Around midnight, the genteel facade of piano music and champagne slipped away from the Banks mansion, along with a number of older attendees, and the real party reared its head. A DJ set up shop in front of the piano, and in the blink of an eye, the music became loud enough to make the floor vibrate, causing me to stagger in my heels. Bass and alcohol swirled to turn the world off-kilter, into a close-talking, body-pressing, shot-taking blur.
It was like someone had cast a spell. All around the great room, people danced too close. Actors posed for pictures with their makeup smudged and shirts unbuttoned. A woman gave a man a lap dance on the couch in the corner. There was an unleashed carnality, a seediness and honesty that made me more comfortable than the false manners of the earlier party.
Slowly but surely, a crowd had gathered around me and Scout, drawn by our laughter and the magnetism we’d always shared, the quality that had once upon a time convinced us we might make it in Hollywood. This was my element. In the depths of the party, I was at the height of my powers.
“So, I was joking with the casting director,” I said, pausing to ensure I had my audience’s undivided attention. “And I said, ‘If I run outside and trip Megan Booker so she falls and busts her face,thencan I have the role?’”
The crowd burst into laughter.
“Andhesaid, I swear to god: ‘Honey, you’d have to find a way todeflate her ass on the way down, cause it’s not her face that’s booking gigs.’”
The laughter turned louder, punctuated by little gasps of faux outrage. I held up my hands. “Not my words, his. I’m sure Megan is a lovely person.”
“I’ve always thought she was overrated,” confided Gia Thomas, an actress who’d starred in a string of art house horror films.
“I heard she flew to Mexico to get a butt lift,” added Ridley Reed, who ran the famous gossip siteHollywood Anonymous. I crossed my fingers he was noting my name for future posts.
“I go to her Equinox on Vine, and I overheard her trainer call her a butter face,” Scout said. Murmurs broke out. “Honestly, people can be so cruel.”
We were good at this, Scout and I. Capturing attention, turning the spotlight on ourselves and reading the room well enough to stay inside it. She’d been surprised a few months ago when we got the call that we’d booked the queen bee cheerleader roles onThe Weird World of Wenda Word,that out of all the parts we’d auditioned for, those were the ones we’d gotten. But I wasn’t surprised. I’d never told her, but my first thought had been,And so the typecasting begins.
Maybe once an actor got famous, they could hire people to blow smoke up their ass, but when you were just starting out, being an actor meant living in a world of brutal honesty. It wasn’t just casting managers: other actors, directors, even crews had opinions about what kind of person you were. Did they see a shy nerd? A villain? The girl next door? Forget Stanislavski and the acting schools, forget talent. In this job, the first thing you had to come to grips with was the same thing most people spent their lives avoiding: the truth about how people saw you. That was your currency, and you wouldn’t last long if you weren’t self-aware. If your face said you were a childhood sweetheart but you kept auditioning to play the femme fatale.
I’d long suspected that when people looked at me and Scout, they saw what Hollywood screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz once called “bitch virtuosity.” It was a tough pill to swallow. Sometimes, since she was a bit more of a dreamer, Scout seemed oblivious to how people interpreted her lofty beauty, high cheekbones, and tendencyto smirk. But when she was naive, I made up for it. I’d always been able to read a room.
I knew I should resist playing into what people expected—for god’s sake, no one ever rooted for the mean girls—but sometimes it was just easier to give in. It was right there to access, anyway: the attitude, the sharp-tongued confidence that inspired fear and admiration, a role I could play with my eyes closed. What girl raised on social media, sitcoms, andAmerica’s Next Top Modelcouldn’t? Bitch virtuosity, indeed. It had worked for us tonight, as it often did at parties, where people were self-conscious and in search of a leader. I had so many cards stuffed in my bra from new contacts who wanted to grab coffee I was sure I’d have paper cuts in the morning.
“Hey.” Brooks tugged my arm, and I turned. He’d been a sturdy presence at my elbow all night, the first to laugh at my jokes. “Not to cut theScout and Izzy Showshort, because I know you’re having fun, but it’s after three. I’ve got that flight home today. I should probably get some sleep.”
“Three in themorning?” Jesus. How had it gotten so late?
“I know you’re on a mission, but—”
“No.” I put a hand on his arm. “You’ve been patient. I’ll round everyone up and call a cab.”
I caught Scout’s eye while she was midsentence and tugged my ear. We’d developed a shorthand for sets that also came in handy in situations like this. As soon as she stopped talking, the three of us slipped out of the circle.
“It’s threeAMand Brooks has a flight home.” I rubbed under Scout’s eye, where her mascara had begun to bleed. “Time to go.”
“Already?” Scout bit her lip and scanned the room. Even though the party had thinned, there were still clusters of people engrossed in intense conversations. Her eyes lit up. I followed her gaze to where Easton Banks and Reese Griffin stood, for once without an entourage. I knew what she was going to say before she opened her mouth.
“It’s too late,” I protested. “They’re probably exhausted, or drunk. They won’t remember us.”
“But we said we wouldn’t leave until we talked to them. That was the whole point of tonight.”
“The point was networking.” I pulled down my top so she could see the cards. “See? We did a great job.”
Scout’s face fell. “Izzy, when are we going to get this opportunity again? We’re in hishouse. You swore to me we’d do anything to catch our break, remember?”
She’d said the magic words:You swore to me. I glanced at Brooks. “What if we just grabbed Georgia and Alden and had him introduce us real fast? Five minutes to grab them, five minutes to chat. Ten minutes, tops.”
Brooks sighed, and Scout raised her fists in victory. “We’ll be so quick, I promise. Where is Georgia, anyway?”
“No idea.” I wiped the glitter from my legs. It had mixed with a spilled drink and turned uncomfortably sticky. “Probably with Alden.”
“I’m calling her.” Scout held her phone to her ear. “Pick up, G,” she said, presumably to Georgia’s voicemail, then hung up and looked at me. “You try.”
I pulled out my phone and dialed Georgia. Straight to voicemail. “Maybe her phone died.”
