THREE

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

 

Monday was awful. As Katie had expected, Ellery cried through most of the table read of their latest script, drawing a variety of reactions from the rest of the regular cast and the guest stars, the producers and the writers—and Katie’s stomach turned a little as she realized that when the writers started to whisper among themselves, they were talking about how they could use Ellery’s weepy mood in an upcoming episode.

There was no ugly crying going on, they pointed out to each other. Instead, like practically everything else she did, Ellery managed to cry attractively.

The minute their executive producer said it was time for a break, Katie retreated to her dressing room and sipped cold water until her stomach had settled. She was almost ready to return to the table when she heard Ellery’s voice out in the corridor, getting progressively louder and shriller and angrier.

“Do you have any idea what this is like?” she shrieked. “To have to call my grandmother every time this happens and explain why a newspaper would print something like that? Something that’s an absolute lie?”

Another voice responded, but Katie couldn’t make out what it said.

“She’s an old woman!” Ellery bellowed. “To her, anything that’s in print anywhere is the truth! All her friends see that trash in the market, and they go to her and cluck at her about her messed-up Hollywood granddaughter. Do you think I like that? Do you think that’s something I can ignore?”

They weren’t standing far away, Katie realized. Her dressing room door was closed, but she could hear Ellery clearly enough that she could imagine the look on her co-star’s face.

Ellery was from a small town in Indiana, a place with very traditional values, not unlike Katie’s home town of Twin Falls. As far as Katie knew, they hadn’t ever thrown a parade for Ellery, but—according to everything Ellery had said—they were very proud of her there. Her former teachers loved to claim their role in shaping who she was, and several of the downtown businesses had autographed photos of her hanging where customers would be sure to see them.

They probably weren’t fond of the idea that Ellery seemed to have a different boyfriend every couple of months, and that she’d supposedly been pregnant four times since Roomies had premiered. It wouldn’t occur to them that most of those ‘boyfriends’ were people who’d simply attended the same party as Ellery and had happened to pose for a picture with her. That those men didn’t actually know Ellery Cooper, and certainly hadn’t had a romantic relationship with her.

As for the pregnancy stuff…

Katie stood near the closed door of her dressing room, glad it kept her from seeing Ellery’s face.

She loved her job. Loved the friendship that had developed among the three roommates, both onscreen and off. The writing was always good, and even though she sometimes had to roll her eyes at the hairdos and outfits her character had to wear, she couldn’t imagine being in a better place. Every week, the studio audience laughed at and applauded her work, and the ones who could manage to evade the studio security guards would cluster around the three of them, asking for autographs and selfies.

She couldn’t help seeing the pile of mail sitting on her coffee table, some of which she’d already looked at. Most of the people who wrote to her were quirky, like her character, Cassie. A little bit different. People who didn’t quite fit in, people who made silly mistakes.

Cassie helped them, they said. They watched her blunder through what she’d done and come out on top, and that helped them realize that maybe their own mistakes weren’t as life-killing as they’d thought, that maybe some of them were opportunities in disguise.

They thanked her, over and over again.

How could you not love a job like that? Helping people. Making them laugh.

But the same job—mostly the same job—was tearing Ellery apart, making her the object of shame in her home town, with family members and friends. True (as Katie could now hear Addison, one of their producers, reminding Ellery) it was all part of life in Hollywood, being not just the Flavor of the Month but also the Target of the Month, but you could ignore just so much and no more.

Finally, Ellery’s voice faded away, and a moment later Katie heard the thump of what she was sure was Ellery’s dressing room door. This would be a long break, she figured, and if Ellery came back to the table read at all, her face would be puffy and flushed, and her reading of her lines wouldn’t be funny.

It’d be heartbreaking.

Katie opened her door unsure what she’d find, whether Addison would still be standing there or the corridor would be empty. She wasn’t sure, either, which one she’d prefer.

He was there. “Katie,” he said, and nodded.

He looked tired. Frustrated. He sympathized with Ellery—he’d said as much, many times, and Katie had no reason not to believe him—but he was also responsible for keeping the show running and on top of the ratings heap. Roomies had a lot of competition, and it wasn’t enough just to be funny. There were also production costs to consider, and hanging on to the public’s interest.

Even if that meant turning a blind eye toward the tabloids.

“Do you want me to talk to her?” she asked quietly, nodding toward Ellery’s door. She couldn’t hear anything inside Ell’s dressing room, but she was almost positive that the tears hadn’t stopped, that Ellery was just as freaked out as she’d been a couple of minutes ago. Talking to her would probably involve bringing her a cool, wet washcloth to lay over the back of her neck, and encouraging her to drink some of the lemonade she kept in her mini-fridge. Maybe eating a little something.

There wouldn’t be much actual talking involved, because… What could you say?

“It’s not a good business for the thin-skinned,” Addison said. He seemed to be talking more to the wall than to Katie.

“Is that what you tell yourself?”

Addison blinked at that, as if he wasn’t sure Katie had actually said it.

“It’s not a good business for human beings,” Katie told him. “It’s like this… this ongoing game of ‘Hit Me with Your Best Shot’. Like, if you can survive everything they throw at you, you win.”

“That’s exactly what it is.”

Addison was in his late forties. Not old at all, pretty much anywhere else in the world, but stretching some limits in Hollywood. Katie had been around enough to know that it wasn’t just actors who aged out of the game pretty early; it was writers and producers too. The studio heads wanted fresh ideas, fresh product, not people who were exhausted and burned out. Not ideas they’d heard a thousand times before. And even though Roomies had been renewed for a third season, none of the people involved could afford to rest. They had to think not only about that third season, but the fourth, the sixth, the tenth.

A marathon, not a sprint, Katie thought.

“What can I do to help?” she asked Addison.

He stood there looking at her for a minute, the baseball cap that covered his bald spot sitting askew, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his rumpled blazer. He might be 47 (or was it 48?), but he looked ten years older, and the longer he stood there, the more the years seemed to pile up.

“I’ll let you know,” he said finally, then turned and walked away.

 

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

 

They had to do the rest of the table read without Ellery, who refused to come out of her dressing room, even after repeated requests from the producers, her co-stars, her friend Jenna from Wardrobe, and her agent. No one was taking her seriously, she told each of them, and if that wasn’t possible, then she was going to spend the rest of the day reading and rehearsing the script by herself.

That put a damper on everyone else’s mood, which made the read-through less than amazing, even though the script itself was good. Solid, well-paced, and funny, as the show’s scripts always were.

“We gotta do something about Ellery” was the general consensus.

At least, that was what everyone said out loud. Privately, Katie knew it wasn’t really Ellery that they needed to do something about—but their chances of ever succeeding against the tabloids were remote. Lawsuits were only won if the paper in question had printed an outright lie, if they’d actually libeled someone and the someone’s lawyers could prove it, which almost never happened.

Even if it did happen, the result was always a tiny retraction printed where almost no one would see it.

Katie’s enthusiasm for show business was pretty much shot by the time she headed for her car, script in hand, hoping they’d be able to patch together some esprit de corps by Thursday evening, when they’d be taping this week’s episode in front of an audience who wouldn’t know what was wrong. Every taping day so far, they’d put on a good show for those eager ticketholders, and they couldn’t stop now, not for something that everyone seemed to agree was just part of the game.

Like a football player getting slammed in a place that hurt.

She was so distracted that she almost didn’t see the guy who was headed toward the door as she was coming out, and she’d collided with him before she could stop herself. A delivery guy, she thought, because he was carrying an enormous bouquet of flowers. Then she realized it was the guy she’d seen near the florist’s shop the day before, the one who’d said he worked at her agent’s office.

So… he had a part-time job at the florist’s, too?

“Katie. Hi,” he said.

Their collision had knocked the heads off some of the flowers, and Katie felt a pang of regret as she looked at the poor crushed blossoms lying on the ground. The bouquet still looked okay, for the most part, but it was definitely dented on one side, and she had to hope it wasn’t for Ellery. Ell didn’t need any more disappointments.

“Doug,” the guy reminded her. “From Amanda’s office?”

“Sure. I remember.”

Looking as sheepish and eager as a sixth-grader, he thrust the bouquet toward her. “These are for you.”

“For me? Why?”

“From Amanda. I guess because—actually, I don’t know.”

“Because I’m her favorite client?”

He grinned at her. He didn’t move his head, but a lock of his dark hair fell down onto his forehead. Somehow, that was adorable. “Sure,” he said. “Let’s go with that.” Then he looked around and seemed to put together that she was leaving. “They were supposed to be for your dressing room, but if you’re on your way out, I guess—would you like me to put them in your car?”

She wasn’t at all sure they’d fit in her car. That bouquet was huge. “I guess,” she said.

“Or I could put them in your dressing room.”

Another blossom fell off.

“That’s my fault,” Katie told him. “I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

He shook his head, and there went another lock of hair, breaking free of its swept-back style. “I can get you a fresh one,” he said so rapidly that the words tripped over each other. “I’ll take it back to the florist and have them fix it. I’m pretty sure they’re open for a while yet.”

“It’s okay. Really. It was totally my fault.”

“But it’s kind of a mess.”

“I won’t say anything to Amanda. Nobody’s going to blame you.”

“That’s not—” He cut himself off and groaned. “That’s not what I’m worried about. I—we—wanted you to have something nice. You know, to brighten up your dressing room. I know things are kind of messed up. Because of… you know. The whole tabloid thing.”

Katie tried hard to imagine the conversation that had gone on in Amanda’s office. Amanda was great at keeping track of what was going on around town: who was with whom, who was talking about whom, what opportunities were out there at the moment and what might be coming up in the near future. She’d probably known about the tabloid story even before the papers actually hit the racks, and more than likely had spent the weekend pondering how it would affect her client.

But she hadn’t made contact with Katie herself, either in person or by phone. There was just this cute, floppy-haired guy bearing flowers.

Which seemed to suggest that it wasn’t really Amanda who’d sent them.

“Tell you what,” she said, and nodded toward the far end of the parking lot, toward the gate that led out to the street. “Have coffee with me so I can unwind for a few minutes before I go home, and we’ll call it square.”