Hollywood Ending

by Tash Skilton

  I glance around but no one’s looking at me; no one knows I brought the cake, so it’s my choice whether I answer the command. I cautiously navigate toward soundstage B, Lucinda’s throne room, where a sight I did not anticipate greets me.

  In front of cast, crew, film cameras, and today’s director, Francis Jean holds forth, brimming with ideas and scattershot energy.

  “Can we do a comedy take? Actually, can we do a musical-comedy take, really quick, love? It’s always so grim and dour in the throne room.” She squeezes the director’s arm, pulls her dress up an inch or two so she doesn’t trip on the hem, and then, the leader of the Kingdom of Six launches into a full-on song-and-dance number, spinning, leaping, two-stepping, and blaring out at full volume what I can only assume are her lines for the day in song form. No one moves. We just watch in stunned silence, shifting on our feet and looking to the director for guidance.

  “Cameras rolling!” Francis Jean shouts, and twirls past me.

  “Do not roll cameras,” the director shouts back. She motions for her underlings to form a huddle, then sends one of them away with an impatient flick of her wrist.

  “Can we do a pantomime take?” Francis Jean starts her scene from the top, this time silently, with wide-eyed, swooping movements to indicate her character’s dialogue. No one knows what to do. Minutes tick by, but Francis Jean can’t be stopped. She cycles through the same scene again and again, always with a fresh theme, which she announces beforehand. There’s a “backward” version, a “children’s” version, and one “as giraffes.”

  “What fun!” she bellows. “Just like RADA. Did we get all that?”

  A woman holding a robe (today’s AD?) tries to corral CoRaB’s lead actress, but Francis Jean sidesteps her, waggling a finger in admonishment as the assistant lunges inefficiently. Just when I think Francis Jean is losing steam, fresh inspiration strikes her. The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts would be proud.

  “Oh, oh, can we do a take where he and I swap lines?” She elbows Roberto, who looks genuinely freaked out. “What’s the matter, scared I’ll show you up, Robbie? Do a better job? Bet you can’t memorize what I have to say today.”

  The director’s underling has returned with a few guys in suits. The director throws her hands up and tells them, “Do you see this? We’re going to lose an entire day of filming. Who gave her dairy?”

  “Oh, shit,” I whisper.

  Sharp, furious eyes laser in on me. “You, what are you? Are you here for something?”

  “Nope, my mistake, bye.”

  I slink off, heart pounding, and make haste back to craft services. Security now surrounds the cake table, their headsets crackling. Only then do I notice the sign taped to the table that reads, DAIRY-FREE.

  Onlookers chime in, a rush of gossip.

  “Who brought it? Where’d it come from?”

  “Someone’s getting fiiiiiiired.”

  “Throw it in the trash! Just get rid of it!”

  My fists clench. No, please! I worked so hard on it—please don’t throw it away! Please don’t dump it out like it’s nothing!

  The security guys pick up the cake, and I can’t watch anymore, so I bolt for the elevator, ride to the second floor, and make a beeline to Daniela and Dominic’s office for the briefcase. The siblings look up from the couch, where they’re filling the briefcase with . . . hexagonal, marble tiles.

  “You’re early,” Dominic remarks, shutting the briefcase and locking it. He approaches me with his usual agitation, but I hold up a hand to forestall him.

  “Why is the briefcase filled with tiles?”

  Daniela covers her hand with her mouth. Is she laughing? “He doesn’t know,” she tells her brother.

  “It’s always a briefcase filled with tiles,” Dom says, like I’m an idiot.

  Dizziness washes over me. I sway on my feet, light-headed, and leave my body for a moment. I look down on myself standing there, dumbfounded.

  “We thought you knew. You’re a decoy, to protect the real messenger. Gives those psycho-fans hiding in Vasquez Rocks someone to tail. Don’t be mad—it’s important work. . . .” she trails off. “The show relies on secrecy. We need people like you.”

  Rubes like me.

  My body slams back into place. Brain on fire, energized, I pace to the opposite wall and back. Okay. It is what it is, right?

  I call Janine and when she answers, I spit out, “I’m here at Vasquez and I’ve just learned what’s in the briefcase. Every time I drove out here, killing my wrist, shoulders, and neck, tense on the freeway for hours at a time, thinking I was helping the show with something important, it was pointless.”

  Silence on the other end. I’m about to repeat myself when Janine’s voice comes on the line. “Pointless? That’s not a designation you get to make. This is a job. It’s not a self-esteem generator or an identity. Or a fan convention,” she adds in a tone that makes me think I wasn’t as clever at hiding my love for the show as I thought. “Can you do the job you’ve been assigned, or not?”

  I swallow, every muscle in my neck and back taut with anger. Pain. Exhaustion.

  Right, right. It’s a job. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s how most people live, right? Get up, go to work, drudgery, drudgery, get paid (not nearly enough), go home, repeat, repeat, repeat, die.

  Welcome to the Golden State, the Big Orange, Tinseltown, Lotusville, La La Land, the Big Fat Fucking Lie.

  I should suck it up and say, Yes, of course, Janine, you can count on me! I should eat shit and apologize. But I don’t have it in me for any more apologies. Not to her, not to anyone.

  I was terrified five minutes ago that I’d be fired over my stupid cake. Now there’s nothing I want more.

  “Mm, let me think about that, gosh it’s so tempting, you paint an absolutely enticing picture, a real fucking corker, but no. I quit.”

  I don’t even keep my security lanyard as a souvenir. I slam it in the garbage on my way out of Vasquez Studios, right on top of the splattered cake.

  Out in the car park, I pass an enormous ship surrounded by a water tank. The set dressers stand on scaffolding to remove a house banner and replace it with a different one. Vaguely I register what this means, that there’s only one ship. All along it’s been the same ship. During battle scenes, they swap out the banners and film from a different angle. Another illusion falls away, so quietly it doesn’t make a sound.

  Elsewhere, a stuntman’s been lit on fire, his entire body in flames, staggering around. I watch for a second, bored.

  I reach my car to discover the passenger-side window has been shattered. Someone broke in looking for show-related items and my car served its purpose well; it saved someone else’s car. My sacrificial lamb routine played out precisely as it was intended.

  Raging, I take the carpool lane all the way home because fuck it, who cares if I’m caught. I arrive unscathed, but when I unlock the door of my apartment, I can tell right away something’s wrong.

  Nina has moved out.

  * * *

  I sleep until two p.m. the next day. Get all the sleep you want now, Sebastian! No job, no girlfriend. Is it everything you dreamed? Do you feel gloriously reborn, refreshed, well rested? Good on you! And you didn’t even have to drop a weight on your foot, or a briefcase filled with tiles, to achieve it!

  I open the freezer to see what’s still inside: a pint of half-eaten pistachio ice cream. I bought it for Nina our first night of being roommates. It lasted longer than we did.

  I don’t know why, but that pint of ice cream nearly wrecks me. A sob tries to climb up my throat, but I push it down and I push it down and I push it down.

  How did all my dreams turn into nightmares? Were my expectations so high that nothing could live up to them? I loved the show so much, but it was never, ever going to love me back. Neither, apparently, was Nina. Wishing otherwise was childish.

  The next day, Millie arrives post-TrekUSA, face and arms sunburned, hair mussed, and full of camping tales. I was
so wrapped up in my problems I’d forgotten she was coming. She deposits her rucksack on the kitchen floor, takes one look at me, and says, “Where’s Nina?”

  I show her the note Nina left on the fridge: S—I didn’t want to make things any harder than they already are.—N

  I’m not even sure when she put it up. It could have been yesterday, or three days ago. I have no clue when she actually left. Somehow that makes it worse.

  “Oh, Seb. Oh, no. I’m so sorry.”

  Millie opens her arms for a hug, but I shake my head. I don’t trust myself to speak or move or accept a single ounce of comfort. The sob I’ve been holding at bay tries to climb up my throat again, and it gets higher this time, making my eyes slick, but I push it down and I push it down.

  She lets her arms fall to her sides. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  I shake my head. I push it down.

  Millie doesn’t rally. She doesn’t tell me a love like mine and Nina’s is worth fighting for.

  I think I expected her to fix us somehow. But if Millie thinks it’s impossible, we really are through.

  So my sister and I get my car window replaced, and then we paint over the office wall. Angry, sloppy brushstrokes to cover up the past month of love notes and drawings. One by one I make them disappear.

  Hi, Sebastian is the first to vanish, absorbed back into the beige landscape, as though it were never there at all.

  We take down the large canvas print of Nina and me in the poppy fields, looking dewy and radiant and younger, somehow. I probably cursed us by hanging it up, by daring to announce to the world that we were forever. How stupid I was, thinking we were special, that Nina’s rules for dating wouldn’t apply to me.

  Around ten p.m., thunder rumbles overhead and sheets of rain pummel the side of the building.

  “Oh, come on,” Millie groans, shaking her fist at the ceiling. “You had one job, LA.”

  Metaphors don’t spontaneously appear to torment fools. They show up when we need to make connections, when we don’t know how to bridge our feelings to the world. The rain is expressing all the things I haven’t allowed myself to feel.

  I’m up and moving before I can think too hard about it.

  “What are you doing?” Millie calls out as I grip the handle of the balcony door.

  “I just need to feel all of it, all at once, or I won’t be able to . . .”

  “To what?”

  “Go on,” I whisper.

  Through the sliding glass, I see my pack of cigarettes lying crumpled on the rusted chair outside, melting in the onslaught of water. I didn’t smoke the entire six weeks Nina and I were together.

  Part of me wants to scour the apartment for my emergency backup pack, chain-smoke until my fingertips reek and my throat turns to ash and my eyes burn. But I’d rather go outside and drown.

  I yank the door open, close it behind me, and step into the storm. It’s raining buckets and within seconds I’m drenched. I shiver and tilt my head up, offering myself to the elements. The rain feels like thousands of tiny needles stabbing me, my face, my neck, my skin, dripping down my arms and legs and plastering my shirt and jeans to my body.

  The sliding door opens again, and Millie joins me in her sweatshirt. She pulls me tightly into her arms. I return the hug, holding on for dear life, and I cry so hard I can’t breathe.

  You’re not alone, a voice reminds me. Millie’s right here, Sam’s down the hall, and Matty’s one text away.

  “I’ve never seen you like this,” Millie says before bed, once we’ve dried off and made ourselves hot toddies. “I’m changing my plane ticket to next week, okay?”

  I don’t argue. My face feels stretched out, pinned back. My eyes are raw, my lips cracked, and I’ve got a massive headache, but giving in to my emotions in all their ugly truth has helped, somehow; taken the lead ball in my stomach and shrunk it. Famished, I finish Nina’s pint of ice cream as well as two sandwiches and several glasses of water.

  When I crawl into bed I can’t smell Nina anymore.

  CHAPTER 36

  NINA

  “Neal, you can go see him now,” I say with a smile to the tall, jittery twenty-four-year-old sitting outside Sean’s office. His suit is about half an inch too short for his ankles, but he’s the first candidate wearing a suit at all. Most of the people Sean has been interviewing have been dressed in jeans and T-shirts of varying degrees of distressed.

  Sean’s been seeing candidates for the social media coordinator position all day, and with every person who walks in, I feel more and more relieved. I can’t wait to leave Twitter and Instagram and the rest of them behind again forever. It’s taken every ounce of strength I have not to check up on Sebastian’s socials over the past week, despite not having any of my own. I want to know he’s okay. I mean, I know he’s physically okay, but I want to know he’s emotionally okay too. Even though I recognize that, even if he weren’t, the chance of him putting anything on his social channels to indicate it are pretty slim.

  I busy myself by doing QA on the new teaser microsite that the show’s about to launch. We’re four months away from the premiere, and everything—from the digital promotions to the Comic-Con bookings—is ramping up. Soon everyone will know what happened to Lucinda and Duncan and Jeff after that cliffhanger of a final scene.

  And I’ll know too—in greater detail than that glimpse I got in the writers’ room. But then there’s the problem of who will I watch the show with?

  Sebastian, a little voice says. Once Sebastian’s had a little while to cool down, I can broach us being friends again.

  But then that little voice goes on. Are you going to be able to sit on a couch with him and not lean your head on his shoulder? Are you going to be able to listen to him make jokes and not immediately kiss him because he knows just how to make you laugh?

  Are you going to let him go ahead and kiss someone else?

  A vision of Heather in that wedding dress floats in front of me and I physically put my hands over my eyes to blot it out.

  Yes, I tell the voice angrily, because I have to let him go. He deserves something I can’t give him. Now shut up and let me work.

  Luckily, Neal emerges from the office before I can get too deep in the throes of bickering interior dialogue.

  “How did it go?” I ask him with a smile.

  He clears his throat. “Good. I hope.” He takes a look at Sean’s closed office door and then leans over to quietly tell me. “I didn’t want to sound too desperate, but this is basically my dream job. I’m just such a fan.”

  “Of CoRaB?” I ask.

  “No. Well, yes, I like it well enough. But I meant of Mr. Delaney. The ladders he’s been able to climb. And he’s only thirty-eight? He’s amazing. I can only aspire. . . .”

  I guess I could tell Neal about the endoscopy appointment I just had to make for Sean because he’s likely flared up his ulcers yet again. Or the HR file on him that’s three miles long. But I don’t. I think coming to terms with the messy reality of our fandoms is something we all have to do on our own.

  “Well, then, I hope you get it,” I tell him.

  “Thanks!” he says brightly.

  Sean sticks out his head from his office. “Nina, can I have a word?”

  “Sure,” I say, grabbing my notebook, giving Neal a small wave and going into Sean’s office.

  I sit down across from his desk and click my pen, poised to write down whatever 450 things he needs from me next.

  “I wanted to ask you why you didn’t apply for the social coordinator position,” Sean says.

  I look up at him, surprised. “I . . . was I supposed to?” I ask.

  “Let’s be honest—you’re the ideal candidate for it,” he says. “You’re already doing it. You have solid ideas because you know this show, and I have the feeling that you’d have solid ideas for other shows too. Plus . . . you put up with me.” He says this last one with a pained face. “I mean . . . my moods don’t seem to faze you. So let�
�s just consider this your official interview. Make sure to fill out the application when you get back to your desk. You know. For them.” Them means HR. Sean was advised a few weeks ago by his therapist to replace his usual term—Horrendous Rectum-monkeys—with something more neutral.

  Sean returns to typing furiously away on his computer, which is usually the sign that I’m dismissed to go. But I can’t move from my chair. He looks up at me after a minute and frowns. “That’s it. Interview over, Shams.”

  Righty-o, boss—or something equally inane—is what I’d normally say, no matter what he’s asked. Instead, I clear my throat. “Um, I say this with all due respect, Sean, but I really don’t want to be a social media coordinator. In fact I kinda hate social media. I’m not even on it myself.”

  “What?” he asks. “Oh, you mean you deleted one of your apps cause some celeb you liked got canceled or something?”

  I shake my head. “No. I mean, I don’t have any social media profiles. I haven’t had one in five years.”

  He stares at me. “Okay, well, whatever. We’ll try to internally promote you into a different department within a year or two. Marketing, PR, whatever floats your boat. Just fill out the application tonight so I can get the ball rolling on this. I assume you’ll want the raise that goes with it too.”

  A raise. I could use a raise. If nothing else, my living situation would improve, meaning my life would improve—cosmetically speaking, anyway. Like a face-lift that doesn’t actually make you younger. Saying yes to more responsibility at this job I don’t care about would take away my time to write. It would take away my time to . . . what else do I have going on? Without Sebastian, I have no friends. Without Sebastian . . . I have no Sebastian.

  “Okay,” I say numbly and then a belated, “Thank you.”

  He nods as I get up from the chair and leave his office.

  Luckily, it’s near the end of the workday because I can’t concentrate on much. I open up the application that Sean was talking about, but besides filling out my name and date of birth, I can’t get myself to punch in anything else. I AirDrop the bookmarked page to my phone. Maybe it’s something I can do tonight from the very unpeaceful floor of my temporary digs.