The Silver Bracelet

Chapter 7 — Screen Star

The Television City Hotel was not what Vera had expected. She had imagined, vaguely, something glamorous — a lobby with marble floors and uniformed bellhops, the kind of hotel that existed in movies about old Hollywood. Instead it was a fourteen-story concrete tower on a side street in Burbank, functional and faintly depressing, with a parking lot full of rental cars and a lobby that smelled of coffee and carpet cleaner. The woman at the front desk, who wore a hemisphere Pictures lanyard around her neck, did not look up from her computer when Vera gave her name.

"Thorne. You're the replacement. Room 612. Elevators around the corner. Production meeting at six in the Green Room — that's on the soundstage, the shuttle leaves the lobby at five thirty. Don't be late." She slid a keycard across the counter without looking up. "Welcome to Screen Star."

Vera took the keycard. She took the elevator to the sixth floor. She let herself into a small, clean, anonymous room with a single bed, a desk, a television, and a window that looked out onto the back of another building. She set her canvas duffel on the bed. She stood for a long moment in the middle of the room, in her thrift-store coat and her Gap outlet sweater, with her silver bracelet clicking softly against her hip, and tried to understand that this was, in fact, happening.

It was happening because a man she had known for three weeks — a man who had not, in those three weeks, said a single kind word to her — had decided, for reasons she did not fully understand, to spend what must have been a considerable amount of money and a considerable amount of influence to put her on a stage. She did not know why. She suspected, with the wary instinct of a woman who had been raised by Maggie Thorne, that there was a cost she had not yet been shown. But she was here, and the room was clean, and the bed was hers, and the plane ticket had been first-class, and the small envelope of cash Hargrove had pressed into her hand at the airport had been more than she had ever held in her life.

She unpacked her duffel. She showered. She put on the only outfit she had brought that was not scrubs: a black long-sleeved t-shirt, dark jeans, the pair of low boots she had bought at the Bridgehampton outlet. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. The face that looked back at her was the same unremarkable face she had studied that first morning in the staff wing. She could not, looking at it, imagine what a camera would see in it that she did not.

She went down to the lobby at five twenty-five. The shuttle was a black van with the Hemisphere Pictures logo on the side. There were already six women in it, all roughly her age, all in outfits considerably more considered than hers. They looked at her when she climbed in, registered her as the replacement, and looked away. Two of them resumed a conversation about an agent. A third was on her phone. A fourth was staring out the window with the focused, terrified blankness that Vera recognized, with a small start, as the same expression she had been wearing in her own bathroom mirror ten minutes ago.

"Hey," the woman beside her said. She was small and dark-haired, with a quick, sharp face and a Philadelphia accent. "I'm Nina. You're the new one."

"Vera."

"What'd you do before this, Vera."

"I was a carer."

Nina raised an eyebrow. "Like, old people?"

"Private client."

"Wow." Nina looked at her with new interest. "Okay. So you're not, like, an actress."

"I'm not anything, yet."

"Fair enough." Nina stuck out her hand. "Welcome to the meat grinder. The trick is, don't sleep with Phoenix Rayne. Everyone tries. He's gay, by the way, but they don't believe it. Also, don't eat the craft services bagels. They've been there since Tuesday."

Vera shook her hand. She filed both pieces of information, and the name Phoenix Rayne, and the term meat grinder, and tried not to think about the fact that her hands, in her lap, were shaking.

* * *

The soundstage was enormous. Vera had not, in her life, been inside a building this large that was not a hospital or a warehouse. The ceiling was a chaos of rigging and lights; the floor was concrete covered in black cable; at the far end, raised on a platform, was a set designed to look like a living room, with two long curved couches facing each other under a fake window. Crew members in black t-shirts moved through the space with the unhurried precision of bees. A woman with a clipboard and a headset was standing at the front of the platform, shouting something about sightlines.

The six other women from the shuttle joined a larger group near a folding table of coffee and pastries. Vera counted nineteen of them in total, all between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, all dressed with the careful, expensive plainness that meant they were trying to look like they were not trying. She was, she registered with a small, bleak flicker, the only one in the room who actually was not trying.

"All right." The woman with the clipboard had climbed onto the platform and was addressing them with the brisk, professional warmth of a flight attendant giving the safety demonstration. "My name is Marcy Klein. I am the showrunner. Welcome to Cycle Nine of Screen Star. You will be here for the next twelve weeks, unless you are eliminated, in which case you will be here for fewer. You will be on camera from the moment you leave this soundstage until the moment you return to the hotel at night. There are cameras in the hotel. There are cameras in the shuttle. There are cameras in your rooms. There are not cameras in the bathrooms. Please do not test this."

A small, nervous laugh went through the room.

"Your mentors this cycle are Mr. Phoenix Rayne, Ms. Aurelia Hart, and Mr. Evan Hamilton. Each of you will be assigned a mentor in week two, after the first cut. Until then, you will perform for all three. The first performance is on Friday. You will each be given a monologue. You will have forty-eight hours to prepare it. The monologues are at the front table. Take one. Read it. Rehearse it. Do not, under any circumstances, ask your mentor for help with it. They will offer. Refuse."

She paused. "One more thing. The internet will, within the next forty-eight hours, decide what it thinks of you. There is nothing you can do about this. You cannot control it. You cannot predict it. The only thing you can control is what you do on that stage on Friday. Do that. Forget the rest."

She stepped down. The room broke into a careful, milling chaos. Vera went to the front table and took the single sheet of paper at the end of the row. The monologue was from a play she did not know. It was a woman speaking to a man she had loved and was about to leave; it was two pages long; it ended with the line, "I am not leaving you. I am leaving the room you have made of me."

Vera read it three times, standing at the side of the room. The third time, her hands had stopped shaking.

* * *

She did not meet Phoenix Rayne until Thursday. She had, of course, seen him — on the soundstage on Wednesday, when he had come out of a production meeting with Marcy Klein and walked past the rehearsal room without looking in; in the craft services tent on Thursday morning, when he had been drinking coffee with the show's host and laughing at something she had said, his profile in the California light as clean and unre mark a copy editor's pencil. She had registered, both times, the small, uncomfortable jolt of recognition she had felt the first time she had seen his face on the show's promotional poster in the lobby. He looked like someone she had known once. She could not, for the life of her, place who.

On Thursday afternoon she was alone in Rehearsal Room C, running the monologue for the fourteenth time, when the door opened and Phoenix Rayne walked in. He was carrying a bottle of water and a dog-eared copy of the same monologue she was holding. He stopped when he saw her.

"Sorry," he said. "I didn't know anyone was in here."

"I'm almost done."

"No, no. Stay." He set his water on the piano bench and leaned against the wall, his arms folded. "You're the replacement."

"Yes."

"I'm Phoenix."

"I know."

He smiled, a small, wry smile that did not reach his eyes. "Everyone knows. I keep forgetting." He tilted his head. "Run it for me."

Vera hesitated. The monologue was still in her hand. She had not, in four days, shown it to anyone. Nina had offered to listen; she had refused. The other contestants had been trading performances like currency; she had stayed out of it. She had not, in fact, spoken more than a hundred words to anyone since she had arrived.

"I'm not your mentor yet," Phoenix said, reading her face. "I won't be assigned until next week. I just want to see what you have."

"If you don't mind," Vera said carefully, "I'd rather wait until Friday."

He raised an eyebrow. Then, slowly, he smiled — a real smile this time, surprised and faintly delighted. "You're the first one in nine cycles who's said that to me."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be." He uncapped his water. "Most of them would kill to have me listen to them rehearse. It's a strategic move. I'm assumed to have influence I don't, in fact, have. The judging is anonymous until the live show."

"I'm not doing it strategically," Vera said. "I just — I don't know what I have yet. I'd like to find out on Friday."

He looked at her for a long, evaluating moment. She had the curious sense, standing there in the rehearsal room with her monologue in her hand and the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, that he was seeing her the way Samuel had seen her, three weeks earlier, in the front hall of the Crowley Estate — not as a contestant, not as a replacement, not as the sum of her clothes and her resume, but as something else. Someone else. A person he had not, until this moment, expected to find.

"Fair," he said at last. "I'll see you Friday, Miss —"

"Thorne."

"Miss Thorne." He capped his water. "One piece of advice, since you didn't ask for it. The line at the end — 'I am leaving the room you have made of me' — most of the contestants this cycle are going to play it as anger. Don't. Play it as grief. The woman isn't angry at the man. She's mourning the version of herself she built to fit him. Anger is loud. Grief is quiet. The camera hates loud."

He turned and walked out before she could answer. Vera stood alone in the rehearsal room, holding her monologue, and for the first time since she had arrived in Los Angeles, she felt the small, electric current of recognition run through her — the recognition that she was, in fact, exactly where she was supposed to be, and that the man who had put her here had known it before she had.

She read the last line again. She closed her eyes. She tried, for the first time, to play it as grief.

The camera, on Friday, would hate loud. So would she.