by Amy Finnegan
With everything, really.
Our crew is amazing. McGregor has pulled several people from other projects to create his dream team, and I give him kudos for that during a lighting setup.
“Thank you, lass,” he replies, sitting next to me after raiding the craft service table. Crafty, as everyone calls the heavenly department that feeds us, keeps the whole set happy. Today, we even have freshly squeezed lemonade. And a catering company is still on its way with lunch. “And if you haven’t noticed, I’ve also gathered a spectacular group of performers.”
I glance over to the cast chairs, where Kimmi is flirting with Jake. She does that a lot, I’ve noticed, and Jake is either playing it cool or his mind is still on the waitress he met a couple of weeks ago. Brett runs past them, kicking a plastic cup like a soccer ball, and Jake jumps up to follow him.
“Talent, beauty, and a brilliant crew—my recipe for success,” McGregor says. Then he narrows his eyes at me. “What do you think of Kimmi?”
To lie, or not to lie? “She’s a great actress. As in, really good. But she’s not very excited about her baggy pants.”
I sip my lemonade, a delicious mix of sweet and sour.
“Ah, yes.” McGregor sticks a carrot in his mouth, but that doesn’t stop him from talking. “She’ll adapt. I have some interesting things planned for her.”
Actors are usually kept in the dark about future plots, but I want to see how much I can get out of him. “I’m sure the writers are working on cool storylines for all of us,” I say. “Eden won’t always be a self-absorbed gossip columnist, will she?”
McGregor thinks a bit before he answers. “This series is planned to progress well beyond the high school years,” he finally says, “so the characters need to begin a fair distance away from where I’d like them to end up.”
A typical brush-off. “I suppose there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell if our characters were already perfect,” I say.
“Precisely.” McGregor looks to where Jake and Brett are now in a heated battle for the plastic cup/soccer ball. “Not that either of our male leads feel a need for improvement.”
“So true,” I reply. Jake is still a mystery to me. Ever since I heard about the waitress, I’ve been watching for signs that prove he’s like Brett made him sound—because, of course, I want to warn Rachel if Jake is a player—but I just don’t see any. Brett’s continued lack of manners isn’t so bad, though. My crush is buried for good. “Yet, surprisingly, I’ve known bigger egos.”
McGregor nods. “You’ve dated some high-and-mighty fellows, haven’t you?”
I stop smiling. “Yeah. A few too many.”
“And not one of them deserved you. Many in this business are arrogant jerks only because they’re allowed to be, so let’s hope you taught those twits a lesson.”
I doubt it. With Troy, pretty much all I’ve done is run away and cry.
A plastic cup hits my leg, and Jake runs over to get it. “Sorry! I missed!” he says, motioning to the two chairs set up as a goal. They’re at least twenty feet from me.
“By a country mile!” Oh my. I never use that phrase outside of Arkansas.
Jake shrugs. “Someone must’ve moved the chairs.”
It’s hard not to laugh as Jake runs off, kicking the mangled plastic cup again. When I turn back to McGregor, his eyes are steady, as if he’s already been watching me. “Don’t think that possibility hasn’t kept me up at night,” he says.
“What possibility?” I ask, then my face gets hot—jalapeño hot. McGregor dropped a hint in contract talks that on-set romances make him bristle. “Oh, heck no! I’ve kissed enough frogs to know none of them turn out to be princes.”
“Then perhaps you should spend less time in swamps.”
“Well, sadly, I don’t have a lot of variety in my dating pool,” I reply. “But who knows? Maybe I’ll one day meet a decent guy who walks into the studio by mistake.”
McGregor’s gaze has shifted to Jake. “Or might just think he doesn’t belong.”
Jake
Most days at work, I catch Emma looking at me at least once, but the last time we had anything close to a flirtatious conversation was when I gave her a ride home that first day in the studio. Since then, she’s only been available enough to not seem snobby.
What do I have to do to get her attention? Some sort of freaky, Hollywood mating dance?
Emma is being just “friendly” with Brett too, though, so I’ve decided she doesn’t like him after all. And with every word he speaks, Brett adds another point in my favor.
“Eww, you sicko!” she tells him now, backing right into a camera to get away. “I didn’t want to know that!”
“You asked me if I knew Bethany Parke,” Brett says. “And I do. Really, really well!”
“At least you remember her name,” I mutter.
He slugs me.
Tyler, the first assistant director, bellows, “First team, back to one!” so I have to focus again. In the scene we’re shooting now, I’m stretched out on an old sofa in our newspaper office set—my feet kicked up and my head on a backpack—and I’m supposed to look relaxed, while also being constantly aware of where my arms and legs are and every expression I make. And I also have to pay attention to what everyone else is doing and saying. Otherwise, I’ll miss my cues.
In modeling, a photographer only has to tell me “smug,” and just thinking of kicking Devin’s butt in basketball will get me through fifty successive shots. But McGregor’s instructions for me earlier today were slightly more complicated.
“Justin, you rolled out of bed ten minutes before you had to leave for school,” he began. “You took three of those minutes to shower, and the only item of clothing you didn’t grab off your floor was fresh boxers. Got that?” I nodded. I’ve been there. “The next five minutes were spent brushing your teeth, using the toilet, and making your hair look casually perfect, pretty much at the same time. This was also when you remembered to get your backpack. You then took one minute to toast some bread and another full minute to butter it, because this is important to you. Understand?” I nodded again. “And then you grabbed a half gallon of milk and raced out the door. You drank a quarter gallon straight from the jug, and the remaining milk is now spoiling in your Jeep. All of this happens off screen, before this scene begins.”
I would argue that none of it actually happened at all, but after two weeks of McGregor downloading this stuff into my head, I’m starting to get why these types of details help me better understand my character.
“Your only concern now, however, is getting Mario from the red planet to the green planet,” he went on, pointing out the broken Nintendo 3DS I’m holding in this scene. “So when Kassidy drops her donation box in the hallway, and Eden and Bryce hear the thud and look toward the door, you do nothing. Nothing but keep pushing ABXXA, or whatever buttons you have to push to make Mario jump. And all you hear is zing-zing, bling! Boing-boing, pop! Is that clear?”
Nod, nod, nod.
McGregor says he’ll only be using his “incessant direction” technique on me during the first few episodes. After that, I’m expected to be Justin and know exactly what he would think, how he’d move, and every expression he’d make in any given situation. Kimmi is getting the same instruction, which she hates.
Brett and Emma rarely get anything more than applause from him.
Scenes are shot out of order, which I’ve just learned is typical for most movies and TV shows, so even though we’re now only filming scene five, we’re almost finished with the first episode. In the script, this scene looked like the easiest so far—I have just two lines. But we’re on hour four of shooting it. Lighting issues, a glitchy camera, and Kimmi—just being Kimmi—have all caused delays.
Take after take from different camera angles, I keep pushing ABXXA. My thumbs are stiff, my neck has a kink in it, and my eyes burn from concentrating on a blank video game screen. The funny thing is, I like it. All of it.
“Picture�
��s up!” Tyler calls.
An assistant director repeats the command, and PAs echo it throughout the set. A buzzer sounds to warn everyone within the entire studio that filming is about to take place.
“Here we go. Quiet down!”
“Rolling!” Tyler says.
“Sound speed!”
“Camera speeding.”
Camera A slate is held up, and an assistant cameraman says, “Scene five Echo, take four.” Clap. “A mark.”
Camera B slate is clapped. “B Mark.”
McGregor sits in front of his monitor. “And … action!”
I tap out ABXXA. No one cares what order I really hit the buttons—or that it usually only takes hitting A to make a game character jump—because at least from this camera angle, it doesn’t matter. Thud … that’s Kimmi dropping the box.
I just keep thinking, Jump, Mario, jump.
“Do you need some help?” Brett says, racing toward the set door. He exits for exactly three seconds, as McGregor has instructed him, then returns with the box in his arms. Kimmi shuffles in behind him, looking discouraged after a long hour on the front steps begging for school supplies—according to the script, anyway. I wouldn’t know because I’m on the red planet trying to get to the green one. “You okay?” Brett asks Kimmi.
My cue. I switch my feet, left on top of right. ABXXA …
“Yeah, but all I got was a used pencil,” Kimmi says. “Will you help me next time, Eden?”
Emma’s as if laugh is my next cue.
“Jump, you midget, jump!” I shout at Mario.
Kimmi gasps. “Hey, don’t be mean to Eden! It’s not her fault that she’s so short.”
I pretend to pause my game, then turn my head to glare at Kimmi as though she has “Politically Correct” stamped on her forehead. “Chill out, will ya?” I say. “My vertically challenged victim is also reality challenged, so he doesn’t freaking care what I call him. And I don’t think Eden looks short at all in those nice tall boots.”
Kimmi’s eyes drift down Emma. “Guess not,” she says, scandalized. Or at least that’s the expression the script tells her to have.
“Cut!” McGregor calls. It’s actually the end of the scene, anyway, but he says it like Kimmi ruined the entire take. “Miss Weston, you’ve got that uppity curve to your lips again when you look her over, as though you’re smelling something foul.”
Brett removes his shoe and sticks it under Kimmi’s nose. “This, maybe?”
Kimmi shrieks, a totally new sound from her, and bats him away.
“And why is it that with two guys in this scene,” Brett asks McGregor, “Kimmi gets to be the one who checks out Emma? That’s cruel, man.” He turns to me and adds, under his breath, “At least you get a view of her butt. I get nothing at all from this angle.”
“Except for my face,” Emma says, close enough to hear him. Then she shoots me a scowl over her shoulder and whispers, “I thought you promised to stop looking at my butt.”
Whoa. Is she … flirting?
“Well, once again,” I reply, still lounging on the couch, “it’s the only view I have.”
Emma laughs. “Move over, these boots are killing me.”
I swing my feet off the couch and gladly make room for her.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” McGregor tells us. “We’re going again. Three minutes.” He guides Kimmi over to his monitor and plays back the footage. “Ah,” he finally says. “I suppose it’s not too bad.”
“Good, then let’s call that the martini,” Kimmi replies, suggesting we should wrap for the day—I think. The set lingo is still a bit fuzzy. “I’ve gotta get out of here.”
McGregor waves Tyler over to the monitor and has him take a look too. And Brett leaves the set for who knows what reason.
Emma and I exchange glances.
“It’s only four thirty,” she whispers. “Do you think he’ll actually let us go?”
“Maybe. Isn’t this the last scene on the schedule?”
She thinks for a sec. “Yeah, but McGregor could come up with a ton of things that need to be tweaked. We’re just lucky he’s so determined to keep his entire weekends free for his family, or we’d all be spending Fraturdays together. That’s how my last show was.”
“Fraturdays?” I ask.
“Oh yeah. And they’ll still be necessary once in a while—probably for night shoots,” Emma says. “We’ll work for about sixteen hours straight, half of Friday and all through the night, until the sun rises on Saturday. So, you know, Fraturday. It’s pretty much a big company pajama party because everyone is half-asleep and laughing at every tiny thing that wouldn’t seem even remotely funny in the daylight.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” I reply.
Emma smiles. “No, not usually. And it’s definitely better than studying every Friday night, which is all I’ve been doing since I moved to Tucson. I’m not exactly looking forward to yet another quiet evening filled with textbooks.”
With any other girl, that would have been a hint. I jump all over it.
“I won’t be having any fun tonight either,” I say. “I need to make a trip to Phoenix so I can start hauling all my stuff down here.” Not bad. Here I go. “It would be great to have someone come along for the drive—you know, keep me awake? Just talk?”
Emma holds very still. “Is your … waitress friend busy?”
“Who?” I ask, then finally catch on. “Jeez. I can only guess what you heard about the waitress. But Brett and Kimmi just wanted to see if I could get her number without asking for it, which also led to her telling me when she got off work. But I went straight to my hotel—alone, by the way.”
Emma raises a brow at me. “I definitely heard a different version of that story.”
I shrug. “At least that explains … well, a lot.”
“Like what?”
“You acting like I have rabies. Or at least cooties.”
Emma laughs. “Subtlety isn’t one of my gifts. But still, I better pass.”
“Oh, c’mon,” I say. “You’ve made it clear enough that you don’t want to date me. So as long as we’re both good with those terms, what’s wrong with hanging out?”
I just keep smiling at her while she thinks it over. Her face is the color of Atomic Fireballs, as hot as the rest of her.
“You’re not very good at taking no for an answer,” she finally says.
“I haven’t had much practice,” I reply, which is true. “Besides, I need to ask you a few more questions about online classes. I want to start school.”
“Really?”
“That last take looks great, folks. We can wrap!” McGregor calls, and everyone cheers. “Scripts for episode two are in your dressing rooms.”
I glance back at Emma. “So … I’ll pick you up at six?”
What is it about me that makes her so hesitant? “Okay. I’ll go.”
Sweet. I want to reply, but Brett is headed back our way. “Guess who’s getting a girlfriend?” he says, and waves a script at Emma. “You might want to take a look at this.”
That can only mean one thing.
Emma
It isn’t a date, I tell myself as Jake walks off the set. I used to hang out with guy friends all the time in Los Angeles. And I’m desperate for some fun right now.
Oh, please, who am I trying to fool? That little vixen in me tempted my better half into trouble, and I know it. But … Jake only wants to talk about school. That’s all.
It isn’t a date.
Brett flips through the script in his hands. “Guess who gets to kiss—”
“Shh!” It’s obvious what the script says. “No spoilers.”
“Okay, okay,” Brett replies. “You ready for tomorrow?”
I’ve already heard Jake can’t go to the motocross because he’s moving into his condo this weekend, but Brett still swears that no one will think our group is in couples because Kimmi and I will be the only girls with four guys. “If I get there, Brett, and it’s just
the four of us—”
“Seriously, Taylor! How many times do I have to turn you down?”
“I just don’t want it to look like a date.”
“It doesn’t matter what it looks like—McGregor jumped through the roof when I told him we were all going to L.A. to promote Coyote Hills.” Brett is backing away from me, off the set. “And he’s counting on you getting tons of attention with your big, pretty smile. We’re supposed to tell everyone we see about the show.”
I should’ve known he would get McGregor all hyped up. “Fine, I’ll go on your fake publicity trip,” I call as he moves farther away. “And I’ll get tons of attention, ’cause I’m gonna wear a flashing billboard on my head that says: I GOT TRICKED INTO THIS!”
“Perfect!” he shouts back, and several crew members turn around. “Write this on your billboard too: Watch me make out with Brett Crawford! Coyote Hills, Tuesday nights, eight o’clock!”
I throw both hands over my face. Great. Brett is about to become my on-screen boyfriend. That shouldn’t complicate things much.
While driving home from the studio in my finally delivered car, passing more sagebrush than I ever knew existed, I try to avoid thoughts of kissing—or strangling—Brett Crawford. I turn my air-conditioning on as high as it can go, but I still feel like I’m a turkey cooking in a hot oven.
The locals have assured me that if I can just make it through the scorching summers, Tucson’s weather during the rest of the year is perfect. Meanwhile, I’ll try to enjoy the random fluctuations between one-hundred-and-ten-degree weather and hammering downpours. The monsoon storms have been hitting every few days, and the lightning is insane—fifty bolts striking all at once.
Beautiful, but truly dangerous. Sort of like Jake.
When I finally remembered to have him sign his headshots for Rachel, three days after we met, Jake mentioned that he had leased a condo in my neighboring community. And when I was on the running path a few nights ago, I saw him get out of his car and walk into it. So now I know exactly where he lives, about four minutes away. Half that if I run.
