“You are my sunshine,” Daniel sings softly, over the hum of the engine
as the car drives over open road.
Elijah joins in without missing a beat. “My only sunshine,” they sing
together. “You make me happy, when skies are grey.”
Both pause.
“I don’t know the rest of the song,” he admits, grinning, as Daniel
gives a ringing laugh.
Elijah listens to that laugh and feels a twinge low in his stomach.
He tries to ignore it as his hands tighten on the wheel.
~~~
Scotland is cold and beautiful.
Green hills rolled in the foreground and tall mountains loomed in the
background, postcard-perfect, the sky a chipper grey as Elijah drives from
the airport. Daniel sits in the passenger seat, his father sleeping in
the backseat from exhaustion, and they were heading towards a little house
the Radcliffe’s rented while they were in Scotland. Elijah breaks into
a story, with Daniel interrupting here and there to give directions, about
that time when he and his hobbit friends pissed in a public fountain, ending
admonishingly with, “Daniel, don’t ever do that.” He’s grinning, though,
and Daniel can’t help but grin as well.
~~~
Mrs. Radcliffe tells Elijah to make himself at home, so the first thing
he does is go to the kitchen.
Daniel comes in awhile later, watching through a wall of steam as Elijah
pours hot orange liquid into plastic cups.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just leave the Jell-O in the big bowl?”
Elijah looks up from his work.
“That way everyone could, like, just take how much they wanted, instead
of, like, having it in cups that they’d have to finish.”
Elijah is wide-eyed, as if the thought had never occurred to him before.
“That,” he says slowly and softly, “is an absolutely brilliant idea.”
~~~
Elijah sits off to the side, the movie script in his hand, and watches
Daniel doze off in the makeup chair.
Quite often, and quite unwillingly, the thought flickers across Elijah’s
mind that Daniel might have the most sinful lips this side of the Atlantic.
And when that thought comes up, Elijah feels quite guilty.
~~~
Daniel’s copy of the script has scribbles and doodles all over it. Elijah
looks at one particular picture intently. It looks like a faceless angel
with broken wings, and the word “rebel” comes to mind.
“Hey, Elijah.”
“Yeah?” Elijah replies distractedly.
“Tig.”
Elijah snaps his head up, looking at Daniel who has a devilish grin
on his face.
“Don’t you dare!”
Daniel doesn’t back down, and looks at Elijah expectantly…
Who gives in. “Tog.”
“You can’t tog on a tig if you’re not pregnant!” Daniel yells, and scampers
away.
“Come back here!”
~~~
“Hey, Elijah.”
“Yeah?” Elijah replies as he looks up from the newspaper.
“We were wondering if you could chaperone Daniel for a week.”
“You and your husband need the time off?” Elijah asks, grinning. His
answer is already yes and Mrs. Radcliffe sees it.
She mirrors his grin, thanking him.
And Daniel comes in afterwards, those sinful lips in a smile, and Elijah
wonders if that was such a good idea.
~~~
Daniel notices Elijah staring at his wrist.
“It’s petrified coconut,” he says.
Elijah reaches out to touch the shellacked beads wrapping around Daniel’s
wrist, large blocks consisting of thin brown veneer on top of thick white
flesh. They clack together as Elijah plays with them.
“Really,” Elijah asks, not really asking. His fingers brush against
the top of Daniel’s wrist, notes that his skin is very soft, and pulls
his hand away rather quickly.
“Yeah. I didn’t really like it until they told me what it was called.”
“Hey, they carved a face into one of the squares.”
The face was smiling.
~~~
Elijah, out of the corner of his eye, watches the other actors: Rupert
Grint, Hugh Mitchell, Tom Felton. He looked at them and feels absolutely
nothing near what he feels when he looks at Daniel.
He doesn’t want to be a pedophile, and wonders if this proves it. That
he feels something he’s never quite felt before, and only because of Daniel.
Idly, right before feeling guilty, he wonders if there’s a word for Daniel-induced
lust.
~~~
Elijah’s cell phone rings, the Itchy and Scratchy theme filling the
air. Daniel fills in the words in a squeaky voice.
“Do you normally break into song?” Elijah asks as he checks the message
and turns the phone off.
“Not really. No.”
“So I’m just special, then?”
“Yeah. I feel like singing when you’re around.”
~~~
He doesn’t feel like a pedophile when Daniel smiles at him. At first,
he felt guilty for not feeling like a pedophile. After awhile, he stops
feeling guilty that he should be, and then feels guilty for not feeling
guilty.
He does feel like a pedophile, though, when Emma Watson flips her hair
back and shakes her hips, singing along to mambo music. He can’t help but
be transfixed with the rest of the room.
The feeling turns into the slightest hint of jealousy, though, when
he sees Daniel staring, too.
Then he feels guilty again.
~~~
Daniel sits in his makeup chair as fake dust is applied and a strand
of cobwebs is trailed down his back, looking past his reflection to Elijah’s
reflection in the mirror.
“How does it feel being Harry Potter?”
Daniel’s been asked the question a million times before, and answers
automatically: “It’s great. Wonderful.” Then stops, and wonders why Elijah
asked him such a strange question.
“How does it feel being a child actor?”
“Weren’t you a child actor?”
“Yeah, but I was wondering how it felt for other people.”
“Well, I haven’t been any other kind of actor.”
“Hmm.”
“How did it feel being Frodo?”
Elijah smiles, and then so does Daniel.
~~~
As they walk from the set to the car, Daniel starts with, “Anything
you can do, I can do better.”
“No, you can’t,” Elijah sings back.
“Yes, I can.”
~~~
Elijah mostly helps Daniel memorize his script as they hang for the
hour or two in the makeup trailer.
The postcards he had sent Daniel over the winter are taped haphazardly
around the edges of the mirror, creating a frame of blossoms, Daniel and
Elijah and two makeup artists the picture in the middle. Daniel looked
at Elijah concentrating on deciphering Daniel’s handwriting on the blank
parts of the script, trying to make sense of the sentence, “Convenience
is complicated.”
~~~
“He’ll be exhausted once the press tour’s over,” a voice says.
Elijah puts his newspaper down, and looks at Mr. Radcliffe. Daniel’s
parents are back from their short vacation.
“Those are pretty bad,” he replies. “They’re fun, but bad. You get what
I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“You guys going on vacation afterwards?”
“Holiday? Probably.”
“He’ll probably need it.”
~~~
Daniel sings that “I Will Always Love You” song. The Whitney Houston
version. At the top of his lungs. Standing over Elijah’s bed. At four in
the fucking morning.
~~~
It’s when he stamps down an erection after Watson’s impromptu performance
that Elijah thinks he can do this. That Daniel-induced lust will have no
hold over him.
When Daniel smiles at him, he stamps it down, ignores it, and thinks
he might lose his sanity.
~~~
His mother bought some oranges.
“What did you mean by ‘convenience in complicated’?” Elijah asks.
Daniel doesn’t answer. He just presses his thumbs into an orange, a
fine mist spraying his hands as he tries to break the orange in half.
“You’re a mess,” Elijah says, taking the orange away from him and peeling
it neatly.
Daniel watches Elijah peel the fibers off as he licks the bitter zest
off of his own fingers.
~~~
“We know we’re asking a lot, but would you like to take Daniel in for
the holiday?”
Elijah ignores his guilt. “Yeah, I’d love to.”
He can do this like a normal person.
~~~
The makeup artist begins drawing the famous scar on Daniel’s forehead.
“Everyone’s born with scar tissue,” Elijah says.
“Yeah? How?”
Elijah reaches forward, one hand holding Daniel’s script, the other
one reaching over to lift up Daniel’s shirt.
“Oh.” Daniel looks at his bellybutton and considers. “But you still
have your umbilical cord when you’re born. It’s an extension.”
Elijah gives a short chuckle. “Then everyone’s born to have a scar.”
~~~
“I like to eat, eat, eat, apples and bananas!”
“You’re eating an orange.”
~~~
Elijah sits in a chair behind Daniel, reflected in the mirror framed
by flowers, and looks at doodles in the margins of the script: cartoon
characters with violent expressions, trees with long branches, horses running
across the top of the page.
On one blank page, Daniel had scribbled “Eden’s in the West.”
Elijah glances up, and thinks otherwise.
~~~
A freak thunderstorm stops the shoot, the crew quickly putting equipment
away and the cast quickly getting inside buildings and tents.
Except for Daniel and Elijah. Daniel had grabbed Elijah’s hand and pulled
him towards the bleachers, hiding in there until everyone had gone.
Then they walked into the middle of the open field. Elijah watches Daniel,
transfixed by something he can’t place a finger on.
A bolt of lightning flashes before their eyes, and Daniel closes his,
raising his face to the sky as the first few drops of rain begin to fall.
The thunder sounds a few seconds later, surrounding them both in a cocoon
of boom.
And Elijah falls all over again.
~~~
“This summer, then? For two weeks?”
“Cool.”