The Truth About Hollywood

As the next couple of weeks passed, Danny and I continued to film quite a few scenes with each other, and it was a lot of fun playing the love-hate relationship that the characters shared. It was pretty cool to scream my brains out at him in one scene and in the next, kiss him.

I was working on not getting butterflies every time he got close to me, but it wasn't working out too well. It always felt like there was a little tornado bloomed in my stomach, and sometimes, it would make me forget my lines, others forget that I even had to talk. It was embarrassing, to say the least. Thankfully, it only happened when we were working to film a scene and not in real life.

Danny and I were getting closer as well, and we spent a lot of time with each other, talking. He knew exactly how worried and scared I was about my mother's fate, and he helped me cope. It was kind of like he was my rock: I could turn to him for things that everyone else just wouldn't know what to say.

Then, it took only a few words to break everything that we had been working toward: "Stephanie's coming tomorrow!"

I was sitting at the edge of the set, watching Annabelle and John filming. Turning to face him and working hard to put on a happy face, I asked, "Oh, really?"

"Yeah! She's coming in tonight and she's going to stay at my apartment, and then tomorrow, she's coming to the set with me." His face couldn't have been brighter, and it made me feel so much worse that I wanted him to break up with her.

"Well, don't get her in trouble," I joked, focusing myself on fixing the strap of my tank top underneath my plaid shirt to keep from crying.

Danny gave me a seductive look. "Oh, I won't. Don't worry." He winked and put a hand on my knee. "So you want to go grab something to eat before I have to get back to my apartment to meet Stephanie?"

For some reason, this rang oddly in me, almost like a girl who was used to cheat on a boy's girlfriend: We had to hang out with Danny at different times so she never knew about me. I knew that she was going to meet me, but it still felt kind of like that sort of situation.

"Nah," I answered, waving him off. Seriously, I knew that I wasn't going to be eating dinner that night if I didn't have it with Danny, since my house reeked of sick, but I didn't care. I wasn't hungry anyway. Too much stress on a single person. "I should be getting home."

His eyes widened with fear. "Your mom...she didn't get any worse, right?"

"No," I interjected, shaking my head furiously. "She's pretty much the same. I'm glad, since as of now, it sounds like she'll be around longer than a month. She took a pretty fast decline, so it seems like she's plateaued a little. At least for now." I shrugged, trying to pass the whole thing off as nothing, even though every night, I had trouble sleeping because I worried about her.

"That's great. So want me to bring you home?" His eyes were a really dark brown and really nice...

"Um, sure." I stood up from the chair I'd been sitting in and we quietly exited the set. The air was warm and humid outside, and I immediately felt stifled. My allergies were bothering me too, so my nose was stuffy and making everything ten times worse.

"Ugh..." I whined, putting my hands on my cheeks right next to my nose and trying to pull my airways open with no success. "This is hell..."

Danny chuckled lightly. "Sorry. It'll get better once we're in the car with the air conditioning."

"Hallelujah for that," I smiled. We got into the car and Danny blared the A/C. It was quiet for a while before I finally burst out the question that had been pressing on my mind.

"Are you sure that Stephanie and I are going to get along?"

Danny hesitated before answering, a sure sign that he was unsure of what he'd said himself. "Well, I can't guarantee anything, but I just feel like because I get along so well with the both of you, you guys can get along with each other. That logic can be wrong, but..." He shrugged instead of finishing his statement, just in case he was mistaking.

I nodded and crossed my arms, looking out the window. I pictured Danny walking through the set doors, a beautiful redhead on his arm. She would be tall (though still shorter than Danny) with beautiful curves, but would also be toned. Her eyes would be bright, and, worst of all, she would have a gorgeous personality too, nice to everyone and complimentary.

Ugh, how much I was not looking forward to tomorrow...

"I'll see you tomorrow with Stephanie," Danny closed as he pulled the shift to park when we reached my house.

Smiling as widely as I could, I nodded. "Yeah, see you then." After I got out of the car, I shut the door with a little too much force, though Danny didn't seem to notice, and ran up to the front door.

"Dad?!" I called out the second I stepped through the door.

"He's not here," Mom's weak voice mumbled from the couch. All the curtains were drawn, and her head was up against the armrest, her tiny body taking up nearly the whole thing.

"Sorry," I whispered, and immediately got ready to dart up the stairs, my escape.

"Stop." She sounded kind of strong when she said that, which surprised me. "Sit for a while. I think that we need to talk."

Some words that every girl dreads to hear. Usually, it's from a boyfriend who is going to break up with her, but this time...things were very different.

I sat down carefully, almost afraid that if I moved the couch too much, she would get some shaking-related syndrome and die right in front of me. Her hand immediately found mine, and she patted it a couple of times, though the touch was barely registrable.

"Honey, I know that this is going to be hard to hear, but just try to listen, alright?"

Though I wanted to answer, I couldn't, fearing that my voice would crack. Instead, I simply nodded once and waited for her to continue.

"Well, you know that I don't have a whole lot of time left. By the time the doctors found the tumor, it was really far along."

"I know," I muttered. "You should have gotten your headaches checked a long time ago."

"I'm not going to argue with that," she admitted. "I should have. But I didn't. I...It was almost like if I didn't go to the doctor, I could try to convince myself that nothing was wrong. How could I have known that there was something seriously wrong?" Mom shook her head a couple of times before trying to get back on subject. "Anyway, the doctors said that I have a year at the most. They're not going to do chemotherapy anymore, since the first few doses did absolutely nothing. Plus, I'd rather die letting this thing kill me than from the medication that they try to feed me. So this was my choice."

Another nod was the only response I could muster.

"I know this is a lot of stress on you, all this plus the fact that you're just getting on a TV show. I do have to say though that you should keep this quiet...I know that soon enough, after you show airs, you're going to have to be flying all over the country to go to different premieres, maybe even to different countries. And that's okay with me. This is your dream, right?"

Finally, my eyes started to fill with tears, and a few escaped, making small droplets on my jeans. "Mom, I'm so sorry. I just wish that there was..."

"But there's nothing you can do." It was clear that the fact that I was starting to cry was having an effect on her too, and soon enough, she was sniffling harshly.

I threw my arms around her and sobbed into her shoulder, something that I hadn't done since I was a little girl.

And Mom did the same thing to me, a milestone between us trying to make up for lost time.

Trying to mend the relationship that had so long ago started to fall apart.