Carly, who was flying around the corner ready to barrel down the hall, skids to a stop in front of me. Her nose wrinkles as the scent of tuna salad wafts into her nostrils, her eyes running over the streaks of beet juice on my hands and shirt and probably other places I can’t think about right now. “Do I even want to know?” she asks.
“No, you don’t,” I reply. “I need paper towels and wardrobe.”
“If you think they’re going to loan you a shirt because you couldn’t manage to feed yourself, you’re high,” Carly says.
“Not for me. For Lydia,” I say. I see her brow wrinkle, and I realize I’m a step ahead of her. If Milo and the cast are only just now finding out, the crew must still be in the dark. “Lydia Kane.”
Carly’s eyes go wide, her mouth dropping open a fraction of an inch before clamping shut again. Then I notice her shoulders shaking with poorly suppressed laughter.
“Oh, girl,” she says. “I do not envy you.”
Not all the crew members are in the dark, apparently.
I follow Carly’s directions to a large room at the back of the main offices that looks like a clothing store’s stockroom. Rows and rows of racks fill the space, holding plastic garment bags with large white tags dangling from every piece. There’s a long white table in the corner filled with jewelry and other small accessories, and underneath are mountains of shoe boxes with Polaroids taped to the front. The whole room smells like a combination of musty attic and permanent markers.
At the front of the room, two women are working frantically on a half-empty rack that has Lydia Kane’s head shot taped to the front of it. Below it is a card with a series of sizes and measurements on it, a bunch of numbers I have to force myself to look away from. I don’t know my own measurements, but I’m fairly certain to find them you’d need to add at least five inches to all her numbers except the height, from which you’d subtract…well…a lot.
A short black woman with a close-cropped pixie and orange reading glasses sliding down her nose glances up at me.
“Extra?” she asks, her tone clipped and urgent.
“Um, actually—” I say.
“Where’s your voucher?”
“I don’t have a voucher, um, I’m—”
She turns to the girl next to her, who is on her knees next to a box full of shoes, matching up mates and securing them together with giant rubber bands. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, how hard is it to give out vouchers? How many times have I told them, Don’t send the extras back here without vouchers? How many times do I have to send them back before that silly girl gets it?”
The girl with the shoes shakes her head and rolls her eyes as she writes a size number on a manila tag with a very fragrant permanent marker.
“I’m supposed to be—” I try again.
“A pedestrian, yes, yes, we know,” the woman says. Her eyes roam over my clothes. “What you’re wearing just won’t work. Didn’t casting tell you not to wear anything with logos? And that shirt has a stain on it”—she gestures to Lydia’s top that I have clutched to my chest—“so I don’t know why you even brought that. We’re not laundresses down here.”
“Speak for yourself,” the girl on the floor mutters, and blows a wisp of hair that’s escaped from her messy bun out of her face.
The brusque woman turns her back to me as she rifles through a rack. She glances over her shoulder at me, her eyes roaming from head to toe. “What are you, an eight? I’ve got plenty of tops, but no pants for you. You’re short, and I don’t have time to hem anything. We’ll just have to cuff and pin.” She whips through the wire hangers so fast they sound like firecrackers popping in quick succession. About midway through she pulls a garment bag from the rack and hands it to me. “Here. You be my dress girl. Eloise will get you some combat boots. Really punky. Change and come back and let me look at you.”
Maybe it’s the intensity of her expression, or the rabbit hole I feel I’ve fallen down, or residual shock over seeing Lydia Kane here without her shirt on…but I silently take the garment bag.
“Go!” she snaps. “If you’re not wearing those clothes when I get back you can march your behind back to your car and go home. And you won’t get paid for this fitting, either.” Then she turns on her heel and disappears down a row of overstuffed racks.
My mouth gapes open and closed like a fish out of water. I want to call out to her, but I don’t know her name, and Hey, wardrobe lady sounds like something that’ll get me slapped.
“Did you need something else?” The girl on the floor with the shoes, who I presume is Eloise, looks up at me, her voice low and her eyes watching the space the woman just vacated.
“Yeah, actually,” I say, finally regaining the power of speech. I drop my hand to my side, and the gauzy white tank flutters near the floor like a white flag of surrender. My laminated crew badge catches the light, and Eloise chuckles.
“So you’re not an extra,” she says. She stands and takes the garment bag from me, carefully hanging it in its rightful place back on the rack. She turns to me, a rueful grin on her face. “What did you need?”
I take a deep breath, and start with the tank. “Lydia Kane asked for wardrobe. She was wearing this when, um, she had an unfortunate lunch incident. I’m not sure what you do for—”
Eloise rolls her eyes again, which seems to be her default response to pretty much any situation, then quickly whips around to Lydia’s rack. “Was she wearing jeans?” she asks as she leafs through the hangers.
“Yep.”
“Black shoes or brown?”
“I didn’t see,” I reply, thinking I was too busy trying to avert my gaze from her nearly bare chest.
Eloise whips back around, a hanger in hand with a similar gauzy white top on it, this one with delicate straps that tie at the shoulders and a white-to-gray-to-black-ombré dye job at the bottom. “Take this. Should work. And I’ll take that.” She gestures to the stained shirt. “Because unlike Gloria, I am a laundress.”
I trade her the dirty top for the clean one and give her my most grateful smile. “Thank you so much,” I say. “I’m Dee, by the way.”
“Eloise,” she says, offering her hand. Her forearm is stacked high with silver bangles that clang when she moves. “Wardrobe assistant. Or more accurately, an assistant to an assistant to an assistant. Or something. I’m like, the lowest on the totem pole around here.”
“I know the feeling,” I reply. Eloise is the first person to bond with me over my lack of clout, and I appreciate it.
“Sorry about Gloria. She gets grumpy when she has to dress extras, but it’s her own fault. She didn’t realize when she sent everyone else off to scour the Goodwill that she’d be the one left to do this.”
Carly pokes her head into the room.
“Lydia wants to know where her shirt is, as does the rest of the cast,” she says. A wad of paper towels crinkles in her hand as she reaches up to adjust her earpiece. “I’ve got the paper towels, and you’ll tell me what the hell happened in there later. Do you want me to take that?”
I pause at the offer. Under any circumstances pre–fifteen minutes ago, I would have said Hell no. Any chance to be in a room with Milo is one I’m taking. But now that I know I’ll be walking back in to hand a shirt to a topless Lydia Kane while Milo is thinking who knows what in the corner? While I’m wearing jeans and a T-shirt advertising my fifth-grade participation in the Cherry Blossom Festival children’s choir and looking like some common…teenager? Yeah, no thanks.
I hold up the hanger Eloise gave me and offer it to Carly. “Please.”
Carly nods, crosses the floor, and takes the hanger, but not before offering me what looks to be a bit of pity. It turns my stomach, because I know I’m oh-so-deserving of it. How have my circumstances catapulted so drastically in such a short period of time? “I’ll have that lecture on standby,” she says before she leaves.
I turn to Eloise. “Thank you for this. And you’ll explain to Gloria?” Which is me asking if I ca
n still get the hell out of here before she gets back, because frankly that lady scares me. And the last thing I need right now is to be chastised on top of pitied.
“Don’t worry, she’s probably already forgotten,” Eloise says. “So long as you’re gone before she gets back.”
I mouth a silent thank-you and hustle out the door.
—
I walk through the next hour as if in a dream. I’m so dazed I actually bump into a rack full of glassware, and it wobbles and clinks ominously. Ruth huffs, and I can tell she’s about had it with me for today. She thrusts two large ceramic vases into my hands, one tall and skinny, the other short and squat, both a deep-blue color.
“Yup, copy,” she says into her headset, then looks at me. “Can you take these to set? And by that I mean, can you do it without breaking them?”
I nod, feeling worse by the minute. I’ve got to pull myself together.
“Good. Rob needs to pick one. You can hang around to bring the other back.”
As I make my way down the hall, dodging crew and office PAs running back and forth to set, I give myself a mental pep talk.
Lydia is here. Okay. Milo has done nothing to indicate that he’s happy about that. The only reason I don’t know for sure is that I bolted before he could reassure me. I’m sure if I had glanced across the conference room, I would have seen the same look of horror and misery that I probably had (and maybe still have). And then he would have pried his eyes away from Lydia and her stupid bra to give me an Oh my God/Can you believe this/I don’t want her here/I only want you look. Which is totally a thing. I mean, if anyone is capable of saying all that without saying anything at all, surely it’s Milo.
Right?
The attic set once again looks like a human beehive. Milo is filming in Jonas’s apartment, and everyone is bustling around preparing for the first shot of the day. The space is lit both from within and outside, so it looks like sunlight is streaming in through the windows. Rob is standing in the corner near a window, staring at a light meter with one of the lighting guys whose name I don’t know. I don’t see Milo or the chair with his name on the back anywhere. “Ruth wants to know if any of these work,” I say when Rob finally looks up at me.
“Yeah, drop them over on that bureau,” he says. He waves a finger toward a hulking antique dresser beneath a window. “I’ll pick one and send the rest back later.”
I make my way through the cramped space, carefully stepping over the extension cords that are crisscrossing the floor. I gently place the vases on the dresser top, and am turning to leave when a familiar voice catches my attention.
“What are you doing here, Lydia?”
I peek out the tiny fake window built into the wall and catch a glimpse of Milo, who’s sitting in one of those tall director’s chairs, a script on his lap. There’s a touch of bitterness in his voice, the anger that he carried around for the first week finally finding its intended target. I don’t see Lydia, but she’s nearby, because I hear her answer as clear as if she were standing right next to me.
“My job,” she says, but she doesn’t sound bitchy. In fact, there’s a bit of pleading in her voice.
Milo sighs.
“I know you’re hurt,” Lydia continues. “And mad. And you have every right to be. But you can be those things and still be in love with me.”
The words hit me like a ten-ton train right to my chest. I inhale sharply, then flatten myself against the wall of the set so Milo and Lydia won’t see me through the prop window. Rob is still engrossed in his light meter and hasn’t noticed that I’m skulking around his set, listening in on his actors having some kind of serious emotional conversation.
“Lydia, you didn’t forget my birthday or wreck my car. You cheated on me. You’re acting like it’s no big deal,” Milo says, his voice razor sharp, like he’s talking through clenched teeth. Angry Milo is back with a vengeance. I find myself nodding along with him. Yeah, Lydia. You cheated.
“It’s a huge deal, and the biggest mistake of my life,” Lydia replies. Now her voice is soft and impossibly sad. If I didn’t know better, I’d feel sorry for her. “I’m going to spend forever trying to make it up to you, because I still love you. And I know you still love me. I can see it all over your face. That’s not nothing.”
I feel a sour, acidy taste in the back of my throat, and my cheeks burn. In front of me, Rob turns, and I know if he spots me he’s going to ask what I’m still doing here. And if I can hear Milo and Lydia, then they can definitely hear me. I feel like I’m going to cry, and I don’t want to do that in front of Lydia. Or Milo. Or more than twenty members of the crew, plus an Oscar-winning director. Sure, the crew have perfected the art of keeping their faces impassive, but they’re still absorbing every single thing going on around them. If I cry now, I’ll be the topic du jour at lunch today and every day. The pathetic PA who fell in love with the star and then cried about it in the middle of set.
I can’t be that girl, no matter how much she feels like me right now.
So before I can get outed as a spy, I tiptoe back through the attic set and out the opening at the far end, wishing I could leave what I just heard behind. But it follows me all the way out, nipping at my heels and pinging in my gut.
Every time I closed my eyes last night I saw Lydia Kane standing shirtless in the conference room. “You still love me,” dream Lydia murmured over and over. When my alarm goes off at seven a.m., I have no idea how much I actually slept, but it feels like not at all. Which is not good, considering today is our first location shoot.
I pull myself out of the seat of the white van that’s ferrying crew members from the studio to Wilder’s town square, where we’re filming for the morning.
Carly pauses for a moment, glancing through the notes on her ever-present clipboard. “Check with Ruth, and if she doesn’t have anything for you, I’ll have you with me. There’s always lots of random running to be done.” She gives me an up-and-down. “And you look pretty spry.”
Working on no sleep and an emotional state that has me feeling like I was thrown from a moving car, I feel anything but spry. But I vow not to let any of it show. Not that it appears to be working.
Carly gives me another look and opens her mouth like she’s about to lecture me, then snaps it closed again. She sighs.
“I’m here if you need me,” she says, then waves me off to find Ruth. It takes a few minutes of wandering between camera rigs and peeking into the backs of the various trucks production has rented to haul in props and wardrobe and equipment. But I eventually find her loading a rolling cart with props for the small group of street-scene extras we have on set today. As soon as I walk up, she hands me a stack of newspapers, all fake unless we’ve inaugurated a President Jones and I missed it.
“Here, separate these and make them look read, okay?”
Having never actually read a physical newspaper, just the online variety, I’m not sure what that’s supposed to look like, but I set about dividing up the sections and giving them a few extra folds and crinkles.
“You guys ready for background?” Benny skips up in what I’m coming to realize is his own personal uniform, this time with yellow knee socks, yellow bandanna, and banana-yellow T-shirt. He looks like a foreman at a banana factory.
“Yep, send ’em over,” Ruth replies, and a few minutes later a small group of people hired to be living scenery file past the cart. Ruth gives each of them a quick glance, then shoves props into their hands. “Please remember what you’ve got, and please make sure you return it to the cart between takes,” she barks as she hands a coffee cup and a briefcase to a guy in a suit who’s already sweating buckets. As the last of the extras receives a prop, Benny reappears to direct them toward the set.
“Hey, I gotta ask,” I say to him. “What’s with the outfit?”
Benny cocks his head at me, a blank look on his face. “What do you mean?”
“Seriously?” He’s got to be messing with me, but he’s actually a really good
actor so it’s hard to tell.
He laughs. “Okay. Well, it’s dumb, but I’m trying to make this crew-color-war thing happen. You get points for your team for dressing up, so see, I’ve got the PAs three points already.”
“How’s that going?” I glance around at the rest of the crew, most of whom are wearing jeans and T-shirts commemorating the various films and shows they’ve worked on.
“It’s a slow burn,” he replies with a chuckle. “Hey, you wanna join? Wednesday is green day!”
“Green makes me look diseased,” I say, “but good luck to you!”
“Just think about it,” he replies. “The lighting guys bet me fifty bucks plus some kind of embarrassing task they’ll pick later that I couldn’t get anyone else on board, and I could really use that money. Help an old friend out?”
I want to hug Benny for making me feel normal again, reminding me of life before the crazy world of film production and kissing celebrities. I feel like I can breathe again.
“If you’re willing to talk profit sharing,” I say, a smile coming naturally for the first time all morning.
“I’m in for sixty-forty!” he calls as he bounds off after the last of the extras. He turns and mouths a dramatic “please” while folding his hands in mock prayer. I shrug a “we’ll see” in response.
The scene we’re shooting today is simple. Kass, Jonas’s love interest, runs into Jonas outside the bakery where she works. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other since the party where they met (a scene we’re shooting later in the week). It’s only about ten lines, but according to the production schedule, we’ll be shooting it for a couple of hours. Which means I’ll be spending the next few hours on set with Lydia, my first time seeing her since the great shirtless escapade of yesterday.
Because Kass is supposed to be sort of a tomboy, Lydia is in jeans and tennis shoes, a ratty tank top and hoodie on top. She’s dressed like me, actually, only a really good-looking version of me. Her hair is falling down her shoulders in these loose waves that are what Hollywood thinks a normal person’s hair looks like when she’s just walking down the street, the sort of hair that takes a hell of a lot of effort to look that effortless. I know, because a team of hair and makeup people have been following her around like bodyguards, attacking her with picks and combs and hair spray every time there’s a hint of a breeze.
My Unscripted Life Page 12
