Chapter Twenty-One #2
Carrie glanced down at her phone. ‘It seems Miss Darcy is getting a stern talking-to,’ she said, reading intently. ‘Turned up late one too many times, I guess. Word on the street is she was summoned to Jonas earlier . . . Martin must have outsourced his dirty work to the first AD.’
I grimaced. ‘Yikes, I wonder what’s going to happen. They can’t, like, get rid of her, can they?’ I secretly hoped they could.
‘Eh, they could, but they won’t. Way too late in the day for that, plus it would cause a huge media shitstorm.
’ She reached out and touched something at my collar.
I was still wearing my Linderley Jones costume, which today consisted of a creamy-coloured shirt with a Peter Pan collar tucked into a voluminous gingham skirt.
‘Your stitching’s coming undone, you’d better take that to costume.
’ I looked down and saw she was right, a trail of thread was hanging off and the bottom of the collar was coming loose.
‘Ooh, thanks for that. I’ll go and get another one now.’
‘If you change out of it in your trailer I can take it for you?’ she offered. Carrie was always trying to save me from doing various jobs, but I liked having something to do and often enjoyed an excuse to walk around.
‘It’s OK, I’ll go myself.’
I wandered off in the direction of the costume department with their mannequins and racks and sewing machines, spare buttons, Wonder Web, everything the human mind could conceive to use for a costume and everything else you might need to repair it.
I traded one of my Linderley shirts for another, and headed back to find Carrie and hopefully everything would be ready to shoot again.
As got near the sound stages, I heard loud, rapid footsteps coming towards me from round the corner, accompanied by a distinct sound of sniffing.
‘Oh!’ I said, as someone barrelled right into me. ‘Darcy!’
She didn’t look at me, just muttered, ‘Sorry,’ and carried on. Instinctively, I turned around and reached out to grab her wrist.
‘Darcy? Are you OK?’
I looked at her, her makeup streaked all over her face. That must have been some talking-to from Jonas. He was known for his flat, Scandinavian effect, but I’d never known him to make someone cry before.
‘I was . . .’ She sniffed. ‘I was going to tell you to leave me alone but . . . then I remembered . . . I don’t have to do that anymore.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, baffled. ‘Do you want to go somewhere quiet?’ I racked my brains for somewhere we could talk undisturbed. ‘We could go to my trailer?’
She nodded, and I bundled her out of a back door I knew connected with the car park that our trailers sat on.
Once the door of my trailer closed behind us, the floodgates truly opened. Darcy was openly wailing. ‘I’ve been so awful,’ were the first words I could make out. ‘I’m sorry, Emily.’
‘What’s going on? Please, just . . . help me out here?’
Darcy took a deep breath and steadied herself.
‘I thought this was what I was meant to do, you know?’ Even without the tears, her voice sounded .
. . different somehow. More lively, less laconic.
More like, well, a normal person. ‘I thought I was meant to be some rebel, some rock and roll girl, that that was what people wanted from me. Or what they expected of me. So I played up to it, didn’t I?
’ She reached for another tissue from the box I had pushed across the table at her.
She blew her nose loudly, something I never thought I would live to see Darcy Jackson doing.
‘But I took it too far. I knew I was taking it too far.’ She shook her head, the shame of it palpable.
‘I should have just put a pin in it when the whole thing with the car company happened. I was so awful to him and it caused such a fuss in the production I honestly thought I was going to get sacked. But then nothing did happen so I just . . . kept doing it. Kept my image up, you know?’
‘But why?’ I asked, baffled.
‘Emily, you don’t get it. You know who you are!
You’re just you! You have no idea what a fucking superpower it is to just be yourself.
But I . . . I don’t know. I thought I had to be someone else for the fans.
They seem to love the idea of me being this spiky little ice queen and I felt like that’s what had got me cast as Loreia, so I figured I should just keep doing that.
I guess I thought that people would take me more seriously if I acted like a diva, that I would get my way more, get a reputation for being someone you didn’t mess with.
I don’t know.’ She shook her head, covering her face with her hands.
‘I thought it was cool to be like that.’
I sighed and handed her a tissue. ‘Oh, Darcy. Wonderwick isn’t like that! A lot of us are just normal people who ended up here by chance. Plus Josh,’ I added for accuracy. ‘But no one is looking for Hollywood divas on this set. It’s just not like that! It never has been!’
Darcy smiled, weakly. ‘I wish someone had told me that before. That I wasn’t in some kind of competition to be the number one star of Wonderwick.
’ So it wasn’t all in my head. She had been, in her way, trying to assert herself against me.
‘I’m going to make it up to everyone. Give a personal apology to everyone I was rude to.
Order pizza for the whole crew. Never let myself get wrapped up in something like this again. ’
I liked this Darcy. ‘I think that’s a good idea.’
‘Thanks for the chat.’ She sniffled, standing to leave my trailer. ‘I’m sorry I called you a bitch that day in the makeup trailer. I honestly couldn’t believe I said it. But, as I think I’ve made abundantly clear, I’m always taking shit too far . . .’
‘Oh, I thought . . .’ I started.
‘What?’
‘It sounds silly, but I thought maybe you were jealous? I know you and Josh, like, hang out . . .’
She gave me a half-smile, her gaze direct but relaxed.
‘Babe, are you in some Tumblr-proof alternate dimension? I’m queer, I’m barely interested in men at all, even the pretty ones.
’ She shrugged. ‘Josh is a friend. He was always trying to get me to chill out with the whole . . . you know . . . madness. But did I listen? Nope.’
I must admit, I had heard something like this on the grapevine over the years, but she and Josh just seemed so intimate. ‘But why not just say it? I feel like the fans would absolutely love that: queer Loreia Buckthorn!’
Darcy shrugged. ‘I want to leave some things for myself, you know? Not offer everything up to the world, to the fans.’
I nodded. ‘It’s a weird world, isn’t it? It all gets a little confusing – what’s real and what’s not, who you are and who your character is, what you want and what the fans want . . . but we’re in it together, Darcy, I promise.’
She looked like she was going to cry again, but instead grabbed me and clasped me to her chest like I was a life raft on the Titanic.
‘Thank you, Emily,’ she whispered into my ear.
Once Darcy had left my trailer to begin her process of making amends with everyone she had thus far wronged on set, I lay down on my sofa and stared at the ceiling.
It struck me that what I’d said to her was true: none of us knew who we really were.
We were, what, twenty or twenty-one years old, most of us had grown up in the public eye whether through Wonderwick or famous parents, no wonder we were all absolutely riddled with insecurities that came out in a variety of ways.
Knowing that Darcy wasn’t quite the person I had thought she was didn’t necessarily solve my problems: the fans still adored her, she was sexy and glamorous and exciting in a way that I was sure I could never be, but at least now she felt more like a person. I could deal with a person.