Free Fade Into Me by Kate Dawes Page A

name on it. “This was on the front porch.”
    My name was definitely written in Max’s handwriting.
    “Thanks,” I said.
    “Are you okay?”
    “Yeah, I’m fine. Let me see what this is.”
    “Okay, well I’m getting ready to leave, so I’ll see you later.”
    I closed the door and went back to the bed. The envelope was thick and heavy. Did I want to open this right now? Not really, I thought, but I just had to look.
    I opened it and pulled out what looked to be a movie script—typed, and fastened with the two brackets, as they always are.
    Attached to the cover page was a note:
    Olivia – Please read this. I wrote this script when I was 22, but the movie was never made. I never thought I’d meet anyone who was anything like the female lead character I made up for this script. Then I met you. Read it and you’ll understand.
    You should let me explain everything that happened this week.
    I’m not going to give up easily.
    I hope you won’t, either. -Max
    I spent the next two hours reading the script. I’d never read one before, so it was my first experience with reading something in that format. So much of it was dialogue, brilliant dialogue. It was a beautiful love story—a guy who is starting to feel lost in life, a girl who comes along and shows him that while there’s plenty of be cynical about, she is not among those things. She’s real. She’s genuine. She’s not corrupted by the world that the guy is so used to.
    Near the beginning of the script, there’s paragraph explaining the female lead’s motivation, and in Max’s handwriting were the words: Manic Pixie Dream Girl. I wondered what that meant, so I Googled it and smiled when I discovered that it was a term used to describe the female lead in one of my favorite movies: “Elizabethtown.”
    I loved that story and I loved the character played by Kirsten Dunst. I remember the first time I saw it, thinking it was the quirkiest and most romantic movie I could remember seeing. It was all real-life situations, but it truly was a fairy-tale love story and a story about a man finding out who he really is…with the help of a girl who appeared out of nowhere just at the right time.
    When I got to the end of the script there was a note from Max, directing me back to that paragraph, just in case I had missed it. He wrote:
    You’ll see why I never made this movie. Someone had already done one like it. But this remains my favorite thing I’ve ever written. You’re the only person on the planet who has seen it. – M
    As much as I loved and admired her, I really had never thought of myself as anything like the character in “Elizabethtown.” But maybe to Max, that’s exactly who I was.
    His dream girl.
    That’s what he was telling me.
    Shit. I had retreated too quickly. I hadn’t given him a chance to explain. Maybe there was nothing to the story. Maybe it was just another tabloid piece of junk journalism.
    I felt so stupid. I at least owed it to Max to let him explain. I just had to.
    I scrounged around for my phone, turned it on, and dialed his number. I waited through three rings….
    ….and then he answered: “Hello, dream girl.”
     
    ~~~
    Olivia and Max’s story continues in the conclusion to the FADE series…
    FADE INTO ALWAYS
    (coming soon in September 2012)
    ~~~
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