Chasing Summer

Chapter One

My whole life was going to change by Christmas. I could not have predicted that fact on the Friday of the first weekend in

July. I woke up assuming that it would continue as it had been. I’d be writing and producing Christmas movies until actual

Christmas arrived, when it would feel like I’d brought the holiday on myself by sheer accidental manifestation. For three

weeks in December, audiences would watch my films every night and make comments online like “you can really see the film’s

ambition straining against its budget” or “low-key feels like emotional blackmail.”

Over the last few years, I’d become the first person producers called when they needed a Christmas movie guru. I’d write scripts,

and fix scripts that others had ruined, thinking they’d landed an easy gig. I didn’t always get to be on set, but they wanted

me here to do on-the-fly rewrites if things weren’t working out. And things definitely weren’t going smoothly in fake Christmas

world.

But then I met Ben.

The first time I saw Ben he was dressed like a sexy lumberjack and standing beside a fake fir tree. In that moment Ben wasn’t

an actor with chiselled abs and blinding ambition, he was Ian, the affable love interest of Cassie, the other lead actor in

A Crush for Christmas. He did not appear to be overheating despite the fact that the back of the white cotton sundress I’d pulled out of my hamper that morning was soaked with sweat.

Ben appeared calm. In charge. Ian’s value system centred on small-town simplicity, the love of family, the military, and most importantly, the pursuit of holiday magic.

Ben really nails this dumb small-town hunk vibe, I texted Marlon, the props master and my best friend. I knew he’d be grabbing us both craft services “salads” before we

officially broke for lunch, making sure we didn’t miss out on the best berries, baby carrots, and most importantly, oft-pilfered

corn chips and M&M’s for croutons.

Ben really is a smalltown dude, Marlon texted back, from Prince Edward County, apparently. He is the one in ten. Maybe you could crush his Christmas this weekend?!

One in ten was Marlon’s way of saying Ben is straight, fitting Marlon’s theory that one in ten handsome leading men often

hired for holiday romance movies actually like women. Marlon and I were heading to “the county” as soon as we wrapped to spend

the weekend celebrating my sister Kate’s bachelorette. That doesn’t even make sense, I wrote back. What’s his Christmas in this scenario and what body part would anyone even want crushed?

You have no imagination. Which is good because this heterosexual nonsense movie has no need for it.

I was trying to type while maintaining my eyes on the scene where the actors were rehearsing the blocking—a term for where

they should stand while delivering their lines, usually on strips of coloured tape stuck to the floor. Then they shot the

scene.

Hey, I wrote this heterosexual poetry, thank you very much!

The director, Jason, wasn’t having a good day.

Which meant no one was having a good day.

He was not a positive, easygoing leader, just happy to work.

He was the other kind of Christmas movie director—the dude who thinks he deserves to be making art but, goshdarnit, needs to make money with the common people.

The snow machine kept breaking, the fake snow was irritating everyone’s exposed skin, and something—no one knew what—was making the air smell vaguely like sauerkraut.

The AD (assistant director) looked like a hostage.

The second AD had to take off his Apple Watch because it kept telling him to stop running so fast while he was standing in place.

The AD and second AD were both white guys in their thirties who had worn black T-shirts and jeans that day, so Jason kept mixing them up and then yelling at them as though his mix-up was their fault.

Eventually wardrobe gave the second AD a bright yellow ball cap emblazoned with the words Merry for Love!

Jason and I have a weird history, even before becoming passive-aggressive adversaries on this film set. It’s why I wasn’t

feeling as free to state my opinions as I normally would. I am not the type to hold my tongue. At work, anyway. I suppose

I made up for never telling my mother what I feel by telling everyone else I’ve met exactly what the story is.

But back to Jason—we met at the last Writers Guild Christmas party, where I thought we were having a friendly conversation,

like peers do, and he assumed that he was picking me up. When we got outside the venue to scatter into our respective cabs,

he yelled after me that I was a tease. Not in a fun banter way, but in a way that made me lock the Uber door immediately.

He sent me an apology email the next day that read as though it was boilerplate cut-and-paste from his lawyer. The irony that

he was now trying to portray romance was not lost on me.

I was supposed to make A Crush for Christmas with Gary, a sweet, near-retirement director who had made hundreds of TV movies. Gary called me kid and I called him Santa. We had fun at work together. We trusted each other. Jason was a last-minute replacement for Gary,

who’d taken ill. I wasn’t sure he remembered who I was, but he wasn’t friendly. It was only slightly comforting that he wasn’t

nice to anyone.

I watched Ben and “Cassie” deciding which fake tree to pick under fake snow in a parking lot of an industrial area that will be, thanks to cheap CGI, a convincing stand-in for the Vermont wilderness.

It was day ten of filming. But it was Ben’s first day.

We’d filmed all the solo and family scenes first because the actress who played Cassie’s mother—despite being fifteen years older than her—had booked a part playing a murdering philanthropist on Law & Order Toronto.

If you don’t know anything about the acting world, that’s a paycheque that can get you through to the end of tax season.

I could not feel my left butt cheek. Cassie kept screwing up a very simple line: I need the perfect tree, or my sister will freak out.

She kept saying, “My sister will freak it.” I didn’t want to hire her, but she had the right combination of symmetrical facial features and a hip-to-waist ratio that

makes casting directors forgive her lack of reading comprehension. Plus, most importantly, she once played a teen witch on

a very popular American TV show, so she was, as the producers say, our bankable star. Ben was kind to her, though. I stood

up from the crate I’d been sitting on, shook my left leg, hoping to regain blood flow to my butt. I looked through the monitor,

and then back to them.

“It’s OK, just take a breath. This happens to everyone,” he said. Take after take, he made no show in his face that he was

tired, that maybe the script was beneath him, and that he missed playing Hamlet in theatre school. But eventually, when I

saw him turn to allow hair and makeup to powder the sweat off his face, I realized that he was having fun. He didn’t mind the multiple takes. I overheard him whisper “Don’t worry, we all have bad days” when he saw Cassie’s

balled-up fists and near tears. The sun was absolutely beaming down on us. They were in parkas. Some extras huddled nearby

sipping sports drinks, their parkas at their feet waiting for their cue times. Jason had taken off his plaid button-up and

was now wearing a white T-shirt untucked from his khakis. I think that the heat was adding to his rage. It certainly wasn’t

helping the patience and compassion I was trying to rely on in order get through this day.

“Ben is being very patient with you, and that’s nice and everything, but we are on a TIME CLOCK, people. Let’s get the line RIGHT this time, shall we?” Jason was the kind of director you just know would love to have a British accent in moments like this.

“Sorry, sorry,” Cassie whispered.

Ben grabbed her hand and took a deep breath, which she mimicked.

“You’re doing great. You’ve got this.” Ben was excellent in this role. I think both me and the AD with the wife and four kids

were starting to fall in love with him.

“Take 17!” the AD yelled, and Cassie said the line right, but then while cutting down the tree, it fell in the wrong direction,

narrowly avoiding messing up Cassie’s perfect blowout with blood from her own skull.

“Are you OK?” Ben asked, and Cassie laughed in a flirtatious way, patting her head.

“Someone from props better fix this TREE!” the AD yelled, while Jason stormed off. I took this as my cue to jet back to our

hiding spot behind a trailer to find Marlon and the corn chip berry salad he’d prepared in a paper coffee cup with my name

scrawled in marker. As I walked, I made a mental note to tell Ben’s agent that Ben was a real asset, truly pleasant to work

with. The secret is, no matter how handsome or talented you are, that’s what gets you hired again.