“Hey!” a guy loudly protested from behind them, interrupting Dax. “There’s a line.”
Brynn looked over her shoulder and saw Sarah and Chace hurrying toward her. “She’s saving our place,” Chace told Protesting Guy.
“That’s not fair,” a girl complained. “The rest of us have been standing here the whole time.”
“She’s right,” Dax told Chace and Sarah. “Sorry, sugarpops, but you two have to go to the back. Although . . .” She peered at the line stretching out the door. “It might be better just to come back tomorrow. We only need about ten more extras for the scene we’re shooting today. There’s really no chance you’ll get used.”
“But we just went to get Brynn coffee so she could get rid of her migraine.” Chace thrust a large paper coffee cup into Brynn’s hands. “Caffeine’s the only thing that works on them. And she didn’t want to go home. Being an extra is all she’s been talking about for the last week.”
“That’s true,” Brynn agreed. That part really was true.
Dax hesitated. “Fine. I guess you two shouldn’t be penalized for being good friends,” she finally told Sarah and Chace. “I’ll get you outfitted next.”
Chace turned to Brynn. “Drink that. You’re probably about two seconds away from seeing those flashing lights. She sees these weird auras right before the headache really hits. Then she pukes,” Chace explained to Dax.
He sounded like he’d known her for years and had helped her through a dozen migraines. His face was full of concern, like all he cared about was making sure she wasn’t in pain. You are a very good liar, Chace, she thought.
“And . . . background!” the assistant director called.
Brynn used the mirror inside “her” locker to brush her hair, ignoring the camera, ignoring the crew. She was a ’70s high school girl, and she was brushing her hair because she had to give an oral report in her next class.
The assistant director, or AD as the pros say, had told her to stand at the locker and brush her hair, but he hadn’t come up with the backstory about the oral report. Brynn had developed that herself. A girl didn’t brush her hair the same way to get ready for a class assignment as she did if she knew she was going to see a guy she liked, and a real actress had to know what was going on in her character’s head. Brynn thought that should apply even if your character was just somebody in the background of a scene. She’d decided her character’s name was Dawn because her mom had an old friend named Dawn. They’d gone to high school together in the ’70s, so it seemed like a good ‘70s name.
“And cut!” the AD called. “Looked great, everybody! Now we’re going to add Sam Quinn to the scene. You’ll be doing what you’ve been doing, and Sam will come running down the hall, searching for his son. Definitely look at him. He’s going to be panic-stricken, in a sweat, yelling. So it would be weird if you didn’t look. Just look at him like a crazy parent, not like a movie star, okay?”
Brynn nodded, trying to imagine how Dawn would react to an agitated parent running down the hall. Would she be annoyed that he was distracting her from her oral report? Worried? Did Dawn know the son he was looking for?
“Hang loose. I’ll let you know when we’re ready to get started,” the AD added. Then he headed over to confer with the director.
Brynn left her locker and walked over to Sarah and Chace. They were part of a group of kids who came piling out of the classroom door near Brynn’s locker as soon as “background” was called.
“You’re finally going to see your buddy Sam Quinn,” Brynn joked to Sarah.
Sarah gave her head a tiny shake, and Brynn immediately understood. Sarah didn’t want Brynn talking about Sarah’s celebrity crush in front of her new real-life crush, so Brynn did a quick subject change. “That stuff I read online was so right about the amount of waiting in the life of an extra.”
It had taken hours to do four takes of the hallway background. First the assistant director had to give them all their instructions, then there were long delays between each take while the lighting was changed for new camera angles. Brynn had kept an eye out for networking opportunities, but everyone on the crew seemed really busy. Trying to network with someone who was trying to work was a definite extra no-no.
“For this break, I suggest we play Rock, Paper, Scissors, Algebra, Dead Fish,” Chace said. He’d elected himself social coordinator, coming up with something for the little group in their part of the hallway to do during all their downtime.
Sarah laughed. “Whoa, back up a second? Dead fish?”
“It’s this new version I came up with. Algebra destroys paper. Paper wraps dead fish. Scissors cut off dead fish’s head. Rock smashes—
“Oh, I get it,” Brynn interrupted. “It’s like the version they play on The Big Bang Theory. Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock. Lizard poisons Spock. Spock vaporizes rock. Something destroys Spock.”
“Paper disproves Spock,” a redheaded guy named Lowell said. “I love that show.”
“I never watch it,” Chace told him. “I guess great minds just think alike.”
Brynn noticed a slight flush creeping up the back of Chace’s neck. She was almost positive he was lying. Again. In The Big Bang Theory version of the game, scissors cut off lizard’s head, just like how Chace’s scissors cut off a dead fish’s head. Great minds didn’t think that much alike. Did they?
She didn’t have much time to explore that thought before the AD called all the extras back to their places.
Back in character, Brynn opened her locker and picked up her hairbrush. You’re Dawn now, she reminded herself as she waited for the AD to call “background.”
She heard one of the assistants call out the scene number and then the AD called out, “Background!” Brynn started brushing the flip one of the stylists had given her. As she brushed, she reviewed her tips for her oral report: Stand up straight, make eye contact, but not with Adam because he always made her laugh, breathe after every—
Footsteps pounded down the hallway, and Brynn automatically jerked toward the sound. Sam Quinn was racing along the hall, sweat making a wet V on the front of his T-shirt. “Gabriel!” he shouted. “I know you’re here, buddy. Show me where you are, and I’ll get you out of here. I’ll get you home.”
“Cut!” This time it was Zan making the call. She walked over to Sam Quinn and they had a low conversation. Then Zan strode right over to Brynn’s little cluster of extras!
“You guys are doing a great job,” she told them. “What’s your name, Red?” she asked, nodding toward Lowell.
“Matthews. Lowell Matthews,” he answered quickly.
Zan grinned. “Clearly a fan of Bond, James Bond,” she said. “Me too. So, Lowell, what I want you to do is head for the drinking fountain when you come out of the classroom with the rest of the group.” She gestured toward the fountain almost directly opposite where Brynn and the rest of the extras were standing. “But before you get there, I want you to kneel down and tie your shoe—so untie it now.”
“Got it,” Lowell said, his eyes bright with excitement. Brynn didn’t blame him—she would be excited, too. Zan had just positioned him right in the middle of the action. That was prime location for an extra. Lowell would definitely get some screen time.
“This is important. Once you kneel down, stay down. Sam is going to jump over you.” Sam must have heard his name because he turned and waved. “You won’t get hurt as long as you just stay still, okay, Mr. Bond?”
“Okay,” Lowell told her.
Zan started back toward Sam, then turned around. “Oh, I want you to say, ‘Smooth move, Six Million Dollar Man,’ after he makes the jump. Just to emphasize that it’s the ’70s. Let me hear it.”
Lowell said the line with just the right amount of wow-ness. “Great,” Zan said. “I want to rehearse it one time,” she called to the AD.
“You just earned yourself a SAG voucher,” Brynn told Lowell. “Two more of those and you get to be a member of the Screen Actors Guild. You’re
on your way to being a professional!”
“That’s so awesome,” said Temple, an extra with two long, hippie-style ponytails and lots of love beads.
“Really?” Lowell turned to Chace for confirmation.
Chace didn’t seem to have heard him for a minute. His face was completely blank.
“Chace?” Sarah said.
“Yeah! Definitely! One down, two to go!” Chace finally answered. He gave Lowell an overenthusiastic slap on the shoulder. “Nice going!”
To Brynn it sounded like he was trying a little too hard to sound happy for Lowell. Which was another kind of lying, wasn’t it?
“I was really proud of you today,” Brynn told Sarah as they waited in line to buy their train tickets home from Guilford. “You kept all your swooning on the inside.”
“Oh, good,” Sarah answered. “I’ve completely got the likes for Chace, even though I just met him. But he doesn’t need to know that. At least that’s what all the magazine articles—and Chelsea—say.”
Brynn stared at her. “I wasn’t talking about Chace. I was talking about your reason for being an extra in the first place—McSwoony himself. You didn’t attempt to get an autograph. You didn’t even stare at him, except when we were all supposed to be staring.”
“I didn’t stare. Just some peeking out of the corner of my eye,” Sarah confessed. But truthfully, she hadn’t really done much of that, either. Most of her attention had been focused on Chace. And every time she had looked over at him, he seemed to be looking back at her with his lake-colored eyes. “Don’t you think his eyes are exactly the color of the lake at Camp Walla Walla?” she asked, bursting with enthusiasm.
“Well, I didn’t stare, but I admit I did a little peeking, too,” Brynn answered. “And I think his eyes are a lot more summer-sky blue.” She paid for her train ticket, and then waited for Sarah to pay for hers. “I’d say we should get a soft pretzel or something while we wait for our trains, but they gave us waaay too much food on the set. How much do I enjoy saying that—on the set? So very much.”
“Chace’s eyes are definitely not blue,” Sarah said as she led the way to a couple of empty seats in the waiting area. “They are green mixed with—”
“Chace? I thought we were talking about Sam ‘McSwoony’ Quinn.”
Sarah gave a little frown. “Oh, yeah. I guess we were. But anyway, what did you think of him—Chace? He reminds me of someone, though. And I can’t quite put my finger on who.”
And the way he kept finding little reasons to brush up against me, she silently added. Like when he adjusted her headband—for “continuity”—between shots in the movie. Or when he kept grabbing her hand so he could rub his fingers over her mood ring—part of her ’70s costume—to see how he was feeling.
“I agree. He does have one of those faces that makes you think you’ve seen the person before,” Brynn agreed. “And he’s kind of a good liar,” she added quickly.
“What are you talking about?” Sarah asked. She’d been with Chace every second Brynn had, and she hadn’t heard Chace lie about anything.
“It was no big deal. It’s just he came up with that story about me having a migraine and needing caffeine so fast,” Brynn explained.
Sarah rolled her eyes. “That’s hardly even lying. I mean, it’s not a lie that hurt anyone or anything. Chace and I wouldn’t have gotten to be extras today if he hadn’t come up with it. I definitely wouldn’t have thought of anything that fast.”
“I guess that’s what I meant. He’s a good liar,” Brynn said. “I didn’t mean he was a bad person or anything.”
“Chace wants to be an actor, just like you do,” Sarah said. “Actors have to have great improv skills, right? That’s what you saw—Chace being great at improv, not at lying.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Brynn agreed. “I didn’t think of it like that. It was an impressive acting job.”
Sarah nodded, satisfied. She wanted her friend to like Chace as much as she did. Well, no, not as much. But she wanted Brynn to like him. And she wanted him to like her friends. Because even though she’d only known him for one day, she had a feeling that Chace Turner was going to be somebody special in her life.
chapter FIVE
Retail therapy had been a complete failure, so Natalie decided to spend Sunday in Central Park. Alone. Communicating with nature. Squirrels didn’t really care if you had braces or not.
But squirrels weren’t exactly great company, either.
Instead, Natalie chose a path that would take her by the little park zoo. She hadn’t gone into the zoo in forever. There’d be some more entertaining animal friends in there. And she’d be by the zoo clock when the hour struck to see all the metal animals glide around the base of the clock. She’d get to see the hippopotamus with the violin. That had been her favorite for as long as she could remember.
Woo-hoo. I’ve really got an exciting day going, Natalie thought. A metal hippo with a violin, a wide variety of live animals, maybe a bag of popcorn later. Except popcorn was on the list of foods to avoid. Yup, Natalie had a list of foods to avoid now. She wasn’t supposed to eat anything hard or crunchy or sticky or chewy.
Natalie sighed as she headed toward the zoo’s ticket booth. As she pulled out her wallet, someone tapped her on the shoulder. It was Colette, a girl from her language arts class.
“Hi, Nat. Are you here to do sketches for Ms. Furth’s class? I’ve drawn my cat about a thousand times and I thought maybe I’d have better luck with a different animal. Although maybe my problem is lack of talent. I don’t know why I signed up for art in the first place. I can hardly draw a stick figure.”
“Not in art,” Natalie mumbled, trying to speak without opening her mouth wide enough to show her braces.
“What?” Colette asked.
“Not taking art,” Natalie said, speaking more loudly to force the words past her mostly closed lips. She thought she might have given Colette a little flash of braces, anyway.
“Oh. Okay.”
Yeah, Colette had clearly seen the braces. She was acting all weird now. Usually Colette was really chatty. Now it was just “Oh. Okay.”
“Are you going to get your ticket?” Colette asked.
Natalie definitely didn’t want to walk around the zoo with Colette pretending that nothing was different about her. “Changed my mind,” she muttered. She rushed off, and could feel Colette staring after her.
You’re being paranoid, she told herself. But when she shot a quick glance over her shoulder, Colette really was staring, like Natalie was some kind of freak girl. Natalie jammed her hands in her jacket pockets and picked up her pace.
She walked without a destination, just wanting to move. A few minutes later, she passed the statue of Balto, the sled dog who had helped bring antitoxin serum across Alaska’s icy tundra, saving the lives of hundreds of people. A little kid sat on Balto’s back, as usual. Some kid was almost always getting his picture taken on top of Balto. In fact, the dog’s back was shiny from all those kids’ behinds sitting on him.
Natalie smiled, momentarily forgetting to keep her lips together. The breeze sent a chill through her metal braces, and an ache through her teeth. Her smile faded, and she kept walking.
She stopped at the Krebs Boathouse Café, just for something to do, and got a hot chocolate. Thank goodness she could still drink anything she wanted to! As she sipped, she watched the model boats glide over the small boat pond nearby. It was amazing to her how people got so into the little boats. Adult-type people, not little kids.
A guy around her age was the youngest person operating one of the remote control boats. He didn’t go to her school. Natalie was pretty sure she wouldn’t see anyone from her school around the pond. She didn’t know anyone who was into model boats.
He’s pretty cute, she thought. He had shaggy, blond hair. Not shaggy like he stood in front of a mirror with a can of mousse every morning, but shaggy like he didn’t get it cut quite often enough. He definitely had emo bangs, withou
t the emo vibe. And he had freckles. Just the right amount of freckles. Freckles as accessories, not as the dominant skin feature.
The boy turned toward her and caught her checking him out. He smiled, a kind of shy smile, a smile that showed a mouthful of braces. Natalie looked down, pretending that her hot chocolate required 110 percent of her attention.
Come on, Nat. Just yesterday you were wondering when a guy would look at you again. That boat boy is looking, she told herself. So what are you going to do about it?
Maybe “normal” boys wouldn’t be interested in her until her mouth was no longer a construction zone. But that guy over there, who had just smiled at her, he had braces, too. So it made sense that her braces didn’t repulse him.
Natalie stood up. Maybe she didn’t have to be completely miserable. She finished her hot chocolate, tossed the cup in the trash, and walked over to the boy with the braces.
“Hi,” she said.
He smiled again. “Hi.”
“Nice boat,” she told him.
“Want to try it?” he asked.
“Sure.” They did the name exchange. He was Eli. Natalie liked that name.
“Have you ever sailed—either model or life-size?” Eli asked.
“I’ve gone out on a friend’s boat a few times. But what I did was more lying around and sunning than sailing,” Natalie admitted.
“Okay, then we have to go over the basics first,” Eli said. “The wind’s relationship to the sails is key to the motion of the boat.
“That much I did get as I was hanging out on deck,” Natalie said.
“What you might not have known was that wind doesn’t just push. The sails have a forward and a sideways pull, which makes the air deflect when it hits the sail. The air on the leeward side has a faster path than the air on the windward side. It’s the difference in pressure that moves the boat forward. So figuring out—” Eli stopped and grimaced. “Just flick me on the forehead when I start getting all Bill Nye the Science Guy.” He set the boat in the water and handed her the remote. “It will be more fun if you just play around with it. You’ll figure out how to get the best speed.”
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