Free Catch a Falling Star by Unknown

one,
    love. Adam goes public with Carter. Hotel garden.”
    I flipped to the first page, trying not to cringe at the (working)
    title.
    A LittLe Love Story (working title)
    On the next page it read:
    eXt. HoteL GArDeN — DAy
    Adam and Carter sit in the garden together. They met
    the day before at Little Eats and had an instant con nection. Leak news to Bonnie (Twitterobsessed proprietor).
    “Wait . . .” I flipped through some more pages. “Is this a script?
    A script for . . . us?”
    “It’s our story. What the public will see.” Adam leaned for-
    ward, pushing his sunglasses into his perfect mess of hair. “Genius,
    right? Parker’s also a screenwriter.”
    Parker shrugged, feigning modesty. “It’s more of a treatment,
    really, an outline.” He crossed his arms and leaned back in his
    chair. Down by the thick edge of trees and shrubs blocking the
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    back of the garden, a sprinkler came on, its hush-hush-shush sound-
    ing, at first, like rain.
    I flipped through some pages. “What is this?” I motioned to the
    odd heading of a scene: INT. LITTLE EAT’S — DAY.
    Parker leaned over. “Those are slug lines. They tell whether a
    scene is inside or outside, where it is, and the time of day.”
    “But how did you write all this already?” I scanned the sixty or
    so pages. “I only just agreed to this.” I noticed he’d mentioned spe-
    cific things about me in some of the scene headings — the dance
    class I taught at Snow Ridge, Sandwich Saturdays, and even Extra
    Pickles. Apparently, we’d be walking him in scene five.
    Parker and Adam exchanged amused looks. “The script’s been
    written for a while, love,” Parker explained. “We just added your
    name and some details.”
    As I flipped through it, I noticed several places where it just
    simply read SMALL-TOWN GIRL. The garden echoed in my ears,
    the fountain gurgling, the sprinkler shushing, a slight breeze rus-
    tling the leaves of an old maple above us. My head buzzed. “It just
    seems so, well — staged.”
    Parker frowned. “None of this can be accidental.”
    “Can I keep this copy?”
    Parker reached for the script. “No, I need that. It’s our only
    copy. Can’t have this getting into the wrong hands. Besides, there
    are always rewrites. I’ll be texting you scene-by-scene updates.”
    “Okay.” My face must have betrayed my swirling nerves,
    because Parker’s face creased the way Dad’s had earlier.
    He leaned in, pushing his own glasses into his hair. His eyes
    were river-water green. “You all right? No cold feet?”
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    Swallowing, I tried for what I hoped was a bright, easy smile.
    “I’m ready.”
    Adam gave me the sort of slap on the back my brother had
    stopped giving me when I was eight. “Excellent. So, next scene.”
    Parker flipped open the script. “Little Eats, the café.”
    Adam rubbed his stomach. “Great. I’m starved.”
    Funny, I felt like throwing up.
    I should have warned Chloe that Adam was coming.
    Twenty minutes ago, we walked into the café, and in what
    seemed like a month but was probably five minutes, the following
    transpired:
    Chloe, steaming some milk at the espresso machine, saw me.
    Smiling, she gave a flip of her hair and, without taking her eyes off
    the frothing milk, began greeting me in her usual way, which was to
    start halfway into a sentence as if we’d already been talking for sev-
    eral minutes. This time it was clearly about Alien Drake. “So, okay,”
    she said over the espresso machine. “We’re going to try to find a spot
    in the field up past Hounds Pond, but I told him we’re leaving if the
    bugs get too bitey.” Another flip of her hair, her pixie face fixed on the
    frother. When the milk finished, she glanced up and, final y, noticed
    Adam. Her expression, like one of those stop-motion videos, went
    through about twenty emotions — confusion, surprise, recognition,
    delight — before she entered into ful -blown spaz mode.
    She screamed, the stainless cup leaping