Chapter 15
As we watched the movie, I kept looking over at Juniper.
She had full lips and improbably large brown eyes.
“I look like a cartoon that became a real girl,” she told me once.
Her hair fell extremely straight from her head, a rich brown, naturally highlighted red.
I liked the way Juniper sat—her legs curled up together, one hand across her stomach.
I liked the way she glanced at me during the most violent bits and made an exaggerated barfing face.
I liked the way she laughed at the jokes in the movie, abruptly and generously.
If you were onstage doing improv, you’d want Juniper in the audience, and I appreciate people like that.
And I loved how hard she worked, how much she wanted to be great.
What other people found annoying about Juniper—she’s too overbearing, too ambitious, too committed—were to me the coolest things about her.
So I was attracted to her. I wanted her.
In a world where I knew so little about what I wanted, I knew I wanted her.
I didn’t just love her; I also liked her.
I liked being with her. But I also felt bad about loving and liking her, and especially about wanting her.
Maybe wanting someone is wrong. This is the fucked-up shit my brain does when I get within a mile of human sexuality. I can’t trust myself. I recoil.
About halfway into the movie, Juniper leaned over into me, and I put my arm around her, and I could feel the strangeness of her breaths rising and falling toward and away from me.
Sexuality always stressed me out, even before.
I guess that’s part of what made me a good target or whatever.
He told me once, “You know I know what you like,” which is one of those very complicated sentences made entirely of simple words.
I thought of Juniper seeing me naked, what she’d say or do.
When I’d been with the social virologist I definitely wasn’t dating, she’d told me she liked this part of me just above the hip, and he’d said that, too.
He’d said that boys and girls both had that little arc of muscle that stretched from the pelvis to the hip, and that’s why he liked both boys and girls.
And I sat there and let him stroke it and it felt good, or at least something adjacent to good.
And then the social virologist said the same thing and I felt like I was going to throw up but we had sex anyway and if she noticed anything off she didn’t mention it.
“Are you ill?” Juniper asked.
“Well, I just saw a guy get his face shot off,” I allowed.
“No, seriously, you look terrified.”
“I’m good, let’s watch the movie.”
She grabbed the remote and paused it. “What?” she asked.
“Really, nothing.”
“Is it me? My proximity? The leaning?”
“No.”
“Because I can sit up very straight. I have excellent posture. I didn’t mean to—”
“I’m just worried about the test,” I lied. “I really want to get it.”
“Andromeda,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said after a second.
Something about her eyes calmed me down. I felt my breath back in my body. Juniper kept looking at me a long time, quiet. I did love her. I knew that much.
She seemed to swallow a breath. She sat up straight—she did have excellent posture—and unpaused the movie, and then she mumbled, “Look at me that way tomorrow and you’ll get it.”
_____
The next morning I woke up early and made my way down to the lobby of the hotel and called an Uber. It was hazy and cool with a whipping wind. I turned my back to the wind and hunched over. The valet standing nearby said, “Fire weather.”
“I hope not,” I said.
“On the news this morning, they said it’s not a question of whether, just a question of where,” he said.
“Scary,” I said vaguely. I was only thinking about the test, about my lines, about the way Gavinth would stand, how I needed to pull back my shoulders and make myself big in the room.
“New normal,” he said, and then my Uber showed up. The driver was a little older than me. He was burly and pockmarked. “How are you today?” he asked, in a slight Eastern European accent.
“Nervous,” I said. “Going to an audition.”
“I am also an actor,” he said. “I am tough guy, you know? I just do this between.”
“Yeah,” I said. “How’s work lately?”
“It comes and goes. I get a day or two on this, a day or two on that. I was mobster on NCIS few months ago. That was good. I died. I died in over forty movies and shows. I am expert in dying now. How about you?”
“I’ve only booked a few things.”
“Good few if you’re staying at Hotel Bel-Air.”
“Yes, a good few.”
“Sometimes,” he said, “I think Hollywood is just actors paying other actors to drive to auditions. Today, I drive Uber and you take Uber. Tomorrow, maybe you drive Uber and I take Uber.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said.
“Only thing doesn’t change? Uber gets money no matter who is driving. Agents get money no matter who is working.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Good luck anyway,” he said.
_____
I’d done a focus exercise at drama camp one summer that stuck with me: You bring yourself into sensorial awareness.
The car smells musty. We’re pulling up to a stoplight and I can hear the rhythmic thud of warped brake rotors.
Feel the weave of the fabric of this back seat.
Breathe the air into your lungs. It tastes a little like something somewhere is burning.
“Here’s good,” I told him when we were a few blocks away.
I wanted to walk, get my blood moving, get my posture settled.
It was warmer than it had been half an hour ago.
A little sun on my skin. It occurred to me that Gavinth lives in a world where his own legs are his second-fastest method of transportation, after only a horse.
That smell of distant fire was undeniable now—not a matter of whether but where.
The casting director’s office was a blacked-out storefront half a block off Santa Monica Boulevard, no sign or anything.
I was twelve minutes early, so I walked around the block.
Halfway around, I saw Juniper on the other side of the street walking in my direction, her earbuds in, her eyes cast downward.
I didn’t know if I would ruin her vibe, or if it would look bad if we arrived together, so I turned around and walked quickly back to the storefront.
My armpits were sweating. Maybe that was okay.
Gavinth sweats. Of course he does. You’ve got this—if you even want it. You might not want it, remember.
The receptionist looked up as I entered but didn’t say anything.
The light was low, the furniture modern.
I sat down next to Callum Golding. I knew him a little bit.
He and I had been up for a couple of the same things.
“Kai, right?” he said, and I shook his hand, and then we made awkward conversation about work.
Callum was so goddamned beautiful it hurt to look at him, with his pouty lips, square jaw, and sapphire eyes.
Juniper came in a few seconds later, nodded to us, and sat off on her own, earbuds still in, until the casting director, Nina, appeared from behind a wall and said, “Juniper and Callum?”
I waited. The sensorial awareness that I’d had in the car was gone and I couldn’t get it back.
Tried to feel myself sitting on this couch, but couldn’t.
Tried to smell the fire in the air, but it tasted like nothing.
I hated casting rooms. I was so much better when I could just self-tape.
I pulled out my phone after a while and went on Reddit.
There was a fire, near the Getty. Part of the 405 was closed because firefighters were working to keep it from jumping the freeway.
Some famous YouTuber had posted, How am I supposed to get to brunch with the 405 closed, and everyone was saying that person was canceled, and isn’t it amazing how celebrities can make even forest fires about themselves, and then other people were saying it’s not a forest fire actually but more of a brush fire, and then other people were saying that LA was getting what it deserved, and others were saying that there aren’t even supposed to be humans in large concentrations in places with so little rainfall, and other people were saying there aren’t even supposed to be humans in large concentrations.
None of which much helped with the fire, or for that matter my Gavinth preparation, but it did give me something to look at while I waited for Callum and Juniper to finish.
At some point another guy came in and sat down next to me, Charles Oldham.
He was properly famous—he’d been the most recent Mimic in X-Men—and he was the guy Bob was most worried about.
We talked about the fire a little, and then finally Callum came out, and Juniper right after him.
I started to say something to her but she put her earbuds back in and looked down at the floor, walking in tight little figure eights.
_____
If I’m good at acting, it’s because I can always connect my life to a character’s life.
I like to think about how people got themselves into now, and there’s always some way that their series of choices and circumstances can relate to my own.
Now is always a problem that started with then.
And so I turned back to Gavinth, who, like me, was in love but didn’t know quite how to act on it, because he wasn’t only in love. He was also in lots of other things.
Nina reappeared after a minute or two. “Juniper and Kai?”