Amelia had all these friends that she’d been friends with long before I’d come along. She’d known Ashley since they were both in kindergarten. I knew I should’ve done more group things with them and gotten to know them better—but for some reason I never felt like we were on the same team. It’s not that they were prettier or more popular than me—some of them were and some of them weren’t. It’s not that they had more money—at the very least, my mother kept up the illusion that we had plenty of money. But whenever I had a conversation with one of them, it felt like we were doing it for a reason other than the desire to talk to each other. Which made me feel awkward.
“I really, really have to get this done,” I told Amelia for the thousandth time. “After all, you want your part to be as big as it can be, right?”
Amelia giggled. “Okay, I can go with that,” she said. “How cool are you?”
I knew this was a question I wasn’t supposed to answer.
Of course, on Saturday I only got through about two pages of revisions before my mind started to wander. I checked my phone a few times to see if Keith had called or texted—just in case Erika had canceled. But no luck. I forced myself to write a new scene with Sarah’s new bitchy mother. Then I felt unfocused again.
Whoever decided to put a word-processing program on the same device as the Internet was one malevolent jerk. Because distraction is always a single click away.
I hadn’t written in my blog since the night I’d ranted about soap operas. Almost every trade article about Likely Story had mentioned its origin, so I’d had more visitors in the subsequent days than I’d ever imagined I would get. There were 413 comments listed under my short entry—many of them from Mom’s fans. Some, feeling motherly by association, cheered me on. Some were offended and called me ungrateful. Clearly, me saying soap operas were going the way of the dinosaur did not make the brontosaurus Kathy Smiths too happy.
As I scrolled through the comments, I realized I’d completely lost my anonymity. And I missed it. Now I’d have to think of total strangers reading what I wrote—each one of them a potential viewer for Likely Story. I never went out of my way to offend anyone, but now I really didn’t want to offend anyone. I couldn’t even start a new blog—the secret journal of an unnamed teenager who happened to be creating a soap opera. Because, I had to face it, there were no other people out there who fit my description. My life was a complete giveaway to my identity.
Finally, toward the end of the comments section, there was one from someone calling himself JuilliardSoaper2B. It read:
Chekhov raises a glass to you. And
Dickens sends regards.
I looked at the date: It had been posted the day after I’d been at the Getty with Dallas. He’d posted it the day he got back.
There was no e-mail address attached, no way to contact him. I was sure I could’ve tracked him down, but I didn’t want to seem stalker-esque. So I simply posted a comment in return to his comment.
Van Gogh wanted me to say nice eyes.
Then I immediately deleted that and came up with:
Shakespeare’s warned me that a show’s
only as good as its cast.
I think we’re off to a good start.
I figured the odds of him returning to my blog to see that were pretty slim. I would try to forget it was there.
Just before midnight, Keith called me.
“What’re you doing right now?”
The honest response would’ve been: I’m debating whether I’m actually allowed to use a certain four-letter word on daytime television or whether Sarah should just say her mother is full of crap.
But instead I said, “Not much.”
“Your mom home?”
“No, I think she’s still out.”
“Can I come over?”
Something about the way he said it made me pay attention.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
“Yeah, Odie. I think there is.”
“Well, Garfield, come on over. I’ll meet you in the backyard.”
I knew it was a sign of some sort that I didn’t immediately shower and change. But I couldn’t figure out what my inaction meant—was I just so comfortable with Keith that I could let him see the real me, or was I giving up? Whatever the case, when I met Keith in the gazebo in our backyard, I was wearing my writing clothes—an old Decemberists T-shirt and torn jeans. Not exactly an In Style spread.
We usually met at the gazebo so I wouldn’t have to worry about Mom seeing us. We were far enough away from the house, and the odds of Mom realizing I had stepped outside were slightly higher than the odds of me spontaneously combusting. We were safe. And we could make all the “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” jokes we wanted.
“Hey, Ariel,” he said when he got there.
“Hey, Jasmine,” I said back. Then we kissed for a minute or two. Or three.
“Erika’s asleep,” he said when we finally came up for air. “At her house.”
“Where else would she be asleep?” I asked.
And that’s when he unloaded, telling me all about how Erika’s father had flown into a rage the other night when Erika’s mom had said she’d had enough, and now Erika’s mom was trying to leave him, but he kept coming by, until finally Erika and her mom went to stay at a hotel until they could get some kind of restraining order. He’d never actually been violent against them, but they were worried it had gotten to the point where that might happen. It was awful, and nobody really knew about it except Keith, and it was killing him. He figured it would be okay to tell me, since I didn’t know any of them.
He needed me. That much was clear. He wanted to open up to me—and wasn’t that what I’d wanted? Wasn’t that what I thought relationships were about? He trusted me. He felt comfortable with me. He wanted me to help him find a way to help Erika.
And I just couldn’t do it.
I felt selfish and wrong and heartless, but I just couldn’t do it.
“I can’t,” I said. “I just can’t.”
“You can’t what?” Keith asked, genuinely confused.
“I can’t do this again,” I said. “I can only take so much.”
“No,” Keith told me, “you don’t understand. Something’s happened….”
“To Erika,” I said. “Something’s happened to Erika. Not with Erika. To Erika.”
“I know this is weird—” Keith said, not for the first time in our “relationship.”
“I want her to be okay,” I interrupted. “You have to understand: I really want her to be okay. But every time I see you, it’s starting to hurt me more than it makes me happy. You show up and one of the first things you do is tell me where she is so you can be with me. I feel like I’m aware of her every move. And I know she came first, and I know you care about me, and I know in some way it hurts you, too. But, Keith—I have a heart. You have to understand that.”
“I know you do…. I know you do,” he whispered, holding me close.
It had to stop. I knew it had to stop.
But I couldn’t say those exact words. And that’s what it would have taken: exact words.
“Let’s talk about spaceships,” he said.
“How about breakfast cereal?”
“Great mountain climbers of the mid-twentieth century?”
“Uses of the word strumpet in literature?”
We knew what each of us was really saying:
Anything but her. We’ll talk about anything but her.
As if that could make her go away.
Instead all I could think about was him thinking about her.
Trip and all the VPs (and, hopefully, Greg) loved the revisions. In particular, they loved the new adults … so much, in fact, that they wanted even more adult characters.
“I’m going to draw the line somewhere,” I told Richard.
“That’s fine,” he said. “Just make sure you draw it in pencil.”
Scooter was more critical.
“Can’t Sarah an
d Jacqueline secretly be sisters?” he asked.
“No.”
“What if Jacqueline’s real mom was blackmailed into giving her up? By a priest?”
“I’m not sure we need that, Scoot.”
“Can babies have amnesia?”
“I don’t think they remember much in the first place.”
“Well, maybe Jacqueline has a repressed memory of being in the crib with Sarah, and Sarah stealing her silver rattle. Which is why she’s trying so hard to steal Ryan now.”
“The silver rattle is a nice touch. But no.”
The good thing about Scooter was that he didn’t mind that I thwarted his attempts at turning Likely Story into Another Unlikely Story.
“Do you have a crush on Ryan?” he asked me as our conversation came to an end. “Because you write like you do.”
“Ryan isn’t real,” I reminded Scooter.
“Yeah,” he said with a smile. “But your crush is.”
After school that Tuesday, I had a meeting with Annie, the casting director, and Richard to go through the head shots that had made it to the final round. I was driven to the studio and was on my way to Richard’s office when I turned a corner and ran almost smack into my mother.
I was about as thrilled to see her as I would have been to be rolling naked in poison ivy, but she didn’t miss a beat. Trilling loudly for everyone to hear, she cried, “Well, look who’s here!”
This was a classic Geneva line, meant to show her casual disregard of threatening situations. What does Geneva say when she sees a three-armed grave robber about to corner her into a conveniently open casket? “Well, look who’s here!” Or when her homicidal stepson crashed through her bedroom with a flamethrower, intent on serving her medium rare? “Well, look who’s here!” Even her third husband’s return from a French POW camp was greeted with a “Well, look who’s here!”—although that one at least was said with a catch in her voice and a Daytime Emmy–craving tear in her eye.
Needless to say, I felt more like the grave robber or the flame-loving stepspawn when she said it to me.
“Hi, Mom!” I said as cheerily as I could. Richard had now emerged in the hallway behind her, and I didn’t want him to see me sweat. Ever.
“What brings you here?” she asked sweetly.
“Casting. You know how it is.”
My mother, of course, didn’t know how it was at all. The producers of Good As Gold were as likely to ask her to cast other parts as they were to ask her to fix the cameras when they broke.
“Lovely!” she cried. Then, digging deep into her past, to the script of Danger at My Suburban Door, a TV movie in which she played a housewife facing off against a murderously sexy handyman, she remembered something mothers were supposed to say: “Don’t be late for dinner!”
“I wouldn’t miss it!” I assured her.
We air-kissed, then went our separate ways.
“Bravo,” Richard said, leaning in the doorway of his office.
“I’ll give you ten bucks if you can prevent that from happening again,” I offered.
“What—and miss the show? No deal.”
He was extending his arm so that the doorway was blocked. This was not a casual lean.
I bent my head and ducked under his arm.
“Mallory!”
“Too late!”
I went straight for his desk, where there were printouts of ten logo designs. Two had the title right—Likely Story. But there were four other titles on display, each with two logo treatments. One was Deception Pass. I could almost understand that. But the other three sounded like they’d been crafted by a Harlequin Romance writer who’d been chained in a pink bathroom for two months with only a perfume bottle for sustenance.
For As Long As I Live
Love … Tomorrow
and my favorite,
Shadow’s Light
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I said, holding up one of the logo boards. “Shadows can’t have light.”
“You’d be surprised how well it did in the focus group,” Richard said.
“What focus group?”
“We wanted to try out a few titles.”
“Richard, the show’s title is Likely Story. End of story.”
“The focus group didn’t get that.”
“Who was in this focus group?”
“Soap watchers.”
I smacked myself in the head. “Richard, have you been hearing me at all? This isn’t for them. It’s for their kids. And grandkids. And great-grandkids.”
“I knew you were going to be like this,” Richard huffed.
“What? Rational? Sorry if you don’t agree. You can get your love … dot dot dot … tomorrow.”
Luckily, Annie came by at that moment.
“You guys ready?” she asked.
“You’re going to have to pick your battles,” Richard warned me.
“Fine,” I said. “I pick this one. Now let’s go do some casting.”
————
Annie was organized as ever, with the head shots in stacks for each character. At first I didn’t see Amelia’s head shot in the Sarah stack … but luckily that was just because it had gotten stuck to the photo above it.
“She’s the one,” I said. “She’s the one I see in my head when I’m writing about Sarah.”
“That’s your friend, right?” Richard asked. Annie raised an eyebrow at this.
“She’s really great,” I replied.
“We want much more than ‘really great,’” Richard countered, making me feel entirely lame.
Annie picked up the photo. “She does have the look,” she judged. “It’s nice to see a fresh face every now and then.”
I restrained myself from cheering.
Annie put the photo back in the pile.
“We’ll see,” she said. “Now let’s start with Jacqueline, shall we?”
After a while, looking at head shot after head shot after head shot can distort the way you see reality. You begin to realize how weird faces are. Especially smiling, blemishless, immaculately lit faces. It didn’t take long in the casting process for me to start thinking about how truly strange it is that our head has three holes in the front and one on either side. The girls in the Jacqueline pile were almost all certifiably beautiful. But even beauty started to seem bizarre.
“Find anything?” Richard asked me.
I felt like I was down at the police station, looking at all the mug shots, trying to identify the right person. Only I wasn’t trying to finger the guy who’d stolen my purse or the woman who’d held up the bank while I’d been waiting to use the ATM; no, I was searching through all the faces in order to find the one person who could bring my up-’til-now text-only character to life. With Dallas, it was easy: The plug fit the socket and the electricity just flowed. With Amelia, it was obvious. But with the other characters, it wasn’t so easy. Part of me didn’t want to let them out of my head. And part of me knew that if these characters were real, they’d never allow themselves to be posed for a head shot.
“They’re all such … actors,” I mumbled.
Annie pushed her silver bangs out of her eyes and said, “Yes … but if they’re any good, you won’t realize they are. It’s our job to separate the wheat from the chaff.”
She held up the head shot of a girl who looked like she’d been created in the laboratories of MTV to be the dim-witted blonde in a reality show called Hot Tub.
“Chaff,” Annie proclaimed.
The next girl was posed in her head shot like she was waiting for her rapper boyfriend to toss her some bling.
“Chaff.”
The next girl startled me. Her head shot actually looked … vulnerable. She was pretty, but she wasn’t believing it.
Annie looked at me expectantly.
“Wheat?” I said.
She nodded. “Wheat. But don’t get me wrong—if she wasn’t attractive, she’d be chaff. We’re in the attraction business here. Although sometimes attracti
ve and pretty are not entirely the same thing. Some of the sexiest women this network has ever seen have gaps in their teeth or asymmetrical cheekbones. Allure is elusive—but with the right eye, you can find it.”
I picked up Amelia’s photo and held it up.
“Wheat?” I asked.
Annie smiled and said coolly, “We shall see.”
Word, it seemed, traveled faster than I did.
I hadn’t called Amelia or picked up the phone because I wanted to tell her in person that she’d made the cut into the next round. But when I got to her house, she was already outside, jumping up and down. I half expected her to use her body to spell out the letters OMG.
“Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou!” she screamed as she hugged me. “Theycalledtheycalledtheycalled. Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.”
“It wasn’t just me,” I told her. “Annie thought you had ‘the look,’ too. And Richard didn’t, like, throw his body in front of her when she moved you to the callback pile—so that has to be a good sign.”
“Pinch me!” Amelia said. “I mean, really. Go ahead. Pinch me.”
The joke was, there wasn’t really much on Amelia’s bones to pinch. I managed to grab about a millimeter of her upper arm.
“Ouch!” she cried.
“Sorry,” I said, stepping back. “You told me—”
“No worries. Assuming it doesn’t bruise….”
Amelia’s concern was only momentary.
“I need to rehearse!” she said. “You need to help me.”
We hadn’t even gotten inside her house and already she was pulling me toward mine.
“Jake will drive us,” she continued. “JAKE!”
Slowly her brother emerged from the house.
Amelia and Jake definitely had a smiler/smirker dynamic going on. If Amelia was the girl who grew up with puppy posters on her wall, Jake was the boy who liked to put puppies in the dryer for a spin.
“Your servant has arrived,” he announced, barely looking at me.
“Shut up—you were going to Century City anyway,” Amelia replied.
“I can’t wait for you to be famous so you can get your own damn driver.”
Likely Story! Page 7