“Do you ever think about going back?”
“Never.”
“Why did you leave?”
I should have expected that question, but it still catches me off guard. Like I told him yesterday, I thought for sure he already knew. There were plenty of stories about me when I left, most of them wildly untrue but some of them close to being right. But a part of me doesn’t want him to see me differently, even if it doesn’t matter. I won’t see him after this week.
Derek’s jaw tightens when I remain silent, though I wouldn’t say he looks angry. I think he’s more disappointed than anything. “I get not wanting to talk about hard things,” he says, his words gentle. “But you can trust me.”
“I do trust you,” I tell him honestly, even as my fight or flight response starts kicking in, leaving me restless because there’s nowhere for me to go. “But I’ve only ever wanted to forget my past and leave it behind me. You won’t see me the same way.”
“Try me.”
“I was…” Ugh, this is harder than it should be! I’ve become someone new, so I shouldn’t be afraid of who I was. But that’s easier said than done. With how visceral my reaction was yesterday when Derek figured out who I am, it’s clear I’m not as over my past issues as I thought I was. Shifting in my seat to a more comfortable position, I clasp my hands on top of my head and take a deep breath. “I got my first movie role when I was seven, when my parents took a chance and brought me to LA.”
Derek smiles. “I know.”
Right.My mind flashes back to his words last night, when he told me about his crush. “I still can’t believe you were a fan,” I mutter.
“Iama fan,” he corrects.
He won’t be for long. Curling my fingers into fists, I slowly relax my hands as I keep talking, hoping the rest of my body will relax too. “Because I was so young, it was easy for the fame to go to my head. I thought I was all that and a bag of chips.”
“You were,” Derek says with a smirk that leaves me warm.
I’m going to ignore that. “Well, my ego started causing problems. I was more than entitled. Idemandedrespect and for everything to go my way. I yelled at directors when they tried to do a scene in a way I didn’t like, and I was rude to my costars and even worse to crewmembers.
“I had a…” I grit my teeth with this one. “…secret relationship… With one of my costars. I was fifteen. He was nineteen.” With my hair already in a braid, I have nothing to do with my hands, so I brush some sand from one of the bags strapped beneath me. Anything to keep from looking at Derek. “We never, you know,didanything. He was too afraid of getting arrested for being with a minor if I ever told anyone we were dating. But I thought we were in love, and I convinced him to run away with me after the premiere.”
Scoffing, I wrap my arms around my legs and tuck my chin in my life jacket, grateful for the brim of my hat keeping my face hidden from Derek. “I wasa kid. He wasn’t that much older than me, but he should have known better. I was so convinced that he wasluckyto be with me, that he was going to stay with me forever because he would never be able to do better than me, and I wanted to see the world with him.
“We didn’t get very far.” I sigh. “At some point between LA and Vegas, he came to the brilliant conclusion that he was being an idiot, and whenwe stopped at a gas station, he called my parents. They met us in Vegas, and instead of taking me back to California, they drove straight to Utah. To Pops.”
I finally lift my head and gesture to the river around us, still not looking at Derek. “And Pops brought me here. For an entire summer, he took me on every single one of his trips and ignored my complaints and pleadings to let me go back to my life. By the end of the season, I was…”
I shrug. “Tired. So tired. It was like I had been one step ahead of the consequences of my life for so long, and it all caught up to me when I was no longer able to hide behind my fame.
“I was so angry at first,” I whisper. “At my parents, at my grandpa, at all the people who were having these life-changing moments on the river while I was stuck sleeping on the ground and staring down terrifying rapids week after week with nowhere to go. I was in hell, and they kept thanking Pops for giving them a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
I don’t know why I’m telling him all this. I could have kept it simple and told him that my parents decided Hollywood wasn’t for me and forced me out. But Iwanthim to know, terrifying as that is. I want him to understand why our budding friendship has to come to an end when we leave the river.
Maybe then I’ll be able to resist my attraction to him.
“On one of the last trips that year, I was sitting on a rock overlooking the river and bemoaning my life, and Pops came to sit with me. He did that all the time with his guests, having all these long conversations that always left them happier and brighter, but he’d never sat down with me. He didn’t say anything for a long time, and I thought for sure he was judging me so hard that he didn’t have the words for it.”
Wiping away tears that start building in my eyes, I take a slow breath, trying to calm my nerves so I can keep talking. “When he finally spoke, he said something about how the more rocks we let into our lives, the harder it is for the water to flow over them. The river’s going to flowdownstream no matter what, but we get to decide if the water is calm or full of rapids trying to knock people out of their boats. Then he patted me on the shoulder and went to make dinner.
“I don’t think I slept that night. If he had said anything else or tried to be direct with me, I would have ignored him, but something about the simple metaphor got under my skin. It was like my eyes were open for the first time and I could really see the ugly person I’d been. More than that, I saw the horrible way I’d treated everyone around me, and it broke me. I didn’t talk to anyone for the rest of the trip, not even to Pops, but the week after that, I asked him to teach me how to row. Instead of trying to push people from the boat, I wanted to get them down the river safely. That was the first time in my life that I thought about someone other than myself.”
Feeling almost empty now that my dirty laundry is all out there for Derek to see, I keep my head down and wait for him to react. Derek is now one of half a dozen people who know the details of my story, which is as terrifying as it is relieving. My parents had a front-row seat to my downfall, but Derek might be the only person in existence who knows how it feels to be on the other side. To be in the thick of Hollywood and all its pressures.
Will he see me as weak for succumbing? I do.
“You’ve been out here ever since?” Derek asks eventually. His words are measured and don’t give me a lot of indication of how he’s feeling about my story, but I’m too scared to look at him.
I nod. “I’ve never looked back.”
“And you’ve kept your identity a secret all this time?”
