Thom watched me paw at the lock screen like a bear.
“Whoops.” He keyed in his password and opened his phone contacts. Scrolled to the name he wanted to use and handed over his phone again.
The contact was listed as “Somebody.”
My throat went dry.
“Phone number?” he prompted me.
“What for?” I asked.
He looked taken aback. “I thought we could keep in touch, maybe check in with each other.”
“We’re on opposite coasts, I’m not sure I see the point.” I knew from my years with J. J. that long distance was crap and never worked.
He swallowed. “Just a thought.” He held out his hand. For a second I thought he wanted to shake, and the formality made me sad. Then I realized he wanted his phone back, which reminded me of how ludicrous his request was; he’d wanted nothing to do with me the other night, but now he wanted to keep in touch?
“It seems a little hypocritical, your sudden interest,” I mumbled.
He rubbed his forehead. “Ohhh-kay, you know what, Holly…?”
“Was I not romantic enough for you? Because I’m never going to be the kind of person who says, I have baggage and you have baggage but somehow, together, we’re a matched set.”
“Except that you are, because you just did,” he replied.
His I’m-calm-you’re-crazy routine was maddening, especially because he knew what I meant.
I was about to tell him that when InstaMom cannonballed between us, splashing with news.
“Holly, there you are. I have to tell you something!”
I expected Thom to flee at her girlie drama, but his eyes darted between us, curious.
“Are you okay? What’s wrong?” I asked, placing a hand on her arm. Her excited motions flung me off.
“Whoops, sorry, I was online, at the Daily Denizen.”
I was instantly on edge. “Why? That’s my addiction.”
“Yeah, you can’t have it.” Thom waggled his finger mockingly.
“I just mean—I’d hate for you to get sucked into a different problem when you’re supposed to be treating your Instagram habit,” I clarified lamely.
“You’re territorial over your addiction,” Thom chided me. “Lisa,” he fake-whined. “Holly’s not sharing.”
I wanted to stomp my foot at him.
“No, listen,” Instagram Mom cried. “I did it on purpose. It was relaxing, checking on yours instead of mine. It’s a technique they call cross-pollination; you’ll learn about it soon.”
Her anxious frivolity was contagious. My heart thrummed and my body tensed.
“What’d you want to tell me?” I asked.
“Didn’t you say the reunion is in a month?”
“Friday, May twenty-sixth.”
“It’s actually on Friday, April twenty-fourth.”
Today was Wednesday, April 22, according to the dry erase board of announcements in the hallway. If Marjorie was telling the truth, that was two days away. Which was impossible.
My throat constricted and I frantically swallowed. “No, it can’t be. It’s in May. After I leave here.”
“The Daily Denizen has a countdown clock up, and it said two days, ten hours, and five minutes.”
“No, that can’t be right.”
“‘La la la, I’m not listening,’” Thom impersonated me.
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” I exploded.
Everyone in the hallway—and cafeteria—gaped at us. Thom slung his duffel bag over his shoulder and marched out of my life. Regret washed over me.
There was no time to dwell, though. I clutched InstaMom’s arm, tightly this time so she couldn’t flail me off. “Are you absolutely sure about this?”
She nodded vigorously. “It’s at Rockefeller Center, eight p.m.”
“New York?” I squeak-screamed. “Not San Diego?”
“It was moved because of a scheduling conflict.”
“No, it’s supposed to be in San Diego. In a month. After I leave here.”
“Tara has a Broadway show opening the next night, so they moved it up a month and changed it from West Coast to East Coast.”
“The whole point was it would be in San Diego, where the show was filmed. Near my house.”
“I’m only telling you what I read.”
“But—”
“You can believe me or not.”
“Right. Yes. Thank you,” I responded by rote. My voice sounded far away, distant, hopeless.
I paced in an ever-widening circle, muttering denials to myself.
The others observed me, moving back as one unit as the circumference of my path widened. They probably wondered if they were witnessing a full-blown mental collapse. Was this what happened to Carl after his iPhone was discovered in its “hiding place”? Am I the new Carl?
I broke the loop I was in and ran to Lisa’s office. I told her I had an emergency and needed to leave right away. She was not thrilled.
“You came to us,” she reminded me. “You wanted to make changes in your life, and you will, but only if you give the program a chance to work.”
“Maybe I’m not even a real addict,” I said. “Thom told me I was a replacement for a guy who got kicked out.”
“You may not have been struggling as long as the others, but I saw the potential for it to get much worse. Why not stay and prevent that from happening?”
“I’ll come back, I swear. You can hold my spot for me. I’ll even start over from scratch. But I need to go to the reunion—I mean, anniversary.” Stupid Thom, getting in my head.
“How will you possibly travel to New York?” Lisa asked, her eyebrow raised, her bifocals inching down. In fact, all her circles—from her necklace to the sun graphics on her whimsical blouse—looked like they were frowning at me.
I ticked off the possibilities. “Rent a car, catch a flight, ride a bus, take a train, does it matter?”
“When your sister dropped you off, she took all your personal effects with her for safekeeping.”
Fuckity-fuck.
Seeing the eerie blankness to my face, she tried a gentler tack. “What you’re feeling is perfectly normal. The panic, the withdrawal, the desire to escape, everyone goes through it. Everyone. But it’s going to be okay. And hey, tomorrow you get fifteen minutes online. You’re so close. The second phase is about to begin, and you don’t want to miss it. The first thing we’ll be teaching you is cross-pollination…”
My brain entered hyperdrive. There had to be an answer, there had to be a way. True, Renee had all my stuff. Besides my laptop and iPhone, she had my purse, which she couldn’t FedEx to me because she was out of the country, and my parents couldn’t use their spare key to get it because they were with her. No one else could get in the house—I’d always been the backup. Who was my backup? Without my credit card or ATM I couldn’t buy a plane ticket, and without my license I couldn’t board the flight anyway. Nor could I rent a car. I could hitchhike—if I didn’t mind ending up in a bunch of jars.
“If you leave the program early, you’ll forfeit your per diem,” Lisa blathered on.
“Oh no, not the ten bucks,” I moaned sarcastically.
That’s when I remembered.
Thom lived in upstate New York.
And he’s driving there right now.
“I’m sorry, that was rude, but I do have to go,” I told Lisa. “Um, could I have part of the per diem? No? Okay, no, I get it…”
I signed myself out “against counselor’s advice” and grabbed my backpack of clothes and my notebook from my room: all my earthly possessions.
I gazed longingly at the massive, comfortable king-size bed. I would miss that bed. The past twenty-odd days with it had given me the longest, most luxurious nights of sleep I could recall.
I raced to catch up with Thom in the parking garage, which smelled like wet paint. He was piling his stuff into an ancient Volkswagen Passat. It was the color of rust. No, wait, it was actually rusted. All over.
“Thom!”
His back went rigid and he turned slowly to face me. “Come to yell at me one more time before I go?”
“The anniversary got moved to New York.”
“I heard. The entire hospital heard.”
He went to shut the trunk. I tossed my backpack inside first.
“Take me with you,” I pleaded.
“No can do, buckaroo,” was his reply, and the single most irritating phrase I’d ever heard. He retrieved my backpack and placed it on the ground, slammed the trunk fast this time, and moved to get into the driver’s seat.
I placed my hand on his arm. It was warm and firm. He tensed slightly and looked at me.
“I will find a way to get there, with or without you, but if I’m sliced up by the Minnesota Mangler, or whoever, they’re probably going to want to interview you.”
My hand still rested on his arm. A partial tattoo peeked out from beneath his shirtsleeve. I wondered what it was. Thom gently extracted my hand and placed it back at my side. It felt like the rejection in my room all over again.
Tears of frustration stung my eyes. “Is it so horrifying that I kissed you? It’s all right if it is, but then you probably shouldn’t have been flirting with me all week.”
His eyebrows flew sky-high. “Flirting? When did I flirt?”
“I seem to recall an offer of pizza at a certain Mall of America?” I hated that those words lived in my brain and found a way out.
His baby-blue eyes bored into mine. “If I were to flirt with you, there would be no confusion about it. You would know.”
His words, and the anger in his voice, gave me a little thrill. God knew why.
His voice lowered, and his eyes darted around. “Look. It’s because I like you that I’m not going to take you with me.”
I couldn’t decipher his logic. He wasn’t flirting, but he did like me? How did that work, exactly?
“Thanks, nice, that’s helpful,” I said in clipped tones.
“Why are you so determined to go?” he asked. “The fact they moved it up is a gift. Now you can forget about it and focus on yourself.” He nodded back toward the hospital.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
I closed my eyes for a second, loathing what I was about to admit. Loathing how pathetic it would make me sound. “I don’t have a ‘self’ without it. It’s the only thing I’ve ever accomplished, and it happened when I was eleven. I peaked when I was eleven. Do you have any idea what that feels like? I’m thirty-six now, and what do I have to show for it? I never finished college, I forgot to marry and have my own kids because I was raising my sister’s daughter, and now that I finally told them, ‘It’s time for me,’ it’s probably too late. What was the point of anything in the last twenty-five years?”
I waited for him to interrupt, or contradict my words, but he simply looked at me, so I kept going.
“See, when I was eleven…anything was possible. Anything could have happened after that. I was on fucking TV, back when that meant something. I auditioned and I was chosen and I was good at it. I did photo shoots, I got fan mail, gifts and letters, like the rest of them. But after I turned sixteen and the show got canceled, that’s where it stopped for me. Everyone else, that was the beginning of everything, their lives, but for me it was the end. It’s the only thing in my life I can look at and say, ‘I did that. That really happened, that was mine,’ and now they want to take it from me, pretend I wasn’t there, that it didn’t happen. I can’t let them do that. It’s all I have,” I repeated, my throat sore. “It’s all I will ever have.”
He absorbed my words. I struggled for breath, and my neck flared with heat.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last. “But I’m not taking you.”
“I can get you home faster to your son,” I blurted out. I felt gruesome saying it. “If we take turns driving while the other one sleeps, we’ll get there twice as fast.”
Thom looked surprised, but then his eyes narrowed. “How do you know about Sammy?”
“A few of us were talking, and someone mentioned you were in a hurry to get back to him.”
“Yeah. I am.”
He climbed in the driver’s side and slammed the door shut. Jammed the key in the ignition. If he left, all hope of crashing the anniversary went with him.
“Please?” I begged. “Please?”
Thom rolled down the window. Slowly, and with effort.
Dear God, it’s a crank handle. That’s how old and decrepit his car is.
He pushed his closed fists against his eyes for a second. When he pulled them away, his face looked wrinkled and pained.
“Get in.”
Part II
1
COLD OPEN
INTERIOR LION’S DEN—DAY
(HOLLY, TARA, KELLY, J. J., DIEGO)
HOLLY rushes in, her arms and legs flailing madly. She jerks her limbs and throws her hips side-to-side.
HOLLY
(whisper-screams)
Skunk!
TARA
What’s going on?
KELLY
I think it’s her new dance move. Remember she was saying we never let her come up with routines?
J. J.
Is this your new dance? I dig it!
HOLLY
Skunk! Skunk!
She frantically points to the den’s exit. The others think this is part of her dance move and start to copy her, pointing in rhythm to the exit.
J. J.
Sweet moves, Holly! Let’s all do ‘The Skunk’!
TARA, KELLY, J. J., and DIEGO mimic HOLLY’s increasingly bizarre movements.
DIEGO
Yeah, that’s one funky skunk!
Audience laughter. HOLLY waves her arms and legs again, trying to get them to understand: There’s a skunk outside! A sudden splash and poof of skunk juice shoots into the den. The others scream and flail at the horrible stench. The room fills with smoke (fog machine).
KELLY
Holly, why didn’t you tell us there was a skunk?
Audience laughter. As the smoke clears, DIEGO waves his hand in front of his face.
DIEGO
That really IS one funky skunk…
END OF COLD OPEN
* * *
I’d told Thom that being recast in Fowl Play made me realize acting was a fool’s game, but that’s not exactly how it went down. That should’ve been my response, and I wish it had been. I wish I’d stopped playing then and there.
Lesson One: Actors are not known for their self-respect.
When Diego got canceled, most of us were sophomores in high school, except for Kelly, who, at twenty, was long emancipated and immediately headed to Hollywood. Over the next year, everyone’s pen-pal game was strong. Then OffBeat formed and took everyone with it, beaming them into outer space from their collective hometowns, as though raptured into Boy Band Heaven. Brody was the first one signed. An eccentric woman who claimed to be an entrepreneur in Sugarland, Texas, realized boy bands were making a comeback. Via an ad in the local paper, she recruited three twenty-something guys to form the initial lineup. They needed two more singers, preferably younger, to complete the band. Texas-born-and-bred Brody fit the bill and called J. J. in North Carolina to join him; and for a time, Melody and Tara appeared as the group’s opening act as a short-lived duo named Manchot (literally “penguin” in French. Because they were black and white. I know, it’s horrifying). Around the same time, Kelly got the lead in Honeypot.
While our friends jumped aboard the Fame Express, Ethan and I kept our heads down. He’d returned to his regularly scheduled life in Iowa and I relied on him to justify my inaction. He was the other “normie,” and his blasé attitude about the entertainment world seemed the healthiest, the one I most wanted to emulate, of the bunch. But then he, too, got swept away, in an indie film about neo-Nazi youth that would earn him a Golden Globe nomination.
By senior year, I was the only one still enro
lled in public school, or any kind of school, but I shrugged it off. What was the rush? Why not enjoy the break from early call times and constant rehearsals? Besides, if I decided to go back to show business, it would be waiting for me, like a puppy.
Lesson Two: Show business is not a puppy.
My teenage self believed it was my choice whether I was on TV or not. I didn’t realize it was something other people had to agree to.
Nearly every casting director, producer, and director who received a copy of my reel immediately crossed me off the list for roles that required subtlety. On Diego, I’d been up for any joke, pun, song, silly costume, or waka-waka moment you could think of. In retrospect, it was obvious I’d been drunk with power. Clowning power. While in clown-mode, backed up by the indiscriminate, torture-induced laugh track, I hit my marks and my lines well enough, but in no way had I demonstrated range.
Fowl Play was in my wheelhouse (that is, a comedy taped live with animal co-stars) and didn’t require its cast to behave like a human ever would, so I fit right in. For the pilot, at least. The night before I was supposed to shoot episode two, I received the call from my agent that ripped my heart out and set it on fire.
To help me recover, J. J. flew me out to Iceland to watch the aurora borealis with him.
I tried to stay positive, telling him it was worth losing the gig to see those lights. (I was still operating under the assumption that other jobs were around the corner. It hadn’t dawned on me yet that it might never happen; that what had worked for me as a kid didn’t work for me as an adult.)
If I’d run out of money, I might have given up sooner, but the Fowl Play checks kept me solvent enough to continue auditioning.
Fame Adjacent Page 7