by Holly Rayner
ONE
Riley shifted in the hard, plastic-backed chair and glanced around the crowded room. She guessed that there were maybe forty other women in there, all of them waiting their turn, their faces twisting into a variety of expressions as they quietly went through their prepared readings, reacting to imaginary partners. She took a deep breath and checked the time on her phone; the runners had called in almost a dozen women so far, and even as she sat, waiting for her turn to read, she saw more actresses filing into the waiting room in ones and twos.
She glanced down at the pages on her lap and pressed her lips together, doing a little mental rehearsing herself. The open call was one of the biggest things going on in the city that week, and while Riley didn’t have much information about the project, the word from her agent was that they were looking for a few beautiful starlets to round out the cast of a mid-level film. It was exactly the sort of audition that Riley had been to a dozen times or more—but unlike when she’d first arrived in LA, she no longer truly believed she stood a chance of standing out.
“When did you get in?”
Riley looked up and turned her head in the direction of the voice that had cut through her thoughts. The girl seated next to her was not quite as tall as Riley, and dressed in a cool, clean sundress, her blonde hair pulled back from her face. Riley smiled. Never any sense in being a bitch to anyone—besides, she’s just being friendly.
“About an hour and a half ago,” Riley replied. “You?”
“I got here early,” the woman said, her delicate features twisting into a grimace. “Fat lot of good it’s done me.”
“Hey—you’ll still probably get to go in a good thirty minutes or more before me; there’s that at least.”
Riley kept the smile on her face but she couldn’t help running through the mental math: it was Friday afternoon, and she had the dinner shift at the restaurant to get to after the audition. Even assuming that she got in to see the casting directors in a reasonable time frame, she would have to rush home to change into her uniform if she wanted to make it on time. Bigger things, Ri. If you get the part, you won’t have to worry about waiting tables for a while.
“What do you suppose the odds are for any of us actually getting the part?” the blonde asked jokingly.
Riley chuckled, looking around at the sea of faces in the room. It was so crowded that the latest arrivals were just taking up positions on the floor, carefully spreading sweaters or whatever else they had in their bags to keep their clothes from getting dirty.
“I heard that there are casting calls going on through the weekend,” Riley said, shrugging again. “So this times at least three—probably not great.”
She took a quick, breath, reminding herself that someone always eventually won the lottery. If you go to enough auditions, you’re bound to get a job. It was a theory that had—so far—steered her mostly well; she’d arrived in the city with a blank CV and bargain-basement headshots from a photography studio in Vegas, and while she still had to hold onto her “day” job to make sure her bills got paid, Riley now had ten or more credits to her name, even if they were minor commercial spots or bit TV parts.
“I heard that they’re not just casting for the main female lead,” another girl commented from Riley’s other side. Riley turned to look at her; she was a petite brunette, with luminous green eyes, and cream-colored skin. She looked to Riley almost like a reinvented Audrey Hepburn. “There are a bunch of bit parts up for grabs, too.”
“My agent told me it’s a mid-level film—one of those between-blockbusters numbers, something to pay the bills for the production company,” Riley said. “There probably aren’t a huge amount of parts going.” She paused, deciding that that sounded a little too negative. “But it could be a really great chance to get something substantial!”
“I’m getting tired of playing the clueless housewife,” the blonde next to her said, shaking her head and sighing. “Something like this would be great, if I could just get it.”
“I know the feeling,” Riley said, sighing. She looked down at the pages on her lap and then back at the blonde. “Good luck, right?”
“Same to you,” the blonde said, smiling politely.
Riley read through the script once more, trying out the lines in her mind. She had never been one for rehearsing out loud in public; she didn’t like to give her competition any ideas, or give them any kind of edge on her performance. As soon as her agent had told her about the open call, she’d found the audition script online and printed it, taking precious time out of her sleep schedule to practice in the tiny bedroom of her tiny apartment. She thought—she hoped—that she had the part more or less memorized; that would at least give her something of an edge on the women who’d come in off the street and grabbed their copies of the script from the basket in the lobby.
Riley read through the part several more times, imaging the lines as she hoped to deliver them. Every time the door to the next room opened, she looked up; one of the frazzled assistants would call a name, and another one of the women would jump up and dart into the room, clutching their scripts tightly in their hands. Riley changed seats as more and more of the aspiring actresses went up, making her way closer to the door as the auditions progressed. She put her bag down in her chair once or twice to grab a bottle of water or to use the restroom, but otherwise she remained in her seat, making polite small talk when the occasion arose, and reviewing the script as many times as she could.
She tried not to watch the time too much; Riley knew that there were plenty of open casting calls where the producers tucked a few moles into the waiting rooms to report on how different prospective actors behaved when they weren’t being watched by anyone obviously in charge. It wouldn’t do to ruin her chances by being rude to anyone, or seeming impatient. Like many of the women in the room, Riley had planned ahead for a long wait; on her way out that morning, she’d packed a quick and unobtrusive lunch: salad greens with a tiny Tupperware container of oil and vinegar, a piece of chicken breast seasoned with nothing more than salt and pepper, and a little bit of brown rice. A growling stomach or low blood sugar would doom her—but so would garlic breath or reeking of spices.
Each of the auditioning actresses was supposed to have a five-minute slot, but as the afternoon dragged on, Riley realized that it wouldn’t be possible for the casting team to see all of the applicants that had come in if they kept to five minutes with each; even after they closed the sign-in station in the lobby and ushered the last of the prospects into the waiting room, Riley thought that the production crew looked frazzled at the high number of people waiting for their turn. She wasn’t about to add to their stress by being unmanageable, but she hoped that she might be one of the last ones to get a five-minute chance in the actual audition room.
“Riley Townsend!”
Riley nearly leapt from her seat at the sound of her name. She got up and strode towards the door leading from the waiting room to the audition room, smiling politely at the woman who called her name. After hours of running back and forth, the black-garbed assistant looked blotchy, flushed, and agitated, her hair starting to frizz and her eyes wide with anxiety.
“Right here,” Riley said.
“You have your CV and headshots with you?”
Riley nodded. Well at least they’ve found one way to weed out the worst of the candidates, she thought. The woman gave her a quick up-and-down look, and Riley knew exactly what she was seeing: a tall, slim, slightly leggy twenty-something with wavy, copper-colored hair and wide-set, sea green eyes.
“Come on in,” the woman said impassively. She held the door open and Riley stepped through it.
She hadn’t realized how warm it had been in the waiting room, with all the people sitting around and fidgeting,
until the door into the main audition room closed behind her. Riley took a brief moment to take in the people who would decide her fate: two men and a woman were sitting at a little folding card table, in chairs only slightly more comfortable than the ones in the waiting room. One of the men was maybe in his early thirties, with a shaved-bald head and a trimmed dark brown goatee shot through with a few threads of gray. He wore square-framed glasses and a black tee shirt and jeans. The other man was about the same age but with shoulder-length strawberry blond hair and a clean-shaven face. The woman was probably older than either of the two men, with steel-gray hair cut to her jawline. Other members of the casting team were scattered around the room, quiet and almost insignificant in comparison to the three directors.
“Riley Townsend?” The woman had a surprisingly soft voice.
Riley smiled, moving forward to approach the table.
“Pleased to meet you,” Riley said, slipping her headshot and CV free of the script sides she’d brought in with her.
“I apologize for how long you’ve been waiting,” the bald man said, meeting her gaze through the frames of his glasses. “We didn’t expect quite such a high turnout.”
“I don’t mind waiting for a good cause,” Riley said, putting her CV down on the table.
“Gives you plenty of chance to study the script, too,” the woman pointed out.
“I actually downloaded the sample from the website last night,” Riley told them. “I wanted to get it as close to memorized as possible.”
“We’ll see how well you did at that,” the strawberry blond man said.
“I have to make you aware that we’re unfortunately going to have to cut your reading short,” the bald man explained, spreading his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “With so many talented actors to see, we want to give as many of you as fair a shot as possible.”
“I understand,” Riley said, nodding. “It happens a lot.”
“It says here you came from Las Vegas?” said the woman, and Riley nodded. “Did you do any work there?”
“No, actually,” she admitted. “I tried out for a couple of the revues, but I’d rather be in film than on stage for the most part—so coming out to California seemed like the natural thing to do.” The woman nodded approvingly.
“You’re taking classes at The Learning Annex?”
Riley smiled at the strawberry blond. “Always room for improvement,” she replied.
“Would you be willing to dye your hair, or make other changes to your appearance for the part?”
Riley considered the question; on the one hand, it was important for any actor to brand themselves—and her hair definitely set her apart from some of the other actresses her age. On the other hand, she didn’t want to seem like a prima donna, especially when she was trying to get a good break—a solid role in a larger film or TV show.
“If it makes sense for the role, then of course I’m willing to do whatever it takes to embody it,” Riley said.
After a few more questions—standard fare, as far as Riley’s experience went—the man in the middle asked her to get up onto the stage so that they could film her reading.
“I hate that we have to make you cut it short,” the man said, shrugging apologetically.
“I understand,” Riley said, smiling as she took the three steps onto the makeshift stage.
There were a few members of the production team stationed on either side, and her gaze slid across them, just long enough to acknowledge their presence. She took up her position at center stage and watched the three people ultimately responsible for deciding whether or not she would get the part.
“You can begin,” the woman at the table said. Riley nodded once, took a breath, and launched into the dialogue she’d all but memorized.
The long-haired man at the table took up the dialogue part with her, and Riley turned her attention onto him, the way that she would if she was playing the scene on set. It seemed like little more than thirty seconds instead of two minutes, but Riley thought, watching the faces of the three judges and the other crewmembers in the room, that she had done well. Not that it means a whole lot, considering that there are at least forty girls waiting to come in after me, Riley thought.
“We’ll be in touch,” the woman at the table said. “We wish we could spend more time with you, but unfortunately there are just too many candidates.”
Riley smiled her warmest smile and nodded. “I appreciate you taking the time to see me,” she said. She climbed off of the stage and picked up her bag, stuffing the script sides into it and checking to make sure that she had everything.
As she made her way towards the door leading out of the audition room, Riley glanced around. There was a man standing off to the side of the stage, and her gaze had almost passed over him when she realized that he was starting at her intently.
He was tall, dressed unremarkably in jeans and a tee shirt. But as she hesitated for just a moment, taking him in, Riley saw that he was by far the most handsome man in the room: deep olive skin, dark hair, and unusual hazel eyes staring at her from underneath thick, well-groomed eyebrows. He looked young—no older than thirty, by Riley’s snap estimate, and looked to be of Middle-Eastern heritage. She thought he had to be relatively fresh out of film school somewhere, working his way up.
She met his gaze and held it for just a moment, smiling as she felt her cheeks warm at the intent look he was giving her. She barely inclined her head towards him and then hurried out of the room, not wanting to be labeled as the kind of actress who went around flirting with crewmembers at auditions.
As she made her way down the hall and towards the building exit, the man’s face lingered in Riley’s mind even more than the three casting directors’ faces did—there was something about him that Riley couldn’t quite place, but that was appealing. She smiled to herself as she pushed the exit door open and stepped through it; maybe if she was lucky she’d end up running into him somewhere where she actually could talk to him.