MARCH 1993 #3
Which was when chatter echoed from up ahead, a door opening and closing and spilling the sound of the lodge out into the woods for us to follow.
Zoe Holland was obviously going to get the role of the Bride.
I wanted the Mother. She was the emotional heart of the whole story.
Young people’s love was ordinary, hundreds of roles in a thousand different stories.
But the Mother was a part with teeth, the sort I wouldn’t be able to play for another twenty years outside of these halls.
I wanted to portray a woman who had suffered and would suffer again, in all her strength, hope, and devastation.
And knowing what lengths Harper was willing to go to be assigned it, I determined to show her just what a combination of talent and hard work could get me.
———
I had never prepared for an audition with this intensity—not even for all of those drama school applications.
The pressure of the end of term cracked a lid on something in the school.
You could not walk the halls for method acting Bottoms colliding into you, unable to see past their donkey’s masks.
Boys in cafés would hit on you in iambic pentameter.
Tents littered the small lawn outside our lecture halls with people who had decided the small, dying square was the ideal place to “connect with the themes of nature and forestry” that all our plays shared.
“Only at CADS, eh?” Ivan said through his laughter, handing me the flower a passing sprite had gifted him. “I have another present, actually. Behold!”
He’d had it ring bound, a service I was pretty certain the university printers only offered for dissertations.
Do You Hear Me, Adeline?
By Ivan Drozdov
“Oh my god,” I said, snatching it from him even though he was holding it out for me.
Ivan had been obsessed with his screenplay but refused to tell me anything about it. And this was an appalling time to give it to me, when I could not focus on anything but Blood Wedding.
Which is why I am not merely being kind when I say it was genius.
I feigned enthusiasm without reservation, went home intending to sate my curiosity with a single page, and finished it an hour later. Then I grabbed my pens, formed a neat color-coded key at the front, and scrawled all over it.
I phoned Ivan at three in the morning.
“Ivan, what the fuck?”
He chuckled. “That bad?”
“Don’t fish. You know it’s brilliant. I know it’s brilliant. I just … didn’t realize it would be this brilliant.”
“Brilliant then, that’s the final verdict?”
I didn’t know where to begin. On its surface, it was a locked-room horror.
Scientists at a remote base who find something they shouldn’t.
But it was a facade, because the real monsters were the people within.
Ivan had managed to explore our potential for darkness, our capacity for hope, and our innate fear of the unknown—especially that living within the depths of one another.
He’d written a poignant love story. A tale of friendship. And a slasher.
All with crackling dialogue and cues I could see in motion. I found myself acting out the expressions as I read, like they could not be contained to the page.
“It’s a shit title,” I finally said.
There was silence on the other end. What Ivan and I did most during our film marathons was critique them, challenging ourselves to find fault with even the best. To work out where space for us existed in this industry, where we might find opportunity.
It wasn’t all that different from how I used to watch them with my grandfather.
When Ivan spoke, his voice was choked: “That’s all?”
“It’s not a horror-movie title; it’s the shout of a raging misogynist at his long-suffering wife and—”
“Nadine, is that all?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s my only point.”
The silence returned. “I want you to be Adeline.”
“Oh.”
I didn’t really know what to say. It was too early to commit to a thing like that—and with Ivan I knew the promise would be binding. Was he intending a self-filmed project on campus or an indie blockbuster in five years’ time once he had developers secured?
“We’re filming this summer,” he continued.
“Which is quick, I know. But I want this out there now. I’ve got investors lined up, not loads, of course, but enough for a small budget, and I think we could make it work.
I sent the manuscript out just before Christmas, and it was …
It was so quick, Nadine. All of it just fell into place.
But I knew I wanted you to be Adeline, so I didn’t want to present it to you until that was as secure a position as it could be. ”
I felt dazed from the avalanche of success he listed as though they were university assignments neatly ticked.
“I don’t need an answer right now. Just think about it.”
———
The week before auditions, everyone’s stress reached new peaks.
The drama students weren’t the only ones with life-changing opportunities at their fingertips—there were similar prizes for the Techies, for the students of fine art, fashion, and music.
Second-year students faced an even tighter culling than that after first year.
And third-year students faced their impending graduations.
CADS felt wrought, tense, and like it was actively pushing us to the brink.
Audition times went up and vanished ten minutes later, scraps of paper clinging to the pin like taking the list might stop your competition.
Rumors flew—that audition slots had changed, that certain types of performance gave you the best chance of success, that various students had cheated or would cheat, and, actually, was bribing even cheating, or could they all try that?
I tried to rise above it, which was easy only because I was so distracted by Ivan’s question. I hadn’t been able to get that screenplay out of my mind, to the point that I’d had to give it back to him, making him swear to keep it until after I got through Blood Wedding.
I had a morning slot and arrived at the studio early to warm up. I moved my muscles, rolled my voice through scales, and stretched like it might make all the difference. With time left, I decided to run through lines, though I must have known it better than the playwright himself by that point.
I went back to the changing rooms, rummaging through my tote bag as my fingers brushed plastic.
I pulled it out and clapped my hand over my mouth in time to smother my scream—an honest-to-god, horror-movie scream—in response to the baggy caught between my fingers.
In case it weren’t abundantly clear just how sheltered I was, I’d never even seen drugs in person before. I knew they surrounded me, but no one had even offered me a joint, so apparent was it that my answer would be self-righteous scorn.
Still, I knew white powder in a press-seal bag was not flour.
And I knew it wasn’t fucking cheap.
So whoever had planted it on me wasn’t idly messing around. I flushed it like they did in movies, wrapping the empty bag in a pantyliner and shoving it in the menstrual waste bin.
I grasped my battered copy of the play with shaking hands just as Martin walked into the changing room, one of the caretakers who doubled as campus security on his heels.
“Nadine, I’m really sorry to do this, but we’ve had a report of … something,” he did genuinely sound quite sorry. But there was an edge too, like he truly could believe it of me.
“We need to look through your bag.”
I passed it over a little too quickly, only thinking a moment later to add: “Why?”
He eyed me carefully. “We’ll see.”
The elderly caretaker took his time searching through it, and my heart raced. What if there was more? What if they’d planted something else on me?
“There’s nothing here,” he finally concluded.
Martin nodded, relieved but still watching me with that same suspicion.
Did I look like I was on drugs? Was my nervousness coming across as coke-addled?
God, I was so sheltered I didn’t even know what coke did to you—was it one of those ones that left you wired or tired?
I doubted it would help in an audition, but I also doubted that line of reasoning would save me.
“Okay, thank you Nadine. Sorry about this.”
As he left, the door swung wide enough that I caught an expectant face arching to see through. Lewis Stamper. And then, just as I was about to convince myself I was overreacting, Martin went straight to him and I heard “We didn’t—” before the door fell shut.
He’d reported it. Perhaps even planted it.
But it was very clear who set this up.
I stumbled into my audition still dazed.
“Nadine,” Clive smiled, gesturing to the center of the stage. “Auditioning for Blood Wedding, I believe. The Mother?”
I couldn’t do this. I felt too thrown.
Worse, I felt too innocent, like I could not even conceive of how low some people would crawl to win a part.
I felt naive for not protecting myself better, for leaving my bag right there.
And I felt raw, like it had been a physical close scrape, like I had drained all the luck the world might ever owe me in the single act of that timing.
“No,” I said. “I’m auditioning for the Bride.”
If I felt vulnerable and scared, I might as well use it. And I knew every single part of that play to its finest detail.
Harper’s audition was that afternoon. I had her time memorized.
Which meant she’d be in the gym this morning. Not that I had her schedule down too, some routines just stuck, and the campus gym unnerved me with its familiarity—I’d worked in a leisure center back home, the same flimsy lockers, the same easy tricks.
So yes, alright. You want the truth of the rivalry? I sank to her level.
I stole her fucking necklace.
And I hadn’t even started on the boyfriend yet.
———
Harper’s distress was delicious. She was frantic, begging Martin to move her audition.
“No, I’ve had quite a day, Miss Moore. In the future, you will miss opportunities if you miss auditions. Let that lesson begin today.”