Likely Story!

by David Levithan

  “Were you always this much of a bitch?” I asked.

  “Only to those who deserve it,” she shot back.

  I opened the door of the car. “I’ll see you at the dance,” I said. “That is, if you can even find a date for Valentine’s Day.”

  “I have someone who doesn’t already have a girlfriend, you lying slut,” she replied.

  “Who? Your slimeball brother, Jake?”

  “Ha!” she cried. “I’m going with Brewster Robbins. You know, the lacrosse star you used to lust after.”

  “That’s exciting. You’ll be his fifteenth girlfriend this month.”

  “You are so out of line.” She turned and stalked away, waving her middle finger at me from behind her back.

  I slammed the car door and looked at the grape-stained Betsey Johnson.

  “Friend of yours?” my mother asked drolly.

  “Not anymore,” I said. And I meant it.

  I couldn’t believe I had to go back to work, but my days didn’t end when the final school bell rang. Back at the lot, my mother quickly ensconced herself in the makeup trailer in order to be ready for her counseling scenes later. I’ve never seen a high school counselor wear as much eyeliner as my mom’s version did, but I guess if we were going to have sexy teachers, a vampy guidance counselor would fit right in.

  My phone buzzed with a text reminding me to go see Richard in his office. I found him finishing the last of his California rolls, dabbing them in the wasabi and soy sauce with his plastic chopsticks. Good As Gold was playing on the plasma TV in his office, along with a live feed of the Likely Story footage being shot on the stage. He didn’t look up when I walked in.

  “How was The Ivy?” he asked, still not looking up.

  “How do you think?” I said, grabbing a Red Bull from the mini-fridge.

  “I’m hoping it was a madhouse.”

  “You are correct, sir,” I replied, exhaustion catching up with me.

  “Good—at least something’s going right today.” Richard flicked his soy sauce packets into the trash can and swiveled to face me.

  “Something else is flying south besides my life and my patience?”

  “Did you spill something?”

  “What?” I asked, not following.

  He indicated my dress with his chopstick and suddenly I remembered I was wearing most of Amelia’s grape soda. “Oh, right. Don’t worry, it happened after The Ivy. I ran into my old friend Amelia.”

  Richard clucked. “Grape is an awfully hard flavor to get out. Next time you get in a squirting match, can you make sure the other girl’s drinking Sprite?”

  I so didn’t want to talk about this. “What else has gone wrong since I left for lunch?” I asked.

  “I’m not going to say anything to impede your impartial judgment,” he went on.

  “My judgment about what?” I wondered.

  “The opening credits for the show. I just got the cut from the editors.”

  The opening credits were all-important in establishing the overall mood of the show. Days of Our Lives has the iconic hourglass. The Young and the Restless was made unforgettable by its plaintive piano theme. Dallas had oil and, well, Dallas.

  I was hoping for an opening hybrid somewhere between the helicopter shots of Dallas and the spooky undertone of Twin Peaks. The fact that Deception Pass actually existed up near the tip of Washington State was especially weird. I hadn’t realized this when I came up with the name originally, though I think a fifth-grade geography report on Washington might have planted it in my brain somewhere.

  The good news was that it ended up adding tons of texture to my story. Filled with foggy bridges and thick evergreen forests, the real Deception Pass provided a great backdrop for the goings-on of the characters in Likely Story. We didn’t have the budget to shoot there all the time, but a few well-placed shots of rushing waters and dark coves would hopefully convince the audience that Sarah, Jacqueline, Marco, and Ryan weren’t on a soundstage two miles southeast of Burbank, California.

  Richard clicked play on the DVD remote and the credits began to roll. I knew we were in trouble by the opening strains of the electric guitar. Electric guitar is never a good sign.

  First there was a shot of a lighthouse. Kind of intriguing. Then there was Alexis in a bikini getting out of the frigid winter waters of Washington. Her close-up revealed blue lips. Dallas was in a wet suit pulled down to his waist with a surfboard. His character doesn’t surf, I thought. And we all knew now where Dallas stood on the issue of shirtlessness. Then there was a shot of crabs crawling on a foamy rock. Eww. Crabs were not what I was trying to project. Javier as Marco combed his hair in a mirror. Check minus—that was more likely the real Javier primping than his rugged character. And finally Francesca was seen fixing her car, covered in grime. It was followed by a shot of some random tree and then a quick cut of my mother looking pleased with herself in the guidance office. One more random tree shot … and then the screen went black.

  “What the hell was that?” I choked out.

  “Your show. Should I ask what you thought?”

  “That has nothing to do with my show!” I screamed. “Since when does Francesca fix cars?!? And don’t even get me started on the surfboards and bikinis. This takes place in the Pacific Northwest, not the OC! Oh my God, I’m hyperventilating.”

  Richard tossed me the paper bag his sushi lunch had arrived in. I started huffing into it and shrieking, “I’m going to kill you, Richard!”

  He put up his hands in self-defense and said, “Stick your knife somewhere else, because I am not at fault.”

  “Then who?” I hissed, finally regaining control over my breathing.

  “I think neither you nor I really paid enough attention to this,” he said.

  “I told them to keep it real. Like you can see your own drama reflected in it, especially if you live near Seattle. There’s not even a shot of the bridge—the two-pronged amazing bridge that we replicated at great expense on Stage Four.”

  “Stop yelling. I get it. I hate it, too.”

  I stopped yelling. “You do?”

  “Of course. That tired old indie garage band they have over the credits. That song sucks now—in twenty years it will be a laff riot.”

  “Twenty years? We won’t make it twenty minutes at this rate. We’ve got to reshoot it. And this time I’m going. I won’t have all my hard work ruined in thirty seconds of MTV backwash.”

  “We debut a week from Monday,” Richard said. “When are we going to reshoot?”

  “This weekend.”

  Richard was quiet. He toyed with his pencil. “I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, you have a photo shoot to get ready for.”

  “Another photo shoot?” How were we going to tape a TV show if people kept taking our photos?

  “This time it’s Entertainment Weekly, which covers daytime TV about as often as it covers greyhound racing. So if someone tells you to smile, you ask, ‘How wide?’”

  “Just get me new opening credits and I’ll smile so wide you’ll be able to use it as a hammock,” I promised.

  Richard raised his eyebrow at that.

  “It’s starting to be a pleasure to work with you,” he said.

  Jim the Wardrobe Boy was none too pleased when I returned to his lair with a stained dress. “I lent you a piece of heaven and you brought back a dishrag!” he caterwauled upon seeing me.

  I shrugged and apologized halfheartedly. I was too upset with the barf-o-riffic opening titles and nervous about “sexing up” the first couple of episodes to be worried about one ruined Betsey Johnson dress.

  For the photo shoot, Jim dressed me in a Marlene Dietrich–style lady tuxedo. I kind of looked like a drag king, but it did make me look tall and important. I liked wearing the pants. Just as I was finishing up in wardrobe, Francesca waltzed in.

  “Hi, boss!” she said in a deliberately chipper tone.

  “Hi,” I replied as I tried to examine my backside in the mirror without perf
ect girl noticing.

  “So I got the new pages a few minutes ago,” she said.

  I stopped looking at my butt. “What new pages?”

  “The episode one reshoot. Where Ryan and Sarah find the student’s body. And then Marco and I decide to join them in finding the killer,” Francesca explained as she stepped into a periwinkle prom dress.

  “Do you have them?” I asked, blood rushing to my face. How dare Richard release new pages without my approval!

  “Right here,” she said, tossing the stapled packet of xeroxed script toward me.

  I flipped through the pages and burned with anger. I hadn’t approved any of this slop. Richard had some ’splainin’ to do. But first I’d test the temperature of the political waters.

  “Francesca, you’ve read these—what do you think?”

  She clicked her tongue against her teeth, clearly searching for a diplomatic answer. “I think they’re interesting …,” she began. “Different, that’s for sure. But maybe we needed something a little more … you know …”

  “No. What?”

  “A little more … edgy.”

  “Please interpret. Does that mean you like them?”

  “I like edgy as much as the next girl, but I didn’t say I liked the pages,” she hurriedly replied. Then she backed up. “But, you know, I’m just a private in this army. You say ‘march’ and I’ll march.”

  I nodded, soaking it in. So she didn’t like them, but wasn’t about to go on record saying so. Then she looked around, as if she was about to divulge a big secret, and motioned for me to come closer.

  In a tone just above a whisper, she said, “I think Dallas is a little more upset.”

  “How much more upset?” I asked.

  “A lot more. And I wouldn’t normally say anything, but as a member of this army, I think I should. Just so you know.”

  I couldn’t tell what Francesca’s angle was. I assumed it was true—she had to know I was going to ask Dallas about it. But why tell me like this?

  “Thanks for letting me know,” I said, keeping it cordial.

  “I said too much. This stays between us, all right?”

  I nodded … but as soon as I was out the door, Dallas was the only thing on my mind.

  I couldn’t lose him.

  I had to try and put out the Dallas fire without burning the bridges I had carefully constructed with the writers and even Richard. I’d barely read the new pages, but I knew from the lines “That dead girl is my half sister” and “What’s this creepy clown mask doing here?” that the scene wasn’t heading down Believability Road.

  I could only assume that Dallas was already at the photo shoot on the soundstage. Dressed in my lady tux, I deducted that the final “concept” for the shoot had been “Prom.” No doubt, this had been a subject of conversation in several meetings over the last several weeks. Magazine shoots don’t just accidentally end up materializing like june bugs or the flu. They are the careful, prissy product of several highly paid professionals whose sole job beyond light-meter reading is to decide “concepts.”

  Thus, I was in a lady tux, the girls in foofy dresses, and the boys …

  I turned a corner and saw the boys were in tuxedo jackets with shorts. Oy. Tuxedo shorts were a particular atrocity perpetrated upon unsuspecting SoCal students. Every year, some tuxedo rental house would pay male seniors to wear tuxedos around the school to promote their store. Inevitably, these boys would wear the jackets, bow ties, and cummerbunds paired with black board shorts, creating a look that was as uniquely unappealing as it was embarrassing. But seventeen-year-old boys, surprisingly, did not pick up on this … leading a handful of mortified prom-picture-taking girls to beg the photographer to only shoot from the waist up. And if the shorts weren’t bad enough, the boys usually wore mandals, too.

  As I gazed upon the photo-shoot horrors in front of me, I noticed that Dallas and Javier were wearing those old-fashioned kind of socks one usually saw in a stuffy British art-house movie. You know, the kind of socks that are held up by a garter belt below the knee? Not exactly fashionable.

  What was even worse was that I saw a throne off to one side. I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I was going to be expected to sit on that throne.

  “Okay, I think we got it!” bellowed Tai, the blond photographer. She circled her finger in the air to indicate that it was time for a new setup.

  As the photo assistants and PAs ran around readjusting lights and props, I sidled up to Dallas and Javier.

  “Nice shorts, boys.”

  Javier rolled his eyes and mimed choking on his own vomit. It was almost as subtle as his acting. Dallas avoided eye contact.

  “Got a minute?” I asked.

  He looked up from the issue of Variety he was paging through and nodded.

  “What’s up?” he asked when we’d gotten out of hearing range of everyone else.

  “I just wanted to check in with you. Make sure everything is okay. Is everything okay?”

  He shrugged.

  “Is that a yes, no, or maybe?”

  “Eh.”

  “Have you read the new script pages?” I asked, fairly sure of the answer.

  He fiddled with the garter on his calf, scratching at the little hairs sandwiched beneath.

  “What did you think?” I pressed.

  “Maybe this isn’t the best place to talk about it.”

  “Is there a problem?”

  He sighed and looked around. “Look, I know you work harder than anybody here. And far be it from me to judge, but these pages are kind of … weak. I mean, a clown mask left behind at a crime scene? I think the Scream movies are great, but I didn’t think that’s what we were doing on this show.”

  “It’s not. I didn’t write, or approve, these new pages. And trust me, Richard is going to get a big, fat, Greek piece of my mind.”

  “I am, am I?” Richard said.

  Damn him! What was his eerie warlock power to be everywhere at once? I’d have to learn how to do it myself. In the meantime, I knew I was fighting for Dallas’s trust … so I couldn’t back down.

  “Yes, you are, Richard. You know nothing gets distributed without crossing my desk first.”

  “Mallory, we simply don’t have time for all these formalities,” he replied.

  “These pages are junk.”

  “Your friend Tamika wrote them, not me. That’s why I went ahead and had them printed. She’s your right hand in the writers’ room. I assumed you told her what to do.”

  I was surprised to hear this. Lines like “Anyone in this town could be a killer” didn’t seem like Tamika’s style. But I wasn’t going to let this blindside me. I was going to stand my ground. For the show. For Dallas. For me.

  “I don’t care if Anton Chekhov wrote it. I have not approved it. And the actors aren’t pleased, either.”

  Richard took out a piece of Nicorette gum and began to chew furiously. “This is not a discussion to be had in front of talent.”

  This was exactly the wrong time for Dallas to step in. So, of course, this was the moment Dallas stepped in.

  “I know that this probably isn’t my place …,” he began.

  “You’re right. It’s not,” said Richard.

  “But,” Dallas continued as he removed his boutonniere with fierce determination, “I’m going to say this anyway. I’m not going to stand by and watch the show I signed on for get turned into just another daytime soap.”

  “Listen here, Dallas.” Richard popped another piece of Camel gum into his mouth, barely containing his rage. “As an East Coast snob, you might prefer a certain style of Public Television BBC snoozefest storytelling. But here on the West Coast, we don’t want a slice of life; we want a big, hot pie full of drama! I don’t know about you, but I also like watching things happen. Now, I admit, this murder storyline is a little cliché….”

  “A little?” I interjected.

  “Hey, soap princess, zip it,” he said with such firmness that I shut up like
a Catholic schoolgirl in the principal’s office. “As I was saying, maybe this murder thing is a bit cliché—but what I’m really saying is this is the bomb under the table.”

  “There’s a bomb under the table?” Dallas asked, confused.

  “Hitchcock’s famous rule was that if you put a bomb under the table at the beginning of a scene, the audience will wait on pins and needles to see if it goes off. By adding the murder mystery at the top of the show, the audience will wait around while Ryan takes Jacqueline car-shopping to see who did it. We’re not changing everything; we’re just changing a few things in order to make everything else better.”

  “Richard,” I said, trying to remain calm, “I totally agree with you that we need to maybe add a dash of paprika in order to spice things up. But these new scenes are so cheesy and full of holes they’d embarrass the Swiss. Just give me the rest of today and tonight to look things over and make some changes. I’ll come up with something better. Something that both you and Dallas like.”

  Richard spit his gum into his hand and mashed it between his fingers. “Sorry, too late. We’ve already started taping. We should be able to get it all in the can this afternoon, once everyone’s out of the formal wear.”

  I was thunderstruck. This was absolutely insane! I turned red and yelled, “You can’t go over my head like this!”

  “I’m the executive producer, and if you’d bothered to familiarize yourself with the chain of command, you’d realize that I have final authority to put pages into production. You are important, Mallory, but ultimately the whole thing hangs on my head!”

  Dallas jumped in. “That’s the problem, Richard. I signed on to do Mallory’s show, not yours. I’d rather quit than sit around while you ruin Likely Story.”

  “You can’t!” I blurted out, desperate to stop this madness.

  “You’re exactly right, Mallory,” Richard said. “He can’t.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Excuse me?” Dallas added.

  “I have something up in my office filing cabinets called ‘Dallas Grant’s Contract.’ And that signed piece of paper says that you are mine for the next five years. You can’t get out of it without ruining your career. It’s airtight. So, if I were you, I’d thank my lucky stars that your producer is not going to hold this outburst against you. Tempers flare. Emotions run high. This is television, not a moonlight drive through Malibu. But if you don’t get back to work and keep those pecs harder than a blood diamond, you will find yourself in a coma so fast you won’t know what hit you. Don’t think I won’t do it. I will make you come to work every day for the next five years just to lie in a hospital bed. And then, after five years, I will activate the renewal clause in your contract, even if I have to pay for it myself, so that I get to keep you here two more years. At which time I will make you show up and make you act in a closed coffin so that you forever remember that your career is just as dead as your character. So before you go around upsetting your very talented and very stressed-out head writer any more, I would think long and hard about what exactly your problems really are.”