Page 82 of Hollywood, Ending

“Okay, Junie, you’re the best. Get that boy home. I’ll talk to you soon.”

I fucking hate being called Junie.

_____

I watch the waves roll in and draw out. I pull up the Andromeda screenplay and run some lines, shouting into the ocean about the future of the Realm, and then I head up toward bed.

As I lie beneath a mosquito net looking at the screenplay on my phone, I can’t shake thoughts about the campaign. Something wells up in me, and I decide to call Katie.

“I won’t do a campaign with Matthew Malone,” I say. “I will not go to lunches with him. I will not go to screenings with him. I will not say nice things about him. I have no interest in helping Matthew Malone in any way at any time, and I will never work with him again.”

Katie fights back, as any normal publicist would, saying that it’s business and there’s no room for feelings in business, and that I need to think about my career and what’s good for me. And then she says, “Honestly, Junie, if I’d known about Kai’s abuse, I would’ve leaked it too. It’s gold.”

“You’re fired,” I say.

“Junie, you’re being irrational. I get it. You’re in love. I’ve been in love. It makes you crazy. What Matthew did sucked, but it’s over. Kai needs to grow up a little, to be honest with you. He’s still young. But you? You know how it works.”

“What part of ‘you’re fired’ was confusing?”

“Junie.”

I hang up.

It takes a long time to fall asleep that night. When I finally do, I dream of Kai. I dream of his mouth on my neck, and then my cheek against his chest, feeling his breaths rise and fall beneath me.

Day 4

Part of me wants to fly to LA and find the next thing. Let Kai recoil. Let him live his life, even if it’s the end for our movie and for us. But also: I know something of what Kai is running from, and I know you can’t outrun it.

I’m getting ready for the day—in pajamas, applying all the necessary serums to the face and brushing my teeth and whatnot—when I hear a voice shout, “Juniper!” I walk out to the pool, where Kai is standing, wearing board shorts and a long-sleeve T-shirt. The air is warm on my skin, a light breeze blowing. I walk up to him and hug him and feel him collapse into me. His breath smells like beer and when the hug ends, he holds on to my shoulders, just looking at me. His face is so symmetrical, his mouth so full, his nose so straight that it’s easy to forget he is real, except for those eyes. The bloodshot veins around his deep green irises remind me: This is just a person, and to be a person is to be vulnerable and frail and temporary.

“Can we just watch a movie in total silence?” he asks. “Don’t ask me anything and I won’t ask you anything and we just watch a movie?”

“Hell yeah,” I tell him.

_____

I walk him over to the veranda, which opens up to a small patch of grass and the sea below. I show him the villa’s little collection of DVDs and he chooses one, appropriately a Bond movie from the 1980s called A View to a Kill. If Bond has teetered between campy and earnest over the last sixty years, this is the campiest one I’ve seen—silly and overblown and featuring loads of anti-communist propaganda that feels, to put it charitably, dated. I lean against Kai like we always do, and he has his arm across the top of the couch, floating just above me. Throughout the movie, I keep glancing over at him.

He doesn’t speak, and neither do I. This is part of what movies can be, a shared experience for people who don’t know how to share experiences. Movies are something we watch together when we can’t look at each other, when we don’t know what to say to each other. They are a site of shared enchantment. At last, just as the action is reaching its peak absurdity, Kai says, “Well, this is not very good.”

“How did people in the 1980s survive with such entertainments?” I ask.

“I’m mostly watching for the costumes,” he says.

“I’m watching for the deeply developed female characters,” I say.

He laughs. “I love movies. In spite of it all, I fucking love them.”

_____

After the movie, we walk over to the restaurant for some lunch. The waiter asks if he wants a Red Stripe, but he just orders a Diet Coke. He is a little more talkative now. “There are probably ways to just act,” he says. “Regional theater or whatever.”

“You would absolutely crush a local production of Hamlet,” I tell him, and then he starts in on some Hamlet.

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country from whose bourn