Page 54 of For The Record

“You don’t know me. I just don’t like being the centre of attention.”

“Okay,” he says, not pushing it any further.

Still, I feel the need to explain myself. “I’m not a perfectionist.”

I’m not. In high school, I would submit essays that I had written the night before without a single proofread. No sweat. I don’t feel the need to dress impeccably the way Poppy does, or have the ideal winged eyeliner, or be some kind of Barbie. Everything that I am, I choose to be, but I’ve never chosen to be something impossible. Perfect.

“I apologize for saying you were,” he says, his tone appropriately cautious, like he’s approaching a cat that at any moment will hiss, screech, and dart away. Probably the best course of action. “But you have to admit that sometimes, Skye, you don’t need to be good at something to enjoy it.”

“I never wanted to be good at…” My voice trails off. “Do you know how hard it is to grow up in a city where everyone is good at something, or at least thought they were, and you have the luxury of trying everything, and if you really wanted, you could be an actor and not have to wait tables, and to feel like you’re squandering that? To feel like you’re throwing away all the privilege that you were born with, by not going into singing or dancing or theatre? Everything that I have, it’s been bought for me. All I wanted was something that I could have that was my own. A drop of talent. That’s all.”

I’ve never said these words to anyone. I’ve never told Ryder how I felt. I never told him the reasons I dated him. Because I saw a guy who was playing covers in a garage band, but at least he cared enough about something to put up with the coffee-making side job and the small-town gigs. Because I saw someone who was passionate about music, in a way that I felt like I would never be passionate about anything, and I thought maybe some of that would rub off on me. Like maybe if I stuck around long enough, I could take on some of his better qualities. Instead, all I became was annoyed by his bad ones. It was wrong. Selfish. Totally unfair to everyone involved.

But I did it anyway.

“You’re right,” he says, and those words melt something in me, open me up in the way a sunflower turns to face the sun. “I don’t understand that. I don’t get it at all. But Skye, for you to feel like you’re something less, like you’re wasting your potential or something… That’s not right at all. We’re born with what we have, but you know what’s really admirable?”

I hide my tears. I don’t need them, not now. “What?”

“Making yourself into something else,” he says, a rough edge to his voice. “Not accepting what you were born with, but becoming someone you can be proud of.”

“You should be a life coach,” I try to joke weakly.

He wraps his arm around my shoulders, pulling me into his chest. “I think I’ll stick to my day job.”

I sigh, staring at the picture before turning it facedown. My eyes catch a different picture: my parents on their tenth wedding anniversary, me standing between them wearing a puffy gold dress. Leo clears his throat. “Are those your parents?”

“My mom and my dad, yes,” I say.

“You never mention your mother,” he says, too observant for his own good. “What’s she like?”

I swallow. Should I tell him the truth?

“My mother left our family when I was ten. The next year she starred in three movies and became an executive producer for some new show.” I rest my head against Leo’s shoulder, remembering that year like it was yesterday. I saw my mother’s face everywhere but at home. “I thought if she left me, if she left us, it must have been for something important. Something so vital. I thought if I could just do what she did—if I could be talented, if I could act or sing or dance—maybe I would know what that was. Why she left. I thought I would know what was so much better about acting or singing or writing that made me seem like nothing. I thought I would know what was so good about being talented that could make her leave me, leave us.”

“Skye,” he says, and that’s all he needs to say to break the dam and make tears flood my eyes. “Skye, there is nothing you did to make her leave, you know that? Nothing.”

I sniff. “How can you say that?”

“Because I spent years trying to figure out why my father left, and I realized it was about him. It wasn’t about me. It’s your mother, okay? It’s not that acting is better than you. It’s that she chose something else, not that you weren’t worthy of being chosen.”

I try to let his words sink in. He pulls me against his body, one hand stroking my hair. Clutching the soft linen of his shirt, I rest my cheek against his chest and do my best not to cry.

Not because I’m wistful, remembering the past, but because I think I’m falling in love with him, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

#

@LeticiaScott: shooting just wrapped for my new movie! Can’t wait for you all to see it. In the meantime AMA

@Ttang: @LeticiaScott, will you ever make a movie with your daughter?

@LeticiaScott: @Ttang never say never!

Chapter 26: Skye Holland

Clearing out my purse, I find, amid the crumpled Walgreens’ receipts and packs of chewing gum, Isabelle’s wallet. Thanksgiving didn’t go so badly that I got drunk enough to pick her pocket. No, it was a sober wallet-stealing. Or, rather, borrowing.

Yes, I’ll admit it: I lifted my older sister’s wallet. But it was for a noble cause. I needed an excuse to drop by the set of her new movie and learn more about the director of her movie, and I doubt she would accept that I just randomly wanted to see her.

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