1-3
1759 Words
AT MIDNIGHT ALEX FINALLY pulls his car into the little parking lot behind his apartment building. He takes one last moment for himself, wrapping his hands around the steering wheel and taking a deep breath before he gets out.
There’s a flight of stairs, narrow and poorly lit, that leads up to the apartment. Alex fumbles for a moment to find the right keys to unlock the multiple latches on the door. Inside, all is the same as ever — ratty couch, rattier chair, milk crate coffee table, and his roommate curled up in pajamas.
“What happened to you?” she demands when he shoves the door closed behind him and drops his keys back in his bag. “You look terrible.”
“Thanks, Gem.” Alex closes his eyes and wishes for more time to let the bizarre events of the day settle in. “Why are you still awake?”
“You didn’t answer your phone. I was worried.”
Alex opens his eyes and looks at her. “You waited up for me?” Her concern is still something he’s getting used to. Back home in high school in Indiana, Alex came and went as he pleased.
Gemma is perched on their lumpy, faded couch. She’s wearing her grey pajamas covered in angry clouds and her chin-length black hair is pulled back into two uneven pigtails. Her laptop is open in front of her.
“Don’t you have an audition tomorrow morning?” Alex asks.
“It got cancelled.” She turns her attention back to her computer. Her voice is the dangerous kind of controlled. Alex asks nothing more, lest he walk further into that minefield.
“Which you would have known if you’d picked up your phone,” she goes on. “Where were you?”
Alex digs his phone out to check the alerts. Sure enough — three missed calls, including one from Nick, though that can wait. “I was at work.”
“Until midnight?”
“Do you not pay attention to anything I do?” Crew days are long. Longer than actor days, which Gemma should know. Sure, Alex is usually done much earlier than this, but erratic hours are hardly unexpected in either of their lives.
“You look like s**t,’’ Gemma says bluntly.
“It’s been a long day, okay?”
“Take your shoes off. There are leftovers in the fridge if you’re hungry.” She turns her attention back to her laptop.
“Thanks, Mom,” Alex mutters on his way to the kitchen.
“I heard that!” Gemma yells. Alex hums to himself as he crouches in front of the fridge to examine the leftover options.
“Work was weird,” Alex says when he’s finally seated across from her in their ratty armchair, a plate on his lap. The paint on the wall behind Gemma is chipping. The lamp beside her, that they picked up from the curb one trash day, makes the cracks stand out more visibly than they do in the daytime.
“What happened?” Gemma shuts the laptop, hugs it to her chest, and waits for him to find words to answer.
Alex is grateful. He’s spent plenty of time training her to be quiet when he needs her to be. “Do you want to go out to dinner this weekend?” he asks. Bribery seems like the safest tactic to hand.
She looks skeptical. “A roommate date?”
“Totally. We can get tacos. Or sushi! Or anything you want.”
“Alex,” she says warily. “I know you like to do the cagey thing when stuff’s happening, but can you talk to me?”
He looks at her over a mouthful of warmed-up rice and tries to be the picture of innocence. “Mmm?”
“What’s going on?”
He swallows. “I was an i***t at work and instead of firing me Victor offered me a part.” The words come too quick, but they’re terrifying.
“A part in what?” She frowns.
“Fourth Estate.”
Her mouth opens a little. “But you’re a P.A,” Gemma says slowly.
“Yes.”
“You’re not an actor.”
“No.”
“How did that happen?”
Alex sets his plate down on the milk crate stack passing for a coffee table, crosses his legs and curls up into the chair. He can hardly explain any of this to himself. None of it feels real yet, and there’s a frightening ominousness to this kind of unknown.
“I told you,” he finally says. “Weird f*****g day.”
“What kind of part?” Gemma demands. “None of this is making any sense. Like at all.”
“I don’t know.” That, in fact, is a lie. But if he tells Gemma about the series of stepping stones Victor put in front of him — including a chance to be a principal in the magic world where it all works out and he comes back next year — he’s both afraid that he’ll jinx it and that Gemma will murder him in his sleep. “They’re still working out the details.”
“Are you going to do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What!” Gemma shrieks.
Alex jumps. He’s used to her volume but the explosions still catch him off guard.
“What do you mean you don’t know?!”
He stretches a leg out and curls his toes against the edge of the milk crates. “I’m a P.A.”
“Who just got offered a part on a major network’s Thursday night anchor!”
“Yes.”
“Why would you say no?”
Alex thunks his head against the back of the chair. “God, Gemma, do you really want the list?”
“Yes.”
“It’s long,” he warns.
“I’ve got all night. It’s not like there’s anywhere I have to be tomorrow.”
Beyond his own reasonable fear and unreasonable guilt, Alex feels genuine sorrow for her. Auditions may be a dime a dozen in this city, but it can take thousands of them for any one person to reach their dreams. “I’m sorry,” he says sincerely.
“It’s not your fault.”
Alex knows that’s a hard kindness for her to offer, but Gemma is an extraordinarily good friend even if, or perhaps because, they met on the internet. They’ve been in this together ever since they moved to L.A. after high school graduation with little more than their love of stories. But Gemma is the one who wants to be a star. Alex has always wanted to make movie magic, but he’s never wanted to be it.
Their apartment is the worst sort of shithole, but it has locks that work and a landlord who doesn’t care that they’re still occasionally, if increasingly rarely, unemployed kids. Compared to the welfare cheese of his upbringing, it’s at least an adventure.
Gemma, as is her narrative destiny, has a waitressing gig and is registered as a nonunion extra at Central Casting. Alex signed up for the city’s film and TV internship program as soon as he got here. It had cost him nothing and also paid him nothing, but there was a real job on the other side of it. As a P.A. he’s been hired, or not, on a day-to-day basis since. It’s not secure, but then, nothing for him ever has been.
“I don’t even know if this is going to happen,” he finally says. “There are a lot of factors in play. If I even start this process the rest of the crew is going to hate me. I’m not sure the cast is going to be thrilled either. You should have seen the look Natalie gave me. And even if it was going to happen for sure, I did not come to Hollywood to be in front of the cameras. I don’t know if I can do this.”
Good things like this don’t just get handed to him. Anything Alex has, he’s gotten because he decided he wanted it, figured out how to get it, and then put in whatever work was required to secure it. He trusts the results of his own efforts; he doesn’t trust other people. A prize that comes with risks he hasn’t even begun to calculate could be all sorts of dangerous. And Alex hasn’t survived by not calculating his risks.
“Obviously you can, if they offered you this.”
“I don’t know if I want to,” Alex says slowly for what feels like the thousandth time. He doesn’t know how to explain his innate reluctance to someone who wants so badly what he’s been handed. “They didn’t pull me because of what I can do. They pulled me because I look like a twink.”
“You are a twink.”
“I’m not —”
“You are skinny, vaguely hairless, and young.”
“Gemma,” Alex protests. She may not be wrong, but getting slapped with labels she knows mostly from gay p**n is completely awful. Where Alex comes from, getting labelled like that gets people beat up. Or worse.
Gemma is unconcerned with his discomfort. “Seriously, though. What happened?”
Alex stabs his fork into his rice. “They needed a certain type in background for James to rag on. Apparently even the f*****g T-shirt and clipboard do not save me from resembling that particular type.”
Gemma considers that for a moment. “Okay, I get that’s not a typical reason to have something good happen to you, but do you know what it’s like being Gemma Hyong in this town?”
Alex shakes his head.
“It closes a lot of doors.”
“You had an audition last week,” Alex says, trying to be encouraging.
“Yeah, to be a s*x trafficking victim. Again. And I didn’t get it, again, because my t**s are too small. The doors that open for me are horrible. But they’re still doors. Other people walk through them all the time.”
“Yeah,” Alex says cautiously. “Not like this.”
“Right, explain to me how being called a twink turns into a part?”
Alex sighs. If he’d kept his mouth shut, he could have avoided this whole thing. “It pissed me off, the line. So I said something back, on camera, and Liam decided it was a great time to test my improv skills.”
“What did you say?”
Alex scowls. “I don’t know, Gemma. Tune in and find out while I hide under my bed with the tequila. Jesus.” He tucks his knees up as close to his chest.
“Sorry,” she says, although she doesn’t sound like she remotely means it. “But I still don’t understand.”
“Victor called me up to his office after for a very long, very scary chat. He liked the moment, thought there was room for a new character on the show, and thinks, maybe — since he couldn’t take his eyes off me and neither could anyone else — that it should be me.”
Gemma is silent for a whole five seconds at that. “Alex, that’s incredible.”
“Victor is crazy.”
“Victor is legendarily crazy,” she corrects. She reels off Victor’s back catalogue of shows in syndication along with their associated network battles from when they were in production. “But he’s the best. And the people he writes are so real. You can’t say no. Like, fame and money and I hate you, but art,” Gemma finishes softly.
Alex mostly ignores her. Listening is way too scary right now. “What if I want to say no?”
“You don’t want to.”
“You don’t know that!”
“Alex, you can’t say no. You’ll be a star! You’ll be able to afford your rent! You can get cuter jeans!”
“My jeans are fine,” he snaps. Saying yes for such reasons seems inherently dreadful, even if the prospect of reliably making rent is appealing.
“Your jeans are atrocious. You can get a car that works! You’re Marilyn Monroe, you don’t say no.”
Alex sets his plate down on the milk crate. He’s not hungry anymore. “Marilyn Monroe is dead.”
“AND FAMOUS. DEAD AND FAMOUS, ALEX, YOU DON’T SAY NO.”
Alex laughs. Gemma is actively absurd, but she’s also a little frightening right now.
“I’m thinking about it,” he finally says, because he is, even if not for any of the reasons Gemma is telling him to. But for all his hesitation, his instincts are telling him to do this. Alex trusts his instincts, even if he doesn’t know what’s going to come of all this. Besides, she’s not going to stop being scary unless he assures her he’s already working towards yes.
- Writer
