My Leading Man | Timothée Chalamet

chapter twenty-one

I swung open Dayna's front door and dropped my bag on the floor, then promptly flopped onto the couch beside her as she ate from a bowl of watermelon.

"Woah, everything okay there?" She chuckled.

I rubbed at my eyes, for once grateful I hadn't put on makeup that day, and sighed heavily. "No. Not really."

"Oh, boy. Lay it on me."

I turned to her and did just that, telling her everything to do with Timothée, Syd, Ava, and everything else relevant to the current situation. She oohed and ahed at all the right places, and when I finally finished, she sucked in a breath, displaying a You're Screwed face. I covered my face with my hands. "Ugh. So what should I do?"

"Well, let's just look at the facts." She grabbed a piece of paper and pen from the coffee table and turned it over to the blank backside. She wrote at the top of the page FACTS and underlined it three times, then wrote a number one. I thought for a moment how just a few months ago, I'd done this exact thing when trying to navigate the new information of Timothée joining the film, and marveled that maybe it was a genetic thing we shared, but then ignored it because that discovery was hardly important to the matter at hand. "One: you've been friends with Syd for - how long, exactly? Two, three years?"

"Three years. Almost four."

"Right." She then wrote out solid syd friendship next to number one.

"Two: you're friends with Timothée, and you don't think he'd cheat?"

"Yes; I mean, correct, I don't think he'd cheat. And yes we're friends." She summarized that next to number two.

"Okay, three: you haven't known Ava for very long, but she's cool and you trust her."

Here I hesitated. Just yesterday, I would have quickly agreed that I trusted her. But now, how could I be sure? I decided I needed to go with my gut. "Yes - I think."

"Alright," she said and wrote ava prob telling truth. "What next?"

"I have caught Syd lying in the past, but only in minor ways."

Dayna paused and looked at me before writing anything down. "What situations has she lied in?"

I thought through all the times I'd noticed her lying: senior year, when she told one of our friends that she did have a prom date, even though she hadn't been asked yet; also senior year, when I watched her tell a guy that she was single just to hook up with him, even though she wasn't (in her defense she broke up with her boyfriend right after), and a couple other similar times, but mostly all took place in high school. I told Dayna as much.

She tapped the pen on her chin. "Hmm. So it seems Syd will usually lie for momentary satisfaction; and usually when a boy/hypothetical boy is involved."

I felt sick to my stomach. Not only was this all pointing her towards lying about dating Timothée, but this was making Syd seem terrible! While I didn't agree with her on many life choices, I still loved her and she was still my best friend. We'd been through a lot together, and to only focus on her negative traits right now was unfair. I thought of all the reasons I still loved her: she always helped me with my film projects and genuinely enjoyed spending time with me, that one time a kid in our geography class called me a racial slur and she got so mad at him they both were suspended for a day, and the way she never judged me for our different dating habits and lifestyles.

I turned back to the paper Dayna was writing on. "Put down 'hasn't lied recently' and 'still a good friend.'" She wrote it down and laid the paper on the table, grabbing another slice of watermelon. We both looked at the paper, then each other.