Forcing Gravity (6 page)

My mother did end up starting college at USC, and she and my father moved into a small house on the beach in Santa Monica. Over Christmas break, they got married, and three months later, I was born
. We lived
in that little house for the first few years of my life, but I don’t remember any more than what I’ve seen in pictures. From what I can tell, though, we were a happy family.

Then, when I was about
six months
old, my mother was discovered while shopping in Santa Monica. She has told the story again and again in countless interviews, relishing in the day she was pushing her daughter in her stroller when a casting director approached her. The way she tells it, he offered her a small role in a movie on the spot. She took the job, and from there things snowballed. I was two when she landed her first lead
ing
role, and she’s been landing them ever since. To the outside world, Alana
Davis,
is one of the top actresses in Hollywood
, but to me, she’s the mother who ch
ose her career over her family
.

Luckily for me, I have my dad, who never stopped loving me and putting me first. I honestly think he would have stayed with my mother, he loved her that much, but she wasn’t faithful to him. Only a handful of people know that in order to score that first lead role, she slept with
both
the director
and the casting director
. Then she actually had the nerve to tell my dad that it
was a necessary part of being an actress
, and he needed to be okay with it. When he wasn’t okay with it, she begged him for forgiveness and promised never to do it again. That lasted exactly a year,
and then she slept with her co-star. My dad divorced her
soon after he found out
and moved us to Florida, where his parents w
ere then living
.

I returned to L.A. each summer to stay with my mom. My dad would fly with me, then turn around and fly right back, and three months later, he’d fly out to get me, and we’d return home together. We did this until I was old enough to fly on my own.
It was almost as if my mother expected that of him and never once volunteered to hop on an airplane either way.

My mother was never
the most attentive
or involved
of parents, and I spent most of each summer with the nannies that she’d hire
to take care of me so she didn’t have to do it
. At least they were fun. We’d go on adventures and hang ou
t at the beach and go to Disneyl
and.

Then, the summer I was seven,
Ethan Lewis moved in next door with his perfect family
,
who
was
more than content to adopt me as their own. Ethan was a shy boy when he was
seven
years old
. And b
eing the independe
nt little girl I was
, I
marched
right
up to him as he hit
a
volleyball
against his garage door over and over again the day after they’d moved in. I told him my name was Logan Kessler and that he was going to be my friend. He’d let the ball roll into the street as he looked up at me – I was taller than him back then – and nodded his head, his eyes wide.

I’m pretty sure that I scared the shit out of him, but it didn’t matter. From that point on, he was my best friend.
His
mother was a super-mom. She made homemade snacks, set up craft projects for her kids and attended each one of their sporting
events. She was also the one who convinced my mother to put me in surf lessons
.

At their house, t
here was a hot meal on the table each night, an
d the whole family ate together and talked about their day
. Even Ethan’s father
alwa
ys made it home for dinner,
if
only to
retire to his
home
office after dinner to continue working.

The first time I ate dinner at Ethan’s house, I was in awe of how perfect his family was. All five of them had blond hair, deep tans and a vivaciousness that only rivaled that of my dad. I was instantly sold that they were destined to be my
California
family
.
 

Ethan’s
sister Kelly was sixteen when I met her, and she soon became my idol
,
as I listened to her tell stories about high school, her volleyball team
,
and the many boyfriends she seemed to have.
Garrett
, who was eleven
when we met, was always putting on a show. He aspired to be in show business, and was always practicing for some play that he was in, entertaining us with his guitar
,
or telling jokes. Even Ethan, who was quiet around everyone else, came out of his shell around his family.

A lot has changed since I first met Ethan
and his family, but we
’
re
still
just as close as we were that first summer, and Ethan is always the first person to have my back no matter what.
Even when he can’t fix the problem, he always tries.

“You’re mom sucks,” Ethan said then, causing me to look up from
my magazine.

“Yes, I know,” I said
, before looking back down, uninterested in talking about my mother
who
I
noticed was gracing the page in front of me
, sparkling in a glittering ball gown at a benefit she’d attended the week before
.
I quickly flipped the page.

Ethan leaned forward on the back of the desk chair
and sighed loudly. He was
broody
, which was totally unlike him. I stuck
my tongue out at him
, h
oping he’d
snap out
of his crappy mood
.

“Hey, ther
e it is,” I said
, sitting up on his bed.

“What?” he asked
,
leaning forward to see what I was
referencing.

I jam
med
my finger down on the magazine page in front of me. “
Garrett,” I said, having found the picture my dad had told me about
the day before
.

I cringed inwardly as flashbacks from the night
in
Garrett’s hotel room in Mi
ami assault
ed
me all at once. I’d
tried time and again to wash the mem
ories from my brain, but they did
n’t seem to want to go away. I looked at the picture again and tried to refocus my mindset. Nothing happened, or rather, nothing noteworthy happened. It was not a big deal. Okay, moving on.

Examining the picture again, I realized my dad
had
fa
iled to tell me
that Garrett
had
ended up on the weekly worst dressed list
, and that, at least, helped me to push past what I didn’t want to recall.
He
was
dressed i
n
a pretty ridiculous
emo
outfit, so it was pretty easy to laugh instead of freak out.

“I told you he’d be in here,” I said to Ethan. “He’s been in every issue since
Earthbound
came out.”

“And you’ve been right ther
e beside him for the past month,
”
Ethan joked.

“Not anymore,” I said, looking down at
the guy who looked like a more
chisled
version of
his younger brother
. Four years his elder, Garrett had a slight build and a more angular face, but they both had the same
nose, same blue eyes
,
and same
blond hair. Garrett’s
hair
was just spikey where Ethan’s was chin length.

“Oh Garrett,” I said. “
Red s
kinny jeans are so not you. What were you thinking?”

I slid the magazine close
r
to Ethan who shook his head in dismay before leaning back again.

“He loo
ks like a douchebag,” he said
, not holding
back, but I knew it was
in jest bec
ause h
e truly loved
his brother
and was proud of his success
.

Garrett
had spent his first two years
post-high school at the UCLA film school
and doing lower budget movies
before getting cast to play
Lucas
in
Earthbound
,
the extremely popular teen trilogy about two fallen angels who fall in love with a human girl. When the movie
premiered
the year before
,
I’d come
out to L.A. to attend the premiere
with Ethan and his family
. At that time,
Garrett
had been a virtual nobody. The fans were more focused on
Donovan Collins
, who played the
sexier lead fallen angel,
Eli
,
who
’d
won the heart of the girl in the first book.

Donovan was already
well-
known for his work in several other teen dramas
, so his fan base was extensive,
although Garrett won the hearts of many females after the first movie. His character actually gets the girl
in
the
second book, so his fans have been
widely anticipating the next film due out later in the year. Just like with
Twilight,
teams had formed, and you were either Team
Lucas
or Team
Eli
. I was Team
Lucas
, simply because of Garrett.

When
Garrett
first called
to
let me
know
he’d been cast as Lucas,
I thought
he was joking
, and so did his family for that matter
. It wasn’t until he sent a picture of the front of the script that we all realized he was serious.
Then I’d s
pent the next hour
on the phone with Carol
explaining what the
Earthbound
t
rilogy was about
, what a fallen angel was,
and why it was such a huge deal that
Garrett had
been cast as Lucas, the charming, sometimes mischievous
angel
who went toe-to-toe with
Eli, who was good and pure
.

It was funny, though.
I thought the weirdest thing about seeing
Garrett
in
Earthbound
would be seeing him with
wings
, but in actuality it was the fact that I forgot it was
Garrett
up there on the screen. I was so mesmerized with his portrayal of Lucas that I failed to remember it was the guy I’d known since before he
’d
hit puberty.
It didn’t hurt that he was playing a character so different from his true personality. Garrett was quite possibly the nicest guy I knew. He was rarely a jerk, but his character sure was.

It was amazing how
accurate his portrayal was, and
I asked him after the movie just how many times he’d read the book. He’d just made a joke about wanting to be sure the fans bought that he could be a
sexy angel
, but whatev
er he did worked. His fans
fell
head-over-heels for him.
After
Earthbound
premiered,
Garrett
became a teen heartthrob overnight
, and he was instantly dubbed as a bad boy, even though that couldn’t have been further from the truth
.

He could no longer go anywhere without being recognized, his picture was in every celebrity magazine
,
and he became instant fodder for the nightly entertainment shows.
Until this summer, it had been a fun weekly event to find out just
whe
re he would be in the magazines, that is until I’d found myself on the pages next to him.

“Personally, I see it as
a sign that he’s arrived,” I said
to Ethan, who
’d
grabbed the
magazine away from me
,
so he could
stare at the smoking hot brunette on his brother’s arm. “You know you’re somebody when you end up on the worst dressed list.”