Hollywood Ending

by Tash Skilton

  In the garage I check my Sigalert app for a live traffic report, and holy shit, there is apparently a “pig in lanes” on the 101, aka Satan’s Freeway. Scratch that, several pigs. A big-rig truck carrying livestock overturned fifteen minutes ago. No animals have been injured but they’re running amok, and the on-ramp at Highland Avenue has been closed.

  My on-ramp.

  No. No. No. This can’t be happening. Not today.

  I’ll have to go a half hour out of my way on surface streets to reach the 5 instead, which is what everyone else will be doing too.

  My boss, Janine, needs the briefcase in time for a ten-thirty meeting at the production office in West Hollywood. As it is, I’ll need to turn around almost immediately upon arrival at Vasquez.

  I slam my hands on the steering wheel, let loose some creative expletives, fly out of my car, then run back up the stairwell and into my apartment.

  “Your day has come. Don’t let me down,” I command the life-size cardboard cutout of CoRaB’s Queen Lucinda standing in the corner of my living room.

  I squeeze one of Matty’s left-behind Boston Red Sox caps on Lucinda’s head and carry her sideways out the door, ignoring the looks I get in the elevator.

  Aware of the garage cameras judging me, I click Lucinda’s seat belt into place and continue a steady stream of pep talks to myself. The only way I’ll arrive on time at this point is if I sneak into the carpool lane, which requires two people. Fingers crossed we’ll be going so fast no cop will see that she’s not flesh and blood.

  Stop-and-go traffic consumes me for a nightmarish hour before I reach the 5. As I’m scanning my rearview windows for CHP officers and mentally preparing to slip into the forbidden lane, WhatsApp bleats with incoming video calls: first my sister, then both my parents, each chiming in from a different location in their house in Sherborne, Dorset. I silence my phone and toss it to the floor of the passenger seat.

  For ten glorious, eighty-five-mile-per-hour minutes, my plan works flawlessly. I bounce and glide past endless rows of unmoving, law-abiding suckers, wondering why I’ve never done this before.

  I merge onto the 14, out into unexpected farmland, and zip past Newhall, Santa Clarita, Shadow Pines, Sand Canyon, and Soledad Canyon. LA is a distant memory now. I take a moment to appreciate the perfect, cloudless sky above and the majestic mountains and hiking trails off to both sides. Green fuzz coats the beige peaks like a wrinkled blanket. I bet the view is peaceful from up there.

  My wandering thoughts are blasted away when some asshole in a Mitsubishi Mirage merges in front of me, going the speed limit. What the actual fuuuuuuck?

  Whoever he is, we’re headed in the same direction. Every time I attempt to pass him, he steps on the gas enough to thwart me, then retreats and slows down again. At least my exit’s coming up. But then the Mirage takes the off-ramp at Agua Dulce Canyon too.

  Now I’m ultra fucked because we’re on a winding, two-lane road with CAUTION: ROCK SLIDE AREA signs everywhere and I can’t pass him. I grit my teeth as we amble in slow motion past Sweet Water Ranch and a series of horse farms.

  At long last, the gormless slowpoke and I arrive at our shared destination: Vasquez Studios. Enormous, diagonal planes of rock jut out behind the soundstages and offices, making the world feel tilted. The image is otherworldly, stunning in its strangeness, and reveals the brilliance of Vasquez Studios: Production can film indoors and outdoors, using the natural beauty of Vasquez Rocks for location shoots.

  The security guard checks my name off a list. His eyes flick to my cardboard passenger.

  “Phone,” he commands. I retrieve it from the car floor and hand it over. The security guard places a bright-orange sticker over my phone’s camera lens and hands it back, expressionless. The implication hits me like a sugar rush: I’m about to see things no other fan will see! Top-secret, incredible things!

  I thank the security guard and push on, heart pounding. My glee is short-lived.

  In front of me, the Danger to Us All pulls over to the loading zone and slams on his brakes, which forces me to do the same, which sends my beautiful cake careening into the dashboard.

  “Dammit,” I yell, as buttercream and white chocolate feathers explode, dripping goo and splatter everywhere.

  Heedless of the destruction he’s caused, my nemesis turns to his passenger, a woman with long dark hair, and kisses her goodbye. I roll my eyes and look away to give them privacy. Once I hear the car door slam, indicating the woman’s exit, I yank my steering wheel to the left so my car rolls up alongside the cake destroyer.

  “Learn how to drive!” I shout out the window.

  The other driver exits his car. “You almost rear-ended us,” he says lazily. “Many times.”

  I exit, too, slamming my door shut. “What’s the point of using the carpool lane if you’re not going faster than all the other lanes? It’s an abuse of the carpool lane!”

  “‘Abuse of the carpool lane’?” he laughs. “You’re using a doll!” He peers through the passenger window. “Who is that? What’s-her-name . . . Wanda? Miranda?”

  “Lucinda,” the female voice and I correct him simultaneously. A premonition casts its shadow over me like the wings of a passing angel, and I swear to God time slows down as I turn to look at her.

  The woman he dropped off, the one he kissed, who’s standing on the curb . . .

  . . . is Nina Shams.

  CHAPTER 4

  NINA

  Time stops. Almost like in episode 207 when Jeff the warlock is temporarily able to harness Mount Signon’s power to manipulate the passing of hours.

  I’m immediately thrown back to the endless debates Sebastian and I had—not about the many plot holes that time manipulation immediately caused. But about the sort of world in which an evil warlock is named . . . Jeff.

  And then, just like old times, we talk right over each other again.

  NINA SEBASTIAN

  “What are you doing here?” “What are you doing here?”

  A pause.

  “You two know each other?” Ennis asks in his drawl, and I find myself deeply envious of how relaxed he is. Then again, I guess he’s not the one who’s just been confronted with his biggest regret, dressed in bright salmon shorts and checkered Vans. My heart seems to give one extra beat at the sight because if I were to Los Angelify the Upstate New York version of the Sebastian that I knew, this is exactly what he would look like, extra muscles and all.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “We were friends,” Sebastian adds.

  I blink at the use of the past tense, not expecting it to give me a little buzzing over my skin since I know it’s unequivocally true. We haven’t even spoken in five years. I try to mask my discomfort by giving Ennis more details. “In college.”

  “So,” Sebastian says. “I can’t imagine it’s a coincidence that CoRaB is getting rebooted. And you’re here.”

  “‘You’ve sussed me out, Queen Lucinda,’” I quote with a small smile. “I’m working for WatchGoNowPlus. On the digital media team.”

  Sebastian’s eyes widen as his face breaks out into a huge grin, giving me another little buzz. “Nina! Oh my God. That’s incredible! Congratulations!” I can tell he wants to go in for a hug but then he holds himself back.

  I can’t help smiling. Sebastian knows the significance of this for me, no matter how long it’s been since we’ve spoken. He was there for all of it, including the CoRaB fanfic I wrote and made him read, and he knows how thrilling it is to be here, on the set of the very show we debated and dissected and adored within an inch of its life. “But wait, there’s more! I’m about to go in to interview”—dramatic pause—“Roberto Ricci.” I roll my Rs to add some extra oomph.

  Sebastian’s jaw drops. “Please, please, please tell me you’ll ask about his beard-care routine.” It was a source of much debate between Sebastian and Stanley back in the day.

  “Well, I have to ask him fan-submitted Twitter questions,” I clarify. “So . . . if you wan
t to go ahead and at the official CoRaB account sometime in the next hour, beard care will be within your grasp.”

  He takes out his phone. “Already on it,” he says as he starts furiously typing away.

  I watch him for a second, taking in the miracle of having the best friend I’ve ever had and lost in front of me again. “You never answered my question, though. What are you doing here?”

  He looks up at me with a smile. “I’m a PA for Alex & Company, on an important briefcase mission.”

  “Get out!” I say. “Congratulations to you!” Because of course I know the significance of this for him, too.

  We grin at each other until Ennis’s phone dings.

  “I’ve got to go pick up another rider,” he says. “Good luck, babe.” He kisses me again on the lips and then turns to Sebastian. “Nice to meet you, uh . . . sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

  NINA SEBASTIAN

  “Sebastian.” “Sebastian.”

  “Got it. Ennis,” he introduces himself as he shakes Sebastian’s hand. “Lucinda.” He makes a mock bow to the cardboard cutout lying on Sebastian’s passenger seat as he gets into his own car.

  “Lucinda,” I point out as Ennis is driving off, “would never be a passenger. Elevor, maybe. But Lucinda, never.”

  “True,” Sebastian says. “I was hoping I wouldn’t run into any superfan traffic cops who would accuse me of ruining the canon.”

  “Is that an extra fine?”

  “In LA, yes.”

  I smile at him. “It’s good to see you.”

  “You too,” he says.

  But then we are plunged into something unfamiliar: an awkward silence. Because barring jokes about our shared fandom, when it’s been five years, there’s no more small talk, only big talk: the broad strokes of what each of us has been up to that the other one would know nothing about. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

  “I don’t want to be late,” I finally say.

  “Right. Let’s go in.”

  We walk together in silence. He opens the studio door for me, and suddenly tenses. “Oh, wait, I still have to park my car. Don’t let me keep you.” We look at each other. He dips his head. “Bye, Nina.”

  Hearing him say my name in that low, soft way takes me back to late-night conversations in the dorm again. I shake my head in wonderment as I enter the studio.

  * * *

  There’s a perfect banana at the top of the fruit bowl in Roberto Ricci’s dressing room. I’m about to compose a poem in iambic pentameter dedicated to this banana’s ripeness—I’m already thinking of words that might rhyme with “chartreuse.” Clearly I should’ve had breakfast this morning. But fixating on the banana is also distracting me from my jumble of nerves. I can’t believe, somewhere in this building, is Roberto Ricci and Francis Jean Taylor (Lucinda) and David Sherman (Jeff). I equally can’t believe that somewhere in this building is Sebastian.

  “Okay, right. What asinine task do you have for me now?” I hear the unmistakable voice before I see him. Roberto Ricci walks in, dressed in slouchy jeans, a white T-shirt, and a white trucker hat. He’s followed by a redheaded woman wearing a bright yellow dress and leopard print cat-eye glasses.

  Roberto sees me sitting on his couch and yells, “Dry skim cap. Extra shot.”

  The redheaded woman rolls her eyes and walks over to me. “Hi. Are you here from the network?”

  “Um, yes,” I say, standing up to shake her hand. “I’m Nina. Here to facilitate the Twitter Q&A.”

  “Great. I’m Sabrina. The publicist for the show. We’ll probably be working together quite a bit.” She smiles at me and I smile back.

  I turn to Roberto then. “It’s such a pleasure to meet you,” I say.

  “I’m sure it is,” he replies before adding, “Does this mean I’m not getting my coffee?”

  “Yeah, sure, I can get that for you,” I reply, trying to remember what he just ordered.

  “Never mind that,” Sabrina says, coming to the rescue. “I’ll get the coffee. Roberto, please just answer the questions Nina puts to you and she’ll take care of putting them up online. Right, Nina?”

  “Definitely,” I say. Sabrina nods and leaves the room.

  Roberto gives a deep, dramatic sigh. “How long is this going to take?”

  “Well, your Twitter takeover is set to run for an hour,” I say.

  “You have twenty minutes,” Roberto replies.

  “Um, okay. No problem.” I’ll just get his answers down and dole out the replies over the hour.

  I open up my laptop, scroll over to Twitter and the Word doc where I’d cut and pasted some of the best questions we’d gotten over the week, and search for a nice, softball one to get things started.

  I clear my throat. “This one’s from at-stevienicks4eva . . .”

  “Rule number one,” Roberto interrupts. “I one hundred percent don’t care about anyone’s screenname or obsessions with hair bands.”

  “Uh, right, of course,” I say, and then feel compelled to add, “Of course, Fleetwood Mac isn’t a hair band. . . .”

  “Rule number one,” Roberto replies in a singsong. “Next.”

  Sabrina comes back into the room with a paper cup that she hands off to Roberto. “How’s it going?”

  “Splendid,” Roberto says sarcastically.

  Sabrina raises her eyebrow suspiciously and then throws a questioning look over at me.

  “Yup. It’s great,” I reply. It’s perfectly normal that Roberto would be guarded with a new person. He’ll warm up after he’s had his coffee, no doubt.

  “Oookay,” Sabrina says, sounding unconvinced. “I have to go check on Francis Jean, but I’ll be back in a few.” She smiles at me encouragingly before leaving the room and shutting the door behind her.

  “You have until I finish this coffee,” Roberto says as he takes an inhumanly large swig of the scalding cup.

  What happened to twenty minutes? I want to ask. But, of course, I don’t. Instead I say, “Got it. So, easy one. How does it feel to be back?”

  Roberto’s eyes widen in surprise. “Wow. That is easy,” he says slowly. “So easy you could, I don’t know, probably write the answer yourself instead of wasting my time.”

  “Um . . . okay,” I say, typing out the word “splendid” in the Word doc. It isn’t technically a misquote. He did just use it a minute ago. I’ll just . . . finesse it.

  “Is there anything you can tell us about what happened in the intervening five years between season five and the upcoming new season?” The show announced just last week that the reboot is going to have a five-year time jump to match the real-life time jump between seasons five and six. Very meta.

  “I sure can. I auditioned for about three hundred roles and the only ones I ever got callbacks for were the ones that required wearing armor, being in a makeup chair for twenty hours a day to play the latest Spiderpool villain, and/or utilizing the fake British accent that I honed in the depths of Central Jersey. Usually all three.”

  “Mmm-hmmm,” I say, jotting down “something about armor” for myself. “How do you feel about some of the discrepancies between the books and the show?”

  Roberto laughs. “No one really thinks I read that shit, do they? It’s thousands of pages about fucking corsets and chainmail.”

  Honestly, this I agree with. In the past few years, I missed the show so much that I finally, finally hunkered down and read the five-book series. A lot of it was somewhat torturous, and not in the way that poor little Pathoro gets methodically skinned in book two/season three.

  “They are a little wordy,” I say to Roberto with a conspiratorial smile, hoping this will be the shared opinion that will finally win him over. But he doesn’t even see it since his coffee cup is currently covering his face. (Is his tongue made of the same heat-repellant metal as Duncan’s sword?!) At this rate, I’ll have a two-minute Twitter takeover.

  I look at my next question. I’m probably going to regret this but I don’t have time to hun
t for a different one. “Are you Team Duncinda or Team Lucivor?”

  “I’m team getting off your couch and taking a shower so that maybe a real, live person will actually want to fuck you.”

  Cool. Cool.

  “Is there any juicy, behind-the-scenes info you can give us about the infamous wedding scene between Duncan and Lucinda?” The question gives me a little jolt. Because how could I have known, when I curated it, that I’d have seen Sebastian just minutes before? He and I had our own behind-the-scenes drama related to that very scene.

  I’m snapped out of my thoughts by Roberto’s short bark of a laugh. “Well, everyone knows that Lou Trewoski and Francis Jean were sleeping together for the duration of the show. Whenever things were going well, she got a power grab scene and whenever things were going poorly . . . Queen Lucinda got betrayed.”

  My jaw drops. “Is that . . . is that actually true?” I can’t believe it. All the little nonsensical plot twists that Sebastian and I would endlessly debate. Was this the real reason for all of them? The head writer and lead actress were sleeping together?

  He smirks at me. “Yup. Print that.” He takes one last swig of his coffee. “And we’re done here.”

  He’s about to leave when I realize I only have answers to five questions. “Wait,” I say in desperation. “Can I ask just one more?” What I really want to ask is how he manages to play the soulful hero when he’s clearly a certified asshole in real life. Instead, my eyes fall to one line of text and before I can second-guess myself, I ask, “Can you give us any beardscaping tips?”

  He stops at the door and turns to me, a gleam in his eyes I haven’t seen before. “An infusion of lemon verbena, coconut oil, lavender, and witch hazel. One drop in the morning, one drop at night. A close shave with a safety razor at a trusted barber every ten days.” He stares off into space and then intones, almost wistfully, with a hint of Central Jersey–crafted British accent: “Most important rule: Never, ever trim your beard when wet. EVER.”

  He exits with a flourish, as if he’s delivered a Shakespearean soliloquy, leaving me alone to schedule out the tweets over the next hour.