NOVEMBER 1992
I’D LIKE TO SAY I DON’T REMEMBER HER. THAT MY TIME at CADS was about me and not her.
But Harper was CADS. Harper and her ripped jeans and loose pages scrunched up in a fraying tote bag, like that sheet of inky black hair alone didn’t speak to nutrition and wealth I could only dream of.
Harper carefully removing her polished gold hoops at the start of each class just to throw them into a grubby pencil case.
Harper and her secondhand plays, beat-up copies with annotations she meticulously erased, like her performance, might become a palimpsest too.
Harper is practically all I remember of CADS.
And with our weekends spent in rehearsals with a constant rotation of scene partners, she was inescapable.
We were finally paired together as autumn fled the city, abandoning London to such a sharp and sudden winter that our breaths clouded the studios and we all layered ourselves in scarves and jumpers between scenes, picturing ourselves already on a set in a foiled coat, sitting in a chair printed with our names.
We’d been assigned a character and were supposed to use the Chekhov technique to consider them from all angles. It was Clive, so of course they were Shakespearean characters, and it was Harper, to whom things the rest of us coveted seemed to naturally flow. So we had Lady Macbeth.
“When are you free?” Harper asked after class, throwing herself onto the bench beside me to lace up her combat boots.
“Whenever,” I shrugged. “We could just do it now?”
Harper paused, her fingers hesitating on the laces. “You’re free whenever? Nadine, tell me you don’t mean that literally.”
I regarded her—it was clear she was trying to condescend, and I didn’t know how to react with anything that wasn’t outright scorn.
“Alright,” Harper said when I didn’t reply. “Saturday. We’ll do our assessment, and then you’ll come with me to Lewis Stamper’s birthday party at Langstone House.”
I was already being forced to spend time with Harper—I didn’t need an evening in a members’ club with her whole posse of wannabe socialites.
“I won’t, but thank you.”
“Nadine!” She did that often—would say my name a dozen times while speaking to me.
Watch her on any late-night talk show, and you’ll notice she still does the same, like she could force some false sense of intimacy.
“Lewis’s father is the head of the Stamper Agency.
There are going to be agents, directors, and producers there. ”
This was marginally interesting but not particularly convincing. “I don’t think I’m going to land an agent or my first role because I met the right person at a party, Harper.”
“Oh, don’t be naive.”
Making connections was something that led me to apply for drama school. I was from the middle of nowhere and knew no one in the arts. Until I went to CADS, I didn’t really know how films got made.
This could take me to that next that felt so intangible. This could give it shape.
But I also knew you only got one shot with some of those people. Better I woo them onstage than stumble over my own feet at a party.
“They’ll be invited to our performances,” I protested. “There will be after-parties. They can see me in action, which I imagine will garner far more opportunity than desperately schmoozing in a bar.”
Harper smiled like she found this idea adorable. “You can play the idealist, Nadine. I’m sure the whole ‘dedicated to the craft thing’ will be a good hook for promo, but don’t actually fall for it. Look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under it and all that. I’ll see you Saturday.”
———
“Well, well, well,” Harper tsked as I sprinted into the studio that Saturday. “Nadine Heywood, five minutes late. This is unheard of. This is apocalyptic. I must tell the dean!”
“We don’t have a dean,” I growled as I caught my breath.
“Well, thank god you let me know; I was just about to sound the alert.”
“Are you done?”
Harper smiled, mischief lighting her eyes. “I wouldn’t want to burn myself out of all my hilarity before this eve.”
“Oh, is hilarity what you were going for?” I asked, letting my bag fall to the floor and stretching out my arms. I was sure Harper hadn’t used those five minutes to warm up, but she didn’t rush to do it now either.
Harper cocked her head to the side. “Everything’s okay though? You’re alright?”
“I was participating in a study for the psychology students at UCL. They ran over. So I am as fine as you can be, having been probed about your avoidant attachment style and whether your mother hugged you enough.”
Harper’s eyes grew wide. “What on earth would possess you to sign up for torture like that?”
“The fifty-pound compensation for participating,” I snapped—still irritable from the study and still, evidently, in the headspace to reveal my every problem. “Which I’ll need if I’m expected to buy a single drink at Langstone House this evening. Are we done now? Can we get to Macbeth?”
“Oh,” she said, clearly realizing the particulars of my situation, and I regretted saying anything at all.
Then she pivoted, a crooked smile falling in place like it might lighten the mood.
“Are they still open? I quite like the idea of startling some poor research assistant with a few childhood anecdotes.” She mimed pushing glasses up her nose.
“Harper Moore is an outlier who must be disregarded.”
Damn it. Something about that softened me a little. Harper was easier to hate from a distance, when she was a blank slate for me to paste all my undeserving, privileged, and lazy labels onto.
Before me she was hesitant smile and awkward humor and someone who was trying.
“Yeah, that article that went around seemed … interesting,” I said, because I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t seen it.
Harper shrugged. “I respect the hustle, I suppose. Greta aged out of modeling and became a sort of maternal guide for the new models on the scene. I just wish the mother on the page was the one I got, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I do.”
She looked at me, and I thought, God, am I really about to do this? And then the words were spilling.
“My grandfather was the one that was into all this,” I said, waving my hand at the stage before us. “No one else really cares. They don’t care about much actually. My mother says I feel things too deeply. But I think you have to if you’re going to create art like this, right?”
I’d never tried to articulate their indifference—and I couldn’t believe I was saying it to Harper of all people. But I was at least aware my aversion to her was childish and based on very little. And she’d trusted me first.
And maybe I was desperate for someone else who might understand too.
She pulled a face. “In my experience the only people who tell people they’re too anything aren’t much worth listening to. So your grandfather, is that who made you want to do this?”
The words stuck in my throat.
“I used to spend the holidays with my grandparents.” My parents would go away together and leave me there each year.
I was so independent I’d have a better time without them, my mother insisted.
(She did that a lot, actually, told me how I would feel about something, like she could make it so.) “My grandfather had a whole cinema set up in the cellar.”
When those projectors rolled, he came alight. Me adoring it too? It delighted him. Whole hours of just the two of us, the rustle of his peppermints, the slightly burnt microwave popcorn, and my tiny head resting against his knee as we reveled in the magic of a screen.
I’ve never felt as loved as when a film score played.
“He died a few years ago.” I kept my voice steady, though all this emotional detangling was constricting me, piece by piece.
Heart attack. Sudden and painless. My parents beside me at the funeral, holding each other’s hands, passing each other tissues.
I was sobbing so violently I was nearly choking.
An aunt noticed and reached forward to pat my shoulder, to pass me a tissue of my own, and—
I swallowed, hard. Grandfathers die. It’s what they do. There was nothing left but to make his life worth it in every step I took. “He knew I wanted to go to drama school. His inheritance paid for the tuition, so I just … I have to make sure it’s worth it.”
Harper nodded, like she got the unsaid parts, and I felt so raw I’d have rather fled right then and there than stayed another moment.
But then, like we’d bartered an exchange, she spoke.
“My mother’s family moved to San Francisco from China about a year before she landed her modeling contract.
She met my father when Moore and Halton were sponsoring fashion week.
It was just as my grandparents were moving back to Chongqing, and I think she rushed into marrying him just to avoid being alone.
She even moved to the Cotswolds to be with him—I mean, who chooses anywhere over San Francisco?
But my whole life feels like it’s been a test to prove she made the right decision.
I’ve always believed she loves me about as much as she can brag about me. ”
“Is that why you’re here? To give her something to brag about?”
She leaned in, almost conspiratorially, and a stray strand of her hair ghosted across my skin, featherlight and prickling, her raspberry-scented shampoo absurdly sweet.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “I’m here because my mother has written about me my entire life, and I’d like to cement my own name. I want to be so famous Greta becomes the anecdote in my interviews. And I like acting well enough. I’m good at it, and I do so love being the best.”
I managed to suppress a wince, but only just. Didn’t this just confirm it? Harper didn’t care. But she was still talking—and she was right, she was good at this—because captivated, I leaned in too.