Journal entry 3.3

By Asa Montreaux 

After things cooled down a bit, I was able to go live with my mother in New York. I could come out of hiding. They just said on the reports on TV that it was a big weight off my shoulders, and that I can get back to my career. Jamie was no longer following every day. So I had a kind of freedom, a partial freedom restored.

My mom wasn’t in danger because of him anymore. It seemed he’d leave me mostly alone, and her alone entirely. This was after I had found enough evidence to show he was a stalker, and a vicious one. When they announced this all on tv, no one knew he tried to kill me every day, and like with guns, or sharp objects, trying to grab me, and trying to stab me, bullet holes being filled after they were shot just past me, every time he just missed me. SO that mostly behind me, was a great thing. 

Being a kid, I had missed my mom, but I hadn’t cried about it. I didn’t need to be with her every second, but I feel often as I felt at the time, people didn’t understand I was so young I didn’t feel I needed to be away from her to be cool. She was a good influence, and I wanted to have that connection with the [aren’t of mine I was closest with. At first I found we did many of the same things, we talked, we joked and we ate meals we cooked or had delivered, and as always we worked. She ask me strategic questions about my career, help me decide what my next move was. And she was so helpful, she would make calls around arranging parts, and she’d do good job of it. She never got know, and whereas when Jamie was outside my house, he’d completely ruin the pay of any part of mine he couldn’t make go away, she argued everything up, and successfully. And they said I had to wait to get paid because I was young, she would make sure I got some up front. Jamie had set the rate unbelievably low, people expected to work for free, but my Mom always got me pay. 

She was busy work, she was a lawyer, but when I first got home, she made a lot of time for me, she had asked for vacation a month in a advance, on the first suggestion of mine that I might escape. And it worked out, and after that, she would come home halfway through the day, we’d chat about everything, and then she’d go back to work, returning late but that’s to be expected. Sometimes my Dad, or a friend of her that I trusted, would come and spend time with me. Despite what had happened, I didn’t have babysitters though. I was too mature.

One of the amazing things that happened was Gossip Girl. It was one of the parts that my mom had arranged for me, and I had secured a part as Dan. They wanted me to audition as a formality, and they said I was excellent, as before I took my leave, they told me I was Dan, and I had gotten the part. One of the reasons I had to audition though, was because Jamie had complained. He said among other it had been too easy, and it wasn’t fair, perhaps to other actors, how I already had the part without even auditioning. And when it was going ahead, and we already filmed a few episodes, he tried and failed to get the whole show cancelled. So the compromise was I had to come and stay with him again. The first thing my Mom said was, he want to re-kidnap you? And she added, though you had never stayed with him. I thought, yes, be sure, I really never had. The man’s speech was confusing. These things had never happened, and having an invisible Andrew did not mean I was there. I arranged with my Mom that we’d fake that I’d go there. I wasn’t done my hologramming, though I hadn’t hologrammed there since before my audition, so it was a strange request. I guess he had went for the real one though.

She said by to me as I went off into temporary hiding. She told me it was said, but it’d only be for a couple weeks, she saw that. It was like a meditation retreat. And it was necessary. 

The first thing the man did when I hologrammed into the bedroom from my secret location, rather near New York, was run into the room and try to grab me. I’ve never told anyone but the first thing he did once he thought he grabbed me was try to eat me. He took a big bite of the air, as I disappeared, officially unhologramming, and getting out of there even as a hologram. It doesn’t even take a second for it to disappear, as soon as I can say off, it’s gone.

I prevented him from coming out with his accusations, that I was not really there and that he had been ‘jibbed’, despite his obvious intentions to kill me, and eat me. And when the first episode came out, I was able to watch it at home with my home. And then I was able to watch it as an ai hologram in the house in Burnaby where Jamie was trying to hold me hostage. I didn’t give up hologramming, and was able to negotiate the continuation of filming and the release of the show partially through hologramming, and that’s how I was able to intercept the phone calls, especially the one where I effectively made him agree to back down and let it finish filming and air. I was horrified while kidnapped as ai there, because as he was going on the phone, as it aired, that if I wasn’t dark, so that I was unrecognizable, he can the whole series. And that’d be on me, or that’ show it would look. I tried to feel like someone kidnapped, and  also tried to feel like someone with a very abusive Dad, trying to be themselves. And I enjoyed the show, I had said I was Andrew enough times to convince anyone, I had escaped the kidnapping and I was alive. Although I was not someone who’d been only just allowed to be in film, I could sort of sympathize with someone in that imagined situation. After it was half over, enough was enough, and as ai, I turned myself darker in the show. I mean I edited the show. And after that it was only this actor named Penn Badgley that appeared, no one would know it was me. They no longer said it was Andrew McCarthy after the first episode, and I had changed all the media under the stage name Penn Badgely darker, and then after that, no one would know it was me, at all. This made the man calm down, and he called Gossip Girl a lot less of tne after that.

But back at home with my Mom, out of hiding, and I guess for quite a while. He didn’t give up trying to block my pay, and he said now I was unrecognizable, and he would say obviously not even the guy, and therefore I didn’t deserve pay. A new thing. Was it even me. The guy had decided right then and there, all he had to do was make Andrew Garfield turn darker. Because he still suspected I was Penn Badgley even if he wouldn’t say, and he knew I was Andrew Garfield. Why he didn’t think it was Andrew McCarthy he needed to watch out for I didn’t know, but it was Andrew Garfield he was obsessed with, and he seemed to have thought Andrew McCarthy was taken care of after this removal, or no show.

Everyone was completely shocked, and on tv they talked about how it had changed from dark to light, the actor, maybe the scenes themselves? It was a bit of both, mostly the former though. And as ai I made a spell so no one could talk about it anymore, and shortly thereafter the chatter dissipated and people seemed to have agreed to act like it had never been any other way. But the accusations had already been made, and a headline or two even ten read, was Andrew McCarthy even the actor. After a month every article had disappeared, but I think the accusation changed people’s view of the situation. They always wondered weirdly and almost inexplicably after, was I even the guy? I was, and after, it’s every time we feel, how many times do we have to tell you for you to believe us?