Six
It’s Sunday, the last day of May, and I’m sweating again. I always think I’ve turned up the AC enough for a cast meeting, and I’m always wrong. It’s kind of terrifying how quickly the body heat of nine people can turn my bedroom into a sauna. And that’s before we switch on any of the set lights.
Everyone is here except Eva, who’s texted me that she’s running ten minutes late.
I’m sitting straight-backed on my bed next to Jack, my reading glasses on and a thick yellow binder in my lap. Jay Prasad sits on Jack’s other side and is shaking the bed with laughter at a joke Serena Bishop’s just told. Serena is on my desk, legs crisscrossed, still doing a killer impression of some character from a raunchy adult cartoon. Serena can whip out celebrity impressions with a flourish that would put the whole SNL ensemble to shame. She’s super talented. Obviously. That’s why we cast her as Anna Karenina.
I met Serena during the first week of Governor’s School for the Arts. I’d been friends with Jay since orientation, when Jay asked if he could sit next to me because I was wearing a Pokémon shirt and, according to him, “anyone who’s a Charmander fan must be legit.” Jay and I were in separate tracks—Jay was Drama, I was New Media—which meant we didn’t share any classes, but we met up during meals and free time. Serena was in the Drama track with Jay, and once Jay made friends with Serena, Serena made friends with me.
That’s how it was at GSA : instant friendship by proxy. I think it worked that way because everyone who attended GSA was by and large from the same social stratum. We were the weird, slightly hip, artsy kids. The ones who put in the extra practice hours after school. The ones whose weekends were tied up with rehearsals and tech and concerts. The only real distinction that remained was between kids who went to public schools and kids who went to arts schools. Here’s what I’ll say about that: Not everyone from arts schools is a pompous asshole, but all the pompous assholes are from arts schools. A square, rectangle kind of thing.
Serena goes to SCAPA , Lexington’s arts school, and is tall and gorgeous, in an elegant, already-grown-up way. She intimidated the hell out of me until a few days after I met her, when I was sitting with a handful of the drama kids in the dining hall and Serena stood on a chair and chugged a two-liter of Fanta on a dare. By the end, the soda was running down her chin and neck—orange rivulets cutting across her dark skin. I looked on in awe as I realized Serena Bishop was crazy and fun and not the least bit egotistical.
For the next two weeks, Jay, Serena, and I were inseparable. We exchanged tearful good-byes the last day. Serena’s and Jay’s were particularly spectacular. (Actors. Typical.) But we took comfort in the fact that we lived within thirty miles of each other—Serena and me in Lexington, and Jay right outside the city in more rural Nicholasville. We promised to keep in touch, and the promise turned out to be much harder to break when Jack and I held auditions for Unhappy Families last December.
Serena and Jay were shoo-ins for the roles of Anna and Alex, but Jack was weird about the casting decision for a couple days. She kept saying things like “Yeah, but they might not be the best fit” and “We shouldn’t make a final decision yet. Anna and Alex are the roles , and there are more video auditions rolling in.”
I finally called her out on it.
“This is because I met them at GSA , isn’t it?”
Jack didn’t answer, which meant “yes.”
Jack didn’t get into GSA , but not because she wasn’t qualified. She actually sent in an application for the Visual Art track, complete with portfolio and teacher recommendations and personal statement. It was the personal statement that disqualified Jack. It read:
Dear High and Mighty Pricks,
You know you’re basically the sorority of the arts world, right? There you sit, smug with your MFA s and your training at Juilliard or whatever the hell, choosing us for your summer program like this is a popularity contest. I know plenty of talented artists who’ve applied to your program and been turned away. You know why? Because the arts are subjective, and in the end it comes down to what the judges like and don’t like. But you act like getting into your shitty camp is a badge of honor. Like your graduates passed some magical test and all the rejects failed.
It doesn’t work that way.
You think Van Gogh or Clapton or Tarantino would attend your program? No. They’d be too busy actually making art, trying and failing on their own without some Artificial Authority telling them they were good enough.
Here’s my portfolio. I think it’s fabulous, and that’s all the approval I need.
Fuck you very much,
Jacklyn P. Harlow
I spent several days desperately begging Jack to reconsider sending in that application. Each time, Jack calmly responded, “I’m not going to change my ideology, so why would I change the letter?”
Here’s the thing: I totally understand where Jack is coming from. I know plenty of really talented students at Calhoun who were turned down by GSA . And yeah, I know it’s a kind of beauty pageant, and that’s not fair. But if I had a chance to learn about filmmaking and screenwriting from qualified professionals, to meet artists my age from across the state, to earn scholarship money for college, why wouldn’t I take it? Sometimes you have to play by the world’s unfair rules. Unless, of course, you are Jack Harlow. Then you play by your own rules, no matter how many opportunities you have to deny yourself for the sake of “ideology.”
I don’t like Jack when she gets like that. Honestly, it scares me, because when Jack takes a stand that unflinching, it means someone has to be right and someone has to be wrong. And while I like to think Jack was just being way too persnickety about GSA , there’s this suspicion in the darker part of my mind that maybe I’m the one who’s wrong. Maybe I am weak in spirit, a total sellout, the kind of human that ancient Greek philosophers warned against associating with. Maybe Jack is the stronger person.
Jack didn’t give me a hard time for applying to GSA . She said nothing snarky when I was accepted. She sent me letters and packages during my three weeks on Transylvania University’s campus. There was no lofty pontification, no judgmental looks, no eye rolls. When I came home with a digital copy of my group’s short film, Jack watched it with adequate enthusiasm. She even said that Serena was talented. But when it came right down to it, as we sat on my bed in a mess of résumés and headshots and scrapped lists of cast combinations, Jack wouldn’t give her wholehearted approval to Jay and Serena, and I knew why: They were GSA kids. They were snotty sellouts, and by extension so was I. And that hurt.
“You’re not better because you didn’t go,” I told her.
“That’s not what this is about,” she replied.
“It isn’t?”
“Look,” Jack finally said. “I’m worried you three will form some kind of inner group, okay? Because you have the three weeks in common. And you’ll be talking about that and making inside jokes I won’t understand.”
Jack’s vulnerability was so unexpected, I couldn’t fault her.
“We won’t be like that,” I said. “Promise. We’re all busy artists with our own projects to worry about. We won’t be talking about the past. We’ll be talking about the future.”
That convinced Jack. Maybe not entirely, but enough for her to agree on the final cast list, with Serena’s and Jay’s names at the top. And just like I promised, the three of us really didn’t bring up GSA . Not often enough for Jack to throw a fit, anyway.
We found Eva, George, Tony, and Brooks through a cold-reading audition we held in the Calhoun auditorium, thanks to some help from Mr. Vargas, our drama teacher. Eva Honeycutt was only a sophomore, but I knew her from some school plays I’d stage-managed. Eva was assigned the usual roles of Flower Girl #3 and Chorus Member that all underclassmen have to endure before seniority grants them stardom. But I’d done enough improv exercises with Eva to know she had the chops to pull off a leading role. Plus, she has the perfect face to play Kitty—delicate bone structure and rosy cheeks and a celestial nose. Eva does modeling for local businesses, and it shows. She knows how to turn her chin and lower her lashes to achieve optimum cuteness. She has a thin, airy voice to match. None of the other auditionees came close to capturing the sweet naivety of Kitty Shcherbatsky as well as she did.
George Connor is one of those notorious arts school pompous asses I was talking about earlier, but dammit if he isn’t a pro. He’s one of Serena’s friends from SCAPA , and he’s already flown out to London twice to tour the Royal Academy. He’s all business all the time, and he’s constantly asking me if he can “tweak a line or two” of his dialogue, which really means a lot of improvisation on his part. Trouble is, I can never get all that angry with him because his improvisation is good . Even, I’ll admit, better than the script. When the camera rolls, George turns into good-natured, overearnest Levin. His chemistry with Eva is on point. Everyone can see that. So everyone tends to turn a blind eye when George is an ass, and we only laugh at him when he’s not in the room.
Brooks Long is a sophomore theatre major at the University of Kentucky. Jack and I were a little shocked when he showed up for auditions. Sure, we’d put up flyers around campus, but we never actually thought a college student would walk into a high school auditorium and take our project seriously. I know how young Jack and I look, and how—to steal a word from Dad’s books—ambitious our project sounds. Comically ambitious, really, if you sit down and ask me and Jack how many classic novels we’ve adapted before (none), or how many web series we’ve directed (none), or how much experience we have with a DSLR camera (very little).
Lucky for us, Brooks gave us the benefit of the doubt. Extra luckily, he’s perfect for the role of Stiva. He plays him as weathered but convivial, full of faults yet lovable. Off camera, Brooks is professional. He doesn’t ever stick around for our after-parties, but he isn’t standoffish. He’s just . . . older. He’s on the other side of that as-yet-uncrossable chasm between the last semester of high school and first semester of college.
At the moment, Brooks is leaning against the doorframe of my closet, chatting with Klaudie. He’s asking her about Vanderbilt, of course, because that’s what college students talk about: college. As I look over the red markings in today’s shooting script—shorthand directions about character placement, camera angle, lighting choices—I catch an occasional sound bite from their conversation. Brooks is asking Klaudie why she won’t consider minoring in theatre, because she’s very good at it. Klaudie’s saying she wants to focus all her energies on engineering, because she is so perfect and simply has too many talents to choose from.
Well. That’s basically what Klaudie is saying.
Sometimes, I regret suggesting Klaudie play Dolly. A year ago, Klaudie wasn’t such a pill. A year ago, when Jack and I told her our big idea, she was genuinely excited and told us we should stop second-guessing ourselves and just make the web series before someone else beat us to it. So I told her she was how I pictured Dolly, the nurturing and heartbroken partner of cheating husband Stiva (updated to cheating boyfriend Stiva in Unhappy Families ). Klaudie said it’d be fun at least to audition, and from there on out, everything clicked. Klaudie has a good rapport with Brooks, and her memory’s a steel trap, so I can always count on her to recite her lines verbatim. That’s how Klaudie joined the cast.
And then there’s Tony Davis, our Vronsky, whose interest in Unhappy Families is about as natural as a professional golfer’s interest in nuclear physics. It just doesn’t compute. Tony’s social calendar is already booked. He attends parties. He plays in a band—a band that sounds like nails being sent through a food processor, but still , a band . Before the web series, he never once came near school plays or drama club. I didn’t even know he could act. But then Tony showed up on audition day, in all his Mohawked, leather-jacketed glory. Tony was Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky. Typecasting in its purest form.
Thus we formed our merry little company: seven actors, two filmmakers, nine companions. Exactly like the Fellowship of the Ring. Okay, not exactly. Only in my mind, where I’ve assigned myself the role of Gimli, because come on, who is better than Gimli?
“Don’t you think we should get started? Someone can fill Eva in.”
I look up from the script to find George standing over me, arms crossed.
“She’ll be here any minute,” I say, capping my highlighter.
“Yeah, but it’s not fair that we’re all here on time like professionals and she’s holding us up.”
This is normal behavior from George—all this talk of professionalism and how everyone aside from him doesn’t know what that is. Usually, I’m cool with it. Like I said, it’s a small price to pay for good acting. But today, my fuse is shorter than usual. My mind is half script, half social media mentions. Last night, I dreamed of weeding through notifications.
“George,” I say, pressing the heels of my hands to my forehead. “Just . . .”
“Fine. We’ll get started.”
I shoot Jack a surprised glance. Jack is never one to give in to George. But judging from the look on her face, she has no fuse whatsoever this morning.
“Okay, everyone.” Jack doesn’t shout. She only shouts when she’s angry, not when she’s happy or excited and certainly not to get anyone’s attention. Her get-attention voice sounds like a bored recitation of phone book entries. No one hears her.
I don’t have a problem with shouting.
“Guys!” I stand and wave my arms. “Hey, we’re gonna go ahead and get started.”
George seats himself in my desk chair with a smug smile on his oh-so-punchable face.
The room quiets, aside from a grizzled sound emitting from Tony’s earbuds. He looks up from his place on the floor and yanks out the earbuds with a quick “Sorry.” Before the music cuts out, I recognize the song and realize Tony has been listening to himself . His own band. Jesus. If egos were helium-filled balloons, this bedroom would detach from the house and float straight to the moon.
Everyone has turned their attention to me. I clear my throat and tug on the sweat-lined collar of my T-shirt. I really wish I’d dashed into the hall and punched down the temperature before starting this prepared speech of mine. But it’s too late for that; I’ve activated public speaking mode.
“Okay,” I say. “So by now, I’m assuming you’ve all read my e-mail and seen the explosion online. As of this morning, we’re at almost sixty-five thousand subscribers, which is pretty wild. This is what we’ve been working toward—more exposure, more fan engagement. It also looks like we’ll be able to fund more projects. And, of course, if we create a Kickstarter, we’ll budget a certain amount to pay you retroactively for your work as actors. We want each of you to get a cut, because we know what it’s like to be poor, broke artists, and Jack and I both think it’s important to pay artists for their time whenever possible.”
“Amen,” Brooks says, shooting me a wink.
“Right,” I say. “So we’re going to continue filming as usual. Jack and I have printed out a final schedule of our remaining shoot dates this summer, so make sure you grab one before you leave and double-check it with your calendar. We’ve tried to work around everyone’s vacations, but that means a few weekends spent filming. Sorry.”
I glance down briefly at the bullet points I penciled out this morning.
“The main thing to keep in mind is that Jack and I will take care of all interactions on social media. We don’t want you to have to worry about that, and it’ll be more controllable if we answer everyone’s questions from the Seedling Productions account. So if anyone tags you individually or asks you to engage, send it our way.”
There’s a click at the bedroom door. Eva slips in, sending a repentant smile around the room.
“Sorryyyyyy,” she stage-whispers, making a show of tiptoeing in and then performing a cute little leap over Tony.
“Let me get this straight,” says Tony. “Are you telling us we can’t interact with our groupies?” He’s grinning the same way he does when he makes a smart-ass remark in social studies.
“We’d just rather you didn’t,” I say. “It’s not that we don’t trust you guys or anything, but believe me, it gets exhausting, fielding stuff like that. And we all know how things can get weird fast on social media. One misinterpreted comment or a slip about something that’s coming up in the series, and we’ll have to do major damage control.”
“Makes sense,” says Serena. “I’m glad you brought that up, actually. I’ve gotten a couple mentions on Twitter—just nice things. But I don’t want to be answering questions.”
“Right,” I say. “This way, you won’t have to. Speaking of questions, any of you have them?”
Serena raises her hand and says, “This isn’t a serious question, exactly, but have you all seen the GIF sets floating around? It’s awesome . George and Eva, everyone is obsessed with you. Or should I say, ‘Kevin ’?”
The smugness in George’s smile has spread to his eyes. He leans the desk chair onto its back two legs and shrugs as though to say, Can I help that I’m fabulous?
Eva releases a pleased giggle and says, “No one’s a bigger Kevin fangirl than me.”
“It’s perfect timing, too,” says Jay. “Right before the Scrabble scene? People are going to go crazy over that.”
Jay is referring to one of our upcoming episodes, which we shot last week. It’s our adaptation of the scene when a previously scorned Levin returns to a changed Kitty and proposes marriage a second time—this time with happier results. It’s the kissing scene . And like I hoped, after all the effort, it turned out perfectly.
In Unhappy Families , Levin isn’t a farmer but a college freshman studying agriculture. Kitty isn’t a socialite waiting around for a proposal of marriage but Levin’s childhood friend and a professional ballerina. And of course Levin doesn’t ask Kitty for her hand in marriage, just out on a date. In the book, the reconciliation happens by way of a word game, using chalk and a card table. It was my idea to update this to a poorly played game of Scrabble. Jack has already shown me the edited footage, and it is undeniably adorable. Like Jay said, this is perfect timing. Nothing pleases a crowd quite like a beloved ship setting sail.
That’s when I say something I haven’t written down. “You guys. I’m really, really excited.”
I’m met with grins and thumbs-ups. There is energy crackling in this room. I can practically see it—lightning bolts of neon pinks and greens and blues. There’s a feeling that something is happening . Something big and uncertain and out of control. It is splendid and terrifying—splendifying . I guess that’s how filming has always been. The thrilling unknown of auditions. The utter largeness of watching dialogue Jack and I wrote coming out of actors’ mouths, then turning into a coherent playlist of videos. Nothing else compares.
“We just can’t go the route of all rock groups,” Tony says from the floor. “We can’t let fame turn us on each other or make us fall into a cycle of substance abuse. And no selling each other out to the tabloids.”
Everyone snickers at the remark. Everyone but George, who says, “Are we going to get to filming now?”
“Yep,” I say. “For this first shot we need Levin, Kitty, Dolly, and Stiva. We’ll be in the living room. The rest of you, feel free to look over lines up here or grab some snacks in the kitchen. We’ll take a break at twelve thirty for pizza.”
I turn to Jack. “Ready to set up lights?”
Not that I need to ask. Jack is always ready to film.
• • •
In the living room, Jack works in knit-browed silence to adjust a reflector on our actors. We fall into our usual prep sequence: check white balance, check sound levels, check frame for any weirdness. Then Jack brings the clapboard into focus, and snap , the scene comes to life.
I am officially the director of Unhappy Families , since Jack and I decided it would be less confusing if we designated one person the actors should approach with questions about interpretation or movement. It also means Jack can edit the footage with some amount of objectivity, since she wasn’t the one behind the camera during filming. Today, I have very little direction to give. There are no forgotten lines, no awkward cadences, no gaffes. Our actors are hitting every single line right on the first take.
An hour in, Jack asks for a quick break to check over sound recordings. I head for the kitchen, where we’ve set up a snack station, to fix a plate of carrot sticks. I walk in on Tony and Jay in the middle of a shouting match.
Jay is brandishing a plastic fork at Tony’s eye while yelling, “I hope you know it’s your fault if she dies! Don’t you ever forget that: It’s your fucking fault.”
“She’s not going to die,” says Tony, who’s blanched to the shade of parchment paper. “She’s not going to die.”
I’m frozen in the doorway, entranced. Tony and Jay stand in front of the fridge, less than a foot from each other, their bodies tensed and prone. Tony’s shoulders are rolled toward Jay in a downward slant. The guys are just rehearsing, but I can’t shake the feeling there’s something about this that isn’t artificial.
“Don’t kill each other before the actual take,” I say, walking up to the counter.
Both of them start. Jay lowers his fork and backs a step away. Tony laughs. He has a magnificent laugh—hoarse and cascading and always a little self-deprecating.
“Can’t make any promises,” he says. He reaches past me to dip his index finger straight into the dish of ranch dressing on the vegetable tray.
“Jesus Christ, Tony,” I yelp, smacking his hand away. “That’s disgusting.”
I know I’m reacting exactly the way Tony wants me to, but seriously, there are certain hygienic rules you don’t break. How does Tony get away with this behavior at all his fancy parties? Is everyone there too drunk to notice?
As I scoop up a handful of carrots, Tony says, “I licked all those.”
I give Tony a “you’re better than that” look and bite one of the carrots clean in half.
I say, “You guys are up in ten. Where’s Serena?”
“In your bedroom,” Jay answers. “She said we were distracting her, so she went upstairs.”
That’s not hard to believe. If the shouting wasn’t distracting enough, the tension between Tony and Jay definitely would be. Part of me wants to shove the two of them together, screaming, “Kiss already!” But the larger part hasn’t forgotten that Tony and Jack were an item a few short months ago.
Even now that Jack and Tony are broken up, I suspect Jay might never say a thing. Not because Tony doesn’t swing that way—he took a guy as his date to prom—but because Tony dated Jack, and Tony, Jack, and Jay are all involved in the web series. I believe this is called “discord in the ranks,” and it kind of makes me feel like I live in season nine of a primetime drama, when the writers have run out of decent plotlines and begin pairing off all the main characters with each other.
I head upstairs to my bedroom. The door is cracked, and I knock lightly before pushing it open and finding Serena bent over her script, eyes closed and fingers pressed to her temples in concentration.
“Hey,” I say softly. “You’re up in ten.”
Serena glances up, looking a little dazed. Then she grins. “Thanks.”
I’m closing the door when Serena calls, “Tash?”
“Yeah?”
“Okay, I’m about to be kind of cheesy, so ignore this if you want, but, um . . . I’m really glad I met you last summer.”
“Me too.”
Serena bunches her shoulders toward her ears, grin still on her face. “I just have this feeling we’re doing something that’s once-in-a-lifetime, you know?”
I nod.
Yes. I absolutely know.