Chapter Two
The phone call comes a week to the day after what may or may not have been the most disastrous audition of all time.
Reading for Catarina was nothing like reading Arabella’s soliloquy by myself: I tripped over words, I asked to start again twice, and it’s like I had never felt or even heard of a human emotion in my life because my words were flat, flat, flat, flatly flat.
I’m no actor, but I know when I’ve bombed something, and that audition was the mushroom cloud of tryouts, even if the last read was halfway decent. Miss Matching Pantsuit in the lobby didn’t have to ask to start over, I bet.
I spend the week weirdly mopey and applying for social media jobs and mid-level management jobs in Tatum—which, ha —and telling myself that I don’t want to do the project anyway.
It was a cool enough opportunity to audition, to try, but now it’s back to the real world and my very real problem of how to navigate inside of it.
Meadow or no Meadow.
James Freakin’ Neely or no James Freakin’ Neely.
His mere presence should have been enough to make me hightail it out of there, but despite the repeated lectures I give myself on hope and how it is futile and disappointing, I still do. Hope, thatis.
Against all odds—and pictures of friends the same age as me having literal human babies and celebrating multiyear wedding anniversaries and buying houses and traveling to far-off places for work—I hope. Even though I swear time and time again that I will stop.
I blame Mom, really. It’s like she was made of the stuff, always trying something new with the absurd belief that it would be her new thing …and quickly abandoning it when it wasn’t.
“ Onward! ” she would shout.
And that would be that. The pottery wheel and expensive clay would be donated, the hobby store visited, and she’d leave with an overstuffed cart of yarn and crochet hooks and knitting needles.
And when she got tired of those and they got stuffed in a closet or a cupboard, it was on to handmaking custom shirts or buying stained-glass equipment or woodburning tools.
Sometimes I wonder if all that rushing around expecting every bend around the corner to be the next best thing, the next greatest thing ever, is what made Mom’s heart give out.
And like so many aspects of her, I wonder where all that energy went when she died.
Did she take it with her? Was I supposed to find where she stuffed it like so many yarn balls?
Maybe that’s why she was so adamant that I go into publishing: because it was a direction, and she just wanted me to have a place to go instead of being a hobbyist nomad like her.
All the same, it’s that ever-burning, traitorous hope that makes my fingers clench on my laptop keyboard when an unknown Tatum number appears in the corner of my screen.
I let it go to voicemail, of course. I’m not answering Unknown Number, because it’s just as likely to be a scammer as anything else.
The minute the voicemail notification pops up, my overeager heart leaps in my chest like it knows the contents before I do.
Hello, Juniper! This is Catarina Harding from Tatum Sounds, and we’d love to have you come in for a meeting with our William who I’m so excited to tell you is James Neely. I’m not sure if you’ve seen his new movie, but he’s quite the star and we’re so excited to have him onboard.
There’s more we’ll need to run past you, but needless to say, we’re excited to see you again and feel confident we can find you a part in this production! Feel free to text or call at this number so we can set up a time. We’re thinking next week if that works for you? Can’t wait! Ciao!
I listen to it once. Twice. A third time, just to be sure.
A part.
Maybe not Arabella, but a part. It’s more than I knew to hope for after the disaster of an audition, and it’s making me giddy.
It’s like all the Junipers that have ever been are lined up before me in this moment: There’s six-year-old me with the stick-on Lisa Frank earrings reading aloud to her stuffed animals, sixteen-year-old me in her Meadow shirt from Hot Topic next to Mom at a midnight showing for one of the movies, and then of course there’s dress-over-jeans Juliet-Juniper careening from the darkness of the wings to the bright stage lights and squinting out at the suggestion of a packed auditorium.
Juliet-Juniper is the one that makes me pause.
Juliet-Juniper knows how painful it can be to let go of dreams you’ve just made, never mind ones that you might have not-so-secretly carried with you for years.
I shove it down, but the hope springs back up, running a flashbulb series of what ifs through my head.
Because what if all of this is some cosmic way to route me back to publishing?
To reading and talking and working with books as a living just like Mom and I always talked about?
It’s an audio drama, sure, but it’s an audio drama of one of the bestselling young adult series ever.
Surely just being a part of that would open doors for me, could redirect my life and give me enough money to fund a major life change, to put myself back on a course my mom would be proud to watch from her heavenly cloud or ghostly corner instead of… whatever this has been.
If the salary is enough, I could move out of Dad’s and afford to take an internship in New York.
I could work my way up the ladder. Maybe I could eventually come to think of the last ten years as an unfortunate but necessary detour, could start living a life instead of just reading about it.
And oh the sweet, sweet irony if it’s all thanks to The Meadow.
The story I love? The one that I’ve been teased over, the one that people say is only for teenage girls? The one they— they mostly being sexist guys—say is problematic and awful as if their treasured shoot-’em-up movies with unfair power dynamics and sketchy romances are any better?
Yeah. Those books.
They might just be the things to turn my life around, to put me in the correct timeline after too many years of living outside it.
—
Tatum’s local radio station is calling today “a scorcher” even though my car’s thermostat is only reading seventy-nine degrees and it’s already three o’clock.
But I’ve been a Texas transplant for so long, this feels divine.
My windows are rolled down, the breeze is in my hair, and everything is perfect except for the fact that my stomach is staging a mutiny.
It’s been in knots the whole morning, but the second I pulled out of the driveway to head to the studio for our first meeting, it got much worse.
I tell myself the nerves are because this is a big deal and could mean a big job and blah blah blah…but I know part of it is knowing I’ll see James.
And even in knowing this and tormenting myself for a solid week by imagining at least a hundred different versions of what it might look like when we meet again face-to-face, there was no way I could have foreseen this variation.
James Neely is lying on his back in the grass just in front of Tatum Sound Studios, one arm covering his eyes, the other outstretched loosely at his side holding a cellphone in his long, curved fingers.
The studio isn’t on the main thoroughfare, but it’s adjacent and there are people walking by.
Tatum is especially busy in the summer with tourists looking to save a buck by not staying in ski resorts or families coming to enjoy the shopping in the historic district, the nightly rodeo, and the general splendor of being able to see multiple mountains from practically any window.
But for all the tourists, it’s still not a normal thing for a full-grown man to be stretched out like he’s on a beach instead of beneath a cluster of aspens in the middle of the day.
As I parallel-park my car, I watch a mother push her son with a dripping Popsicle to her opposite side as they pass James on the sidewalk.
I tell myself I’m watching him from my parked car because I’m trying to make sure he’s okay, that he’s not in some kind of medical distress, but even from the somewhat limited vantage point of my passenger window, I can see the way his chest is moving up and down.
It’s a steady rhythm, one that pulls against his long-sleeved Henley shirt that he has rolled up to his elbows.
Not for the first time, it occurs to me that the female gaze really does owe the creator of Henleys a large, large amount of money.
And then I worry I’m objectifying him, which isn’t very feminist of me and shouldn’t I go check that he’s okay? But that would require talking to him and isn’t he going to freak out when he sees me? Worse, what if he doesn’t.
I close my car door extra forcefully in the hope that it’ll jolt him into a sitting position, but alas. James Neely will not be moved.
He’s not exactly in the middle of the pathway or anything. I could easily walk past him to get to the studio, and he would be none the wiser. Which would be an excellent plan if my guilty conscience didn’t choose now to remind me that he once helped me when I was in a place I shouldn’t be.
Now that I’m standing directly over him, I’m wondering if he’s actually fallen asleep, but I can’t tell with his arm covering his eyes.
“Excuse me?”
No movement. Not so much as a twitch.
What do I even say ? This was not in the dozen or so scenarios I rehearsed last night, all designed with complete dialogue on both sides that would make me sound cool and effortless and like someone who has a leather portfolio full of audio prep materials.
Someone put together. The kind of thirty-something who makes it in magazines instead of living with her dad.
But because I’m a total and complete idiot, I decide not to say anything. Instead I gently move the toe of one of my sneakers—my good Reeboks that I think were in style last year, which probably means the kids think I’m cheugy now—and nudge it into his rib cage.