“Oh God, you know as well as I do that they have no idea what they want to see. And I’m pretty sure they only agreed to this because my dad made some calls.” She shoves the sides—the audition dialogue—at me. “You go. Tell them you’re me.”
“I can’t tell them I’m you! I don’t even have my headshots on me.”
Daisy pops open the glove compartment and pulls out a stack. “Please, if I know anything about Tatum Connelly, it’s that she’s always prepared. Sign in with my name, then give them your real stuff when you get in the room. They won’t say no.”
“They’ll say no.”
“Then so what? I’m not getting this part anyway.”
I glance at the sides. She’s right: this role was practically written for me. Notme, Tatum, but the version of me I so easily inhabited at the bar, the one who threw shots down her throat, dismissed the tarty undergrads, picked up men for the sport of it. That version of me could play this role as if I were someone else entirely.
“They’re going to say no,” I repeat.
“So make them say yes,” she answers and shifts her seat back to take a nap, as if she’s put the question to bed.
They ask me to read three times through, then whisper among themselves, conferring in a tight little huddle behind a table littered with scattered headshots, discards of actors who are disposable and unwanted, not right for the part. The director, Seth, a guy about thirty, give or take a few years, with a scraggly goatee and a worn Red Sox hat, flips my résumé over and rereads it.
“So,” he says.
“So,” I reply.
“I could be blind here, but I’m pretty sure you arenotDaisy Alexander, now, are you?”
I stutter, feel my composure ebbing out of me. I remind myself to play the part, to be anyone they want me to be, to be anyone I need to be. I tilt my chin higher, puff out my chest.
“Listen. I just thought ...”
He waves a hand, indicating for me to be quiet. I turn to go.
“Wait, it’s OK, it’s OK.” His eyes narrow on my résumé again. “Ah,Romanticah. I knew I knew you from somewhere.” He smiles. “Ben and I grew up together.”
“Ben grew up with everyone, it seems like.”
“I know, right?” He laughs. “You from the city too?”
He means:Are you part of our circle? Shouldn’t we have met? Are you someone from whom I should curry favor?
“Sort of,” I say.
“I’m intrigued,” he says, raising an eyebrow.
“Give me the part, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
His raucous laugh shocks his associates into laughing too. I smile, though I think:You are all such fucking lemmings.I put my hand on my hip, jut it outward, flip my hair in a display of attitude. It’s not so hard, this bravado. It’s what I practiced for at the bar with Daisy, it’s what I trained for practically sinceRomeo and Juliet. Being someone other than me. I slip into it like a second skin, like if I try a little harder, soon I won’t even notice the difference.
“I like it,” Seth says, nodding.
Me too,I think.
They call the next morning with an offer for a three-episode arc, tell me to have my agent reach out to go over the details. I only have my dubious commercial agent, with his dreary office in Van Nuys and who mostly got castings for non-union local commercials (and possibly soft-core porn), so Daisy calls her own agent, and just like that I have real representation and am a working actress. Daisy had booked two of her commercials and the spot in the Tarantino movie.The O.C.was small potatoes compared to that, but I didn’t have a dad who knew people who knew people; I didn’t have a high school network to call in favors. Not that Daisy wasn’t talented; not that Ben wasn’t either.
Also, not that I wasn’t indebted to Daisy for giving me the audition in the first place.
I was. I am.
I love them both.
But even with them in my army, it had been fifteen months without as much as a nibble, without as much as a solitary yes.
