Falling into Forever (Falling into You) - By Lauren Abrams Page 0,9

a piece of grade-A ass right there.”

“Yes, that’s who I meant.” My voice is a growl, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

“Well, it’s her screenplay, so we needed her to sign the paperwork.”

“It’s his screenplay.”

I can’t say or even think his name. His words come rushing back anyways.

“You’ll never be good enough for her…I’ll be there to pick up the pieces…”

He had been right on both counts.

“Ben Ellison didn’t write the whole thing. He didn’t write any of the screenplay, actually. I mean, maybe bits and pieces, but I don’t think he managed to get very far into it before...” Suddenly, he turns to stare at me. “Didn’t Marcus tell you all of this?”

So, Ben and Hallie were a team, then. A little husband and wife writer team. Cute. It was just so fucking cute. I ignore the question about Marcus, who’s probably cursing my name right now.

“Why didn’t he write it? It’s his brainchild, right?”

“Well, who the fuck else was going to write it?”

I am utterly confused.

“You really didn’t know, did you? Jesus.”

“What?”

“He’s dead.”

I’m out of my chair and on my feet. What is he talking about? Why didn’t someone tell me? Why didn’t she tell me?

“Who’s dead?”

“Ben Ellison.”

“Ben Ellison is dead?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said.”

My brain can’t process that information. That means…

“Don’t you think that’s information that I should have had, I don’t know, maybe when you sent the screenplay?”

“I assumed that you knew. Of course I assumed that you knew. The dude was fucking hero teacher, man.”

I give him a blank stare, even though the phrase rings a faint bell.

“He was plastered all over the news. His face was everywhere. For weeks. Months. If you turn on CNN right now, there’s probably a story running on it.”

“Hero teacher?”

“Seriously?”

I shrug. “Tell me.”

“All right, man. I think it was about a year ago. Ben Ellison is this stand-up guy. I think he’s even teacher of the year, a basically a saint by anyone’s standards. He and the hot writer are the golden couple in this small town in Michigan and they’re both so saintly that they spend all their weekend volunteering and building houses and shit on the weekend. They have the perfect life, you know, the kind of life that makes you wish you never heard the word Hollywood.”

I close my eyes. I didn’t need to hear that.

“So, he decides to take some kids from his school on a college visit, and they’re driving to some no-name college in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, traveling on some deserted road with not a soul in sight except for maybe a stray lumberjack or two. Then, wham! Their bus gets blindsided by a semi. Everyone’s screaming and bleeding and shit, and then someone realizes that the truck has a sign on it that says, ‘Explosive Materials.’”

Jeff’s taking pleasure in telling the story, dragging it out. I close my eyes again.

“The worst part is that the door’s blocked, so everyone has to crawl through a window. I think someone calls 911 right away, but this shit is so far out in BFE that none of the emergency crews could get there in time to help. So, the amazing Ben Ellison starts pulling dozens of kids out of that bus, one by one. He’s like Superman, at least according to some of the kids that survived. Before the rescue crews can even get there, one of the TV helicopters shows up, just before the bus blows him and a couple of the kids into a million pieces. So, it’s all recorded for the world to see.”

Oh, God. So, Ben Ellison actually was Gandhi and the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa all rolled into one. And now he’s dead.

“It would have been a big story anyway, but some genius in the copy room at one of the publishing houses released this crazy story to the tabloids—that Ben Ellison had a pen name, and that hero teacher was actually the same guy that had written the Carson Sellers books, the Rage books. The craziest thing is that the whole story turned out to be true.” Jeff shakes his head. “It’s rotten luck for him, really. He’s like the van Gogh of the literary world, you know, without the whole cutting off the nose scenario. He never really got to relish his own success or even to spend any of the money that he made. Sure, some of the literati were already calling him some kind of wunderkind, even before the bus incident happened. But the fame