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Then like she was reading my mind, Lena said, “I’m talking about lover boy Janus up there.” A positively gleeful glint lit her eyes.
Just leave. She’s baiting you and it’s your fault if you stay and listen.
“Janus is the best man I’ve ever met in my life,” I defended him.
She tilted her head and made a face like she pitied me. “Aw, look how sweet and stupid you are. I guess that’s why it was so easy to dupe you.”
I stood there silent, fuming. Not giving her the satisfaction of asking what she was talking about. She was obviously so delighted with herself she couldn’t keep it back much longer. So I stood ramrod straight and glared at her.
And I was right, ’cause a moment later she said, “Don’t you get it? God, you’re gonna make me spell it out for you, aren’t you?” She sighed dramatically. “Janus has been looking for a mommy for his fucked up little family to cement Leander to him. So he can never be left behind.”
I started to roll my eyes again—
“You’re like the fourth chick he’s tried it with?” she kept on. “And I talked to the second woman, Sage, and she said she found Janus switching out her birth control for sugar pills.”
“What?” I barked out with a laugh.
“Janus has wanted what he never had—a real family with a kid to bind them all together. It’s fucking pathological with him. Doesn’t it seem convenient how fast you got knocked up?”
TWENTY-FIVE
LEANDER
I was up on crutches, actually managing to leave my bedroom for the second time this week. Milo was right behind me in case I tipped or got in trouble, but still.
“Doing great, man.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered, biting the side of my cheek as sweat broke out on my brow. I was determined to make it to the living room, though. The doctor had given me a certain timetable but I was determined to prove him wrong and improve faster than any other patient he’d ever had.
He’d never met a stubborn bastard like me before. Lying around in bed was not my fucking style. I was not a man to be waited on hand and foot, for one. I’d always earned my way in the world. Even when I’d been a teenage fuckwit, I’d still been a workaholic teenage fuckwit.
I’d been given a ton of privileges in life, and as screwed up as it was that our real-life parents died after America already loved our four-year-old on-screen persona… Well, it made our fame skyrocket. I didn’t always know how to handle that.
Plenty of my peers around me had traded on less. Was I just an asshole profiting off my parents’ tragedy? Even the idea pissed me off and made me work twice as hard with a fury to prove them all wrong. Even if it would take me years to ask who “them” even was and what exactly I was trying to “prove” anyway.
It still drove me to take every acting class I could, study harder than anyone around me, and take it more seriously. I gritted my teeth at how ridiculous I’d been, so self-serious and refusing to see I was just a kid in the shitty situation of having to grieve with the whole world watching. And then it felt like they all judged my grief. So-called reporters certainly asked about it in every interview when we were teenagers.
I always felt it—those eyes on me. And my incessant mind dug at me with the thoughts that tormented me worst: had I grieved enough? Had I even loved my parents at all? I barely remembered them. Maybe that meant I was broken in some fundamental way. If I wore black clothes and eyeliner, would it prove how sad I was?
I had just a single vague memory of my parents. And I’m not sure if it’s just a memory of the memory at this point, I’ve recalled it so many times trying to cling to it. I see my mom’s happy face laughing down at me from an open square in the ceiling as my dad lifted me up by my armpits into grampa’s attic. Me and Janus were going to help Mom look for her childhood treasures in old boxes up there. There’s this happy warmth that comes with the memory. But again, I don’t know if it’s just something I’ve fabricated because of how much I want that feeling.
And then they died and suddenly a world that made sense toppled like a deck of cards.
Everything changed.
Except Jan and me. And the show, Who’s Counting Now?
The set was familiar. At least we still went the same place every day. But then mean Mrs. Pappas who always ordered us around on set was suddenly trying to take us home with her. Milo had always been nice enough to us but we hated his mom. And then the rest of the grown-ups just let her take us. It didn’t matter that Jan and me cried and kicked her and tried to run away.
