Chapter 4
Priscilla
The director has me in a chicken suit, practicing my bawking.
I started doing these commercials long before the Golden Globe nomination, and since I lost that award and all the elusive possibility that came with it, I can only hope to be doing these commercials for a long time after.
A check is a check, and being the face of a car insurance company is something even Oscar winners do, like J.
K. Simmons. He’s above my level in every other way, but we’ll always have car insurance, won’t we?
Still, it’s hard not to feel a little like, well, like I’ve been tarred and feathered, the way everyone on the commercial’s creative team has their iPhone pointed at me as they laugh.
“This is incredible,” Matt, the commercial’s director, says.
Alone in my trailer, zipping myself into the body portion of the chicken costume, no one had a bigger laugh than I did.
That’s the beat I need to play, no matter how everyone else reacts.
I’ve survived in show business this long by teaching myself to smile instead of wince when someone presses on my bruises.
“I’m doing something really special in the feather space,” I say, twisting to show off the costume from every angle.
The only one not amused is Erik. “I don’t get it,” he deadpans, one eyebrow arched and arms crossed, my phone hanging halfway out of his hand.
“I’m the chicken crossing the road,” I tell him. “You know, like the saying.”
“Right. And why is that funny?”
The director explains the premise of the commercial.
It’s very fun to see him squirm under Erik’s floodlight of judgment, attempting to appeal to Erik’s Gen Z sensibilities by searching for the gravitas behind the gag, when the truth is, they thought it would be funny to put me, an actress from a very earnest doctor show, into a chicken costume.
That’s the whole joke. And because everyone knew I’d go along with it—I always go along with it, no matter how ridiculous—it’s what has happened.
I would enjoy seeing this entire exchange play out, but an email from Marlowe Jenkins lights up the screen in Erik’s hand.
“Can I see that?” I ask him.
Hey Cilla,
Any chance you’ve heard from Dallas today?
Marlowe and I haven’t spoken in five months. She never replied to my last email. Erik asked if he should follow up with her, and I told him to let it be. No kissy-face emojis necessary.
My fingers strain to reach past my wings and touch the screen.
Well hello there Marlowe. I texted him this morning and we talked on the phone for a bit. Why?
What time was that? she emails back.
We’re having a text conversation over email. I’m in a chicken suit. That isn’t directly related, but it can’t be forgotten. I send her my phone number. Within seconds, she’s in my text messages.
Marlowe: What time was that?
Priscilla: And good morning to you, too. It was 5:06 a.m. PST. I was up early for a shoot. Why? Is everything okay?
Marlowe: What did he say?
Priscilla: He told me he’d been at the school all night working on something.
Marlowe: Got it.
Priscilla: Is something wrong?
Marlowe: Nothing. Sorry for bothering you. I’m sure you’re busy.
Something is clearly wrong, but I’m not sure what I can do about it in the middle of filming a car insurance commercial on a soundstage in Burbank. Dallas told me more than that, but there is something about knowing Marlowe wants the information that makes me reluctant to give it.
Marlowe: One last thing. Can we still expect you at opening night this Friday?
Shit.
Opening night.
I forgot all about that promise. I’m not sure why I made it. It must have been the excitement of my nomination. Of the possibilities. Or maybe I was fueled by a need to get Marlowe to stop being so, well, Marlowe about me.
I scramble to think of a satisfying alternative.
Going back to Garden Meadows is not an option.
The closest I ever get to returning home is offering money to the drama department and my yearly text catch-up with Jaz Sinclair, where I covertly check on my mom’s well-being by asking Jaz how often she sees her around town.
“Erik,” I call out. The director is still trying to sell him on the commercial’s premise, and judging by the fresh sweat beading on his forehead, he’s still failing. “Can you do me a huge favor and find the best florist in Garden Meadows, Iowa?”
“What is it with you and Iowa?” Erik asks.
“Our liberties we prize, and our rights we will maintain.”
“Is that some kind of Iowa thing?”
“It’s our state motto,” I say. “I had to learn it for a school project in fifth grade.”
“They should workshop that. It has a threatening aura.” He looks down at his own phone, which now fills the spot mine recently occupied in his hands. “Are you going to ask me to find out what the state flower is for this, or will you be happy with roses?”
“Roses are great. Let’s do two dozen bouquets. And make sure they all get sent to my dear friend Marlowe Jenkins at Wilbur Reed High School. Write something really nice from me in the note about how excited I am for the musical. Throw in some red hearts.”
“I’ve removed the red hearts from your texting style. It would be brand inconsistent to use them now. What’s the show?”
“It’s Spring Awakening.”
“A high school in Iowa is putting on Spring Awakening?” Matt asks. “Isn’t it about sex and suicide?”
“That’s reductive,” Erik tells him.
“My drama teacher is known for his bold choices,” I say. “He made me who I am.”
Everyone laughs. Once again, the chicken costume carries a little more weight than I want.
Marlowe: You’re not coming, are you?
It hasn’t even been a minute since her last text.
What a leap for her to have made. Instead of answering, I call Dallas.
He’s the one who matters anyway. He will understand that returning to Iowa is not a real option right now.
What if they need me for another car insurance commercial here? I have to pay my bills somehow.
The phone rings only once before someone picks up. That someone being Marlowe.
“Hello?” The urgency in her voice is plain, even in her short greeting.
“Surprise! It’s your favorite person!” I say.
She lets out a frustrated sigh. “Why are you listed in his phone as Darling?”
“Same reason you’re in there as Nuisance, I’d imagine. What’s going on? Why do you have Dallas’s phone?”
“He left it backstage,” she tells me.
“You saw Darling flash on the screen and had to know who’d finally captured Dallas’s heart after so many years of him choosing to be single?”
“He’s missing,” she says.
I laugh.
“I’m serious,” she insists.
It isn’t any funnier the second time than the first, but I still laugh again. “I just talked to him this morning.”
“As far as I know, you’re the last person to have talked to him,” she tells me.
Something cold and prickly floods my veins—the awful tingle of dread, a feeling determined to find me, no matter how well I hide from it.
“His phone is locked,” she says. “I was able to answer this call, but I can’t get into his text messages without the passcode.”
“Where did he leave the phone?”
“On top of the Memory Machine.”
Oh, the Memory Machine. Dallas’s never-ending, not-so-secret passion project.
It rests in the depths of the WRHS auditorium wings—backstage right, in the space between the second and third side curtains, behind a pile of old set pieces Dallas has long claimed he’ll one day repurpose.
It’s more than seven feet tall and made of scrap wood.
It looks like…well, it looks like a gigantic coffin.
When I last saw the machine, it was painted a nondescript brown. Just a big box with a locked door.
Back in my day, everyone knew about the Memory Machine. Other teachers. Students. Parents. It was an endless source of curiosity and a dead-end conversation with Dallas. He wouldn’t explain to anyone what it was supposed to be, except to give it a name and ask us politely to leave it alone.
Seeing as we were teenagers, we were never going to do that.
We once wore him down enough to get him to admit that he had to work on the Memory Machine at school, because if he did it at home, he’d never sleep. That got everyone vibrating. We’d finally unearthed new information! We were making real progress!
Then Dallas said, “That’s enough,” in his scariest, most definitive voice, and everyone went very quiet, knowing that to bring it up again would be to get all of us in real trouble. I liked to bend boundaries, but I knew better than to break them.
“How did you reach the top?” I ask Marlowe.
It’s the wrong question—a detail that doesn’t matter—but it’s all that comes to me in the moment.
Dallas’s scary voice may have ended our questions, but it did nothing to kill our curiosity.
There were so many rehearsals where someone stood on lookout, making sure Dallas wasn’t nearby, so I could make myself into a human bench for Jaz to step on my back and examine the top, hoping to uncover something that revealed the secret meaning of the machine.
“One of my students heard the phone ringing. I wouldn’t let him touch it, though. So I got a ladder,” Marlowe tells me.
“Did you open the door?” I ask.
“No. It’s locked. But the inside is definitely empty. All the kids were shaking it.”
I almost smile. That’s exactly what we used to do. One time Jaz and I shook it so hard we almost tipped it over, and as it wobbled, I saw my entire life falling apart. Dallas’s faith in me shattered. Everything good destroyed.
“What about law enforcement?” I ask. “Have you reported him missing?”
“No one believes me yet,” Marlowe says. “It hasn’t even been an entire day.
But I went to his house. Used my spare key and walked through every room.
Nobody was home. When I got back to the school, I realized his car was parked in the lot.
Now I know his phone is here, too. But he’s not.
And our first dress rehearsal starts in ten minutes. ”
“He never misses a rehearsal,” I say, though Marlowe knows that better than most people. Certainly better than me.
“Exactly,” she replies.
“Dallas said something else on the phone this morning,” I admit, motivated by the fact that Marlowe isn’t being defensive or employing her clever retorts.
“What?”
“It was right as we were hanging up. He said he’d finally figured it out.”
“Figured out what?” Her throaty desperation scratches against my ear. I’m surprised by how much I like having her here, at my whim.
“How to walk through universes,” I tell her.
The silence stretches so long I actually laugh. Of course she’d ignore this. She hates Dallas’s penchant for the mystical.
“Hello? Marlowe?…Hello?” I pull my phone from my ear. It’s back to the home screen. “She hung up on me,” I mutter.
I call back Dallas’s number. This time it rings and rings, going to voicemail, where he says, “If you have something important to say to me, now’s the time to share it.”
My dread intensifies. What do I have to say to Dallas Winthrop?
So much. Too much.
“Who hung up on you?” asks Erik.
I end the call without leaving a message, forcing myself to swallow all my worries.
No one wants this shoot to run overtime because I’ve decided to panic about a situation that makes very little sense in the first place, and I can’t let anyone here see me slip, not when their opinion of me is already so precarious.
Cilla Cove in her chicken suit, onetime Golden Globe loser, no other jobs lined up outside of these recurring car insurance commercials.
My hands might be jittery, and my eyes might be desperate to well with tears, but I’m the one in charge of myself. That’s what my mom used to remind me when I would thrust myself into wailing despair as a child.
“You’re in charge of your own body. So stop it, right now,” she’d say.
It’s taken longer than she wanted it to, but I’ve finally learned how to do that. They want Cilla Cove for this shoot, so Cilla Cove is who they’ll get.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m ready.” I flap my chicken wings. Let out a bawk.
The whole crew laughs.