My Unscripted Life

by Lauren Morrill

  “The whole world saw it, Milo. I think I was the last one, in fact.”

  He throws an arm around me and pulls me close. I take a deep breath, but he smells more like the costume closet and the makeup chair than Milo, so it doesn’t have the calming effect I was hoping for. “Are you doing okay?”

  “Um, I don’t know. I mean, you’d think you’d get used to reading grammatically incorrect and questionably capitalized diatribes about your maximum sluttitude, but you’d be wrong.”

  “I’m really sorry, Dee. I promise, this will blow over. Someone else will crash his car or go to rehab or kiss someone or grocery shop and we’ll be yesterday’s news.”

  “Yeah, but until then we’re the news today, and I don’t know how to deal with it,” I say, my words muffled by the thick fabric of his jacket. I still can’t smell him, so I rear back. “Milo, I have six hundred and thirty-one unread emails! And not a single one is from the Gap! That’s seriously more emails than I’ve received in my entire life combined. I’m pretty sure my third-grade teacher emailed me—that’s what my in-box looks like right now.”

  Nevermind that you’re smiling at Lydia and squeezing her arm and the two of you are practically bursting with chemistry. But keep that one to myself. I can’t go there yet.

  Milo looks pained. “I’m really sorry, Dee. Truly. I really hoped this wouldn’t happen. It’s what I was trying to avoid,” he says. “Listen, I’ve got to stay tonight for a few more shots, but are we okay?”

  I’m not. I’m categorically not okay. And I know it, but Milo is so good at convincing me it’s all going to be okay that I find myself nodding, like maybe if I bob my head enough my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend won’t be trying to get him back, and he won’t maybe still be in love with her, and a rabid pack of fangirls (and more than a few fanboys) won’t be verbally destroying me on the Internet.

  “Great,” he says. He leans in and plants a soft kiss on my lips. “Maybe we can hang out tomorrow after we wrap for the day? Grab a bite?”

  For the first time, a kiss from Milo isn’t an instant, blissful fix. There’s more than a hint of doubt and defeat that I just can’t ignore. But I try, because it’s Milo.

  “Absolutely,” I reply. “Can’t wait.”

  Today is a new day. Today, someone else in Hollywood will get caught making out in a parking lot. Or maybe someone else will punch a paparazzo or start his or her morning with a gallon of tequila or simply take a trip to the grocery store, and Milo and I will be old news. Yesterday’s news. No news. At least, that’s the pep talk I gave myself over and over until I fell asleep last night.

  But until that happens, I plan to do all I can to make today better than yesterday and brush off the misery of that website. I want to pretend everything’s okay. I want to have fun, like I would with Naz (if I hadn’t spent my summer lying to her). So when I head to my closet to get dressed for work, I pull out a pair of khaki cargo capris that I haven’t worn since middle school and top them with a red tank top. It takes some digging, but I’m able to find an old pair of red knee socks that have white stripes at the knee, left over from a Halloween costume the year Naz and I dressed as ketchup and mustard.

  “Hey, Dad!” I call, half in my closet as I riffle through piles for my other shoe.

  “You bellowed?” Dad pokes his head in my room, already dressed for his morning run.

  “Yeah, you have a red bandanna, right?”

  Dad takes a glance at my outfit. “Did you join some kind of gang?”

  “Yes. Yes, I did,” I reply, gesturing to my knee socks and matching tank top. “I’ve joined up with some local street toughs. This is our uniform. This evening we plan to knock over the local soda fountain and then lean against some light posts while we comb our hair and whistle show tunes.”

  “Smart mouth,” he says, shaking his head at me. “I taught you well.”

  “Bandanna?”

  “Top drawer of my dresser!” he calls as he heads down the hall, already bouncing on the balls of his feet. He’ll be halfway down the block before I even finish tying my shoes. I’ve tried to explain to him that he’s doing summer vacation exactly wrong. You don’t get up early and exercise. You binge-watch police procedurals and reality shows about rich women without jobs while seeing how many different varieties of potato chip you can consume in one sitting without throwing up. But he insists on the whole running thing, so I’ve given up.

  I find the bandanna and tie it around my head after gathering my pouf of curls into twin pigtails. I take a glance in the full-length mirror mounted on the back of my parents’ bedroom door. I look a little like a 1970s gym coach. I hope Benny appreciates what a good friend I am. And I hope the outfit masks the doubt that’s practically rattling in my bones.

  The sun is only just starting to peek over the trees, so the air outside is still slightly cool and very damp. The road has a haze across it as I scream down the back country roads to the gristmill.

  Dad’s Honda bounces down the dirt-road entrance, kicking up a cloud of red Georgia clay behind it. I follow the yellow direction signs that I’ve come to know well to the grassy clearing marked CREW PARKING. I pull up and stop at the end of a row of cars, park, and climb out to catch the van the rest of the way to the Thorpe Creek Gristmill, the location for today’s shoot.

  The mill is ancient, built in 1858, when Wilder was founded by a bunch of farmers who had failed to find gold during the north Georgia gold rush. I can practically recite the facts with the same bounce in my voice my sixth-grade history teacher used during our Georgia History unit. I swear, this movie is turning into a tour of historic field-trip sites.

  A creek runs up the back side of the mill, a small wooden footbridge that’s still usable crossing from one side to the other. In the middle, you can see the view of the ancient, hulking waterwheel attached to the outer wall of the mill. Waterbury, two towns over, dammed up the river, which slowed the flow of water down here to a trickle. At its peak after a particularly heavy rainfall, the creek will still rise only a foot or so, not even coming close to licking the bottom of the wheel. I’m not surprised locations is using the place. With the wonder the lighting guys will work in the hazy, sunlit morning, I imagine the whole property is going to look like a fabulous fever dream.

  The crew must have been working since long before sunrise, because when I arrive on set I find the lights and cameras and tents already set up for the first shot of the day. Milo and Lydia are perched on a pair of director’s chairs with their names printed on the back, both surrounded by hair and makeup people who are brushing and dabbing and swiping and combing and spraying. In front of the camera, Milo’s and Lydia’s stand-ins are on their marks while the lights and cameras get a final adjustment.

  “Red team, go!” Benny bounds up next to me at such a speed that I worry he’s going to slip on the dew-damp grass and bowl me right over. He manages to stop in time, though, and raises his hands for a double high five, which turns into a low five and chest bump. “You remembered!”

  “The outfit or the high five?” Tariq and Benny made it their signature move back when they were in middle school, and Naz and I, lowly elementary schoolers at the time, mimicked every move until it became our signature move as well.

  “Okay, first of all, this”—he gestures up and down to his own red ensemble—“is a uniform. You have just earned another point for Team PA while also saving me from having to run around the studio in my underwear.”

  “I’m sorry, what?” Now, there’s a picture Naz would want to see.

  Benny laughs. “I told Pete, the first AD, that you were dressing up today, and he didn’t believe me. He said if you didn’t, I had to run around the studio in my boxers, so thank you for not leaving me hanging on this one.”

  “I do what I can, Benny,” I reply. Which reminds me that I never sent Naz the picture she asked for. Maybe it could help soften the blow of me shutting her out this summer.

  “Hey, quick selfie? You know, for the scoreca
rd or whatever?” I pull my phone out of my pocket and glance around to make sure it won’t look like we’re going to take any pictures that could get us sued.

  Benny throws his arm around my shoulder and pulls me in close to his side until we’re practically cheek to cheek. I hold the camera out in front of us until I’ve got us framed up, then Benny sticks out his tongue like he’s going to lick my face while also giving me bunny ears. When I snap the picture, I’m midlaugh. It’s a good one, and despite his ridiculous expression, you can see that he’s still handsome. Naz is going to like it. I hope.

  “And by the way, it’s Ben!” he says, but he’s laughing. He pulls me into a giant bear hug and finishes it off by giving me a noogie.

  “Hey, watch the hair, Benny!” I say. I give him a little shove. He returns the favor with a shove on my shoulder, and before I know it we’re laughing and roughhousing like a couple of fifth graders.

  I hear a throat clear behind me. I turn around to see Milo is studying us, an eyebrow slightly arched, the other furrowed. “I didn’t know you’d be on set today,” he says. He keeps giving my outfit—I’m sorry, uniform—sideways glances.

  I adjust my bandanna from where Benny knocked it down over my eyes and give him a final shove. He laughs and jogs away to get back to work. I give Milo a smile. “Yeah, I’m not actually working today. I just wanted to observe.”

  “Ah, well—” Milo starts, but Rob steps out from the tent and calls for first team before I can make it across the grass. Milo looks like he wants to say something, but he also doesn’t want to keep Rob and the crew waiting, so he follows Lydia to replace their stand-ins while the hair and makeup crew wait just off camera to jump in and adjust between takes.

  I find a spot to stand near video village. I want to be able to peek at the monitors so I can see what the camera sees, and possibly overhear some of the direction. They’re using two cameras to shoot simultaneous close-ups of Lydia and Milo. On one of the monitors I can see Milo mouthing his lines, while on the other Lydia blots her lips on a tissue a makeup assistant has pulled out of a fanny pack.

  “Don’t you just love the quiet days?” Carly asks, appearing at my side.

  “If only they weren’t quite so early,” I say. I let a yawn escape, and it travels to Carly, who stretches her arms wide and tries to suppress one of those yawn-moans. “How early did you have to get here?”

  “Four,” Carly replies, like that’s not an ungodly hour when most respectable people should still be tucked into bed, or possibly just crawling in after a long night. Just the thought of four in the morning makes me yawn. I got up at six to be here at seven, and I barely feel human as a result.

  “Hey, can I see the sides?” I ask. I know today is some kind of romantic scene, hence the scenery, but I haven’t seen the actual pages for the day. I have no idea what they’re shooting. Carly hands me the stapled pages, and I flip through them. There’s only one scene, with only Lydia and Milo playing in it. No extras, no other cast. I skim the dialogue, not absorbing a whole lot of it, but my eyes skid to a halt over a piece of direction.

  THEY KISS.

  It’s right there on the page, all caps, like an accusation.

  Okay, I knew that Jonas, Milo’s character, was the love interest of Kass, Lydia’s character. And if I’d thought about it for two seconds longer, I would have realized that of course they were going to kiss. Has there ever been any piece of entertainment in the history of the world ever where the love interests don’t kiss? Duh, of course they kiss.

  But today? While I’m here and watching?

  THEY KISS.

  No matter how many times I read it, the words don’t go away. And neither can I. If I leave now, it’ll look suspicious to Milo, and possibly the rest of the crew. I’m just going to have to suck it up and watch my boyfriend kiss his superhot, superfamous ex-girlfriend.

  Today is a new day indeed.

  “Rolling!” Rob calls, and the rest of the crew start to echo the call like dominos, so that everyone gets the message and shuts the hell up. The boom mike may not look like much, but it can pick up all kinds of whispers and footsteps, none of which belong in the scene. Everyone on set pauses, like a scene out of The Day the Earth Stood Still, where they’ll stay until Rob calls cut.

  “And action,” Rob says. Milo and Lydia launch into the dialogue, which is heavy on the flirting. I watch Milo on the monitor. He cocks his head. He gives a smile. At one point, he winks. It all looks so…familiar, and it’s giving me a serious case of déjà vu.

  I try to avoid looking at the monitor with Lydia’s face on it, but every once in a while my eye drifts over to her ruby-red lips, emerald-green eyes, and the way her skin looks like ice-cold milk on-screen. The camera, as they say, loves her, and when my eyes go back to Milo’s monitor, it looks like he does too.

  They shoot the scene six or seven more times, both up close and with the cameras pulled back. Whatever problems Lydia was having with her lines the other day seem to have disappeared. She’s amazing today playing opposite Milo. He seems to put her at ease, or maybe it’s that acting out a flirty relationship with him isn’t so foreign to her. I know she cheated on him, but watching them now all made up and lit the way Hollywood intended, it makes me wonder if he still has feelings for her, too.

  Rob yells, “Check the gate,” which Carly tells me means he’s ready for them to move on to the next shot. This is the part I’ve been dreading. The kiss.

  There’s lots of discussion happening under the tent about the best place to have the kiss happen. Apparently they were originally slated to suck face on the footbridge, giving the cameras a great view of the waterwheel in the background, but now Rob doesn’t like it. Milo and Lydia have migrated over to listen in on the conversation.

  Rob trots over to a rock off the side of the creek and starts asking Cole, the gaffer, if he can light the space, and Allen, the director of photography, if he has everything he needs to get the shot at that angle. And before I know it, lights and cameras are in place and Milo is boosting Lydia up onto the flat top of the rock. He climbs up next to her, and Rob is telling him to lean back on his arm, but no, move it closer, yes, closer to Lydia, and telling her to lean into his chest slightly. It’s like a slow-motion nightmare, only it’s not going slow enough for my taste, because suddenly Rob is calling action.

  I make it through exactly one take of the kiss. I watch one time as Milo cups Lydia’s chin, her head tilting perfectly as he leans in, their lips meeting. I count, one, two, three, four…and the kiss is still going.

  I can feel the nausea start low in my stomach, a sort of sour pit forming and rolling around with the contents of my breakfast. I’m seriously regretting those Cocoa Puffs right about now. I drop my gaze to the toes of my sneakers and try to take some deep breaths of the cool morning air, but with the sun rising higher every minute, the atmosphere suddenly feels too heavy and too hot. I really worry I might throw up.

  “You okay?” Carly asks, and that’s when I realize I’m still mostly staring at my shoes, taking deep yoga breaths.

  I let myself look up at her and try to wipe the illness from my face. “Uh, yeah, I, uh, just left something in my car,” I reply. I turn on my heel and start to head back down the dirt road. I hear Carly say that Rodney can drive me back, but that seems ridiculous. Crew parking is barely a quarter of a mile down the road, and I think if I have to wait for the crew van to show up to drive me, I’ll lose my breakfast in the grass. And then I start running, know I won’t be able to stop.

  I sit in my car with the air conditioning on full blast for almost an hour. I want to leave, but I also don’t want to admit defeat. And an hour feels like long enough that Milo and Lydia have thoroughly made out and finished filming the scene. At least I hope so. Regardless, hiding out in my car for more than an hour feels just as pathetic as ditching out on the day, and besides, I don’t have enough gas to sit here like this and still make it home, so I shut off the car and climb out.

  I don
’t want to go back to set just in case the world’s longest make-out session is still going on, so I cross the grass to the row of trailers production brought in for the cast. Milo’s is the first one, according to a sign on the door, so I knock.

  “Come in,” he calls.

  I take a deep breath and step inside to find the nicest space that’s probably ever been associated with the word “trailer.” The interior has wood floors and more chrome and glass than I’ve seen in Architectural Digest. Milo is parked on a gray suede couch paging through the script and mouthing lines. When I step into the trailer, my shoes slap-slapping on the wood floor, he looks up, his blue eyes nearly cutting me in half with their laserlike gaze.

  “Hey,” he says in a way that sounds like the word is taking the temperature of the room.

  “Hey,” I reply in a way that sends a chill into the air.

  “Is everything okay?” He looks like he’s waiting for me to burn the place down, but frankly I don’t have the energy for that kind of rage. Between yesterday’s Internet explosion and today’s indignity of watching my superhot maybe-boyfriend making out with his superhot ex-girlfriend, I just feel defeated and sad.

  “Yes,” I say, leaning against the wall across from him. But we both know that’s a lie, which just makes me feel even more pathetic. “No. I don’t know.”

  Good one, Dee.

  Milo sighs. “Look, I know that must have been hella awkward. I didn’t realize you were going to be on set today, or I would have warned you.”

  I glance up from my feet, the whole conversation already bordering on ridiculous. “Oh? And what would you have said?”

  Milo looks like I’ve slapped him, then he sighs. “I just, I don’t know, I would have…It’s my job?”

  The silence between us more than fills the trailer. It’s so big and heavy that it feels like it’s trying to bust out the windows. When it gets too much to bear, Milo drops his script onto the couch next to him and crosses the small space to me.