by Amy Finnegan
She would actually be perfect as the foundation’s director, but we’ll take it one step at a time. And this way, she can still be involved in my life without supervising my every move.
“Sure, I’d love to help,” Mom says. Then we’re both silent for a bit while we just smile at each other. Sort of awkward. But she eventually says, “Now, as only your mother, I have just a thought about Jake.”
“Okay,” I reply, the tightness in my throat returning.
“Simply put, even nice guys can be idiots,” Mom tells me. “So if you’re confident you didn’t do anything to betray him, then this is his problem, not yours. And if he’s worth all these tears, he’ll figure things out and come back on his own.”
A knee-jerk reaction. Isn’t that what Jake had said sometimes happens to him? Is this all that’s going on? Or has he heard, as Devin hinted, one too many excuses from me?
“You don’t think I should try to talk to Jake before we go back to work?” I ask Mom. She has to know how crazy things might get on set if I wait. “I’ve already left a ton of messages, and I asked his best friend to tell him what happened, but—”
My dad opens the back door and pokes his head in. “Emma, do you have a bucket?” he asks. “We’ll also need a hose. And a few towels.”
Mom and I walk around the counter to get a better look at him. He’s wet all the way up to his waist. “I don’t even want to see the boys,” Mom says with a hand over her mouth.
I peek outside, too curious to resist. Logan and Levi are plastered in mud—from their toes to the top of their heads—and are chasing a flopping fish down the running path.
Jake
It’s better to just be numb, to forget about it.
I’ve been staying in a hotel since Friday night and plan to stay here as long as I have to. It’s a given that I’ll have to move, but my job is a serious problem. I can run all I want to from Sabino Canyon, but seeing Emma—being told to kiss her on cue, like I know will happen in upcoming episodes—will be impossible to pull off without losing my mind.
She’s been right all along. We never should’ve crossed that friend line, so this is the angle I use when I e-mail her the day before returning to work:
I don’t want you to feel like you owe me an apology. I’m the one who pushed you into something that you told me, over and over again, you weren’t ready for. So let’s just remember the good times and move on. It isn’t worth fighting over.
That one paragraph took me a full day to write. It’s the easy way out, but I don’t have time to handle it like a man. I’ll have to work with her at least once before our hiatus begins, but it isn’t until Monday night, when I get my schedule, that I know when that will be.
Tuesday and Wednesday, I’m working on some scenes without the principal cast. Thursday, I’ll only be with Kimmi. Then Friday is the day: Emma and I are scheduled to be in a chemistry class scene together. The script features the early stages of dangerous flirting between our characters—art imitating life in the most agonizing way.
My only hope of getting through Friday is if I walk into the studio with a totally calloused attitude. But when I see Emma sitting in her cast chair, my heart detaches from the rest of me and starts thinking on its own. She doesn’t look like herself. With her eyes lacking their usual brightness, she seems hollow. It’s hard not to stare, so I head for the food instead.
Two crew members are already at the table and don’t notice me before I overhear them talking about Emma. They say she’s been despondent all week. McGregor catches me listening in, and says, “You look like you’ve been blindsided by a bulldozer.”
“I’m fine, okay?” I reply, but he knows I’m full of it.
A few minutes later, while McGregor explains how he envisions the scene, Emma and I are practically face-to-face, but nowhere near looking at each other. I’d sent her the e-mail so we wouldn’t fight in front of everyone at work, but why isn’t she even trying to explain herself? I guess she might’ve already done that in one of the messages she left me, but I was so pissed off that first day that I erased every one of them without listening.
We start rehearsal, and right off the bat, the script supervisor corrects me on my opening line. “Jake, that’s from the original script. Didn’t you get a copy of the revised scene?”
“Uh …”
Tyler pushes stiff fingers through his hair. “It was delivered by express courier yesterday afternoon,” he says. “We missed you at the studio.”
I look down at my feet, but my eyes shift to Emma’s instead. “Sorry, I haven’t been home for a while,” I reply, then realize that I forgot to grab the sides—copies of my lines and what scenes are being filmed—from my dressing room.
Tyler walks over to mumble something to a fuming McGregor, then finally speaks into his radio. “We need sides of the revised lab scene for Mr. Elliott.”
“Copy that,” is the reply. A PA swears in the background, probably because his head is on the chopping block for not double-checking that I saw the changes. No one usually has to.
“Sides flying in,” comes from a nearby radio.
A PA runs onto the set and puts the miniature pages right into my hands. I scan the lines. “Wait, this is … totally different.” There’s still a lot of friendly conversation, but none of the touchy-feely stuff from the original script. Is the love triangle being delayed? Or even cut?
“Back to one!” McGregor shouts.
Emma has wandered off, fiddling with a wad of electrical tape. We return to our marks behind a lab table. “We just need to get this over with,” I tell her.
“You made that clear when you broke up with me in an e-mail,” she says. “But, gosh, I loved the personal touch at the end: ‘Let’s just remember the good times!’ Where’d you get that line, your high school yearbook?”
“Quiet please, let’s rehearse,” Tyler says, and the set falls silent.
“I meant the scene,” I whisper, almost knocking over a row of glass beakers. The whole table is covered with flasks and other breakable crap, all filled with neon-colored goo. It’s a seriously bad day to be filming on this set.
McGregor doesn’t take his eyes off us. “And action.”
I read my first line, tripping over it like it’s written in a foreign language. Then Emma practically coughs through hers. Tyler glares at us both before turning to McGregor.
“Regain your focus,” McGregor says. “Let’s go again.”
“You’re being stupid,” Emma snaps, which isn’t her line—it’s meant for me. A mere second later she flubs her part again and looks to the script supervisor. “Sorry, what’s my line?”
The script supervisor says, “Forget about my date, how was yours?”
Emma hesitates before nodding, and we start rehearsal over again. And again … and again. McGregor finally stops pacing the floor. “Let’s add the Steadicam.”
Tyler raises his brows. “We’ll need twenty minutes to set it up.”
“Just do it,” McGregor tells him. “We’ll film this one line at a time if we have to.”
Adding a third camera isn’t all that unusual, but the set has always been arranged for it in advance, and we only use the Steadicam when we’re in a hurry to get a scene finished. I’d say this qualifies. We still have the other half of the scene to shoot with Kimmi and Brett later on.
The gaffer sends his lighting team running. PAs also race around the set, directed by radio commands. “You two, follow me,” McGregor hisses at Emma and me. As we obey, Emma rolls the wad of electrical tape between her hands even faster. I need something to fiddle with too, like a stick of dynamite.
McGregor leads us to Emma’s dressing room, opens the door, and extends his arm. “After you,” he says. Emma steps in first, and I follow, but McGregor stays in the hallway. “You have exactly eighteen minutes to work this out, or you’ll both find your characters taking a nosedive off a steep cliff. Understand?” He closes the door.
We spend at least three of our allotted minutes in b
rutal silence while Emma plays with her tape, and I mindlessly kick a metal leg on her chair. She finally looks right at me and says, “This is absurd, Jake. Stop pretending like you flipped a switch and shut your feelings off.”
“I guess that’s what happens when someone cheats on you. Right?” Emma squints her eyes at me like she doesn’t know what I’m talking about, so I add, “Oh, I see—I’m overreacting. You sure there wasn’t any kissing involved? Because it looked pretty darn real to me.”
“Did you even listen to the messages I left?” she says. “I explained everything.”
I fold my arms. “Let me guess, you were rehearsing a future scene?”
“We were just talking, and then he caught me off guard!”
“How could you say that? I told you months ago that Brett liked you—and McGregor told you too. And you want to know something even more interesting? Brett has been telling me for months that you liked him, that you were practically begging for a relationship.”
“What?” she says. “There’s no way he could’ve thought that.”
“The only thing I can’t sort out,” I say, “is when you were acting and when you weren’t. That seems to be a very fine line with you.”
Emma pushes past me. “How stupid of me to think you were the only guy who ever knew the difference.”
She leaves the room and slams the heavy door behind her. My heart is hammering so hard it feels like my ribs might crack. I sit in Emma’s dressing room for another ten minutes, trying not to look at anything that belongs to her. McGregor finally comes to get me.
“That went well,” he says. “Emma’s flooding the ladies’ room with tears, and judging by the look on your face, special effects had better hide the explosives.”
“Funny you say that,” I tell him. “I was just thinking about dynamite.”
McGregor’s face twists into pure fury. “There’s not one bloody joke to be made about this!” he says, but he made the first joke, not me. Or at least I’d thought he was joking. “We have over a hundred employees working on this production, most with families to support, and we’re all at the mercy of a childish love spat!” He continues to release heaves of breath until he finally drops his head. “My apologies. I’m rather volatile when my studio is in disarray.”
Maybe I’m the one who needs to talk to special effects.
I’m back on set before Emma is, and I find Brett prowling around, hours before he’s supposed to be here. It isn’t the first time I’ve seen him this week, but it’s the first time I’ve wanted to say something. And I have plenty to get off my chest.
My target must be obvious because McGregor blocks my path. “Jake, when I hired you, I hoped you’d bring a much-needed maturity to this group. Please don’t prove me wrong.”
I shake the tension from my arms. “Since when did right or wrong matter in this business?” I ask. “As Emma just informed me, I can hardly tell the difference anymore.”
“Then we’ve given you a proper welcome to Hollywood.” McGregor turns back to our audience and shoots a stabbing glare directly at Brett. “This is a closed set. If you’re not in this shot or have a radio on your hip, get out!”
Emma
The fact that only one chemistry flask has gone crashing to the floor today is nothing short of divine intervention. Jake and I have barely made it through filming the first half of the lab scene—it took us over two hours—when Brett and Kimmi arrive on set, and we’re stuck with them for at least two hours longer.
Even on a good day, those guys can’t be in front of the same camera without a SWAT team of crew members distracting them from killing each other. And now that I’m fighting with Jake, and Jake isn’t speaking to Brett, and Brett is being all sulky with me, McGregor is acting like he would rather shut down the whole production than deal with us.
And maybe it would be better that way. We’re only wrapping episode six, with sixteen episodes to go in the first season. Then there are three more years on our contracts after that … which makes eighty-two additional episodes to film … with eight to ten workdays for each. This means spending at least seven thousand more hours together.
I want out.
I was a minor when I agreed to do this series, so I should just plead teenage insanity, pack up, and hit the road. My lawyers can take care of the rest. I would rather walk away, ruin my career, and lose all of my money in a lawsuit with the studio, than wake up every morning and try to convince myself that I hate the guy I just spent the entire night dreaming of. And then come to work and have to be all flirty with him for the camera.
I can’t do it.
“Last looks!” The shout rattles my head.
Kimmi is close by, complaining about her flat sneakers. “They make my ankles look fat.”
“And don’t forget that the camera adds ten pounds,” Brett says from the other side of her. “Even to your ankles.”
I would have told Brett to leave Kimmi alone, but we’ve hardly spoken to each other since the premiere. According to “someone close” to us, however, we “skipped off to San Diego last Saturday.” I’m dying to call the tabloids and ask a few questions about our invented trip, such as: Did we eat at a cozy restaurant? Did we buy a house together with a white picket fence? Or was it a beach villa, where I can splash in the waves while Brett surfs?
As part of the curious public, don’t I have the right to know this stuff?
“Martini’s up!” Tyler calls. “First team, back to one! Then we’re off for two weeks!”
We all return to our marks behind adjacent lab tables. An entire classroom of extras has just left. McGregor explains that this shot will be tight—only on the principal cast. The camera is closest to Jake and will show our adjacent tables from the side. The angle is to capture a brief exchange between Brett and me, where he answers my question about our experiment.
All day long I’ve felt Jake next to me, been haunted by his familiar voice. And now to my right, just a few feet away, is the guy who somehow came between us. But how?
Production calls are made, and McGregor sits behind his monitor. “And action!”
“You know it was all real,” I whisper to Jake, right over Brett’s first line. Brett is the only one with a mic. “Deep down, Jake, you have to know that.”
“Emma …” I hear him say, and his tone has changed. It’s soft. Sad.
Probably my imagination.
“Cut!” McGregor says. “You missed your cue, lass. Let’s go again, from the top.” I try to focus, but there’s a metronome inside me, making me think, think, think everything through. “And action!”
Brett leans back from his table. “What did you say, Eden?”
I turn my head, on cue this time. “What’s the next step?” is my actual line, but I don’t have to say it for this shot. The camera only has to catch my hair swishing from one shoulder to the other; Eden is nothing but a prop right now. A silent temptress.
But what am I?
A few lines later, McGregor calls “Cut!” again.
“Back to one!”
We’re about to start over when a sound guy shouts, “We’re picking up background noise!” And we all freeze, listening. There’s a distant roar of military jets.
McGregor flies into a rage. “I built my studio in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, and …” He curses and commands us all to stay exactly where we are. Then he leaves the set for who knows what—to call the Pentagon?
My heart is throbbing, my eyes stinging. I turn to Brett, unable to hold back any longer. “Did you know?” I ask. “Did you kiss me knowing that I liked Jake?”
The crew scampers around and chats loudly, but I can still hear Jake breathing to the side of me. Brett looks over with a stunned, hurt look on his face, and for the first time, I realize he’s faking it. “You like Jake?” he asks.
“Oh please!” Kimmi says, coming around Brett. “Of course he knew. I told you that forever ago. And he also knew there was a camera outside the atrium.”
&n
bsp; “Whatever,” Brett tells her. “You’re such a liar.”
Jake stirs behind me, but my focus stays on Brett.
Kimmi steps closer. “Brett followed Payton and me into the atrium at the party, and then they started arguing because Brett doesn’t want us getting back together—but I am sooo over Payton, anyway. Then Brett did a double take at the window and said, ‘Chill, dude, someone’s in the hedges with a camera.’ So we all left.”
The part about Brett chasing after them is for sure true. And if that’s true, and Brett has been feeding Jake lies about me liking him, then … everything at last makes sense.
Brett laughs. “Think about it, Emma. Kimmi would say anything to make me look bad.”
“You set me up,” I reply. “You were coming into the ballroom to find me when we happened to pass. Then you lured me into the atrium, planning to kiss me and knowing it would all be caught on camera.”
“Oh, come on! Why would—”
I slam my hands into Brett’s chest. “I’ll tell you why!” The set falls silent, and all heads flip toward us, but I can’t rein in my emotions. “Even if I would’ve pushed you away after you kissed me, you still could’ve played it up in the tabloids and claimed that I’d broken your heart! And it’s really no big deal that I’ve figured you out now, is it? Not when you can still say that I cheated on you with Jake. So either way, you win!”
Brett holds up his hands. “That … that isn’t true.”
“You’ve tipped off the press all along! Starting with the motocross.”
Kimmi eases away. “Actually, that was me.”
“See, just like we thought,” Brett says. “So how can you—”
“It doesn’t matter,” I reply. “Our trips to L.A. didn’t have anything to do with promoting the show. The publicity was all for you.”
The veins in Brett’s neck are purple and angry. “You’re crazy.”
“Yeah, I must be,” I snap, “because I fell for every lie and sob story you told me. Well, bravo! Great performance.”
“Really?” Brett says. “You want to talk about lies? Where’d you and Jake go for Labor Day, huh? When you were supposed to be with me in Tahoe? Or how about that scam of setting each other up with your best friends? That was a good one!”