by Tash Skilton
Celeste turns at the sound of my footsteps and stares at my gaping expression. “Oh, good. You’re up,” she says. She places the glass hexagon on the table and then proceeds to hammer a nail on top of the mark she’s made on the wall.
Everything inside me is screaming to shut the door, try and get another hour of sleep, and forget this episode ever happened. But I’m too curious for my own good. “Celeste. What in the fuck?”
“I know. Aren’t they adorable?” she says, touching the glass. “I’m starting with one, but we can expand so that we can make this whole wall into a hive. And we can eventually collect our own honey.”
“Honey,” I repeat dumbly, staring at Celeste’s preternaturally smooth face and her wild, springy hair. She could be anywhere between twenty-five and sixty-five years old; the walk-in Botox-and-boba center around the corner makes me think she’s closer to the latter but that’s mostly conjecture.
“I’m thinking if they produce enough honey, we can set up a stand at the farmers’ market and get a huge tax break on our rent. Maybe we’ll call it . . .” She stares off into the distance as she makes imaginary rectangles with her hands, like she can see the name on a marquee. “‘Micro-collected honey,’” she intones dramatically.
“Mmm-hmmm,” I say. “I’m just going to . . .” I can’t think of what to finish that sentence with, so I shut the door, crawl back into bed, and burrow underneath two pillows.
My body’s self-defense against the actual swarm on the other side of the door is to go back to sleep. But then I glance at my phone again. 7:23 a.m. My real alarm is set to go off in exactly seven minutes anyway. Might as well take the extra time to get a head start on what I’m about to walk into at work.
I go to my laptop, open up Hootsuite, and, through a fog, check the socials to make sure nothing dire has happened in the eight hours since I dared to go to sleep and take my eyes off them.
The CoRaB Twitter still only has the one tweet from three weeks ago that turned out to be Clarence’s farewell message:
@CastlesofRandB : Halt, Rustiers and tell us . . . ARE YOU READY TO REBOOT?!
Ah, Clarence. I hardly knew ye. Seven hours into training on my first day on the job at WatchGoNowPlus—the streaming service that acquired the CoRaB reboot—Clarence quit in a flurry of shouting (from our boss, Sean Delaney, not Clarence), stomping (also Sean), a smashed centaur mug (yup, still Sean), and an HR huddle/human litigation barricade gathered around—guess who?
On my second day on the job, I got a temporary promotion to “interim social media coordinator.” This promotion comes with no monetary gain or title change on my email signatures. But I am now responsible for taking over Clarence’s duties while they interview for a permanent hire. Because, as Sean put it through gritted teeth and while squeezing the life out of a WatchGoNowPlus stress ball that came at the suggestion of his mandatory anger management courses, “I know strategy. Not the minutiae of sending out tweets to the masses. Which I’m sure you’re . . . you’re . . . great. At.” He spit that last part like it physically hurt him to dole out positive reinforcement. Ah, little Seany, the part of me that once studied child psychology whispered in my head, who hurt you?
Despite that, I still haven’t gotten the password to the Twitter account. Clarence has been holding it hostage while he negotiates his severance/here’s-what-I-need-you-to-give-me-so-that-I-don’t-sue-your-asses package. Our interactions may have been brief, but I’m still rooting for him.
As of now, all is quiet on the CoRaB social front. So I get dressed, swipe on some makeup, wait until it’s exactly 8:03 a.m., and then open up my phone to summon the LA version of my knight in shining armor: my Uber driver.
* * *
It’s a classic story.
Girl moves to Los Angeles in the hopes of becoming a screenwriter.
Girl is terrified of driving.
Girl meets a nice and handsome (because it’s LA and handsome is a requisite for anyone who’s hopped on their flight with a dream and a cardigan) boy/Uber driver on her first day in the city.
Boy asks girl out at the end of her ride.
Girl thinks, eh, why not? At least she can get chauffeured around for another week. Besides, Craigslist has paired her up with a roommate straight out of a “wacky neighbor” casting call and she could use some face time with someone with a semblance of normalcy.
And before she knows it, two months have passed and boy is nice enough, and—let’s face it—girl needs a ride to work (not as a screenwriter, natch), so she doesn’t see any reason not to keep the mutually beneficial relationship going.
Tale as old as time, really.
At this point, Ennis and I have figured out the system pretty well. At a predetermined time, he drives close enough so that when I summon a car, he’s the one who gets pinged. He picks me up; I get a discount, since 75 percent of the fare money goes straight to Ennis and he kicks half of that back to me; and he gets a little something for picking up his girlfriend (thus slightly mitigating my guilt that he’s become my chauffeur). Everybody wins.
He gives me a dimpled grin as he pulls up in front of the WatchGoNowPlus offices, his blond hair blowing just slightly in the SoCal breeze. If there was ever going to be a “California Boys” song to counter all the many Girls/Gurls versions, there’s probably a program that could just scan him in and use its algorithm to make one. (He shockingly doesn’t surf, but that’s about all I can think of that doesn’t fit the stereotype.)
“Pick you up at five thirty?” he asks.
“Yup. I’ll text you if I’m going to be late.”
“Righty-o, babe.” I mean, come on. He even has his own catchphrase. Ennis leans over to give me a sloppy peck before I get out of the car.
I look up at the glass building, take one deep, centering breath, and enter.
* * *
It’s noon and I’m eating my desk salad at—where else—my desk, when a piece of paper floats onto my keyboard to join the soggy piece of lettuce that has inevitably landed in between my B and N keys.
“The password,” Sean says when I look up. I guess Clarence finally got what he wanted, which might explain why Sean has two stress balls today—one in his left hand and one, inexplicably, tucked in under his armpit. The original one he had was a prototype, but an enormous box of them got delivered yesterday—his idea to brand them and therefore expense them as a marketing tool. Because when you think of WatchGoNowPlus, you want to be thinking about stress?
Sean is breathing out puffs of air in between every third word he says.
“Lucky us because—puff—I have something—puff—for you to—puff—do Monday to—puff—actually earn your—puff—paycheck.”
I wonder if HR/Sean think the words are less biting when they’re said slowly and with extra enunciation.
“Sure thing,” I respond with the enthusiasm that five years in the workforce have ingrained in me. “Could you drop an atom bomb?” a supervisor might say and I’d probably retaliate with an exuberant, “You got it, boss!”
Sean closes his eyes, collects himself, and opens them before he says in what I’m sure he thinks is a zen voice, but sounds more like a spam callbot failing to sound human. “Get yourself over to Vasquez Studios by nine a.m. This Twitter Q&A was announced two months ago and now someone has to go transcribe Roberto’s words of fuck . . . I mean f-r-e-a-k-i-n-g . . . wisdom into a hundred eighty characters.”
I don’t bother explaining to him that Twitter expanded its character count years ago. And it was never 180 characters anyway, it was 140.
Because the thing is, he said Roberto . . .
“Roberto . . . Ricci?” I squeak out. The lead actor in CoRaB?
Sean stares hard at me and loses his robot voice for just a second when he says, “Are you going to fangirl all over his shoes and embarrass the company?”
“Of course not,” I reply, in as professional a voice as I can muster, while my inner self is squealing: OMGGGGGG, in three days I am going to meet Pr
ince Duncan of Briqlian. THE SILVER PRINCE ...
“Super.” Sean goes back to the voice that sounds as dead as his soul. “Don’t forget to validate your parking with security before you leave.”
“Right. Of course,” I say calmly, in lieu of pointing out that it might be difficult to validate an invisible car.
Instead, as soon as he’s out of earshot, I scroll through my phone and dial Ennis.
“Hey! Monday morning, do you think you could drop me off at Vasquez Studios instead of the office?” I feel compelled to give him a heads-up before the weekend because it’s a much longer commute, even though if I had to guess his answer, it’d be...
“Righty-o, babe.”
CHAPTER 3
SEBASTIAN
“Don’t do this to me. My death-row dessert? Right now?” My best friend, Matty O’Brien, rolls his suitcase across the bubbled-up linoleum floor—does anyone still believe it looks like wood?—and into the apartment hallway. “I’m supposed to be carbo-loading.”
“Your game’s not until Thursday. Eat up.”
I hand Matty a fork and a slice of seraphim food cake so large it makes the paper plate sag. I’ve been putting together a Castles of Rust and Bone–themed cookbook in my spare time, testing ideas out and modifying them for fun on the weekends. The dessert in question—one of two in the fridge—is a modified angel food cake that includes white-chocolate feathers everywhere, over blood-red icing.
Matty grins and leans against the wall to shovel it in. He’s claimed for a few years now that he’d request this for his final meal, should it, er, come to that.
Speaking of final moments . . . “Your last photo as a single man,” I announce.
His smile is cake filled, and right before I snap the pic, he straightens his tie and shakes his shaggy brown hair out. He used to mock my ponytail, but now he steals my hairbands. When we moved here together after graduation, Matty swapped his archetype from squeaky clean baseball captain to rakish advertising executive, complete with suit-and-tie aesthetic, which is rarer than rare in LA, land of zero dress code, and thus catnip to some of the girls out here; no wonder his girlfriend, Maritza, wants to lock that down. One mitigating factor: The tie he’s wearing is a Boston Red Sox tie because those are the only ties he owns. This one’s eye-wateringly awful, siren-red with diagonal stripes and random Bs everywhere.
Our other best friend, Sam Jeong, barrels through the door. Sam lives down the hall, just like he did in college. We managed to re-create our dorm here in the Park La Brea apartments, stretching out senior year like taffy these last five years.
Sam groans and flicks Matty’s tie as he walks by. “Uggh, O’Brien, we talked about this. I’ll take you shopping.”
Matty sets his cake plate down and slings his final piece of luggage, a duffel bag, over his shoulder. Despair grips me at the sight.
“What’s the rush?” I ask. “Food’s on.”
Every Sunday I cook dinner for the three of us—two of us now, I guess—and throw on a movie. Dessert’s first because I have my priorities. Now that the cakes are done, I’m about to braise ribs in the oven.
Sam cringes. “Shoot, I forgot to tell you, I’m interviewing a new band at Molly Malone’s tonight for my podcast.”
“Oh.”
“And I’m meeting Maritza at Ray’s before we head to her place to start unpacking,” Matty says. “You should come, too, save the ribs for another time.”
Ray’s is the outdoor bar a block away near the Urban Lights, the restored streetlamp installation on Wilshire that shows up in everyone’s ’grams.
Apparently I made dinner for one tonight.
Matty waves a hand in front of my face. “You there?”
“I have to get up early tomorrow, but thanks.”
“Oh, right! It’s your big day.”
He sets his duffel bag on the floor again and my shoulders relax. I’ve bought us a few more minutes of roommate time.
“Did you ever tell your news to ‘Mi-chelle, ma Belle’?” he sings, butchering the Beatles.
Belle was our codename for Nina back in college, so we could talk about her without her knowing. (Matty’s favorite band at the time was Belle & Sebastian. Also, Nina was beautiful and smart like Belle from Beauty and the Beast.) Every guy in the dorm used to bust on me about her. They couldn’t understand why she and I never dated.
The last time we saw each other was . . . bad. “Torture scenes from season three” bad.
We haven’t spoken in five years, but I’ve had her on my mind all month. How could I not? As the newest production assistant at Alex & Company Productions, I’ll be working behind the scenes at the actual fucking reboot of CoRaB. Way behind the scenes, because I’m not an on-set assistant. I’m producer Janine Alex’s personal assistant, which mostly means running errands for her all over town in my 2007 Toyota Corolla. But still! I’m part of it! I’m within the sphere of its existence!
When I got the job six months ago, I attempted to friend Nina and attempted to follow her, but increasingly frantic searches for her yielded nothing but 404 Not Found / No Longer Exists screens. Her phone number’s still in my phone, but it’s a 607 area code from Ithaca, New York, and I doubt it’s still good. Besides, I can’t text her out of nowhere after all this time. What if she didn’t text back?
I also worried it would come across like I was only getting in touch to shove my good fortune in her face. Did I imagine, or even hope, that she might be impressed? Definitely. But the main thing was that I wanted to share it with her, like old times.
Tomorrow’s too important to risk oversleeping. It’s my first visit to Vasquez Studios, out past rugged and dusty Canyon Country, where the show is shooting.
With the prevalence of hackers and techno-savvy fans, no one can email important files anymore; the show’s so paranoid that multiple times a week yours truly will be making the pickup and drop-off of sensitive materials between offices. I feel as though I’m part of a long Hollywood tradition, a once-thriving brotherhood long since dwindled down: that of the messenger.
“No, I haven’t heard from her since graduation,” I say quietly. “What about you?” I ask Sam, in what I hope is a nonchalant voice. “You and Nina ever connect?”
Sam grins and runs a hand through his slicked-back, pomaded hair. “Ahh, my favorite ex. I wish.”
Matty frowns. “Dude, show some respect. You know Sebastian was cuckoo for Nina’s Cocoa Puffs.”
“I’ve given it a lot of thought,” I remark, “and I’ve concluded there was no worse way you could have said that.”
“No, I never hear from her, but I could check with our mutuals,” Sam offers. His eyes are kind, and I know he and Nina only dated for a few weeks, but it still grates on me that he can refer to her as a former girlfriend.
“That’s okay,” I say quickly. “Don’t bother.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, forget I asked.”
“All right, guys, you know I hate drawn-out goodbyes.” Matty lifts his duffel bag once more, and this time he means it. “I’ll probably see you tomorrow at Baja Fresh anyway.”
“Nah, you’re closer to Poquito Mas now.” The words stick in my throat.
Maritza’s place is in Studio City, practically a different time zone from the Miracle Mile.
We hug and that’s that; he’s gone.
Sam opens my fridge, as though he lives here now that Matty’s gone. “Why did you make two cakes?”
“One’s for us, and the other’s a gift for the show. I’m bringing it to craft services tomorrow.” When I started the cookbook, it was a lark for me and my friends. I never would have guessed I might serve one of my recipes to the actual cast and crew.
“Save me some of tonight’s leftovers?” Sam asks, angling to leave.
“Yeah, definitely. Come by whenever.”
“Sorry I can’t stay tonight.”
“You’re fine—have a good interview.”
“I sorta overdosed on pork a
lready today too.”
Sam is Korean American, and his family lives about four miles east, in Koreatown. I occasionally join him and his parents for services at the Methodist church on Sunday mornings, but only because they go to a restaurant called CHD for kimchi fried rice and grilled pork dumplings afterward. They spend half the meal berating Sam for wasting money renting an apartment when he could be occupying his childhood bedroom. It’s hilarious, obviously.
“Don’t suppose you want to take over Matty’s room?” I ask, only half joking.
“Nah, I like the studio life too much.”
He chose the studio floorplan when we all moved in, and transformed it into an actual studio for his indie music podcast. We slap hands and he’s out the door too.
“Knock ’em dead tomorrow,” he calls before letting the door shut behind him.
My apartment’s abruptly silent. I finish cooking and then, for the first time since it aired, I pull up the season five finale of Castles of Rust and Bone. Every episode is available on WatchGoNowPlus, to drum up renewed enthusiasm for the reboot. I already own the first four seasons on Blu-ray, but I couldn’t stomach paying for season five; too many bittersweet memories.
Part of me thinks I’ve been numb ever since the show ended.
It doesn’t take a psychologist (or a little sister who used to ship me and Nina) to know the two events are linked in my mind: our friendship breakup and CoRaB’s cancelation.
I can’t help thinking that if the show gets it right this time around, it could heal more than just my broken fandom heart.
* * *
Monday morning, I wake at 5:45 and hit the apartment gym. My energy needs an outlet, and I go a bit overboard with bench presses and chin-ups. I’m sure I’ll pay for it later, but right now adrenaline shields me from pain.
I’m showered, shaved, dressed, and eating breakfast (cake and ribs) by seven, which should give me plenty of time to make it to Vasquez Studios by nine with the other cake, pristine and carefully packed in its bakery box. I’ll be heading north to the middle of nowhere, yet within the thirty-mile zone of LA County so production can take advantage of the tax incentives.