The Waldmans live in a Dutch Colonial two doors down from me.Two doors closer to Ocean Park and Main Street and South Santa Monica—with its surf stores and fruit stands and gourmet coffee shops. Lydia Waldman grew up in that house. Now she is raising her girls here. Twin girls, and two yellow Labs.
“Are they okay?”
“They’re fine. I just need to get inside to check the line, if that’s all right. Make sure it’s not coming from here?”
I look up the block toward the Waldmans. I see a white pickup truck on the corner. It could be this repairman’s truck, but it could also not be his. I can’t make out the logo from here. I can’t be sure.
As if reading my hesitation, he gives me a warm smile. “I can give you my worker ID number, if you’d like to call it in to my supervisor,” he says. “Can’t be too safe these days, can you?”
“No. Sure.”
I head back inside, the flash drive heavy in my hand. I will call that supervisor before I let the repairman in, before I let anyone in. I’ll text Lydia Waldman too.
But as I hit the staircase, my phone buzzes again. Same international number that I don’t recognize. Same +61. Another text coming through.
Get out of the house. Now.
At Twenty-Two, Something’s Always Broken
Bailey rips the wrapper off the fortune cookie from last night’s dinner.
It’s not the healthiest breakfast, that’s for sure. But a quick trip to the fridge reveals that it’s either the cellophane-wrapped cookie or her roommate’s questionable, recently expired cherry yogurt. So the fortune cookie it is.
Bailey breaks it open, looking for the fortune inside. Sadly though, the cookie’s empty. If she were a superstitious person (she’s not, really) that doesn’t feel like the best sign for the day ahead. But, then again, it’s not as bad as those fortunes that you sometimes get that aren’t a fortune at all. Like the time that Hannah got a fortune that simply read:Believe!Or the one that Bailey herself got the night before she started her job:If you think something’s too good to be true, it is.
No, that was not a fortune.
It turned out, it was more like a premonition.
Bailey is the casting assistant for an acclaimed alum of her university—Alice Sleight of the famed Sleight Casting Agency. When Bailey applied for the position, Alice said she wanted to give a young graduate a great first work experience—that the hours wouldn’t be too intensive, that the job would also allow time to work on outside projects.
Alice asked Bailey, during that interview, if she had a project she was working on. She told Bailey that it was (in fact) a prerequisite of her getting hired.
Bailey filled her in on the rest, excitedly. For her senior thesis, she wrote the first act of a musical (a modern retelling of Pandora’s Box from Pandora’s point of view), and by some miracle her professor thought it showed real promise and shared it with a theater producer in New York. The theater producer liked it so much that he asked Bailey to send him act two when she was done with it. Act three.
Alice said that she loved hearing this. That her husband was a visual artist and so she understood that passion—and what it means to be devoted to it.
Then she went on to explain that she was paring way back and only needed someone part-time. Nine-to-two. A dream learning opportunity! And one that would leave plenty of time for Bailey to focus on her own art.
Bailey didn’t realize, of course, that apparently Alice meant 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. Alice calling her all hours of the day and night with emergencies.
Once, Bailey was unavailable for an eighteen-minute window (10 p.m. to 10:18 p.m.) in which Alice decided she desperately needed to reach her. Alice sent thirty-eight texts in those eighteen minutes. Firing her, then hiring her again. Then firing her again.
So it is.
Who needs sleep at twenty-two?
At least, this is what Bailey tells herself. It motivates her to spend every free moment working on her musical. (As if she needs more motivation.)
And, on the plus side, she can work from her own apartment, and she loves her apartment. It’s in the heart of Venice, overlooking Abbot Kinney Boulevard, which is exactly where she and her college roommates wanted to be, now that the UCLA music program is behind them and their lives (as underfunded as three young theaterkids’ lives are) are sweeping out before them. They had to pick between proximity to Abbot Kinney and air-conditioning. They chose Abbot Kinney.
Bailey shoves the rest of the fortuneless fortune cookie into her mouth and heads to her keyboard—which she’s set up underneath the window that’s opened all the way to let the breeze in.
She pulls her hair behind her ears, takes a seat at her keyboard, and starts to get to work.
But then her phone buzzes.
She expects it to be her boss with her first frantic, pretend-emergency request of the day. But she looks down to seeCHARLIEpop up on her phone screen, an incoming call from her uncle.
