by Brian Rowe
I decided to shut up as she stepped toward the shelf in the back that housed various paintball guns.
“Cam, can you step on this table here to grab that gun?” She pointed up high and at first I thought there’d be no way to reach it. But once I hesitantly stepped up onto the glass table, I realized I could’ve reached a whole other ledge higher than this one if I needed to. I grabbed the heavy black gun and dropped it down onto Liesel’s hands.
“A Tippmann A-5,” Liesel said with a smile. “These things run for like three hundred bucks! Maybe it was a good thing this place was closed. Here, grab me the one just to the right up there.”
I threw her down another gun, then two more. One Liesel said had sniper capabilities, and another was a cheaper but lighter paintball pistol gun.
By the time I stepped foot on the carpet again, we had five weapons in our inventory. We grabbed the necessary accessories—barrels, loads, markers, and paintballs—and threw it all in a large black bag. Liesel didn’t seem to be having a problem stealing all of this equipment. Part of me expected her to clean out the cash register before we left, too. Thankfully she didn’t.
“OK, I think we’re good,” Liesel said. “Do you want to grab anything else from here?”
“No!” I shouted louder than I expected to. “Were you a shoplifter or something before I met you?”
She shook her head. “Just a witch, that’s it. I promise.”
“Oh great. That makes me feel much better.”
Before I turned around to face the exit, a door slammed shut in the back. I thought it might have just been the wind, but the sounds of footsteps instantly dropped Liesel and me to our stomachs.
“Oh no,” she said.
“Oh shit!” I said. “What do we do?”
“Just stay calm. And shut up.”
She joked about it a lot, but sometimes Liesel did wear the pants in this relationship. While in high school I was the stud of the senior class, and Liesel was practically unrecognized by the entire student body, here I was being bossed around by my wife like I was a cockroach beneath her feet ready to be squashed.
We stayed low to the ground, bumping our shoulders up against each other behind a rack of multi-colored paintballs. We heard the sound of whistling—it seemed to be coming from an older man—before the whistling stopped abruptly.
“What the hell?” the man shouted.
I moved my head up to see the full white beard of a security guard. The guy looked sixty, at least, but muscular and lean. He had a scowl on his face as he looked up to see the missing paintball guns. He darted behind the desk, hit the gratingly loud ALARM button, and started running to the back hallway of the building we had entered in.
“Now!” Liesel shouted.
She jumped up and ran for the front door. I made my way up and followed her, slowly because the guns and accessories were so damn heavy. But as soon as I reached the door, I knew we had a problem.
The door was locked.
Uh-oh.
“Hey! You there! I see you!”
I tried to make a run for it, but the security guard rushed up toward me, grabbed my bag, and threw it to the ground.
“The cops are on their way,” he said, rubbing his hand against the snot under his nose. “Don’t you even think about going anywhere!”
Wait, I thought. Where’s Liesel?
As an answer to my question, I saw the top half of Liesel’s face appear behind the security guard’s shoulder. She tapped on his shoulder, and as he turned around, Liesel drop kicked him right in the face. The security guard stumbled back a few steps but maintained his composure.
He rushed up to Liesel and tried to hit her in the face, but she dodged the hit and punched him in the center of his back. She must have hit him somewhere sensitive, because the man screamed and tumbled down to the hardwood floor.
I watched in amazement, my jaw dropped, as Liesel disappeared for a moment, and the guard made his way back up to his feet. As soon as he turned around, Liesel approached him again, this time with one of the paintball guns in her hands. Before he could grab for one of his weapons strapped to his belt, Liesel slammed the back tip of the gun against his face, knocking him out clean. The security guard swayed forward, then backward, then slammed his face against the floor, again.
Liesel took a deep breath and reached her hand out for me. “OK. Let’s go.”
I couldn’t move for a second. “How… what…”
“Cam! The alarm! Let’s go!”
She helped me up, threw her two paintball guns at me, and grabbed the heavier bag. The two of us raced out the back of the building.
When we reached the car, I could hear sirens in the distance.
“Cam, throw me the keys!”
“What?”
“Now!”
I did as I was told.
After throwing the guns and the bag in the trunk, we jumped into the car, and Liesel drove us out to the 101 freeway and back on our way to our next destination.
For the next few minutes, I couldn’t help but think it, time and time again.
Yep. Liesel definitely wears the pants.
CHARISMA
She’d never seen the L.A. traffic this bad. Even though she had one eye on the 405 freeway and the other eye focused on her eye shadow in the rearview mirror, she preferred the cars in front of her to move a little faster than this. She always left for her auditions at least an hour early, just to be sure. But she was worried this afternoon, for the first time, that she might be late. She was just passing Westwood, after all, and she still needed to get all the way to Santa Monica.
She finally honked at the large truck in front of her, trying her best to control her increasingly hostile road rage. “Let’s go!” she shouted out her side window. She honked again. “Move it, you redneck son of a bitch!”
None of the cars ahead of her moved, and the guy in the truck up ahead didn’t acknowledge her screaming. The only activity that took place in that next minute was an old guy in the car behind her rolling his window down and spitting a lougee on the pavement.
She planted her head against the steering wheel and said, softly, “That’s the one and only thing I miss about Reno. The lack of goddamn traffic.”
Charisma Kellog, wearing a tight, bright orange dress, her long, straight blonde hair falling beside her shoulders, had been living in Los Angeles for exactly one year, and had enjoyed every minute of it, even if she hadn’t become a major movie star overnight. When she left Reno last June for the glitz and glamor of Hollywood, she barely made time to say goodbye to her family and friends. She’d wanted to get out of there, just leave that nasty desert behind for something bigger and better. She knew she wouldn’t miss her on-and-off again boyfriend Ryan, or her exes Lyle, Tim, Fred, John, Justin, Wyatt, Chris, Christopher, Peter, and Stevie. Or Scarlett, whose little fling with she enjoyed but didn’t mention to anyone.
And then there was Cameron Martin, her boyfriend for most of senior year who she had gone out with to make one hundred percent sure she’d be on the top of the social status at Caughlin Ranch High, where she liked to think of herself as popular as far back as her eventful and promiscuous freshman year. Charisma had found him cute, to be sure—she wouldn’t date a guy who looked like a dog, even if he was the star player of the basketball team. They had their fun together, even if Cameron had kept insisting on having sex, which was something that didn’t interest Charisma in the least. She had slept with multiple guys throughout her freshman and sophomore years, but by the time senior year rolled around, she wanted to save herself for all the older, powerful men in Los Angeles who could help her slide through the ranks in the entertainment world. She had enjoyed watching Cameron suffer with blue balls all those months, begging her to sleep with him. She had liked to torment him for sure, and she was sad when it all came to a screeching halt.
It still gave Charisma goosebumps when she thought about what happened to Cameron during those last three months of senior year. She
had made out with the guy hundreds of times, let the guy touch her breasts. And then, there he was, showing up to school every day, a year older, a year uglier, soon looking like her father, and soon after that, her great-great-grandfather. Even though she saw him turned back to normal at high school graduation, she was done with that chapter in her life. She had moved on to a time and place where time moved fast, traffic moved slow, and nothing, and nobody, would get in the way of her acting career.
The problem was that breaking into the movie and TV industry had been a much tougher beast to tame than Charisma ever expected. It had been twelve months, and she still hadn’t secured a theatrical agent yet, although she did have a commercial agent, and a manager. She had gone in for multiple auditions, but thus far had only secured two television show one-liners (one on House, the other on an unaired pilot called The Wonderful Maladys), four commercials, a couple of PSAs, and a supporting role on a webisode series that felt beneath her. Her manager kept telling her that she needed footage for her reel, as much quality footage she could obtain that showcased decent production values and the quality of her acting. Charisma never thought of herself as a great actress; she figured her looks alone would get her places. Unfortunately for her, though, every audition cattle call she attended featured fifty other girls who were as good looking as her, if not more so. In little old Reno, she could stand out in a crowd. But not in L.A.
So Charisma did the unthinkable, and started taking acting classes, trying her best to improve on her skills and her God-given talent, hoping that with a lot of hard work, she could finally start nabbing bigger roles. She still hadn’t been in a movie. She really wanted to be in a movie, even if it was just some small part. She had an opportunity one day to go be an extra in an upcoming Zac Efron movie, but she just couldn’t do it. She was Charisma Kellog, and she was no extra. She was a star.
And today, while she found herself stuck in the horrendous 405 traffic, she felt confident about her big Santa Monica audition coming up at 4:00. It wasn’t for a movie, unfortunately, but it was for a brand new Disney Channel pilot, a chance at the lead role. She thought of breakout stars from the Disney Channel, like Selena Gomez, Shia LaBeouf, and, of course, Miley Cyrus. She couldn’t particularly sing very well, but her acting had improved enormously, and she could feel, in her heart, in her soul, that today was going to be her day. She was going to prove to that casting director that she could play this part. And before she could scream, “STAR ON THE HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME,” she’d be the newest Hollywood somebody, a somebody whose life would be changed… forever.
“You’ve got this,” Charisma said to herself as the traffic finally started clearing a bit. “I don’t care if everyone’s focused on the economy, the state of the world, all those little babies looking older. Pretty soon, everyone’s focus is going to be on me. And I won’t be able to walk down the sidewalk to grab a freakin’ Pinkberry without the paparazzi snapping my every move. Today… it all comes down to today…”
She smiled to herself and started applying more lipstick as she turned on the I-10 and started heading toward Santa Monica. Thankfully for Charisma, all the traffic was headed in the opposite direction. She couldn’t believe her eyes, as there were hardly any cars going toward the ocean. It looked as if everyone was trying to get out of town, as if a giant tidal wave was headed for the coast. Charisma laughed and realized, even if she was minutes away from death, she’d still deliver an amazing audition at the casting space. She’d still get the final word, no matter what.
It took her ten minutes to find the building, two streets over from the beach. She parked her car, analyzed her make-up in the rearview mirror one last time, and grabbed her four-page scene, even though she had memorized all her lines the night before.
She stepped out onto the sidewalk. It was a gorgeous eighty-degree day. If she wasn’t running a little late for her audition, Charisma would’ve taken a minute to enjoy her final hour on Earth. But she was in a rush.
“Hello,” Charisma said to the assistant on the fifth floor. “I’m here for the role of Valerie.”
“Yes, of course,” the young woman said. She seemed sad, like she hadn’t been able to poop in days, or maybe because she wanted to be the all-powerful casting director, not some unpaid intern spending her whole day greeting actors and sitting bored at her desk.
Charisma took a seat next to the other twenty girls, all with blonde hair, all looking, more or less, like her. She couldn’t help but think the other girls looked a few years too old for the part. The character was supposed to be only sixteen, and Charisma felt positive at the young age of nineteen that she would be perfect physically for the role. Once she brought her acting chops into the room, the rest would be history.
“Academy Awards, here I come,” she whispered to herself.
“What was that?” a girl with a noticeably flat chest asked next to her.
“Nothing.” Charisma didn’t want to say anything, but as she crossed her legs and turned to the girl next to her, she just had to. “How old are you, anyway?”
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” the other girl said. “You look too old for this part.”
“Excuse me?” Charisma said with a chuckle. “I’m nineteen. How old are you? Thirty-five?”
“You’re nineteen? Gosh, I feel sorry for you.”
“You better shut your mouth.”
“I already have.”
Charisma smiled, knowing she had won that war, as she waited another forty-five minutes for her big audition. Finally, her moment arrived.
“Charisma Kellog?” the assistant asked.
“That’s me,” Charisma said, standing up and taking a step forward. “Finally.”
“Uhh, you can go right in.”
“Well, duh.”
She didn’t mean to be so nasty with the assistant, but she couldn’t help it. She never had to wait forty-five minutes. Ten, maybe. Fifteen at most. She felt tired and hungry now, not as on her acting game as she liked to be. But she had winged it before. It was time not just to wing it again, but to make the role hers. Charisma stepped inside the small casting room.
She knew that the warm bodies sitting all day in the casting area could sometimes look dazed and cynical, but Charisma had never seen anything like this. An older man on the right looked like he was sleeping, and the young woman manning the camera on the left looked depressed enough to throw the heavy object, as well as the tripod, right at Charisma. The casting director Patricia Stead sat in the center, and she looked the most animated of all, even though it was clear within seconds she didn’t want to be here either.
“Headshot?” Ms. Stead asked.
“Yes,” Charisma said, handing it over. Charisma felt good about the headshot. She had just taken some new pictures three weeks ago, and she had updated the resume last night.
The casting director looked down at the headshot, then up at Charisma. “How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“No, I mean, your real age.”
Charisma opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out for a second. Finally: “Nineteen.”
The casting director just shook her head. “Sorry, you just look too old.”
“What?”
“We need you to look sixteen. You look too old. I’m sorry.”
“I look sixteen,” Charisma said. “Hell, I could pass for twelve!”
“Not in this town, missy.” The casting director darted her eyes toward the waiting area. “Andrea! Next!”
Charisma looked back to see another girl already making her way into the room. She glanced back at the casting director. “You mean… you won’t even let me read—”
She hadn’t even finished her sentence when she saw Ms. Stead start chatting with someone on her cell phone in a somber manner. There was no use. There was nothing she could do.
Charisma stormed out of the room, out of the waiting area, and down the main hallway to the elevator.
“Too old? Too old?
I’m not too old for anything!”
Charisma exited the building and headed straight for her car, her rage intensifying, her desire to start screaming increasing by the second.
She started grabbing for her keys, when she stopped, and noticed the guy parking his car right behind hers, so close she could tell the front of his car was tapping her bumper.
“Hey!” Charisma shouted.
She walked up to the passenger side window and started incessantly tapping on it. The guy was bent over the passenger chair, separating quarters from nickels and dimes. Charisma knocked again, but he wouldn’t turn to her.
“Why is everyone ignoring me? I’m Charisma Kellog for Christ’s sakes!”
She raced around the back of the man’s car and over to his driver’s side window on the other side.
Charisma went to tap again, when she stopped, and noticed her reflection in the window. It wasn’t, astonishingly, the image she had made herself believe it to be for the last few days. She saw what everyone else was seeing. Charisma didn’t look old, but she appeared older, lines running down her forehead, cheeks, and chin. She looked tired and weak, like she hadn’t exercised in years, and hadn’t eaten much of anything, either. She didn’t look like the high school bombshell anymore. She looked normal. As average as every other girl in this town.
Tears welled up in Charisma’s eyes. She placed her hands on her face, and she took a few steps back.
“I can’t…” she started.
The man rolled down his window. “Did you need something, ma’am?”
“I can’t just be normal!” Charisma shouted at the top of her lungs, staring with intense hatred at the man in the car. “I’m Charisma Kell—”
Charisma didn’t feel any pain when the gargantuan FedEx truck struck her frail body and sent her flying in the air nearly two hundred feet.
6.
Liesel avoided most of the bad traffic by taking side streets, and by the time we reached the I-5 Freeway, the congestion had broken up almost completely.
“What…” I started.
