“I’m not off-book.”
“Nobody expects you to be off-book a week before you even start,” Charlie tells him. “Also, don’t say ‘off-book.’ It makes you sound like a dickhead from Juilliard.”
“I am a dickhead from Juilliard,” Will points out.
“So am I, but there’s no reason to advertise it.”
Will ignores him. “I’m gonna pass,” he says, sinking back down into the dune of sand-colored throw pillows. Charlie rented this place sight unseen a couple of weeks ago, wanting a quiet placeto crash while he did West Coast press forMajor Fantastic. Will flew out from New York last weekend, the two of them staying up until four a.m. eating pizza bagels and watching shitty reruns like it’s college all over again.
“Oh, come on,” Charlie says now, undeterred. “A couple of hours. You gotta eat, right?”
“I’ll eat here.”
“There’s no food here.”
Will shrugs. “I’ll order something,” he says, but Charlie shakes his head.
“There’s a whole weird thing with delivery drivers and this neighborhood,” he explains, wandering into the kitchen and digging a beer out of the fridge. “Literally none of them can ever find it, and then if they do find it they have to, like, answer three riddles to get past Paul Blart at the gatehouse, and it’s also entirely possible that fake pond thing is full of alligators. I’m still waiting for a burrito I ordered the night I moved in.”
Will smirks. It didn’t take long for it to become glaringly obvious that Pemberly Grove wasn’t quite the exclusive luxury oasis promised by Charlie’s real estate agent. In the short time Will has been here they’ve discovered a terrarium of mold in the dishwasher and a family of coyotes nesting in the pool house; two days ago the garage door nearly crushed Charlie’s Land Rover like an empty can of Budweiser, stuttering up and down for the better part of an hour before finally grinding to a halt. Both Will and Caroline keep telling him to just find someplace new, but Charlie, typically, is adamant about making the best of it: “I signed a lease,” he keeps explaining, like he’s bargained his soul to Mephistopheles and has no choice but to soldier bravely on toward hell.
“I feel confident in my ability to feed myself,” Will promisesnow, which isn’t entirely true. He’s been a wreck since he got here, anxious and itchy; he doesn’t feel confident in his ability to handle much of anything, be it cobbling together a weird pantry dinner or making his major motion picture debut. He wavers for a moment, glancing back down at his script.
“Come on, bro,” Charlie urges, sensing Will’s hesitation as keenly as Ranger, Charlie’s shaggy shepherd mix, sniffing out a half-eaten cheeseburger under a park bench from half a mile away. “You have the whole rest of the weekend to shuffle around the house in your bathrobe masturbating to Lady Macbeth, or whatever the fuck you’ve been doing. You’ve barely left the house since you got here.”
“Not true,” Will protests. “We went to that juice place literally yesterday.”
“And you complained the whole time about how the sun was too bright and beets turn your pee red.”
“It’s not natural,” Will says darkly. He tips his head back against the couch, gazing up at the double-height ceilings. “Also, I hate parties.”
“You don’t hate parties,” Charlie counters immediately. “Nobody hates parties. Even people whose whole personality is saying they hate parties don’t really hate parties.” He finishes the rest of his beer in one long guzzle, lets out a jaunty-sounding burp. “On top of which, we’re new here, and we were invited. It’s the neighborly thing to do.”
Will huffs the ghost of a laugh then; he can’t help it. That’s the problem with Charlie: he says things likeit’s the neighborly thing to doand sincerely means them. Will remembers him trundling through the door of their room the first day of freshman orientation fifteen years ago, all massive shoulders and broad Chicagoaccent. The first thing he wanted to do was get a hot dog off the street.
“It’s not my whole personality,” Will grumbles finally. “Saying I hate parties.”
“Fifty percent,” Charlie shoots back.
“Forty.”
“Sold.” Charlie grins. “Hurry up and get changed, will you? I don’t want to miss the good snacks.”
“Whoa whoa whoa,” Will says, holding a hand up in alarm. “I didn’t—”
“Gentlemen,” Caroline says before he can finish, scuttering downstairs in a sleek black dress that makes her collarbones look very elegant, her lemon-mouthed friend Lucy in tow. Caroline is Charlie’s half sister from his dad’s first marriage; a couple of years ago she left the talent agency where she was a junior partner to handle Charlie’s career full-time—which, not coincidentally, was three months before he got cast as Major Fantastic. Caroline is very, very good at what she does. “You ready?”
“Almost,” Charlie reports happily. “Will just needs to put his face on before we go.”
“Hang on one fucking second,” Will protests. “I definitely never said—”
But Charlie waves him off. “You were getting there,” he promises, already strolling toward the door to the mudroom. “I’m just speeding things along.”
Will sighs. Charlie’s the one who gave him the hard sell about taking the part in the movie, an undoubtedly ill-advised postapocalyptic retelling ofAntony and Cleopatra. “Dude, you’d be a dumbass not to take it,” Charlie said when he called back in July, the connection crackling across three different time zones. It was aweek after Will got out of Lenox Hill, his head like a balloon from all the meds they’d pumped into his bloodstream. That morning he’d looked down and realized, with a detached kind of wonder, that the hospital bracelet was still looped around his pale, skinny wrist. “You realize basically every actor in LA would cut off his left nut for a chance to work with Johnny Jones.”
“I am not,” Will reminded him, “nor have I ever wanted to be, an actor in LA.” He wasn’t an actor anywhere, actually. At least, not anymore.
“Not yet, maybe,” Charlie countered easily. “Seriously, why not give it a shot? Come out here, get a little sunshine. Hang out with me.” He cleared his throat. “Also, not for nothing, but a change of scenery might not be the worst thing to ever happen to you.”
