by Kasie West
He shoved his notebook and pencil in his open backpack. “Sure.”
“You don’t have to stick around, if you need to go.”
“You don’t want to finish your last packet after this break?”
“Not really.” I offered him my best smile.
He seemed disappointed in my lack of motivation. But I had just done ninety minutes’ worth of homework. That had to count for something.
I sighed. “Fine. Maybe. If this plan doesn’t work out. Follow me.”
Surprisingly, he did. I led him through the large parking lot where the set was being packed away into vans and trailers. The sun was on its way down and had turned the clouds that streaked the sky pink and orange like paints on a canvas.
We stopped by Amanda’s trailer first. She answered the door.
“Hey, want to go on a trip with us?” I asked.
“Who is us?” She looked Donavan up and down.
“This is Donavan. Donavan, Amanda,” I said.
They exchanged hellos.
“Already working on the assignment I gave you?” she said with a smirk. “You’re fast.”
“What?” I returned, genuinely confused. Then, all at once, I remembered her telling me that in order to have chemistry on set I needed to imagine someone I liked off set.
“No! Really. No.” Even if I had been trying to form a connection with someone (which I wasn’t), it wouldn’t be with Donavan. He was too uptight and serious and . . . boring.
Amanda just shrugged, then held up some pages. “I can’t go anywhere, I have to work on my scene for tomorrow, I’m not ready. Faith gave me some notes.”
“Faith gave you notes? Like actual, handwritten notes? She never gives me notes.” She only ever brought me dialogue changes.
“Because you’re already perfect.”
“Ha. Yeah, right.”
“You have your phone on you?”
“Um . . . yes, why?” I asked.
She held out her hand. I unlocked it and placed my phone in her upturned palm. She typed something into it, then handed it back. I looked at the screen. She had entered her phone number under the name Amanda the beautiful one Roth.
“That’s for a report later. You two have fun,” she said with a look like this was more than it was. “And you’re welcome.”
I just sighed as she shut the door.
“What was that all about?” Donavan asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Absolutely nothing.” I led him toward Grant’s trailer.
Donavan looked out over the cemetery. “Is it scary to sleep here at night?”
“I don’t sleep here. I have to go home every night.”
“Why?”
“I’m under eighteen. I could sleep here if my dad stayed with me, or signed the waiver, but . . . he won’t.”
“You actually want to sleep here?” He was still taking in the expanse of the headstones.
“Absolutely.”
In the distance behind a chain-link fence I could see Grant’s fans still holding big signs. I wondered if one of those sign holders was the one who had taken my makeup-less picture and labeled me as undead.
“No Lacey Barnes signs today?” Donavan said, noticing them as well.
“You can come be my fanboy tomorrow. Bring a bright-colored sign. Or maybe a big cutout of my head. That seems more productive than this homework stuff,” I said.
“Don’t tempt me.”
A new set of security guards stood at the barricades to Grant’s trailer. “Hi,” I said, stopping in front of them. “Where are Duncan and Phil?”
“Their shift starts at eight.”
“Oh. I . . . we . . . need to see Grant.”
“I told you I didn’t need to meet him,” Donavan mumbled beside me. I lowered my brow. He had been serious about that? He really didn’t want to meet Grant? Apparently he wasn’t swayed by fame at all. That was new. And interesting.
“He asked not to be disturbed,” one of the guards said.
“But he didn’t mean me,” I said.
“He meant everyone, Ms. Barnes.”
“Okay . . . fine. Can you at least give him a message for me?”
“Sure.”
“Will you tell him that I need to go on an outing with him to look for my muse.”
The guard leveled me with a hard stare as if I had just spoken a foreign language and he was waiting for me to translate.
“That’s all,” I said. “He’ll get it.”
“Okay.”
“Oh, and tell him I’ll be in my trailer.” I started to back away. “No, actually, give him my cell number.” I patted my pockets and then looked around on the ground as if a piece of paper would magically materialize because I wished for it.
Donavan held one out for me.
“Ah, a true Boy Scout,” I said, taking it. “Thanks.”
Then he handed me a pen.
I wrote down my cell and gave it to the security guard. “Because I won’t be in my dressing room.”
“Got it,” he said.
“Where will you be?” Donavan asked as we walked away.
“Finding my muse.” I met his eyes. I couldn’t do this alone. I had to have someone with me to play off of. “With you, apparently.”
“We have to find a place I’ve never been before,” I said, after we walked back through the parking lot, past another set of security guards at the entrance to the cemetery, and to a car parked on the street. Donavan stopped beside it, which I assumed meant it was his. Several long strips of black duct tape were holding the bumper on.
“We’ll take my car,” I said, pointing to my beautiful cherry-red mustang down the street.
“Have you ever been in a ten-year-old car?” he asked. “That can be the first new place you experience today.” He opened the door, raised his eyebrows at me, then climbed inside. He was so frustrating.
I went around the back to the passenger side and slid into the seat. “I have been in a ten-year-old car. Do you think I’m some snob or something?”
He paused for one beat, then said, “Yes.”
I smacked his arm, and he laughed. “I’m not,” I said. “I live in a small two-bedroom apartment with my dad.”
“But that’s only because you’re down here temporarily. Where do you normally live?”
He had me there. I wasn’t sure how he knew this but he did. “In a house,” was all I answered. My stepdad was a high-powered attorney on the Central Coast. He had his own firm and everything. So yeah, when I lived with my mom we lived in a nice house on the beach. And yes, I owned a brand-new car, but I’d bought it myself with television money. So I wasn’t that snobby.
He didn’t ask me to expand on my answer.
“What about you? You live in Southern California, maybe you’re the spoiled one.”
“Possibly,” was all he said.
I couldn’t read him well enough yet to know if that was sarcasm or not. He could deliver a line without attaching any emotion to it. It was actually quite impressive . . . and annoying.
He turned the key in the ignition. Loud music with heavy electric guitar sounds blasted from his radio, and he quickly turned it off.
“Really?” I said. “Choir boy likes heavy metal?”
“I’m not as straitlaced as I seem after all,” he said.
Maybe he wasn’t.
“Where to?” he asked.
That was the million-dollar question. I wasn’t from around here, so I wasn’t sure. “Do you have any abandoned buildings close by?”
“We’re going to trespass?”
“What was that you said about straitlaced?”
He tightened his grip on the wheel and backed out of the parking stall.
“What is this?” I asked.
Donavan had stopped the car in the shadow of a three-story building. “It used to be an old folk’s home. Now it’s nothing . . . obviously.”
I opened the car door to get a look that wasn’t through dirt-streaked wind
ows. The building was boarded up, but not tightly, so hopefully the windows would let in some of the light from outside. The parking lot was completely empty, cracked and crumbling parking curbs the only other thing besides Donavan’s car.
“Let’s go see if there’s a way inside,” I said.
He took a deep breath but didn’t argue.
We walked the perimeter of the entire building, over dried weeds, around a dumpster in the back filled with various things people had apparently dropped here so they didn’t have to pay or drive to the city dump—a floor lamp, a mattress . . . “Is that a giant dice?”
“Looks like it,” he said.
“Why would anyone throw that away?”
He chuckled. “You could take it home.”
“Who knows where it’s been.”
“In a dumpster. Behind an abandoned old folk’s home.”
I tugged on the brown metal door to the building. It was locked tight. The window next to it had a board across it that was hanging by just one nail. I pulled at the board, and it easily fell to the ground with a clatter. I wiggled my eyebrows at Donavan.
“Is that a good thing?” he asked. “Because there’s just a locked window behind it.” He knocked on the glass as if to show me it was solid.
I pushed on it and tried to slide it over. Sometimes the windows on old buildings were flexible. And I was right. It was. It popped a little, then slid with the applied pressure.
“Are you sure you’re just an actress?” he asked. “And not some cat burglar?”
“Cat burglar? Do people say that? Do people even say burglar without adding the cat?”
“What would you call this, then?”
“Not cat burglary.” I climbed in the window, first perching on the frame and then jumping down, much like a . . . cat.
He didn’t say anything, but it was clear what he was thinking.
“Shut up,” I said.
He chuckled, then climbed through behind me. “I still don’t understand how this helps you at all.”
“Sometimes I need to snap out of my normal way of thinking. So I do something different—see a new place, experience a new emotion—and it helps me have a breakthrough. It opens up something in me that helps me work past whatever block I’m experiencing.”
“You’re having a hard time relating to the script? That masterpiece back in your dressing room? I can’t imagine why.”
I ignored him, because it was obvious he thought he was better than a low-budget movie. He apparently would’ve held out for a script with Oscar potential for his very first feature film. And he thought I was a snob. Everyone had to start somewhere, and this was my start. Plus, the movie had somehow scored Grant James. The producers were smart. He’d make it successful. I was smart too—his star power would guarantee people would watch it, would see me.
“Walking through an old abandoned building is going to make you somehow feel something?” He turned toward me, but his face was in the shadows, unreadable.
What Amanda had said came back to me again, that the best way to feel chemistry was to draw on some real chemistry I’d experienced. I didn’t want her to be right. I could channel it here somehow. I didn’t need to know what falling for someone felt like.
I clicked on my phone’s flashlight, lighting up his face and revealing his dark eyes on mine. He squinted, and I quickly turned the light away and searched for the door that would lead us farther into the building. “Let’s go.”
Dust and spiderwebs coated nearly every surface.
“This seems like the perfect zombie hideout,” he said.
Right. My makeup. I was still wearing it. Apparently I should add that line in my bio about how long I could endure stage makeup. “Yes, it does.”
The first room we came to let in enough light from the streetlights outside that I tucked my phone in my pocket. It had the frame of a bed, still intact but pushed on its end against the wall, its headboard on the floor creating a stable base. I stepped onto the headboard and tugged on the footboard up near the ceiling to see if it would support my weight, then swung on it a couple times.
“Okay, time for some improv,” I said.
“Improv?”
“Yes, it’s an acting term. We need to make up some stories.”
Donavan nodded, then wandered once around the perimeter of the room. He stopped at a small closet and bent down to pick up something. It was a paper of sorts. He wiped it on his jeans, then studied it close.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a picture.”
“Of what?” I dropped from the bed and inched closer.
He was still for a long, quiet moment before he said, “My grandfather. I thought he died suddenly, from a heart attack. At least that’s what my parents said. But they sent him here?”
“What?” I slid next to Donavan, my mouth right at his shoulder level, and looked at the picture. Only it wasn’t a picture at all, it was a faded old receipt. “That’s not . . .”
“I thought you said we were making up stories. Don’t the rules say that you’re supposed to go along with mine?”
“Yes . . . actually. I was supposed to. You caught me off guard.”
“You literally just said we were doing improv.”
“I know. I just didn’t expect . . .”
“You thought you were the only one who would be able to do it?”
That’s exactly what I had thought. “Sorry. That was really good. Have you acted before?”
“No, but it’s not rocket science.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure you said exactly what you meant.” So much for starting on a new foot. Of course that’s what he thought. He was Dad Number Two, after all. Why was I letting this hurt my feelings? I didn’t care what Choir Boy thought. The only thing that would impress him, I was sure, was if I were genius-level smart. Literally, a rocket scientist. “I’m going to check out the rest of the building.”
Nine
Donavan and I had separated (I obviously hadn’t talked myself out of being irritated with him), and I was on the third floor, wandering through the dark halls, my phone light shining the way. I ran right into a spiderweb strung across the hall. I blew air through my lips and wiped it off my face. Grime coated my hands so I was sure all I had managed to do was make my face even scarier.
At the end of the corridor, an open door cast a strip of light on the dark ground. I clicked off my phone and tried to get in the mind-set of my character. If I were Scarlett, wandering through this abandoned building, sick with a disease that made me hunt humans, how would I walk, think, feel? I slowed my step, like I was creeping. My body was being ravaged by a disease, I must’ve been in some sort of pain. I began to limp a little and hold one arm against my chest. I easily fell into character, which didn’t surprise me. Channeling Scarlett wasn’t hard for me. It was channeling her feelings for Benjamin that was the problem.
I let myself think of Grant’s eyes. That’s what would keep me going. His eyes for sure.
“You have to come see this room,” Donavan said from behind me.
I stopped but didn’t turn. I continued my hissing breath. Then I turned slowly, jerkily, until I faced him, looking up from under my lashes with a hungry stare.
He raised his eyebrows. “That’s creepy. You obviously have that down well. Come on.”
Right, I had this part down. I needed to change something. But how could I show I was still a zombie while also showing I was still in love?
I followed him—still in character—slowly, and dragging one foot. He led me down one flight of stairs, then disappeared behind an open door. When I got inside the room, I didn’t look around, I just focused on Donavan. His back was to me. I limped all the way to him. I ran a slow finger up his spine. Then I grabbed him by the head and pretended to snap his neck.
“I honestly don’t think you’d be strong enough to snap my neck. You should’
ve found something to knock me out with.”
I tried to hide my smile, because he was facing me now. Instead of speaking, I lunged for his neck with an open mouth.
He laughed and backed away, grabbing my arms to hold me at bay. “You’re not a vampire!” he said, while struggling to hold me off. He twisted me around so I was facing the opposite direction, then pulled me up against him, wrapping his arms around me and trapping mine in his hold. I let myself relax against him. I was Scarlett; he was Benjamin. His arms were strong, so was his chest, which pressed all along my back.
“If I let you go,” he said by my ear, “will you stop trying to bite me?”
The skin on the back of my neck tingled to life. That was new. It was working. Being in this building, away from cameras, interacting with someone as Scarlett was stirring up some feelings that I could draw from.
He tightened his hold slightly. “Deal?”
A shiver went through me. I leaned down and bit his arm. Not hard, but enough to make him feel it.
He released me. “Lacey Barnes, you are so weird. Seriously.”
I finally dropped the act and laughed. “Oh, come on, it’s fun. You have to admit it.” It was surprisingly fun to goof around with Donavan. Maybe because he was usually so serious. I decided it was now my mission to help this boy act like a seventeen-year-old. At least some of the time. “Wait, are you seventeen?”
“What? Yes,” he said, registering my question.
“And are you opposed to having fun?” I asked. “Does fun mean that you are not learning something new?”
“I am not opposed to having fun.”
“Good.” I looked around the room we were standing in. It was cleaner than the other rooms. Almost lived in. There was a metal bedframe with an old stained mattress in one corner. A night table with broken drawers sat next to the bed. A picture frame with a real picture inside was on the night table. I walked over to it. A man and woman and three kids smiled at the camera while standing in knee-high yellowing grass.
“Did they forget to clean out this room?” I asked. The rest of the room was cluttered with an array of other things—a hanging rack of clothes like I had in my dressing room (only men’s), a stack of dusty books, a lantern.
“I don’t know, but check it out. I don’t think this old man liked his nurses much.” He went to the nightstand and opened the top drawer. It scraped along its track as he did. He shined his phone on the contents.
