SEPTEMBER 1992
THIS IS THE TRUTH, AS I’D ONLY ADMIT IT TO YOU, MY love: We all stopped talking when Harper Moore walked into the room.
I’d been at Central Art and Drama School a single day, and I was so desperate to feel it: that moment of knowing I’d made it.
That here was a place I belonged. But my dreams were so all-encompassing that drama school was barely a blip on the map, and even as I sat there waiting for the relief of having finally landed, I was already focused on all the other places CADS might propel me.
The applications had been a stressful haze of video tapes and essays, my disinterested parents snarking about internships and groaning every time I had another audition, until I stopped telling them completely and just headed off by myself, denting my inheritance from my grandfather on eye-watering train fares.
He wouldn’t mind. In fact, part of me suspected he’d left it to me for this reason.
Even from the grave, he was determined to be my number one fan.
When I got the letter, I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t have anyone left to tell who wouldn’t crush the fledgling happiness blossoming in my chest. And I’d been hungry for so long I didn’t know how to stop and feel the satisfaction.
I’d ended up with three offers but no real decision to make.
I knew it was CADS—prestigious but cutthroat, a place where the admissions process was only the first hurdle and far from the sensible choice if I had my heart set on something as outlandish as graduating.
But I had wanted it from the moment I entered those ornate wooden arches.
The school’s premises were just a few doors down from where The Globe had once stood, and you could feel the prestige the moment you stepped into the CADS theater, with its painted dome ceiling, its crimson velvet seats, and its deeply impractical backstage area that connected through the auditorium, like all that mattered was the stage; everything else was an afterthought.
CADS felt like somewhere you could become somebody … or at least fake it until you did.
And I was certainly faking it: perched at the end of a bench, nervously toying with the strap of a bag so laden with textbooks and notebooks it was a wonder it hadn’t snapped.
I wasn’t the Nadine Heywood yet; just Nadine—anxious scholar, socially inept, and beautifully desperate.
My hair was still its natural strawberry blond; frizzy curls scraped back into a bun, and I wore the same denim shorts and oversized T-shirt as half the girls present.
“You think you’ve completed the hard part,” our lecturer intoned, and no, my pulse pounded because I didn’t think the hard part was over at all.
Surely at some point, an academy this prestigious would realize what a mistake it had made letting in the kid who’d never had any sort of formal training.
Everyone here likely had connections or generational talent; and my family’s greatest contribution to the arts was the artifice in their every forced smile.
I’d be out before I could even start to make those smiles real.
“But here you will be tested. Pushed to your limits. And asked to leave if you fail to keep us interested.” He clapped his hands—something I’d seen him do in tapes. Clive Bellingham, legendary Shakespearean director, now, somehow, my own teacher. Christ. This was real. “Let’s begin.”
Excerpts were handed out. Monologues for us to prepare for the following week. Two of each—and everyone began muttering as they realized we would be up against one another. Of course we were. How could we receive feedback without a comparison point, a mirror to move against?
And there I was at the end of the row, holding two sheets because somehow, impossibly, we were an odd number.
And then Harper breezed in—late, effortless, and bringing the room to a standstill.
I could never work out why she had that effect on us—the caught breaths and halting conversation, the drawing of every single eye.
She was beautiful, but most people in that room were.
CADS taught one of the most competitive drama courses in the world, but in 1992 it was clear the “stage presence” they’d auditioned us for paid particular attention to jawlines.
We didn’t know then that Harper was the daughter of Greta Liao and Declan Moore, though it wouldn’t have mattered if we had.
Liao and Moore were hardly the most famous ancestors of anyone in that room, nor the wealthiest or best connected.
That was the hardest part of being at CADS; it was a precursor to the industry as a whole: that we were all incredible, talented, beautiful people and together it made us ordinary.
Clive had turned to arrange his notes, the only one not impacted by Harper’s immediate, unshakable presence.
She slipped beside me. There was barely any space left on the bench so her bare thigh pressed against mine, warm and soft and as immediate as the rest of her.
She plucked the paper from my hands and whispered thanks with the smile that would later make her famous—a girl-next-door, everyone’s-a-friend-you-just-haven’t-met-yet grin.
But acting meant everything to me. I took it very seriously. And while the rest of us might have nearly ruined ourselves in our desperation to secure one of the forty-eight spots in this course, Harper made it clear from the start that she did not particularly value hers.
We were competition from the off.
But if there was a rivalry to be found, it was only this: I cared too much, and Harper did not care at all.
———
Our first day continued in a dizzying haze of introductions and exercises, so that by the end I had chanted tongue twisters and clutched hands and zipped, zapped, and zoomed every classmate, but I had not truly spoken to any of them.
Harper was the first, dabbing on a watermelon Lip Smacker and sliding her hair free from the elastic band she’d slung it into. “Are you coming to the pub?”
As though this were predetermined. Maybe it was.
Maybe they’d discussed it over lunch while I’d darted past her to student services to inquire about tour guide opportunities.
We weren’t allowed part-time work—CADS felt it would “interfere with the flow and fecundity of our studies.” But we could pick up odd jobs—like showing prospective students around campus.
I imagined I could do it well, as instantly enamored as I’d been with the school.
I knew I should say yes to her—though admittedly Harper had a way about her that made yes the only thing you wanted to say.
(I know, I know. It obviously did not remain that way for long.)
But I could picture it: clustered into a tiny oaken pub on a street corner, cracking jokes around a table of my peers, trying to work out who would take who home by the end of the night, maybe even stumbling back with one of them myself.
My bedroom back in Yorkshire was covered in posters of beautiful young actors and actresses—a pursuit I’d finally begun to admit wasn’t entirely scholarly—and now I was surrounded by high cheekbones and waifish silhouettes—my mood boards incarnate.
But I could also envision awkward silences and hesitant excuses not to buy rounds and all that desperation festering inside me leaking.
Before this, I’d skirted by at school, where my anxiety about getting it all wrong was construed as a haughty aloofness that made me if not cool, then adjacent to it.
The closest I’d come to anyone was a boy on my school bus who loaned me his Discman when he wasn’t using it (and stopped when he began dating Rachel Watts, who thought sharing music was a step away from sharing saliva) and a girl who painted the sets at my local community theater (she’d broken up with me before I even realized we were dating—and yet, still, somehow left me thoroughly heartbroken).
At CADs I thought I might actually crack deeper, true companionship rather than the utility of the past. I’d pictured study groups, rambunctious debates about our favorite performances, and gatherings of hastily run lines that would stretch until sunrise.
All of it centered around the one thing no one else in my life has ever understood: my obsession with the craft.
Well, almost no one else—but dead grandfathers don’t count.
“I have to go to the library, I’m afraid,” I said, slinging that oh-so-heavy bag across my shoulder.
I’d visited the secondhand shop off campus before class and rushed to buy the substantially discounted, severely battered copies before someone else got there and left me with the “good as new” ones with their “nearly new” price tags.
“The library,” Harper scoffed. “It’s the first day. What do you possibly have to revise?”
I did not have to revise. I had to photocopy pages of plays.
CADS didn’t let you check out texts for core classes.
You could only read them on library premises.
But in the flurry of professors printing syllabi and sports societies demanding posters, they had temporarily dropped charges for copier use. I intended to make the most of it.
But I didn’t want to explain that, the same way I didn’t want to explain the relief I felt at evading an evening of carefully calculating the cheapest drink and trying to subtly hop the barriers for the tube.
So I shrugged instead. “I just really don’t want to waste my time here.”
I didn’t mean it as an indictment on anyone else, but I saw the shutters fall across Harper’s face all the same. Her eyes fell to that monologue in my hand—something cold crystallizing in her gaze. “Well, alright then. Have a valuable night.”
———