Chapter Five
I guess I should have wished harder, believed harder, because by lunch, it’s abundantly clear that if I ever had magic to begin with, I’m not only devoid of it, I must owe it something fierce. And the only price it will accept is my extreme stress and incompetence.
Despite my extensive googling and deep dives into audiobook narrator Reddit, I feel woefully underprepared. Even with ever-patient, ever-enthusiastic Catarina in the room with me, the smoke circles around both our ankles, quickly filling like a house on fire.
But it’s not a house. It’s me. And damn every single harebrained thought and wayward text or email that made me think this was ever going to work out.
If Serena were here, even she would struggle to make a list of everything that goes wrong.
First, there’s the voice I’ve chosen for Arabella. While my natural speaking voice won me the audition and the role, Catarina says we ought to lighten it up a bit to make it sound more youthful.
“Arabella is a young girl at the beginning of the series,” she says. “And by the end, we need her to have a noticeable change in tone to better suit her character development and change of species.”
She’s not wrong. We spend a good twenty minutes workshopping young Arabella and vampire Arabella, with Catarina encouraging me to record the whole thing on my phone’s voice memos to review later when I’m rehearsing at home.
It seems fine until I get about a paragraph into recording my higher, younger voice and I realize that my throat is already tingling with strain and stickiness.
This is going to be much, much more physically taxing than I thought.
Second, there’s the snapping. My god, the snapping.
Fun fact about me: I can’t technically snap.
I mean, I can make my thumb and middle finger make a sound, but somehow I learned it backward and instead of my thumb swiping upward, it swipes down.
So you can “hear” the snap, but it’s not as sustainable as regular snapping because it needs undue force and also my thumbnail tends to dig into the pad of my middle finger and can draw blood.
Which it does today, of course, because it turns out that Catarina and the crew that will be editing our audio after we finish production favor the “snap” method of editing in which the audiobook narrator snaps to indicate they are starting the previous line over due to a mistake or to try a different tone.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve snapped this morning to start over after stumbling over a word or mispronouncing it entirely, but my fingers haven’t.
And then there’s the smoke settling in my brain.
While it’s always melancholy, it turns damn near insidious beneath the dim lighting of my booth, assuring me over and over again with each snap and each desperate gulp of my water that this was a mistake.
They’re going to find out—Catarina, the producers, James, all of them—and they’re going to fix it in the easiest and most obvious way: They’re going to get rid of me.
And I can’t blame them. This is a big project, and there’s no way they don’t have some women with portfolios and honeyed tea ready to jump to take my place at a moment’s notice.
James would be all the happier for it. No Juniper means no guilt, no social media, and no need to keep his word.
When Catarina cuts off for a lunch break, it’s a toss-up which is sorer: my hand, my voice, or my brain. All feel completely drained, completely at sea, and at this point, I’m ready to be fired.
Send me home. I’ll just go back to…to whatever I was doing before.
“I’ve got a lunch meeting,” Catarina tells me.
“So I’ll be in my office. But I wanted to mention that you and James ought to get together and make something resembling a posting schedule for the producers.
I think they’d be interested to see what you have in mind for the social campaign.
It certainly doesn’t have to be anything too official at this stage, but they’ll be sending over all the necessary logins by Wednesday and I know you can’t wait to get started! ”
I hope my mouth is smiling instead of grimacing when I say, “Of course. Also, is it okay if I stay in here to make a quick phone call?”
“Definitely,” Catarina says. “Just no food in here, of course. But the conference room is your break room for the remainder of the project, so feel free to head in there for lunch.”
She doesn’t sound mad, but she might just be holding up a pretense of professionalism until she can run to her office and have a meeting with the producers to inform them that Juniper Green had her podcast taken away for a reason and they ought to get her as far away from this project as possible.
The moment the door shuts behind her, I call Serena.
The phone is still ringing when I hear the muted chime of my text alert and pull the phone from my ear to see one of those automatic texts:
Sorry I can’t talk right now.
I wait for her usual follow-up text, the one that explains that Misha is being particularly toddler-y today or that she’s in the grocery store and will call me right back, but after a few minutes, it’s clear that the automated text is all I’m getting for now.
In lieu of Serena’s aggressive calming techniques, I settle for numbly scrolling on my phone, cognizant that I will need to go eat lunch and—more important—get coffee before starting back up again at one o’clock with Catarina for two more hours of recording.
My intention is to go to my Meadow Pinterest board I made as a source of inspiration for the project—something I thought I wouldn’t need for a couple weeks, ha —but instead, any remaining strongholds of sanity crumble to dust when I see the notification.
It should be innocuous, the podcast update, but of course it’s not. I asked the magic for too much, and now it has come for another pound of flesh in the form of one emboldened line: New Episode of On the Same Page —New Season, New Host! Getting Cozy with Cosette available now .
I race to Reddit, to the subreddit I haven’t allowed myself to check in months, and because this is the shittiest day in the entire world, of course people have already posted.
Some quick scrolling confirms that my podcast app was late to inform me of the new episode’s release and it has actually been out since this morning.
There are roughly twenty new comments from listeners who finished the episode and are eager to chat.
CatsRFriendsNotFood: I was NOT expecting to love it as much as I did. Juniper walked so Cosette could RUN.
UserNotFound323: I’ve been waiting for this to come back online FOR SO LONG and it was definitely worth it! Somebody leveled up in production funds, because the new theme song is a whole ass bop.
StepInTimeBoy: Did anyone else catch the hint about the special guest after the credits?
I think “a man of strange mystery” must be Benedict Cumberbatch, right?
? If that wasn’t a Doctor Strange/Sherlock reference, I’ll eat my phone.
Whoever it is, psyched to hear that this podcast might finally be branching into celebrity territory because I need to know what they’re reading! !!!!!
But the comment that makes me close out of Reddit is the most compassionate of all:
ReadingTheFNRainbow: I think Cosette did an amazing job, but I kinda miss Juniper.
I like the new theme music and the higher production value, but I feel like Juniper got the heart of this project and Cosette is reading from a script.
I really hope u/StepInTimeBoy is wrong about the celebrity guests.
(No offense, Step!) I just think listeners would only care about famous people episodes and it would take away from the original plot of the podcast. I liked feeling connected to random, regular people from around the world who love the same books I do.
I don’t really care about what book the celebrity publicists are pushing these days.
TLDR: Cheering on Cosette, but worried she isn’t the biggest change coming to the podcast. I miss Juniper already.
It feels like after I get my eyes dilated at the optometrist. My close-up vision is blurry, my head aches a little, and there’s a faint ringing in my left ear.
On top of it, my entire body has been reprogrammed: Coffee. Now. I can’t possibly be expected to have thoughts or feelings about literally anything—including On the Same Page —until I am caffeinated.
I don’t care if it tastes like gas station coffee. I don’t care if it tastes like dirt. I’ll take it if it’ll get rid of the shaky feeling in my limbs. If I can’t have magic—and apparently I can’t—then java will have to do.
When I stumble out of the recording booth and down the hall into the conference space Catarina said to use as our break room, I expect to be met with silence, hope to be met with it.
But I’m being punished, I know, because instead of blissful, noiseless nothingness, I’m met with a loud slurp and a quiet moan of pleasure that is annoyingly identifiable.
Of course. It wasn’t enough: the rough beginning to my first day of recording, Serena not answering my call, the new episode of what used to be my podcast coming out today, of all days. Of course this is the next boss to beat.
James Neely is sitting at the table licking whipped cream off the underside of a to-go coffee lid. He flushes red and returns the lid to its cup when he sees me.
“Juniper.”
He sounds embarrassed but like he’s trying to be nonchalant about it. I’d maybe find it endearing if my brain weren’t on fire.
“James,” I say, and I don’t need the headset to tell me my voice sounds like hell.