Part 18 (2/2)

I looked down at myself. I didn't look as sleek and tanned as the pretty publicists, but I didn't look quite as rumpled and dumpy as the journalists either.

I'm starting to fit into this d.a.m.n town, I thought. Who knew?

Almost immediately, I recognized a familiar face across the lobby - an actor. What was his name? I couldn't remember. I knew he'd been on Ugly Betty at some point, and he had a new show now.

I crept toward him like a lion stalking a gazelle. He was by himself, looking around, probably for some publicist to tell him where to go. Or maybe he wasn't here for the junket. Maybe he'd come to the Hilton to meet his agent for lunch. He was wearing white skinny jeans and a pale blue b.u.t.ton-down, untucked, and he was shorter than I expected, but he was definitely cute. He had a mop of brown hair, impressively jumbled, and I wondered exactly how long it had taken for him to get it to look so perfectly uncombed.

He'd stopped, so I stopped. I looked around, pretending I was momentarily lost, like I was maybe waiting for a friend. I pulled out my iPhone, pretending to text.

I couldn't resist glancing down at his a.s.s.

It was a great a.s.s, even what I could see of it under his untucked s.h.i.+rt.

That a.s.s has been on television, I thought.

He turned for the restroom, but I wasn't about to follow him. That was too creepy even for me.

I turned and made another scan of the lobby, licking my proverbial lion chops. Where the h.e.l.l was Jennifer Lawrence, who I just knew would want me to be her BFF if she ever met me by, say, b.u.mping into me in the lobby of the Beverly Hilton?

A familiar face materialized right in front of me. Once again, it took me a second to remember who it was. There was something off about him. Was it the face? He was good-looking, but a lot older than I remembered.

”Oh!” I said. ”You're Declan McConnell.”

Talk about ghosts from the past! Back when I was in high school, my friends and I had volunteered to be extras in this zombie movie they'd been filming in town. It had turned out to be a terrible movie, but the experience itself had been pretty interesting. At one point, I'd even had a chance to talk to the star - Declan - for a few minutes, and he'd given me some good advice about high school.

Declan looked over at me, his face blurring in confusion.

”Sorry, you probably don't remember me,” I said. ”I was an extra on Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies? You talked to me once and were really nice.”

His eyes slowly found their focus.

”s.h.i.+t, that was, like, five million years ago,” he said.

I suddenly realized what was off about Declan McConnell. It wasn't just his age. He wasn't dressed like everyone else in the lobby, like either the publicists or the journalists. He was dressed like he worked in the hotel, somewhere between a busboy and a bellhop. He had a stain on his s.h.i.+rt - something dark yellow that I hoped didn't smell as bad as it looked. Was he some kind of handyman?

”You're not here for the junket,” I said stupidly.

”Nah,” he said. ”I work here at the hotel.”

I didn't know what to say to that.

I thought back on what I knew about Declan's career. It's true that he wasn't a big star when they'd shot Attack of Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies. He had a supporting role on a sitcom, but it had been cancelled pretty quickly. He'd also been in a few smaller movies, although I couldn't think of any that he'd done since Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies. After I talked to him on the set of the movie, I followed his career for a while. Did Twitter and Instagram even exist back then? I couldn't remember, but if they had, I would have followed him.

He'd been a rising star. He was even up for a role as a superhero at one point. Deadpool? But that had ended up going to Ryan Reynolds.

I thought back to the time I'd talked to him on the set of that movie. He'd told me that even though he was still playing teenagers, he was actually twenty-eight years old. He hadn't really looked like a teenager, but he'd looked like a ”movie teenager”: younger than he really was, and also incredibly cute, which meant that n.o.body gave a rip about accuracy anyway. That had been eight years ago.

He wasn't young and cute anymore. You could tell he'd been hot - I guess he was still hot, for an ordinary, non-actor person, I mean. But now his skin sagged and had blotches, and his teeth were yellow. Even his posture was bad. If he looked five or six years younger than his years before, now he looked at least five or six years older. I couldn't help thinking: At some point in the last eight years, he must have looked his exact age. Was the day after that the moment when the twinkle had left his eye?

I'd been so awed by him before. Now it felt like I was talking to one of my dad's friends.

What the h.e.l.l happened? I wanted to ask.

”What a piece of c.r.a.p that turned out to be,” Declan said, and I realized he was talking about the movie.

”Yeah, well,” I said.

Declan glanced over at the bathroom. He looked desperate. At first I thought maybe he needed to pee, but this was a deeper, sadder kind of desperation.

This was like a scene from a movie: meeting a rising young star, and then years later running into him again, and he's not only not a star, he's working at a hotel and is maybe even some kind of junkie. In fact, I think this is a scene from a movie, in the original Fame. And didn't something like this happen to Rachel on Glee? (I'd stopped watching by then.) ”So you're an actor too, huh?” Declan said to me. Now that he'd stepped closer, I realized he had bad breath. That figured.

”Me?” I said. I was still flattered that people sometimes thought this. ”No. Screenwriter.”

”Yeah?” His eyes brightened - or as bright as they probably ever got these days. ”Working on anything now?”

”Kinda sorta,” I said.

”Really? You casting yet?” He was smiling his yellow teeth at me when he said this, but it wasn't really a joke. He was actually asking me if I could maybe get him a role in my movie.

Who would you play? I thought. The grandfather? (I immediately felt bad for thinking this.) ”Oh?” I said. ”You still act?” I hadn't wanted to ask, but I admit I was curious.

”Oh, yeah.” He motioned around the lobby. ”This is just temporary.”

His eyes latched onto me again, like a drowning man who'd found a life preserver. ”We should, like, get together.”

There was a time when the idea of getting together with Declan McConnell would have literally blown my mind (and I know what ”literally” means, and I literally mean ”literally”). But that's when he'd been young and cute and a rising star, not when he was a desperate old handyman with bad breath and a yellow s.h.i.+t-stain on his s.h.i.+rt. The idea of him hitting me up for work was almost too much.

Meeting Declan really was like meeting a ghost from the past. Anyway, he left a chill that was just that cold.

”Yeah,” I said. ”Maybe. But I'm meeting someone, so I should go, okay?”

He nodded, not quite getting my brush-off. ”I'm done in a couple hours.”

”Okay,” I said, walking away. ”See ya.”

It was a little awkward, because I wasn't meeting anyone, and I couldn't leave the hotel yet either, not for another three hours. But I didn't linger in that lobby looking for any more celebrities. I spent the next three hours in a back corner of the hotel bar, trying hard to avoid Declan.

That night, there was a knock on our door.

”Daniel-” I said, opening it.

It wasn't Daniel. It was his older sister, Zoe.

<script>