Say It Out Loud

Chapter Six #2

“So your art and passion and career found a larger audience than you bargained for? That’s your problem?

” I know there’s nuance I’m trampling over, but it’s such a relief to be talking about his problems and not mine, I can’t seem to stop myself.

“If you hate it all so much, why did you take the job in the first place? Why did you do Disassembled at all if you didn’t want to break into film? ”

I’ve read about characters’ faces shuttering, but I’ve never actually seen it happen to a person.

James’s jaw loosens. His eyes go carefully blank.

His mouth slacks from twisted, gnarled anger and indignation to absolute neutrality.

Even his eyebrows, which I hadn’t noticed were tense, soften.

He goes from engaged and passionate and opinionated to… nothing.

It’s eerie. It’s uncanny valley. A smart person would feel put off by how quickly he closed all the windows to his thoughts, but I am not feeling particularly smart.

If I was, I wouldn’t be here to begin with.

I’d be at Dad’s applying for jobs and going in the same, well-trod cycle of burnt-out millennial ennui instead of here waiting for Catarina to give me the boot.

“Sorry,” I say, and this time I don’t regret the apology. “I didn’t…We don’t have to talk about your work.”

“It’s okay.” His voice is perfectly pleasant. Cordial. He’s also pointedly not meeting my gaze. “It was an honest question.”

“Will it get an honest answer?” I ask, and maybe I am not totally hopeless at voicework, because I feel good about the tiny splash of humor I sneak into my tone, just enough to let him know I’m okay with dropping the conversation.

James hears it, and while his mouth doesn’t tilt into a smile, there’s a tinge of it in his gaze.

“Most likely not.” He looks down at his shoes—too-boring-to-not-be-expensive white sneakers—and then back at me. “I’m not always sure of the answer myself.”

“I get it,” I say.

His mouth tilts this time.

“So glad a plebe has deigned to relate to me,” he says wryly. “Really warms the cockles of one’s heart to be permitted back into the human race.”

“I don’t want to hear about cockles,” I say.

“Fine,” James says, and I try to ignore how warm his hands feel on my shoulders when he gently turns me back toward my booth. “Then you’re going to hear me run lines, because that’s what I came in here to do.”

“I’ll leave—” I begin, but James interrupts.

“We’re both here now,” he says, already walking to the other booth. “Might as well get used to recording together.”

“I don’t think—”

“Let me help you,” he says.

“You helped me enough with the shirt situation,” I say.

Even the way James puts his headphones on looks more professional than me. He adjusts the earpieces just so, messes with the angle of his mic, and moves the stand holding his script up half an inch as if that makes any difference.

“It’ll help me, too,” he says. “It’s always easier to work off another person with stuff like this. Come on. We can help each other. ”

Which for some reason makes me blush a deep red, but I find the spot he was planning to run in the script and—when James signals me to begin—start to read.

“I don’t need your help,” I say in my Arabella voice. “Mr. Simons is just paranoid. I don’t need to be taken to the nurse.”

God , does this feel silly. James seems so distant, both of us in glass boxes several feet apart. I feel like I’m back in high school in the mandatory choir tryouts they made us do freshman year, being silently mocked by all the kids who could sing.

I hear James click into my headphones.

“Do you want some constructive criticism?”

I think about it.

“No,” I say. “But yes.”

I can hear his smile more than see it.

“It’s coming off a little wooden. Arabella is really indignant here, remember. She’s not only mad that she’s being forced out of class, but also frustrated that William is acting so strangely and not showing her all his cards.”

“Okay,” I say. “I get what you’re saying. Okay for me to go again?”

I go again. It is not better.

“Okay,” James says, clicking in again. “Let’s try it this way: We’ll scan our lines for the next page or two, okay?

Just get the gist of the scene and then we’re going to run it from memory.

It doesn’t have to be verbatim. We’re just looking to connect some natural, organic emotional beats here.

Pay attention to what your voice does and what inflections you naturally use and then we can come back and try the script itself. ”

My cheeks are red for a different reason—because it feels like when the struggling kid gets paired up with the genius for tutoring during class —but I read through the couple paragraphs’ worth of dialogue twice and tell myself not to be a coward and to look at James while we do this.

For all the space between us both physically and emotionally—we’re arguably not even us when we’re reading lines—it’s weirdly intimate. James’s voice—well, William’s—is directly in my ear as if we are standing side by side.

“I don’t need your help,” I say in my Arabella voice. “And I don’t need to see the nurse.”

James as William smirks, and I can hear it in his delivery.

“Mr. Simons thinks otherwise.”

“And how could you possibly know what Mr. Simons is thinking?”

“Trust me,” James says. “I know. Besides, you’re forgetting my father is a doctor. It’s always in your best interest to be seen by a medical professional.”

“And I suppose that the school nurse who is also the history teacher qualifies?”

James hesitates so long, I wonder if he’s forgotten the lines.

“We can look at the script if you need to,” I say as myself. “I think this is working for me.”

He moves one headphone off his ear.

“This is the part where William picks her up and carries her to the nurse.”

“Yeah?”

James rubs the back of his neck.

“We ought to do it that way, don’t you think? So you can get an idea of what it does to your voice?”

It’s like a memory vortex, a small one that drags me down through watery years and minutes and seconds to the stage and whispers of Come play with me, and just as quickly releases me so that I’m left bobbing along the surface gasping for air, the heat of collegiate James’s breath still tickling my ear.

He was Just James then, too, I realize. James Freakin’ Neely the Actor with a capital A wasn’t in existence yet.

And I think he might be Just James now. There’s not so much a whisper of superiority in his watchful eyes, even as I narrow my own at him. If he was anyone else, I’d accuse him of being nervous, but surely that’s just the glass from the sound booth distorting my vision.

I put my headphones down on the stand and come out of the booth toward him.

“I’m sorry,” I clarify. “Are you really suggesting that we read lines while you carry me around the recording booth like a sack of potatoes?”

James rolls his eyes and exits his booth, too.

“It’s difficult to portray the physicality of a scene with just your voice. This would help give you a frame of reference, at least. And you’re not a sack of potatoes. If anything you’d be a sack of coffee beans.”

“Awfully Method of you,” I mutter.

“I am the professional here,” James says, his tone teasing instead of smug. “You’re gonna have to trust me on this one.”

Something has changed in the air between us, and for once, it feels like I have the upper hand.

James is watching me again and I have the most absurd, random thought that I ought to just…

do this. For the plot, as the kids say. Or at the very least, so I have something terribly, terribly interesting to regale Serena with when I call her later.

I step forward.

“Fine,” I say. “If you think it’s a good id— Hey! ”

He says something under his breath, but I don’t even have time to ask what it was because as soon as the word fine leaves my mouth, he leans forward and hooks an arm beneath my knees and the ground falls away and I’m…

“I’m too heavy,” I tell him.

I feel his snort in my hair.

“Don’t make me be the ass who has to tell you how much I can bench, please. That’s too cliché even for this. ”

The this is clearly meant to indicate the fact that he’s holding me bridal-style in the middle of the sound studio.

“This was your idea,” I remind him.

I haven’t looked into his face yet. Instead I’m picking at a loose thread at my knee.

“Juniper?”

I look up, which really is a mistake, because were his eyes always this deep brown like the best part of a chocolate chip cookie?

Yes, my traitorous brain whispers, and for a split second, everything but his eyes fades away and we’re in the vortex together, back on the stage in college, and he’s just kissed my cheek and—

“Your lines?” James prompts.

Now I’m the one staring, and I can’t stop. This, I know, I will absolutely not mention to Serena.

“I don’t remember them,” I say.

His arms shift me a little higher and our noses bump.

“Try,” James says and then, with a tilt of his mouth, he adds, “Play with me.”

He—annoyingly—was not wrong. When I start to talk as Arabella, James begins to carry me toward the back of the room, and it’s subtle how my voice changes when he does, but it’s undeniably there.

There’s a different cadence to how I speak—how Arabella speaks—and I try to hold the feeling in my throat so I can replicate it for the recording.

“I don’t need to go to the nurse,” I say as Arabella. “I don’t need your help.”

That last part I say with more bite than maybe Arabella would, and James must hear it because his cocky laugh feels both in and out of character.

“You so clearly do, though,” he says. “It’s not an inconvenience. I have nothing better to do with my time.”

“Most guys get into sports or videogames or cars,” I say, which is not a line Arabella utters, but it’s in the spirit of her frustration. “They don’t go around schlepping girls from science class to the nurse.”

James looks down at me, and he really is good at this whole acting thing because I can almost see as his regular self replaces the William mask.

“ Schlepping ?”

“It’s a good word,” I argue in my own voice.

“For a twenty-first-century teenager?”

“Well, I used it in high school.”

James snorts again. I can feel the air of it on my lips.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” he says.

“You’re one to talk,” I say. “What twenty-first-century adult uses the word cockles unironically?”

I make the mistake of meeting his eyes, James’s eyes. And I know he’s James in this moment and not William in the same way that you can tell if the sun is setting or rising over the horizon just by looking at it.

“You didn’t text me,” he says, and there’s more than a little accusation in his tone.

I blink at him. “I…what?”

“You got my number from Genie.” I can see and practically feel his swallow, we’re so close. “You didn’t use it.”

At some point during the schlepping, my hands have wound their way around his neck in an effort to help keep me hoisted in the air. When my fingers twitch at what he’s implying—that he wanted me to text—I can feel the silky-smooth ends of his hair drag across my palms.

It’s entirely too…something.

“I forgot,” I said, my voice quick. “I forgot to ask for it.”

He’s still looking, so I add, “Maybe she put it in an email and I didn’t see it or something, but as far as I’m aware, I don’t have it.”

I’m suddenly uncomfortably warm, and I think it has less to do with the proximity to James’s body heat and more to do with the way we’re bleeding in and out of our assigned roles.

Which makes it doubly awkward to realize that at some point after James started carrying me back toward the booths, Catarina must have walked into the recording room…

and her slow clap and the casual way she’s crossed one leg over the other from her perch on the chair indicate she must have heard everything.

“ Excellent, Juniper, James. This is the chemistry we need. This is the reason we hired you two. And neither of you was far off from the straight dialogue. Do you hear how much more natural that sounds? Much more like a play and less like a book. We’re turning Sullivan into Shakespeare here, folks, and we’re doing it well! ”

I catch only a glimpse of James’s face as he sets me down to the floor and takes a huge, obvious sidestep away from me.

“We were just rehearsing,” he tells Catarina.

“Yes, I can see that.” Catarina smiles. “If it gets results this excellent, I’m afraid you might have to carry Juniper around for the entirety of our recording schedule.”

James cuts his eyes to me and then quickly away again.

“I doubt that will be necessary,” he says.

It doesn’t hurt, his dismissal, but I won’t mention this bit to Serena when I call to give her the humorous, light version of the day’s events.

I also will neglect to tell her that I spend the rest of the day smelling like strawberries and him or that I notice it every time I turn my head for the rest of my time recording in the booth.

—

So I guess I’m not fired. At least, if I am, Catarina doesn’t mention it. Maybe she’s waiting to send a formal notice in the mail, or maybe the afternoon of recording solo but pretending as if James’s stupid face was in the empty booth across from mine was actually successful.

I don’t see James when I walk to my car at the end of the day. I’d half hoped I’d get to see him one more time and give him a cool, breezy, tear-free see ya, but he’s not in the break room as I pass and from what I can tell, the other booths are empty, too.

I’m fully in my car and starting the engine when I see the little piece of paper trapped beneath my windshield wiper.

I take my time getting out to clear it, knowing it’s probably another flyer for a ski equipment sale, but it’s not.

It’s a handwritten quote with a single word written in infuriatingly nice cursive: Cockles . And beneath it, a phone number.