Without Scars (18 page)

“Yeah. Can I? Because I already know who has to play her.” An eager smile rose from her methodical look.  “If the tall, dark-haired girl with the amazing boobs over there is good, pick her, please.” She cocked her head at the woman towering over the others. “She’s what I would look like now, if God really listened and was as forgiving as everyone claims.”

I laughed. “Got it.” I went to sit next to Samira, and I explained Fallon’s purpose before she could inject her snarl into any conversation. She slid a script in front of me, clasping Lux’s hand before she could reach for it. I swallowed down hard, reflecting for a moment on how close Lux had come to eating those pills. Today could’ve been a totally different day. I took one of her hands and kissed it.
I’m so sorry, Boog.

All the women were sent out except for the randomly selected ones who were reading first. “What do you think of that one?” I aimed my pen at the woman Fallon liked. “Let her read first.”

Samira shrugged. “Sure. Number thirty-two…Cara Jessup, step forward.”

My phone beeped with a text from Nikki:
In between a costume change.
A picture. Headless and topless.

A hard slap connected with the back of my head. “Charlie, stop sexting and pay attention. Also, tell Nikki she better enjoy those boobs while she’s baby-free.” Samira giggled.

“
We
will,” I joked before turning my attention to the front. Cara was
gorgeous. She’d even dressed the part in a plaid uniform. It was sort of ill fitting, but she stood out, and I wondered if it was purposeful, given that everyone else looked like sexy Hermione Grangers. Her confident stride brought her just a few feet away from where we were sitting.

“I’m on page twenty. Start with the voiceover, when the teacher realizes he’s been buying drugs from his student all summer,” Samira directed. “I’ll read the part of Mr. Dane.” Cara flipped through the script, and there was arrogant enthusiasm in her expression. Maybe Fallon was right about her. She began speaking without referring back to the page.

She was half a page in when my stomach clenched.

No fucking way.

I flipped anxiously to the page. This was my original script for the pilot episode, all
my
words, not the one I’d recently given the other writers permission to draft using my notes. I stood up. “Um…can you stop for a second?” I said to Cara. Actually, I think I yelled because she looked terrified that she’d screwed up.

“What is it?” Samira whispered. After plopping Lux down in the chair, she stood up next to me and looked from my face to my hand. It was shaking so I hid it behind my back. I didn’t know if it was my nerves or the drugs.

“Why are they reading this one?” I asked. The draft of
Confessions
I’d written wasn’t pilot-ready, despite what Samira said. Most of the lines were awkward. The character development seemed to plateau, especially for Cody. Hackneyed tropes galore. Did high school kids even speak that way? Worst of all, I couldn’t seem to get the hang of the overarching story I wanted to fucking tell—

“Well, I liked yours better. I just happened to read through the other script last night. It didn’t seem right. I crosschecked it with the draft in the cloud file, and it was different. Where’s all the questionable morality stuff? That was why Tara rocked. She didn’t give a fuck about
anything
except her money and Cody. Where’s all that?”

“I guess the other writers didn’t want to keep it in. I gave them my notes.”

She let out a flat laugh at the ceiling. “The
other
writers, Charlie? It’s your
goddamn
story. You should’ve told me you were turning it over to them in the first place.”

“You shouldn’t have sent it to Hillington
in the first place
. It wasn’t—”

“‘Ready’?” She did air quotes on either side of her head. “If I waited for every time you were ‘ready,’ we wouldn’t even be here! There would be
none
of this.” She held up her hands like she needed to calm herself down as lines of frustration cut into her forehead. “Are you just going to supervise now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh my fuc…” She looked down at Lux for a moment. “Why wouldn’t you tell me you aren’t writing on the show anymore?”

“I didn’t say that. I said I didn’t know.” Samira was fuming but it shifted to concern, which only made me wonder what I looked like to her. Pathetic, probably. That was why I’d made the decision to turn over the script without consulting her. Samira had no idea how pervasive my self-doubt was, and if I gave up the meds, I’d feel the full weight of it, paralyzing and crippling. I couldn’t have it affecting us in the future. If I fucked up, it would become her fuck-up. If my stories were in someone else’s hands—people Hillington already approved of—she wouldn’t have to worry. My mistakes would not ruin my best friend’s life.

“Can I talk to you in private?” I said.

She nodded. “Josh will take over the auditions for a few minutes,” Samira announced, her voice shaking. Sighing, she lifted Lux to her hip and followed me out of the office. My heart was hammering and the tremors had snaked into my legs, my knees nearly buckling on a few steps. My anxiety had ratcheted up. 

Samira paced almost to the end of the block, bouncing Lux, then walked back to me. She was shaking, too, but from the effort it took to suppress her rage. “What are you telling me right now, Charlie? Or
not
telling me? Because you’ve turned
Traitor
over to the other writers, and now
Confessions, too.
What is it?”

“I was thinking about producing more web series. You know, financing them. There’s a lot of good stuff out there. We have a little clout in the web series community. And we have the money…” My heart was thrashing my chest, but anyone else would’ve been convinced, because my exterior was solid. She was getting an unreadable stare from me. I made up stories for a living. I could lie for years.

Just not to Samira.

Her eyes got wide and her jaw pulsed. She shifted Lux’s position to higher up on her side and clutched her tighter, as if my news had frightened her. Well, if my plan was not to elicit any more concern, I’d failed. “Bullshit,” she spat. “Real, Charlie,” she demanded. “Real, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You don’t want to do this anymore? You don’t want to write anymore? Is that what you’re saying to me?”

“I…” My cellphone buzzed. Texts from Fallon:

Elliott’s on his way, lucky you.

Beta version of my app is due in a month, lucky m
e


****

“…And that’s when I blew the guy while he cried. Life changing experience.”

“What the fuck?” I said, looking over at Nikki, catching the frown of our cab driver. “What the hell are you talking about? What guy, Nik?”

She was laughing so hard her eyes were shining with tears. “You deserve whatever you’re feeling for not paying attention to me the past ten minutes.”

I shook my head, trying to remember the last thing I heard her say. “Weren’t you talking about Darla Lyons? I remember that part at least. Shit, I’m sorry, baby.” I stroked her knee and kissed her shoulder. “Are you going to meet up with her?”

“I explained all of that…five minutes ago,” she said with an eye roll.

“Tell me again, please…”

She sighed but flashed a forgiving look. “I told her I’d meet up with her. If only to save face. The last time she saw me I was covered in my own vomit. And she was, too.” She paused when we got another strange look from our cab driver.

“You want me to come with you?”

“No. I need to see her on my own. At least I’m still dancing, because she’s going to ask.”

I hugged her and pressed my mouth to her cheek. “You’ll have lots to say proudly, baby girl.
West Side
rehearsal was fucking fantastic the other night. You’re killing it at SoBe Sexy, too. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and say she wants to see you because she wants to catch up and know that you’re doing well.”

“Why are you always so supportive?” Nikki turned to me and held my hands in her lap. She almost looked frustrated.

I made a face and pulled her until her head was on my shoulder. “You keep waiting for a certain reaction from me, and it annoys you that you never get it.”

Nikki sat up, still unsatisfied, her expression demanding more. “Just answer, please. How come you’ve never looked at me like what I did mattered? I don’t want to sound ungrateful but I don’t get it sometimes.”

“What you did
does
matter. And you live your life like it does. Even without knowing who you were two years ago, I only see a beautiful woman with a good heart, who tries very hard to be better than she’s ever been. So that’s why I’m supportive. And sorry I blanked out a few minutes ago.”

“Thank you, but you’ve been pretty quiet since yesterday. Is it weird being back on the West Coast? Are you nervous?”

I shrugged but there was a knot the size of Texas in my throat. “Kinda. Never thought I would be back giving a talk as an alum.” It was surreal. Three years ago, I graduated with a six-month internship and the impossibility of
How to Fuck up a Friendship
. Now I was going to be on a stage next to guys who were innovators in their fields, who’d developed things I used daily. Things that had changed the way we communicated with each other. I was a guy with a popular web series who had sometimes filmed scenes in his parents’ house. What the hell did I know about trends and success in new media?

The lush edges of Leeward’s campus finally appeared in the foreground. “I can’t believe you went to school here,” Nikki said breathlessly as she scooted closer to the door. We shot up the scenic palm tree-flanked road that offered one of the best views of the campus chapel, which was framed by hazy distant mountains. The mission-style sandstone and stucco buildings, with their wide archways and bright red roofs, came into view. “People are laying out! Oh my God! This place looks like a resort.”

The cab dropped us off when we ran out of accessible road, and we walked the rest of the way to the auditorium so I could check-in for the event. The whole time the coordinator was speaking I was staring at my gigantic headshot on the banner behind her. Samira had taken that photo, just like I had taken hers, when we decided we were going to attempt to be a professional brand. I chuckled. We were still attempting. I wanted to call her and tell her about it, but she was still angry with me for not giving her a clear answer on where our partnership was going, and what my role was going to be in it. I’d told her I needed time to figure it out. She’d told me I needed to go fuck myself.

Nikki grabbed my hand and dragged me out of the building, bringing me back to the present. She was clutching a map of the campus and chattering about ways for us to kill time. We were about an hour early. As she circled buildings with her pen, I glanced at my phone. A Miami City Prep alum was supposed to get in touch with me tonight about someone who could sell me a ninety-day supply of meds for seven hundred dollars. That was more than enough to get my work done and definitely kick this…habit?

Was it a habit?

“Ready, babe?” Nikki touched my arm, and my cellphone tumbled to the concrete. My heart almost jumped out of my mouth. She’d startled the fuck out of me. After I picked my phone up and I saw her smiling at me, my secret felt like it had just created a crevice between us. Something crushed inside me when I smiled back, and it made my chest hurt.

“Where are we headed?” I asked when I intertwined our fingers. With a cloudless blue sky and students milling about in school t-shirts, campus looked like every brochure I’d ever received.

“Man, I missed out on a regular college experience,” Nikki shouted a few minutes later. Eager to get a glimpse of everything on the 8,000-acre campus, she was ten feet ahead of me, snapping photos every two seconds. She’d tagged me in about a million of them so I kept getting notifications on my phone. “I went straight from the dance academy to SCB. The closest I got was the online public relations classes I took through USC that had video lectures.” She finally slowed down so I could catch up.

“How long have you been dancing?”

“Unofficially, since I could stand. Officially, since I was seven…a total of fourteen years before it all came crashing down. Then I pretty much couldn’t audition with any other company after that, given how things ended. Sometimes when I’m feeling particularly masochistic, I check out what SCB’s doing. Darla killed it this year. She was the lead in
Sleeping Beauty
and
Giselle
. Probably means nothing to you but
major
in the dance world. That’s Super Bowl ring epic.”

“But can she jeté like you, baby? Because your jetés are pretty much
the shit
,” I said, just to hear her laugh.

When we got back to the event, the place was almost at capacity. I showed Nikki where to sit in a reserved row up front. I was walking down the aisle toward the stage but she grabbed my arm. “You okay, baby?”

“Yeah. Nerves.”