Hollywood’s highest-paid actress for the last two years breaks up with me thirty seconds before I jump out a window.

Secrets have never been Adelle Tremaine’s style. She lives for drama even off the stage. So when she storms onto the set, makeup smeared and heels dangling from one white-knuckled fist, I know there’s a hurricane coming. Her edges are blurring out of reality, her hair smearing into the green screen, her skin transparent enough I can see the director straight through her—but like always, no one seems to notice this but me.

“We’re done, Joss,” she tells me, loud enough for everyone to hear—hell, they probably caught it on the mics, too. “And you’re fired.”

Then I wind up to jump out the window.

Adelle and I met at a party in LA six years ago—it was BBB (which, in Tremainese, stands for Before the Big Break). There was a pool bigger than my whole apartment and a live performance by a local indie band that was supposedly on the up and up. Everything was glitter and the smell of champagne and the cool night air on my skin.

The first time I saw her, she was sloppy drunk and tottering at the edge of the pool, some of her drink sloshing out of her glass. She was wearing a bright blue dress that I knew at a glance was from a thrift shop, though she was pretty enough that I guessed everyone was pretending it wasn’t. There was something uncanny about her, like looking at a high-def picture: the outline of her shoulders, the aquiline curve of her nose, the strands of her blonde hair…they were all eerily crisp, clean.

She met my eyes from across the pool, where I was nursing the same drink I’d clutched all night, and winked. Then she jumped in.

I jumped in after her.

Don’t get me wrong—it wasn’t some random love-at-first-sight bullshit. No, I just thought she was about to drown, and I’d been a lifeguard back home every summer since I was sixteen. When I tried to lug her out of the water, she splashed me in the eye. “Leggo. I’m having fun.” She pushed off me, drifting towards the deep end.

I stayed in the pool, waiting to make sure she was all right. After a while, she paddled back over and we watched the glut of dancers and wannabes until she asked me if I believed in life after death.

“No,” I replied. “I believe in things I can see. Feel. Do.”

“Pragmatic,” she said, slurring the word.

“You believe in an afterlife?”

Adelle shook her head. “Reennkernation,” she said. “Not the same thing. What would you be? If you were reennkernated?”

“A human.”

“I’d be a flower. An orchid, a purple one. Sometimes I change my mind, though. Last week I wanted to be a honeybee. And last month a capybara. You’re beautiful.”

“You’re not half bad yourself,” I replied.

The night was a whirling, starlit thing, and so was she. Words flowed between us like water, reincarnation making way for the merits of meditation and the monsoon she’d read about in the paper that morning and my last gig in a climate fiction film. Then she asked if I’d drive her home.

“Y’all look like clones,” someone told us as we exited the water. We were both shivering, drenched, and I realized with a jolt that it was true. We were the same height, give or take an inch, same build—long and lean, what my dad used to call “string-bean-esque.” I still thought her silhouette, unlike mine, looked strangely sharp, hyper-real—but maybe that was just me.

“Well,” Adelle said, leaning into me, “I guess it’s fate.”

That was right before she threw up in a potted plant. I held her hair.

Two weeks later, she got her first gig. She needed a stunt double. And she gave the producers—as she later told me—the number in her phone that was still labeled: NICE POOL GIRL.

When I was ten, I was in a car accident with my mom. She slammed on the brakes for a stray dog, and the teen driver who’d been tailgating rear-ended us, flinging us forward with the impact. My heart was pounding its way out of my chest, my nerves buzzing like live wires, but I ignored all the emotions crowding for space in my brain. I unbuckled my seatbelt and climbed in between the front seats to check on my mom. No room for thought. Just action. I grabbed her cell phone and called 911.

It was only later that the sensations flooded back in, a slice of shock and pain and fear. During the accident, I was nothing but calm.

That’s how I feel now. We’re done. You’re fired. Adelle’s words are still ringing in my ears, but I barely acknowledge them. I just back up and wait for the director’s mark.

When it comes, I run at the window, keeping my balance on too-tall high heels. I burst through the glass in a clean arc, the rough of it scraping my skin, and for a moment I feel weightless. Suspended. All of my emotions hushed, as they always are when I’m in the middle of stunt work. The world put on hold.

The world including Adelle.

“Jocelyn Cole, you magnificent bastard,” Adelle whispered. “Give it here.”

This was back in our first year working together. Our careers were a binary star system, orbiting each other. I matched her every step in the film industry, from low-budget parts where I was expected to leap through cheap breakaway glass and deal (I did) to her first big flick and all the safety gear it entailed. Every time Adelle’s agent got her a movie whose sexy spy heroine wore three-inch platforms, kissed hotties, and kicked ass, I was the one who had to deal with the shoes during the motorcycle chases.

We were working the big flick then. The studio had pushed Adelle into their “Heroine’s Diet,” meant to keep her trim for the catsuit she (and therefore I) was sporting for most of the film. Chocolate strictly prohibited.

Which meant the ice cream in my hands was basically frozen gold.

Her fingers lingered on mine just a moment longer than necessary when she took it. There’d been weird tricks of the light in her vicinity recently—she’d go blurry and transparent in my periphery, only to be completely normal when I looked at her—but there was no trace of that effect now. She was solid, present, real. I shut the closet door behind us. A closet rendezvous is cliché, I know, but I swear to God that personal trainer of hers was around every corner in those days.

“You’re very brave to risk Dean’s wrath,” she said.

“Or very stupid,” I suggested. “If he knew I was feeding you sugar, he’d have my head.”

Adelle cranked off the top of the ice cream carton. “Well,” she said, “consider me impressed.”

I’d only grabbed one plastic spoon from the craft services table, so we shared. When we finished, I reached out to wipe the chocolate mustache off her upper lip with my thumb.

She leaned forward and let me.

I try to fall from the window gracefully, like I’m supposed to. The first few times we ran this stunt, I wore wires, but the director asked that I do without this time. It’s at least a ten-foot drop. Not the worst, especially with a crash mat breaking my fall.

We’re done.

You’d think after so long running stunts I’d be used to surprises. I’ve freed myself after a set of chains holding me underwater got stuck, taken a motorcycle down a set of stairs to avoid another driver who hit his mark wrong, and nearly slipped on the third take of a leap between two high-rise apartment buildings.

You’re fired.

All that experience doesn’t mean shit on the way down, when I realize I missed my mark.

Adelle and I were hip to hip in the back of the limo. It smelled like money back there, like champagne and roses, like gold anklets shimmering in LA lights. Her hand was on my knee and the ride was smooth, the chauffeur taking us to her first-ever red-carpet event. Her last indie flick did better than anyone had expected; the press was supposed to be turning out in droves. She was all dolled up in baby blue and giddier than I’d ever seen her, words tripping over themselves to get out of her mouth.

“I knew I was good, but damn, Joss. I was Oscar-level, maybe. Imagine me with an Oscar.” She laughed, high and flighty. “I’d carry it around. Conversation starter. And we’d make you a copy. Like, fool’s gold.”

We’d been a package deal for a little more than a year. Adelle was a diva for the directors, a friend to most of the cast, and a bombshell for the cameras, but she was always just Dell to me. That same girl I met at the pool, with thoughts too big for the conversations she put them in. She was honest with me. Solid. It was intoxicating.

We were giggling like girls when she said, out of the blue, “I’m going to kiss you now.”

It was so entirely Adelle that my voice froze in my throat. It crackled to life again a few seconds later. Not that I needed it.

Her lips were soft and sweet. She tasted like promises and starlit nights and ice cream in closets.

The limo glided to a stop, and Adelle pulled back from me, her cheeks flushed. “Wish me luck,” she said, and before I knew it, she was out the door, the train of her dress slipping through last.

I heard the camera shutters click and watched her through one of the tinted windows, striking poses and tossing her hair like she owned the place. I blinked. For a moment, I thought I’d been able to see straight through her. The ghost of her lips was still on mine.

She didn’t look back.

My favorite Adelle became the one who shivered to the surface most often between projects, like an emergent pearl diver whistling out a long breath of relief. That was the Dell that let herself be mine like I was hers. The Dell behind closed doors.

That Dell had a weight to her, a presence. My best memories orbit her: me in her apartment’s kitchenette, sprinkling frozen blueberries into morning pancakes, surprised by her hands slipping around my waist. Her unbuttoning her blouse as she sat back on my bed, the mattress denting beneath her, her fingers quick with desire when they moved from her to me. Playing gin rummy in her trailer, her triumphant laugh each time she picked up a good card, the way she’d pout when she lost until she’d kissed my victory away. Moments when I felt the gravity of her body near mine. When she was solid as a house. Real as dirt.

It was all about those moments, wasn’t it? Making up for the chimerical Adelle Tremaine of parties and sets and red carpets, whose form flickered in and out of coherence, whose laugh was only an echo.

Moment after moment after moment, avalanching—over my better judgement—into the private, beautiful, fragile relationship that spanned Adelle and me.

But Adelle’s star kept on rising.

And those moments with my Dell, one by one, started winking out.

On the window jump, I land wrong and know it.

I’ve done my parkour training. I know how to roll. I’ve leaped from greater heights onto concrete without a scratch. The difference is preparation—and a lack of distraction.

We’re done. You’re fired.

I take the impact as best I can, driving my momentum forward more than down. I still hit hard; I hear a sharp crack as I slam into the ground, pain starring my vision, and roll until I come to a stop on my back.

The crash mat is so close I can almost touch it. But I can’t move.

I found Adelle on the roof of our hotel during our sixth big film together. We were set up in a suite while we shot on location in Australia—it was a horror movie this time, the kind with sharks. I was ready to murder whoever had invented the concept of bikinis. You try “escaping” a shark by diving off a reef into an underwater cavern when you’re pretty sure one wrong move will send your top to the bottom of the ocean.

It was just after a cast party. The place was clogged with people, heat radiating off bodies and someone—I thought a production assistant who’d brought me coffee once—doing lines in the bathroom.

Adelle shone, as always. She was a comet, streaking from one conversation to another, flinging sparks of light through the room as she walked. Her shoulders were spangled in glitter and her lips were smoky-dark, and she never once looked at me. I was the only one who seemed to notice that she was glare more than image, ghost more than star. Several times, I lost track of her in the crush; I wasn’t sure if she had drifted to another room or just momentarily blinked out of existence. The uncertainty scared me more than a stunt.

The party ended after a few hours. People trickled out like the last drops of water from a faucet. The stragglers left as soon as Adelle did.

The air on the roof was hot, sweeping dry fingers down the back of my throat every time I took a breath. The ocean stretched out to our right, the city to our left. She looked small where she sat, her glittery shoulders limned by the light of the moon. There was only a little ripple in the reality of her.

She was drinking. She tipped the empty bottle at her side off the edge of the roof as soon as she heard me coming, though she must’ve known I’d seen. I heard it shatter down below.

“Hey, Dell.” I sat down without asking. That was how I’d gotten into stunt work in the beginning—just inserted myself in places I didn’t belong until people stopped telling me no. The habit never left.

She glanced at me, gaze darting to my arm. “You okay?”

“Fine. Just a scrape against the reef after I landed wrong on one of the takes. Nothing I couldn’t work through. Part of the job.” Hurt like hell, but that was true of half of my stunts. I swept my fingers dismissively down the gash. “You’re not looking so hot, yourself.”

She let out a sharp laugh that cut the night in two. “Jesus, Joss. I’m always looking hot. That’s part of my job description.” She gripped the edge of the roof. The edges of her seemed to shimmer and smudge against the sky, the oddity stronger now; I tried to believe it was an optical illusion.

Maybe I was desensitized, but I wasn’t dazed by the fact that we were up so high. That a fall would mean more than a scratched-up arm.

She peered at her toes. “It’s a long way down, isn’t it?” We both knew what she was really saying, layered underneath that statement of fact. She got like this sometimes, drunk. I could never tell if it was an act.

“Dell,” I said, “we’re in Australia. There are much cooler ways to die down here.”

She sighed. “Sometimes I hate you.”

“I know.” I saw how she’d started to turn away during my stunts, when she used to cheer me on as soon as I landed. The way her gaze would flick towards me when she thought I wasn’t watching. I didn’t know how long it’d been happening, but I knew she hadn’t looked at me like that back in the beginning. Hungry. For what, I couldn’t tell.

“No,” she said, voice fervent, “you don’t. Everything I do is fake, Joss. Every single damn thing. Even this,” she banged her heel down against the side of the building, hard, “isn’t real, okay? We both know I’d never jump. I couldn’t. I’m not you. You’re never anyone but yourself, but I’m always pretending. With everyone.”

She didn’t add, “except you.”

I think she was waiting for me to disagree. But Adelle was a kaleidoscope, fracturing more and more with each twist of fame and fortune. She was skinnier than she used to be, I thought. More fragile. I couldn’t remember the last time her outline had been completely clear. I almost didn’t remember what she used to look like, back when someone whose name I’ve forgotten had called us clones.

I didn’t tell her that I could still see glimpses of the girl at the pool. That I knew her real face as well as my own, and knew that she didn’t always wear it—but that it was there, if she just kept looking.

She was waiting for me to say that she was just the same as she always had been. To comfort her. But I said nothing. I couldn’t lie to Adelle.

I wondered if she was looking for someone who could.

We’re done. You’re fired.

And that’s the thing about celebs. Even when you think you’ve found one whose head isn’t entirely stuffed up her own ass, even when you’ve shared pool memories and ice cream and Australian sunrises, sometimes she cheats on you with a cinematographer who couldn’t bench a hundred pounds.

That was what most surprised me on set. Not that she’d taken our private life public. Not that she’d made it the world’s problem. But that she’d pretended like I hadn’t caught them a week ago. Like I hadn’t broken up with her.

Adelle Tremaine, all about appearances. All about control. Pulling the old “you can’t fire me, I quit.”

I lie on the ground as the set medics hurry over, waving them away as I try to push myself to a sitting position. I’ve had my fair share of fractured ribs before; I know what it feels like. I know that the doctors won’t be able to do anything about it, that all I can do is wait to heal.

But something deep inside me is broken, and it hurts too much to be a rib.

They take me to the ER, which is both unnecessary and embarrassing. “I’m fine,” I insist, “didn’t even hit my head.”

But I did, according to the doctors, break my back. Fractured, actually—L1, lumbar region, three months of healing, minimum. More importantly, the shift in my vertebrae caused an incomplete Grade C spinal cord injury. In half a year, I’ll be able to walk again. Maybe.

When I press, the doctor repeats the number. “Any strenuous activity before that time, Ms. Cole, and you’d be putting your career in jeopardy.”

Which I already have. Adelle already has. I do my job best when I’m invisible, stepping into Adelle’s mannerisms, her gait, so cleanly that the cameras can’t tell the difference—even when I’m performing stunts Adelle could never pull off.

I can’t be invisible when she tells me I’m fired in front of the whole crew. I can’t be invisible when I miss my mark. I can’t be invisible with a broken fucking back.

I should’ve given myself a second to think before the stunt. Waited to jump until I knew I was in the right mindset. I should’ve known. No one can get in my head like Adelle.

And it’s my fault, for letting her.

Early in our relationship, a month or two after our first kiss, we went to a party at an Academy Award winner’s house. They’d hooked up a dance floor in the massive entryway. Enormous skylights were heaved open above us to vent the heat; they’d hired a professional DJ who had the music cranked up to ear-shattering volume. I was leaning up against one ornate, already wine-stained wall, drink in my hand.

Adelle was dancing, wrapped in a thin golden sheath of a dress that looked like it might tear with a strong breeze. Jewelry dripped from her ears, wrists, neck. She shimmered, barely visible: a mirage.

Then she caught my eye from across the room and sank back into semi-solidity. She took off towards me, weaving in and out of the crowd. She was hammered, her cheeks flushed, and I pulled back when she tried to kiss me. “You look lonely,” she said, latching onto my arm. “Come dance.”

The music pounded in my head. It was too loud, too much. So was the transient immateriality of her. “Not tonight,” I said. “I can’t…Dell, I can’t do this.”

Adelle nestled her chin on my shoulder. She had to lean on her toes; we are, after all, the same height, give or take an inch. “Okay,” she said, and it was as simple as that.

We left the party, even though she’d had to cash in a favor to get an invite. We went downtown instead, the night sky stretching hazy and soft above us. We window-shopped in glitzy boutiques and designer stores without price tags, where asking how much something cost meant you couldn’t afford it.

That night—Adelle’s head tucked against my chest, her makeup still on—I thought of how quickly she’d left the party. For me.

Her breath was soft against my skin. Her edges had shifted back to corporeal clarity.

Loving her wouldn’t be easy, and it wouldn’t be clean, because Adelle never was. But my favorite stunts were never the simple ones. They were the ones with a challenge.

Besides, it wasn’t like I had a choice.

She visits the second day I’m in the hospital. The room is sterile, all straight lines and clean sheets. Personal touches are sparse, but there’s a fan on the bedside table for if I want a breeze, and beneath it, a borrowed novel I’ve been too antsy to read. It’s mostly neutral colors in here, pastel blue walls and dull tan cabinets, save for the flowers—lavender asters, golden sunflowers, and roses with sunset petals. The bouquet pokes out of the trash can.

“I see you liked my gift,” Adelle says, skimming a hand down the door frame as she steps into the room. I can barely see her; she’s a shimmer more than a person, as insubstantial as watered-down paint. Her eyes are red, her cheeks wet. She perches on the chair next to my bed and cries freely, easily. Her voice, when she speaks, sounds like a distant echo. “I’m so sorry, Joss. I—”

“Stop it.”

She pauses. “What?”

“I’ve seen you cry over a broken nail, Dell. Quit the act.”

She leans back in her seat, wiping the tears away with a final sniff. “Fine,” she says, brushing a transparent strand of blonde hair behind her ear, “but I really am sorry. For distracting you and all.”

She waits a beat, then adds, “I need to tell you something.”

My fingers clench around the crisp hospital bedsheets. “God, Dell, now?” It’s hard enough just focusing on her. Usually, she’s better when we’re together, but ever since we broke up, my presence doesn’t solidify her. I am no longer her grounding force.

“I’ve got you alone, don’t I?”

“Adelle. Listen to yourself. I’m in the hospital with a broken back.”

She shrugs. “You’re tough. If anyone can handle it, it’s you.”

I remember her sparkling by the pool, the openness of her face. The two of us, inseparable. Shining, terrible Adelle side by side with the woman I used to be. Someone who thought I could make her love me more than herself; that I could halt her smooth slide into unreality, if only she’d let me be her anchor.

“I wish I’d never met you.” My own words, a surprise.

Adelle laughs, then cuts herself off. Her gaze settles on the flowers again. “We had fun, though, didn’t we? We can have fun again.”

It was never fun, I think. Thrilling, yes. Addictive, yes. But never fun. Just…inevitable.

She reaches out, her hand brushing my arm—the contact more idea than touch. Her nails—dark blue pricked with glitter—are new. She’ll have to remove the polish before she goes back to work. “I take it back,” she says, and there it is, a fleeting instance of solidity—her fingers pressing divots into my skin. Her voice strengthens, nearer, clearer. “I know you’re angry, but it doesn’t have to be over with us. I ended things with Tomas. And you can have your job again. Once you get better.”

She’s looking at me like an award—one she’s won before and will win again. Because this is who she is, shaping the world to match her whims and losing herself to do it.

It was a mistake, loving her. A beautiful mistake. She is so lovely and so empty. She is the moment when it’s too late to go back, the arc of the leap, the acceleration to terminal velocity.

I fell for her, and she never even jumped.

“Nope,” I say, twisting out of her grip. “We’re done. I’m fired.”

The edges of her blur so quickly, so fiercely, that it makes my eyes water. It’s like watching a chalk portrait melt in the rain: blonde hair wavering into transparency, painted fingernails dissolving into blue mist, and her expression—caught somewhere between shock and displeasure—merging into itself as it fades out. I close my eyes for a moment, steadying myself against the nauseating smear of Adelle Tremaine.

When I open them, she’s gone.

She left the scent of perfume lingering in her wake. I glance at the hospital bracelet on my wrist; I cast my gaze around the room in a final, irrational survey for a remnant of the woman I loved.

Then I reach to my bedside table and switch on the fan.

© 2024 Tia Tashiro