Then Wilhelmina
Then WILHELMINA
G olden light in my eyes, tiny voices screaming out in the shadowed audience, and an iconic purple wig pinned to my head, I take a bow, and season six is a couple episodes away from done.
A bell rings. The stage lights fade and the work lights take over. Our soundstage is just a box full of seats again—not a Baldovian palace.
“That’s a wrap on Marnie, Maybe , episode seventeen, season six, folks.”
I’m expecting it to be our director. His voice, warm and patient, has pushed me gently through these last five years of glittering chaos. He’s made me feel calm.
But the voice slithering through our speaker system is that of Harris Bastian, our executive producer. The phony, impatient sound of it prickles the hair at the back of my neck. I hate Harris Bastian.
“How about another big hand for our cast and crew.”
That’s my cue. Smile. Wave. Tune him out.
Little starry eyes blink excitedly at me from the audience bleachers and I head over, signing lunch boxes and spiral notebooks with my face on them. I don’t know why, but lately, I feel my stomach dropping low inside me any time I see a Marnie poster or a (hideous) Marnie doll. I want more than this, and I’m also scared to let it go.
“Wil, production wants you backstage,” an assistant tells me mid-autograph. I wave goodbye to the crowd, letting her lead me off.
Sometimes, after tapings we get notes. I head into our director Bill’s office, but I see he’s not alone.
Harris stands behind him to the left, arms folded, expression blank. Our showrunner sits on a chair to my right. It’s her face that tells me to start worrying.
“Hey, Wil, take a seat,” says Bill.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
Harris snorts. “I don’t know what this production is for, Bill, let’s just lay it out there.”
If my stomach could fall out of my butt, it would. I wish they’d waited until I could get changed. In a room full of adults wearing normal clothes, I look like someone who just won a competition where you try to put on as many outfits as you can in thirty seconds. Plus—the purple wig. I hate the purple wig, but it’s my character’s identity in a way that nothing else is.
“Should I get Daxon?” I ask. My voice is tremulous and small, like a child on timeout. The empty chair next to me looks especially lonely without my best friend and co-star sitting there.
I can’t really remember a time that he wasn’t there with me. We auditioned for the Magicworks network, for our show, as twelve-year-old child actor monsters, seated side-by-side. I remember seeing him in the waiting room. He was shorter than me. A little pudgy. Brown curls that could probably stand to be trimmed. And friendly, funny eyes. A soft face with a prankster’s smile.
We were instant friends.
Bill’s soft frown tells me that, whatever this is, it’s bad news.
“You’ve worked really hard the past five years and I want you to know we’ve seen that, we appreciate it, we love you for it,” Bill says.
Harris pulls the ball cap from his head and ruffles his thinning hair with an impatient, shallow breath. “Today, Bill.”
Bill’s eyes hit the desk. He chews his lip. “We just received word that we’ve been canceled. No final season. We’ll film just these last couple episodes coming down the pike, and that’ll be it.”
I stare at him.
My entire world is crumbling, cracking, giving way. Since I could stand, since the first word out of my mouth, I’ve wanted to be a performer. I worked so fucking hard for it. And, five years ago, I got it. Not only that, I really rolled around in it. Covered myself in glittering stardust and, for a little while there, I could fly if I wanted to.
And now...
“What?” I say.
“Look, it’s a network decision. It happens. We’ll go live with the news tonight. ’Til then, don’t say anything to anyone about it.” The way Harris says it is like he’s sweeping something gross into a dustpan and dumping it into the trash. “Igotta make a call.” He leaves the room.
“I’ll give you a moment,” says Bill, and the room empties.
But the last thing I want is to be alone. I bolt up off the chair and crash through the door with my sights set on our stage. Maybe Dax is still there.
We’re canceled .
There’s only one reason why a hit show like Marnie, Maybe gets canceled—because its star isn’t the brightest in the sky anymore.
I walk as far and as fast as I can, out the door of this row of offices, across the lot where our neat line of trailers has sat since day one. It’s started raining. I hurry past teamsters moving set pieces, and hair and makeup assistants sharing a cigarette under a tree to keep dry.
Can’t find Daxon Avery? Usually, it’s not hard. Follow the sound of people laughing, and he’ll be in the middle, glowing and magnificent like a bonfire on a cold night.
Benny from Security is monitoring the stage door for Studio 7B. When he sees me, damp from the rain, he opens the door without asking any questions.
“Thanks, Benny,” I murmur with a wave, and head inside.
It’s cleared out by now. No more audience, no more crew. It’s quiet. Dark.
Above the seats, up high, there are posters for shows that have filmed here. My face is enormous, hanging up along the back wall, smiling, glittering. I’m young in that picture. I mean, younger than I am now. Thirteen, probably. From our first season.
I feel a responsibility to tell her—that little girl who had just lost her mother, and lost herself until she found it on this stage—that it’s all over now. And it’s her fault.
“Wil!”
I shut my eyes, my back to him. “Did they tell you?”
Dax’s feet come to a squeaky stop. “I just heard.”
I can’t think of anything else to say. My fingers fish in my wig for the pins, pulling them roughly out. One snags painfully on my hair, so I growl and throw it across the dark stage.
“Want help?” Dax asks.
“No,” I say sharply. I turn to look at him. And it’s funny how lately, when our eyes connect, my stomach bottoms out. My face goes suddenly hot. There are so many new things that stand out to me now when Daxon Avery looks down into my face. For one, he’s never been taller than me—that’s new. The angles in his jaw? New. The nearly-there stubble across his chin? New.
Forever, he’s been just Dax. Next to me in the makeup chair doing silly impressions. Discreetly ripping the corners off of his script pages at our table reads, balling them up and tossing them at Harris’s coffee mug until he lands one. My best friend in the world.
Now he’s seventeen, and tall, and gorgeous. And when I’m not expecting him, when he sneaks up on me or comes around a corner and we’re suddenly face-to-face, my heart starts hammering.
“Come here,” he says.
“Dax, I’m fine.”
“Come here.”
I close the distance between us, coming to stand right in front of him, then turning so he can pull out the last pins. My eyes fill with tears.
This set built us. And all of the people around it, our writers, director, crew, they took us from chatty, over-confident little shitheads to actors. From here, we were supposed to keep rising. Moving forward. Riding high into our last season and on to the next big thing, a project where I wasn’t a princess-turned-pop-star in disguise. But what now?
“This is so fucked,” I breathe.
“Extremely,” says Dax. He pulls away the last pins with gentle fingers and peels off the wig. I turn around once it’s off, removing the wig cap.
“Feels good to get that off,” I say, but instantly start to cry.
Dax folds me into a hug, just us two alone in the dark in the middle of Studio 7B. He pulls back a little, looking down into my face, and brushes the tears off my cheeks with his thumb. “It’s not over,” he says quietly. “Not yet.”
Our show? Me? This warm, fluttering thing between us now that I can’t name?
Benny calls for us to clear out.
“You’re pretty optimistic for someone who just got canceled,” I say.
“Honestly, let’s blame Dougie. He’s a smug little asshole. He had it coming.” He’s grinning, but there’s something shadowy circling beneath the surface. Like maybe he really does blame his character.
Dougie is Marnie’s best friend. Her partner in crime, the one person who knows her secret—that she’s moonlighting as a pop star.
The show started with Dougie. His ordinary world getting flipped on its axis by the new girl in town, a princess—Marnie—and their clunky misadventures through school, friends, life in general, plus the added wackiness of Marnie’s duties as a royal and her secret singing career.
But it’s surely not Dougie who ended everything for us. Sweet, goofy Dougie, cuter and cuter as the seasons trickled on. The grounded foundation every show needs in order to let the audience fly away with the purple hurricane that is a character like Marnie.
It’s my name in the title. This is because of me.
“You know what,” I say, “I think you’re right. It’s definitely Dougie’s fault.” I wrinkle my nose at him and Dax glares playfully back. “Come over tonight,” I say. We make our way to our trailers, parked across from each other. The way they’ve been since we were thirteen. “Dad’s cooking.”
“It’s me!” Daxon’s voice calls from the foyer.
“Dining room!” I say. One of my favorite rooms. There are pictures of me as a little girl with Mom and Dad together. Afew with just Dad. And even some with Dax are framed along the walls.
One leaps out at me as I pass it. Dad and me on set sometime in the first season, laughing into the lens. Having him play Marnie’s dad has been everything. My safety net. He wasn’t on set tonight when the news broke, but by the time I got home, he’d heard.
“What’s he making?” Dax asks. We take placemats from the pile at the edge of the table and set them at each place setting.
“Pot pie.”
“Daxon!” Dad booms. They shake and Dad claps his hand to Dax’s shoulder. For the first few years, it was just Dad and me. And then there was Dax, and in some weird way, it’s like he got a son. “Jesus Christ, save some bone structure for the rest of us.”
Oh my god. I have a hard enough time pretending I don’t notice things like Daxon’s jaw. The space from his throat up to his ears. How it’s angular and taut now. Regardless, I don’t need it pointed out. “ Dad .”
“I’ll see what I can do.” Dax plays along.
“Good man,” Dad says, taking a seat. He pours himself a glass of wine and clears his throat. “So, I have some news.”
It’s in the way that his mouth twitches downwards a fraction of an inch, like he’s bracing for my reaction, that tells my stomach to flush suddenly cold. Something’s wrong. Something other than Marnie being canceled. “What’s going on?” I say.
Dad sips his wine and pulls a face, ignoring me. “Daxon, word of advice for you, don’t bother with the fancy shit. All wine tastes the same: like disappointment pissed in your grape juice. Write that down.”
“ Dad ,” I say, my voice sharp. I set my fork down. Lean forward in my seat.
Dad looks from Daxon to me, then smiles slowly at his plate. My heartbeat is loud in my ears. But if it’s bad news, he doesn’t think so. “I met someone.”