James worked as a concierge at a hotel in Beverly Hills, a posh place that wasn’t nearly as fancy or nice as people liked to think it was. No place, in James’s opinion, was as nice as it liked to think it was. The fanciest restaurant, the nicest hotel, the best neighborhoods and shopping districts, they all started to show their same humdrum frustrating frayed edges if you spent enough time looking around. Nobody knew that better than the employees.

Sometimes, on his not-so-good days, when customers were assholes rather than simply oblivious and his managers were outright bastards rather than simply exacting, James was certain people were the same way. Nice at first, but if you got to know them long enough the frayed edges began to show.

Familiarity breeds contempt, as someone too clever for his own good said once.

That day, James wasn’t sure how things were going. He felt an odd sense of anticipation. He wasn’t sure why or how. It was two days since the audition, and he was pretty sure he hadn’t been cast, so there was no use waiting for that. He didn’t have any other auditions coming up. What else was there to anticipate?

It left him in a strange in-between state, not quite happy with work but not outright wanting to tear his hair out either. He wasn’t sure what to do about it.

His coworkers were definitely picking up on it. Three of them asked if he had gotten an audition, while another, mindful of the time of year, asked him if midterms had hit. James felt stupid for not being able to give them a straight answer.

His shift lasted from ten in the morning until six at night, so he wasn’t really able to check his phone all day. He tried, sometimes, sneaking a look while he was at the desk, but his bosses and the customers had a bad habit of walking up right as he did so, like his phone was secretly a homing beacon or something. It meant that he didn’t get a chance to check his phone until he was out of work and scrolling through his notifications on the way to his car; but he rarely missed anything terribly urgent.

This time there were a few texts from Sophie and Brandon in the “Roomies” group text message—Brandon was asking if anyone wanted anything from the grocery store that wasn’t on the list taped to the fridge—a few spam emails, a snapchat or two, and then one final email from a marykowalski99 email address.

James’s heart rate sped up, and he found himself clutching his phone in a white-knuckled grip. Mary Kowalski was the casting agent from his audition. Had he gotten the part?

He opened up the email, trying to breathe. It felt like his lungs were burning, the way they usually did only after a hard gym workout, and all he’d done was swipe a couple of times on his phone.

Dear Mr. Novak,

It is our pleasure to offer you the part of Jerry in the upcoming film “Catmouse.”

There was more to the email, but James’s vision blurred, and he couldn’t read it.

He didn’t know what to think. He looked around him as if the dark parking structure would offer up some kind of answer. Jerry was the role of the masked murderer, so named after the famous mouse in the cartoon series. The main character, Tyler, named the masked murderer Jerry because he felt like Tom the cat, making an idiot of himself by chasing after this supposed prey that was just laughing at him.

It was a starring role, James had to note that. But he’d be wearing a mask the entire time, and playing a masked murderer was a far cry from the complex main character role of Tyler. He didn’t even get to really say anything. Sure, it was an iconic role, like Jason or Freddy Krueger, but c’mon, did anybody remember who had played those roles? Did those actors actually get anywhere?

How could he have not gotten the role? His audition was good, and Jack Wallace had seemed to like him. Or, at least, it had felt that way judging by the expression on the guy’s face when James had finished his monologue. Could he have really read the situation that wrong? Did they dislike him so much that they wanted to hide his face and not say a word?

He knew he was built, but that didn’t mean that stupid jock roles or playing a burly masked murderer was all that he was good for. James could have punched something in frustration. Instead he got into the car, threw his phone onto the passenger seat, and tried not to think about it for the entire drive home.

Naturally that failed.

The moment he walked into the apartment, Sophie and Brandon could tell that something was off. Brandon had the night off and was clearly celebrating, seeing as he was wearing a kangaroo onesie and watching some Canadian science fiction television show.

“Not going out?” James asked, stripping off his uniform as quickly as he could. By the end of the day the outfit felt like it was clinging to his skin, choking him, claustrophobic. He wanted to wear nothing at all, that was how much the clothes got to him, making him feel constricted and worn down. Although Brandon and Sophie were both interested in men, they’d made it clear that they had no desire to see James naked. He put on a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt instead.

“I work at a club and take shots all night: why would I want to go out and do the same thing only not get paid for it?” Brandon pointed out. “I ate all of Soph’s cookies, by the way.”

“Don’t worry about it.” James headed to the kitchen to grab some leftover lasagna.

“Have you heard back from the audition people yet?”

James thought about lying, but in the split second between hearing the question and wondering if he should lie about it, Brandon sensed the change in him and sat up straight, crowing in victory. “Ha! You have heard from them!”

Sophie’s voice carried over from the bathroom. “Hey, if something’s going on can it wait until I get out of here?”

“She just got out of the shower, she’ll want to hear this,” Brandon said, putting the television on mute.

“There’s not much to hear,” James said, trying to deflect. It felt like even the lasagna in his hand was judging him which, okay, maybe he was being a little hard on himself if he was imagining food judging him.

Sophie hurried out of the bathroom in a robe, tying it up quickly as she literally hopped onto the couch. “Spill!” she said.

James frowned. “There really isn’t much to say, okay?”

“So you heard from them,” Brandon pressed.

James pulled out his phone, pulled up the email, and tossed it to them. Sophie caught the phone, and Brandon hunched over her shoulder so they could read it together. He watched as their faces went from excited to confused and a little nervous.

“I thought you auditioned for the part of Tyler?” Brandon asked.

“I did.” James stuck the lasagna into the microwave. Fuck it, he was too tired to bother warming up the oven and heating it up properly. “They’re offering me the part of Jerry instead.”

“It’s a starring role, isn’t it?” Sophie asked, while Brandon took the phone from her and continued reading the email. “You’ll get starring credit and pay, and make connections.”

“They say they liked your Tyler audition,” Brandon added, still reading the email.

“And isn’t Wallace known for collaborating with the same people?” Sophie pointed out. “He had the same cast for basically all of the films he did while in college, and a lot of them starred in his first film. Three of them were in his second film, and I bet you they’ll have a role or two in this one.”

“They probably want a bankable star,” Brandon pointed out.

The microwave beeped at him, and James glared at it. It felt like the machine was mocking him, letting him know that his time was up. “If they wanted a bankable star, then why audition us students at all?” he asked.

Brandon shrugged.

“This is a good thing,” Sophie insisted.

“You see the good in everything, Soph,” James replied.

“She didn’t see the good in the last presidential election,” Brandon pointed out, to which Sophie punched a pillow. The amount of screaming, crying, and breaking things that had gone on that election night had been epic and terrifying. Brandon and James had, frankly, not realized the level of wrath their barely five-foot roommate could dish out, and they now lived in semi-fear of her.

“I’m just saying,” Sophie said, her voice growing more pointed, “you should take this job. It’s an opportunity, even if it’s not the one that you thought you’d get.”

James grabbed the lasagna and carried it over to join them. “Or this could typecast me and leave me stuck playing nothing but mask-toting, silent villains for the rest of my life.”

“Christopher Lee played the mummy,” Sophie replied, “and Saruman in Lord of the Rings. He didn’t get typecast.”

“He was Christopher fucking Lee, the man spoke six languages and was a spy in World War II, there’s no comparison,” James pointed out.

“Would you stop being so negative about this?” Sophie asked. “Come on. See this in a positive light. You get out of something what you put into it, and if you put positivity and hard work into this, then it’ll pay off.”

James shook his head. If that was how life worked then it would be a lot fairer than it was.

“I think Sophie has a point,” Brandon said, and added—before Sophie could crow in triumph—“and so does James. I think it’s worth taking the job. If nothing else, you’re getting paid to act rather than deal with spoiled brats on vacation, and you will make connections. And, before you say anything, yes there’s a danger of being typecast, but there’s a danger of being typecast no matter what you do. Everyone struggles with getting typecast. It’s why I stopped.”

Brandon had been an actor once, although James hadn’t met him that way. They’d met through Sophie, who’d known Brandon from when she was helping out as a Production Assistant on a friend’s short film, and James had met Sophie at a party on campus. Brandon had told James about how it had gone. Brandon was lean, and more than toned; “sculpted” was probably the best way to put it. He took extreme care in his appearance, from his clothes to his hair to his tan. He was also extremely good looking. Unfortunately, this meant that he’d been typecast in more effeminate gay roles. Tired of never going out for anything else—“I was in the closet for years, they think I can’t play a straight guy?”—Brandon had taken the dancing job at the club, found that he liked it better than auditioning and being turned down constantly, and quit acting for good.

James wasn’t quite at that point of disillusionment. Brandon fully admitted that he’d been into acting because he liked attention, which he got plenty of at the club. James was into acting because he loved to play pretend. Call it a holdover from growing up in a poor, rough neighborhood where you liked women or else, but James was good at playing pretend, and he enjoyed it. Acting was basically getting paid to do the same thing you’d done as a five-year-old when you were running around pretending to shoot up bad guys, or being a knight destroying a dragon, or a detective replicating murder scenes with your action figures and “solving the mystery.” James loved that. He loved getting to be someone else and sharing stories with people, stories that made them laugh or cry or think. Maybe if he’d been in this business just for attention, or for a lark, he could leave it as easily as Brandon had. But some part of him was inexorably tied to the idea of acting. Something inside of him yearned to act, needed it like he needed to breathe, ached when he couldn’t. So he kept at it.

Unfortunately, acting wasn’t just an art but a business, and he had to make a smart business decision about this offered part.

“You’re going to run into this,” Brandon pointed out. “People are going to try and stick you into a box. Every actor runs into it, even the famous ones. If you played Tyler, you’d possibly get typecast as the crazy person all the time. If you played, I don’t know, some cookie-cutter, handsome love interest in a romantic comedy, you’re in danger of always being cast as that. I could go on.”

“He really could,” Sophie said, gently elbowing Brandon in the side. Brandon did tend to get long-winded.

“The point is that this is a risk you’ll be taking no matter what, so why turn down a chance at a starring credit role, a steady paycheck, and working with an up-and-coming heavy hitter?”

When he put it that way, James did feel a bit petulant for not wanting to accept the role. People got cast for roles other than the ones they auditioned for all the time. They’d go in, read for one part, and get cast in another part instead. It wasn’t unusual.

“I’m sure you’re not the only one,” Sophie said. “They tend to cast the main role first, if there are other male roles, then I bet some of the guys who auditioned for Tyler will be getting those as well. That’s what happened when I PA’d for my friend, a guy that auditioned for the romantic lead ended up being perfect for the character of his best friend, so she cast him in that and didn’t even have to hold auditions for the best friend role.”

That didn’t really make James feel better, exactly, but it was true. The simple fact of it was comforting, in a way. He still felt a little sick in his stomach, though, knowing he hadn’t gotten the role of Tyler. He’d worked hard on that audition, and he really liked the character of Tyler. A part of him wanted to throw a tantrum and yell about how unfair it was. But that part was childish, and was something he needed to get rid of, or so Professor Thomas had informed him and the rest of their class when she was talking about auditioning.

“You’re going to feel as though you deserve every role,” she’d advised them. “You’re going to want to throw a fit, and you’re going to come up with all the reasons why that role should have been yours, and you were robbed. You may even decide that clearly, you were a horrible actor who had no right to be there, and you screwed it all up for yourself, and you should just pack it in and go back to Des Moines or wherever you came from. Don’t believe any of those things.”

James tried to remember that now. He hadn’t screwed up, and he wasn’t perfect. The truth lay somewhere in the nebulous middle. Maybe they wanted someone who was a little shorter, or skinnier, or someone with dark hair like the guy who’d been sitting at the table rather than a blonde. Who knew? There was no use beating himself up about it or mentally beating the director up about it.

As Brandon and Sophie had both pointed out, it was something to put on his résumé. It was steady work and pay. It also didn’t involve plastering a smile on his face while filthy rich fuckers treated him like the dirt under their four-hundred-dollar loafers.

“All right,” he said, taking a deep breath in and out through his nose. “All right then. Fine.”

Sophie gave a cry of triumph, and Brandon silently handed the phone back, his expression neutral. Brandon didn’t try to make James stop acting or anything, but he was a lot more wary of it than Sophie was, with her faith in humanity and all that.

James tapped out an appropriate response to the email, thanking Mary for the opportunity to audition for Tyler and saying that he would accept the role of Jerry. Once he heard the whoosh of the email being sent, he flopped onto the couch and started digging into his lasagna.

Hey, at least maybe Mr. Possibly Tall, Dark (Haired) and Definitely Handsome would be there. That was something to fantasize about.