. “PG,” he says. “You’re a pretty girl and a great actress, but sometimes you can be really thick.”
“A great actress? Now I know you’re lying.”
“Nah,” he says. “That one is all truth.” Wyatt looks at me. His curly hair seems to have grown six inches outward in this salt air while we’ve been talking.
“I don’t want to do this without you,” I say. “Are you really not coming back?”
Wyatt chucks me under the chin softly. “I’m here now,” he says. “Let’s talk about what you need to do.”
Wyatt lays out rules. No partying, no shopping, no staged paparazzi pics with “the crew.” No dating movie stars. No drinking. Get a non-Lockedjob. When he leaves, I pull open my laptop. Alexis is outside, talking on the phone. I see her hands gesturing wildly.
Hour by hour, the story continues to spread. It’s posted in even more places than it was this morning. It feels like the entire Internet is devoted to hating me. There are real-world problems, there isnews, but none of that is front and center. It’s just me, my body pressed against the side door of a hotel, and Jordan leaning over me.
FANSRAGE ATRAIGE
They don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re wrong. I want to throw my computer across the room. I want to make my own YouTube video, give an interview, anything to have a voice in this deafening chorus of cries. The whole world is a bully, and I can’t defend myself. I can just go into the bathroom, balance my lunch tray on my lap, and cry.
This is what I’ve been afraid of, and it’s just as bad as I thought it would be.
And then I see a headline. EXCLUSIVE: CLOSESOURCESPEAKSOUTABOUTPAIGE ANDJORDAN’SAFFAIR
My blood turns to ice in my veins.
I click on the link with shaky fingers.
A source close to Paige Townsen, a young woman who asked to remain anonymous, spoke exclusively to Fansugar regarding the Paige/Jordan affair. “I know Paige had feelings for Jordan for a long time. Since he first got to set. They hooked up once or twice when Rainer was away. She’s pretty fickle. She used to date a guy in Portland who was a friend, but she ditched him for Rainer the second she got to Maui.”
I feel my heartbeat slow to a stop in my chest. No one knew about Jake. No one but my family, and Cassandra.
“It won’t last with Jordan, and it won’t last with Rainer. Paige would never admit this, but she’s not reliable in love. She’s in over her head.”
I think about the two times Cassandra has been out here. At the premiere, I told her everything about Jordan. How I’d fallen for him on Maui and how confused I was. But there’s no way she’d do this. I know Alexis and Georgina warned me about old friends, but they don’t know Cassandra like I do. Cassandra isCassandra.
But how did they find out? Who sold me out? Is it possible I told Alexis or Georgina that Jake and I used to date? Would they do this?
I think about Alexis, how kind she has been. And Georgina offering us her home to hide out. I have no idea.
The only conclusion I can come to is that you can’t trust anyone, not a single soul.
I close the laptop. I feel light-headed and nauseous. I blink a few times and see Alexis at the door, a pitcher of lemonade in her hands.
She comes toward me, a concerned look on her face. “Everything okay?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “It’s not.”
The breakup with Rainer is brutal. It feels like shards of glass swimming around in my chest cavity. But now I don’t even know who I can talk to. I have no idea who I can trust. And that, that isolation, that’s like a puncture straight to the heart.
Alexis pulls a glass down and hands me a cup. Then she puts her arm around me. She’s so much taller that I just lean into her side. “You have to tune it out and turn it off,” she says. “It’s the only way you’ll survive.”
“I guess so,” I say. Add it to the list of things I didn’t know about this life. I didn’t know getting to do what I love would mean giving up the freedom to be who I am. I didn’t know that the world would decide that for me. I didn’t know I’d have to hold things so close to my chest they wouldn’t even have the space to breathe.
CHAPTER 10
“It’sThe Little Mermaidbut for teens. You would play the girl who is torn between her merman love and a human.”
I look at Sandy. We’ve been in the office of my agent, Amanda, for forty-five minutes, and all I’ve heard are ideas for other YA franchises. Angels incarnated as mean girls, a princess who turns out to be an alien and takes over the nation. When Wyatt told me to get a job, I don’t think this is what he meant. I half expect them to start pitching me a love triangle about gnomes in outer space.
