by Emma Dibdin
‘Did he tell you that he got a part? Tom did. Some sort of series on TV, I didn’t really take in the details, but—’
‘Wait, really?’
And suddenly, prioritizing Tom feels easy.
10
I have to be careful about money. This is one of several anxious thoughts that strike me when I wake up before dawn on Saturday, when it hits me for the first time that I have gone from two jobs to none. Things seem unimportant in one moment and vital the next, and I have to get a better handle on the cold, hard immoveable truths of my life, such as the fact that I need $925 for rent every month no matter what, and now I have no guaranteed way of getting it. I have enough set aside from these past few months of fifteen-hour days to last me a while, but I can’t lose sight of the fact that getting published in Reel is not a long-term strategy, not even if I choose to be optimistic about their per-word rate.
In an effort to calm myself, I send out four enquiry emails to editors on my To Contact spreadsheet, along with the formal pitch email to Reel, and with every one I feel my anxiety dissipate a little, though not as much as it does after I’ve run seventeen loops around the block, watching the dawn gather brighter with every repetition.
Clark’s email comes precisely at sunrise, and his view from the deck is so perfect that I doubt this is a coincidence.
Skye will meet you at midday at the Venice Beach Boardwalk. She wants to be outside and you’re less likely to be bothered if you’re on the move.
C.C.
Not a question, but a statement of fact. He does not ask whether that time and location works for me, because he knows that I will make it work. Venice is a long way – forty minutes in a cab if I’m lucky, or a full two hours on public transport – and full of aggressively cool, aggressively underemployed people my age who seem to me like another species, their meticulously ragged clothes over tanned skin, their sense of collective belonging. I’m probably being judgemental, but no more so than LA demands.
Lacking any clothes that qualify as grungy or hip, I opt for sportswear, the most expensive pair of running tights I own, a tank top with a denim shirt thrown over it. Athleisure. I have no idea what Skye Conrad will wear for a beach walk with a stranger, but I’d rather dress deliberately down than even try to play the game of competing with her.
On the first of my two bus rides to Venice, I finally call Tom.
‘I’d pretty much given up on you,’ he says after letting the phone ring five times, joking but not joking.
‘I know, I know, I’m really sorry. I always say this, but work’s been—’
‘Crazy,’ he finishes.
‘Yeah. But now, role reversal! I’m done at the place I was working, I have nothing lined up, and you’re a TV star. Soon you’ll be the one who’s too busy to take my calls.’
‘So you thought you’d better just get in there while you still could,’ he says, fully teasing now.
‘Look, I am nothing if not a craven opportunist. But seriously, I really do want to see you. You pick a time. And also tell me about this show – is it the hot ghost twins?’
‘No, it’s about vampires. It takes place in this future world where vampires have taken over and they’re basically now most of the world’s population, but the problem is that they’re running out of humans, and the blood supply’s dwindling. So instead of being a post-apocalyptic thing about humans trying to survive, it’s actually about the vampire race realizing “shit, all those years of hedonistic bloodshed haven’t actually left us with a world we can live in”. It becomes kind of bureaucratic: they have to form a government to try and figure out how to deal with the blood shortage, create laws, regulation… This is all just the outline for the first season, but I think it could be a pretty great satire of society. I’m not totally sure the writers have figured out the right balance between comedy and drama, but—’
The ride passes easily with Tom’s wry voice in my ear, as he unfurls the long and drily comedic story of his first botched audition for Undead, the surprisingly appealing-sounding vampire show. How he’d been running late and had side-swiped another car in the parking lot, still unaccustomed to driving from the left side, and that damaged car was parked in a designated space which turned out to be for the executive producer of the show he was auditioning for, because of course. And rather than confessing in the room and ensuring he’d never get a callback, Tom had walked into the audition and shaken the producer’s hand as though nothing had happened, read his lines and done the variations they’d asked for and, two weeks later, had landed the role.
‘Are you shocked?’ he asks me.
‘No, I’d be shocked if you’d done anything else! What kind of lunatic walks into an audition and immediately tells the most powerful person in the room they’ve just damaged his property? Honesty gets you absolutely nowhere as an actor anyway. Did you lie about your age too?’
‘I’m pretty sure only actresses have to do that.’
‘Savage and true. Tell me, Man In Hollywood, how does it feel to be just starting out and know you’ve probably still got seventy bankable years ahead of you?’
‘Let’s just see how long this thing lasts. The odds that we’ll even get picked up aren’t that great – everyone keeps telling me not to get too invested, not to take it personally when I don’t get a callback, or when my show doesn’t go to series, or when an actor I just auditioned with four days ago blanks me at a party.’
‘That sounds specific. Who blanked you?’
‘I’ll tell you when I’m drunk, the memory’s still raw. Let’s just say it was someone I idolized before, and I could not believe it when the casting director called me back to do a chemistry read with him. He really is a good actor, because he had me convinced we’d bonded in the room.’
If anything will doom Tom’s chances at a career here, it is this. He’s too quick to believe, too eager to take people at face value and see the best in them, while ignoring all the small tells that should put his guard up. He’s never learned to be suspicious, his upbringing giving him no reason not to trust people, and it makes me worry he’ll be eaten alive here.
‘He probably knew something I didn’t, anyway,’ Tom continues, as my bus pulls closer and closer to the water, weighed down by the mid-morning traffic. ‘Couple of days after that party, I found out I didn’t get that part.’
‘Well, maybe he just knew you’d probably crash into his car if they cast you, so he encouraged them to go in another direction.’ I get off the bus a couple of stops early, opting to walk along the beach from Santa Monica to Venice, since I’m early enough and maybe the salt air will calm my nerves. ‘Hey, I’ve got to go, but when can I see you? Are you insanely busy with pre-production stuff now?’
‘Yeah, actually, why don’t you just come to the set?’
‘You’re offering me a set visit? You don’t think the publicity department will be pissed off about you inviting some journalist they haven’t approved?’
‘I don’t think there even is a publicity department yet. We don’t start shooting until next week, but I’ve got fittings and training and stuff this week on the lot.’
If I can shadow Tom on the set of Undead for a day, maybe observe some stunt training, get friendly with the publicist before the pilot has even begun shooting, I can swing an exclusive to pitch closer to the show’s debut, assuming it gets picked up to season. It’s a gamble – the vampire craze has been over for several years now, but the premise of Undead sounds genuinely promising to me, and the showrunner has a strong track record of well-liked genre shows with deeply engaged fanbases. If this show becomes a success and I have been covering it from day one – interviews, recaps, behind-the-scenes exclusives – it could become a nice earner for me, nothing splashy but a solid source of regular commissions.
Our set visit now scheduled, I hang up and wait for Skye in a bare white-walled coffee shop near the boardwalk, nestled between a tattoo shop and a stall selling goth-inspired T-shirts that my teenage self
would have loved. I’m making an effort to sip my drip coffee slowly, conscious of every cent I’m drinking. But that one cup turns into two, and then three, as midday comes and goes and Skye is still nowhere to be seen. I don’t have her number, and the idea of emailing Clark to check on her ETA is somehow so depressing, so not reflective of what our relationship should be, that I barely consider it. I should have asked him for her number, but I did not, and so I wait.
It strikes me that Skye probably has no idea what I look like – how could she? – and that she probably blends in perfectly with the effortlessly cool twenty-somethings strolling and rolling past me on the boardwalk, so we could have missed each other. I begin composing and deleting casual check-in emails in my head: Hey Clark / Hello Clark / Hi, and then maybe the perfunctory small-talk sentence, Hope your Saturday’s starting out well / Hope all’s good with you, or maybe just straight to the point: I just wanted to check that I got the time and place right / Do I have the right time and place?
I’m too wrapped up in my thoughts to notice, for a second, that the seat next to mine is no longer empty. It’s her, of course, her cascade of hair pulled back into a messy bun and dark roots showing beneath the gold. She’s wearing enough bulky layers of clothing to distract from how tiny she is, and even in her current outfit – sweats and a ragged jumper and a hoodie, an ensemble that would make me look like a transient – she is beautiful, luminously so, the kind of beauty that makes her almost ludicrous. Between the pool and the paparazzi photographs before that, I realize now that I have very rarely seen her face up close, and therefore have not appreciated how much she looks like her father. Even with her eyes hidden behind reflective blue aviator sunglasses, it’s clear.
‘You have something,’ she says, in an unexpectedly deep and sonorous voice. I expected thin, nasal, valley girl.
‘What?’
She taps a finger near her left eye, but the shades are so disorienting that I don’t immediately understand, and then I do. There’s a smudge of mascara below my eye, because that’s what I get for experimenting with lower-lash application, and any faint hope that I had of appearing impressive to Skye Conrad dissipates.
‘How’s it going?’ I ask, once the smudge is gone, barrelling ahead. ‘I’m Jessica, by the way.’
‘It’s going well,’ she says quietly. Glancing down unconsciously, I see the artificial thickness of her lower arms and wrists, a flash of bandage visible through a hole in her sweater. It was three weeks ago yesterday.
‘Thanks for meeting me.’
‘My dad wanted me to come.’ She shrugs.
‘Do you hang out with everyone he tells you to?’ I ask this as a joke, but it comes out accusatory, not that she seems fazed.
‘Pretty much. He has good taste in people.’
I ask her if she wants to walk and she says yes; a relief, because long silences and stilted conversations are less unbearable in motion. The January sun is bright and the Pacific sparkling as we set out towards Santa Monica amid the mingling smells of sea salt and marijuana. I keep looking furtively around for lurking paparazzi – Skye has not been pictured since her suicide attempt, and the last I checked online there was still a gaggle of photographers and reporters camped out permanently near the gates of the Laurel Canyon house. But here nobody takes a second glance, Skye’s shades and sweats and unimpressive companion seemingly enough of a disguise, and in any case Lenny is following a few paces behind us, keeping watch.
‘It’s nice to be out,’ Skye says, unprompted.
‘You haven’t been out much, since…?’
‘Not really. My dad wanted me to rest, when I got home.’
‘That makes sense. How are you feeling?’
‘On top of the world.’
It’s impossible to tell whether she’s being serious or sarcastic.
‘Do you know Brett?’ she asks, out of nowhere.
‘Brett Rickards?’
‘Yeah. My boyfriend.’
‘I know of him.’ Obviously.
‘He’s a genius,’ she murmurs. ‘I know everyone thinks he’s just hot, and has a good voice, but he’s a really amazing writer too. You know, he wrote the entire lyrics for “It’s Me” by himself? Nobody talks about that.’
I’m itching to grab my phone and fact-check this on the spot, because even with my limited music knowledge it seems implausible. Brett’s last single had five separate producers credited, and I know this because I had to write up the story from a press release.
‘So you and Brett are still together?’
She smiles, almost to herself, and says nothing.
‘What about, um—’
‘About what?’ She knows what I want to ask. She has to, and now I have to see it through.
‘The nudes,’ I say, with an apologetic wince. ‘I thought that he—’
‘That wasn’t him. It was this creep I dated back in high school. The media just loves to blame Brett for everything, because it’s a way better story if he did it than some rando who works at The Viper Room. If you look at the pictures you can see they’re taken a few years ago, my hair’s not even the same.’
‘I haven’t seen them. I would never.’
‘Whatever,’ she says. ‘I look good in them, so.’
The realization of just how little I understand is overwhelming, now. The question of what on earth I’m doing here, walking next to this impossible girl as though we’re friends. We’re here because I engineered it, like two children forced into a play date together because their parents are friends, and now I’m finding it hard to remember what I ever thought would come out of this. What we’re having is not so much a conversation as a series of almost-conversations, each of them sputtering out within minutes.
‘I read your article,’ she says, then enunciates every syllable as she adds, ‘on Nest dot com.’
‘Oh! Great, what did you think?’
‘Is that what you do? Write about people’s houses?’
‘No, I’m—’ Now I’m wondering what Clark has told her about me, if anything. ‘I’m an entertainment journalist.’
‘Isn’t journalism dying?’ She’s softer and quieter than I expected, but she has fangs.
‘Yeah.’ I laugh. ‘Well, kind of. I work mostly online so the whole “death of print” thing doesn’t impact me so much. But digital journalism’s a mess in a different way. Nobody really knows what the business model’s going to be in five years’ time, or even a year’s time. It’s a lot of chasing traffic, trying to get Google to rank you highly, trying to get Facebook’s algorithm to favour your content.’
I’m not convinced she’s listening any more, and I can’t blame her.
‘Do you know what you want to do?’ I ask, trying not to sound judgemental, just curious. ‘You were at USC for a while, right?’
‘Yeah. It wasn’t a good fit for me. I guess I’m focusing on getting better, and then maybe I’d like to do more acting.’ She sounds like she has rehearsed this. ‘I don’t want to model any more. It’s boring.’
‘I believe it.’ I pause, but this has to get addressed at some point. ‘You know I was there, that day. At the house.’ I stop short of telling her the whole truth, that I was the one who found her bleeding out in the pool. That I’m still wondering whether she would be dead if I hadn’t happened to need some air at that precise moment. ‘There were a lot of us there. Me, a photographer, a couple of video producers. You knew we were coming, right?’
‘I knew.’
She slit her wrists while her house was swarming with press, because she is that specific kind of famous child who has grown up believing that the world owes her its attention. I thought this meeting would make me feel more sympathetic to her, not less.
‘I thought it was dumb,’ she continues. ‘That a magazine was coming to take pictures of our house, pretending like that’s what people care about. When what they really care about is us. Getting the dirt.’
‘You’d be surprised. A lot of people really ju
st want to look at pretty pictures of beautiful homes, and read a lot of details about how they were renovated.’
‘Not you, though.’
I feel seen.
‘No. Not me, so much.’ Though I have the high-res photographs from that day at the canyon house saved on my laptop, and at night when I can’t sleep I pull them up and imagine myself back there, walking back out onto the deck where he is waiting for me, view spread out behind him and his smile like home.
‘Do you live in a nice house?’
‘No, I live in a shithole.’
‘Makes sense,’ she says. It’s hard to tell whether she’s insulting me, her tone is so placid and unchanging. Clark’s Changeling comparison is making more and more sense by the minute.
‘So, is that why you did it?’ I ask. ‘Because you didn’t like the fact there was press in your house? You were angry about that?’
‘I thought it was dumb, but I wasn’t angry. If people want to see our house…’ She shrugs. ‘Why not? I was just bored that day. When my mind isn’t occupied, I have weird thoughts.’
‘I get that.’
‘I didn’t want to kill myself,’ she says. ‘I would never do that. I didn’t even cut that deep.’
‘Well, I’m just glad you’re doing better now.’
‘I am. Thank you. So, are you fucking my dad?’
‘What?’
I’m blindsided, but she just stares expectantly at me, knowing that I heard her just fine.
‘No. I’m not.’ Off her stare, I hear my own voice get louder, higher. ‘He has a girlfriend! And I have a boyfriend, too, Tom, he’s an actor. He just got cast in a show, actually, he came out here from London for pilot season and he booked a CW pilot about vampires, so.’ I’m giving far too many details, padding out the lie with too much truth. I could simply have left it at Amabella.
‘So what, then?’ she asks, still so gentle, so nonchalant, as though she were asking me for the time. ‘What’s the deal?’
