I slip my body through the cracked door, the sunlight hitting me all at once. I’ve shifted now to a bedroom that has navy-blue walls. It’s barely furnished.
“You are being difficult, you know that.”
“How am I being difficult for you?”
“Oh, not me. Just all the hardworking people on set that have spent time and money to make you a star. Just wasted on you. Do you understand how childishly you are taking this whole ordeal?”
“I am a child. Yours, to add, in case you forgot.”
Without notice, a loud slap hits Holden’s face, making the flesh of his right cheek red.
“Don’t talk back to me! Right now, you are about to be eighteen. An adult with responsibilities. And everything we have worked for to make you successful will be for nothing. You want that on your hands?”
She storms off in a huff without letting him answer, leaving Holden to stew in her anger.
Holden’s body collapses to the bed and I jump in with him, feeling what Skye must feel when all you can do is observe.
“These people are just rotten. You don’t deserve any of it,” I say, but he can’t hear a word. No matter how loud I get. He only curls his hands into a ball and bites his lip as if he can wind himself up so tight that he can hold it all in before it explodes.
From angry to sad, it takes all of sixty seconds to see the tears trickle down his face. Everything painful about him makes sense now. I just want to take it all away from him.
Scooting my body closer to his, I get close enough to his face that I try to wipe his tears, but I’m not able to physically touch him.
“A luz sabe, duas almas incompletas, uma guia a outra.”
Whispering sounds in my ears, in a set of three as everything is and the room is swallowed up in a tornado. It circles me back into a room where I can no longer see him. All I can smell is popcorn again.
Dorothy is officially back in Kansas.
Chapter thirty
You Were Never Real
My whole body aches as if I’ve been in a hit and run. I’m left weak and catatonic, scouring the swarms of people shuffling through the theater.
“Holden.”
“Holden…”
“Holden!!”
Each time, I get progressively louder than the last.
I know where I am, but everyone and everything feels disjointed. Nobody seems to notice a woman wound up tightly like a rubber-band ball, charging through the theater, brushing past anyone who gets in her way.
No, I’m as invisible now as I was ten minutes ago. My feet only stop charging forward when a hand grips at the center of my silk dress, propelling me forward, stumbling my way into a tiny room with no lights.
“Holden?” I say with a shaky breath. He flips the light switch of the room. I take an exasperated breath and see his eyes narrowing on me. Hardened and cold. Jaw twitching as it clenches together. Analyzing every inch of this supply closet he has just dragged me into.
With my back against the wall, he asks, “Did you sell photos of me at the acting class?”
His tone is sharp and piercing, searing into my soul as everything I want to say comes out jumbled.
“No—I mean, yes,” I say.
“Which one is it?” He bites back even stronger, his body no longer leaning over me and trapping me in one place as I sidestep to the other edge of the closet to create distance between us.
How could we have gone from holding hands and giving soft kisses to plummeting on a downward track, where my stomach has dropped so fast that I am queasy and anxious all at once?
