The shot, p.10
The Shot, page 10
‘Well, she’s a tough old bird. She’ll be fine.’
‘Happy to hear that.’
‘Sorry to hear that, happy to hear that,’ the woman says teasingly, but not meanly. ‘Customer service sucks, doesn’t it?’
Kristy’s not sure how to respond so she just laughs. The woman brings the yellow bag over to the counter.
‘You gift wrap?’
‘Yes, of course, um, I’ve got flowers or stripes.’
‘Flowers, please.’
Kristy unrolls a length of floral-print wrapping paper and places it on the counter between them, clipping the price tag off the bag – a whopping twenty-seven hundred dollars – and places the little purse in the middle of the square. The woman is watching Kristy’s fingers closely, as if she is performing brain surgery or something. Kristy is suddenly aware of her chipped neon-yellow nail polish, something which Irma would have admonished her for. ‘Are you from out of town?’ asks Kristy, in an attempt to deflect the scrutiny.
‘Well, yes and no. I’m from here, actually, but I live in New York now.’
‘From here? Oh, that’s cool. From the Lagoon?’
The woman laughs. ‘How can you tell?’
And suddenly Kristy realizes that might’ve been a weird thing to say. ‘You don’t have an accent,’ Kristy says, trying to change the subject.
‘Which one? From here or New York?’
‘Either, actually. You definitely don’t sound like you’re from here.’ She hopes the woman takes it as a compliment. She’s flailing.
‘Well, I suppose my accent found some kind of happy medium between the Bible belt and the bagel belt.’
Kristy’s not sure what she means, but she’s laughing, so Kristy smiles and says, ‘Yeah, definitely.’
Looking down, Kristy realizes she forgot to put the purse into a box first. ‘Sorry,’ she says, explaining about the box and un-taping the paper she’d started to wrap around the purse. She rummages under the counter for an Irvings box.
‘No problem at all. I’m in the opposite of a rush. Killing time, actually. What’s your name?’
‘Me? Kristy. Kristy Shaw.’ Why did I tell her my last name? Kristy wonders, blushing at her own awkwardness. Kristy has an uncontrollable urge to please the women she serves at Irvings, to prove them wrong about whatever it is they might think about her, the girl behind the counter with a name tag. But something about this woman elicits even more from her. Something she can’t quite put her finger on.
‘Pleased to meet you, Kristy. I’m Mara Bolt, of the Connecticut Bolts,’ says the woman, and then she laughs so uproariously that Kristy is sure she’s missed something. When Mara stops laughing, she asks, ‘How long have you worked here?’
‘Um, a little over three years.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-one.’
‘Born in Puerto Seguro?’
‘Yeah.’
‘But not the Lagoon, eh?’
‘No, um, over in Seguro Park.’ Jesus, she’s just firing off the questions, Kristy thinks, and is suddenly worried the woman might be some sort of Irvings spy.
‘Boyfriend?’
‘Um, no, well,’ this question still trips her up, ‘I’m just coming out of a long-term relationship.’ She omits that it has been over three years.
‘Oh,’ the woman says with a seriousness that makes Kristy think she’s laughing at her, ‘I’m sorry to hear that. So it’s been ice cream and rom-coms for a while?’
‘Um, yeah, I guess. His parents actually own this place.’
‘What, Irvings?’ she asks, waving her hand in the air to suggest the entirety of the building. ‘Harold and Rose Irvings’ son?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Max,’ she says, and her stomach does a little backflip. Since deciding to become a sugar baby, she has also resolved to stop talking about Max so much, beginning with the gut-punch of his name. Saying it now, she can feel the shuriken blade of the x slicing through her tongue, shredding the inside of her mouth.
‘Max,’ Mara repeats with dramatized gravitas.
‘Yup.’ Kristy’s finished wrapping the purse and is ringing up the purchase in the computer. ‘Um, that will be twenty-eight twelve, tax included,’ she says, and the woman, Mara Bolt, nonchalantly hands her a jet-black credit card. She’s looking at Kristy very oddly, as though she’s scanning her for something. Kristy puts the receipt in the bag with the box and hands it across the counter. ‘Thank you very much,’ she says as professionally as she can, ‘I hope your mom likes it. If she doesn’t, she has thirty days to return it for a refund or exchange, with the receipt.’
‘Oh, I’m sure she’ll love it. Thank you, Kristy Shaw of Seguro Park, take care.’
Kristy rummages through the bathroom drawers, looking for makeup. She’s never really been a Makeup Girl. It’s not that she doesn’t care about how she looks or doesn’t want to be a Makeup Girl. It’s just that she’s never felt like makeup does her any favors. Lipstick only accentuates how thin her lips are, eyeliner only seems to make her look crazed. Her routine – if you can call it that – consists of Carmex lip balm and a dash of drugstore mascara. And she tries to keep her eyebrows in check; if they are left to their own devices, they’ll attempt to join forces in the middle of her face. Kristy’s mother taught her how to pluck her eyebrows after Kristy came home in hysterics one day in middle school, complaining that Jacinda Yeats had announced to their entire seventh-grade class that Kristy possessed a unibrow.
Kristy’s mom had sat her on top of the fluffy pink toilet seat cover and handed her a mirror. ‘Watch what I’m doing,’ her mom instructed. It had hurt, and Kristy winced with every hair tweezed, but she was lulled by the rhythm. Pluck, ouch, and then her mom would press her thumb onto the angry follicle and say, ‘Ohhhh,’ and then move on to the next one. Pluck, ouch, ohhhh. Pluck, ouch, ohhhh.
‘Girls can be mean,’ her mother said while watching closely as Kristy took a turn with the tweezers. Kristy didn’t say anything. ‘Is there anything else going on? Anything you want to talk about?’
Kristy had stopped what she was doing and looked at her mom, sitting uncomfortably in front of her on the same footstool Kristy had used to reach the sink and brush her teeth when she was little, covered in stickers and dried toothpaste. Of course there were other things going on. She was a thirteen-year-old girl, everything was going on. She had crossed the threshold from child to woman – and not only in the sense that she’d started her period three months ago and was already a B cup, but in the sense that she’d gone to bed one night feeling like she was not a problem, and woken up the next morning realizing that everything about her was a problem. A problem whose only real solution was that she must somehow be different in every way. And by different, she meant better. Better clothes, better accessories, better shoes, better food in her lunch box, better answers to what she’d done over the Christmas break, better birthday parties, better friends, any friends besides Denise. And Kristy knew these were not things her mother could fix. ‘Nothing, Mom. I’m fine,’ she’d said, and then asked if they were finished and could she be alone.
‘Are you sure there’s nothing you wa–’
‘Mom!’ Kristy had shouted, suddenly flooded with hormones and rage, ‘how could you possibly help me! Look at you!’ Her mother’s face had fallen and Kristy had never felt such regret in her short life. She knew that her words had just broken something precious between them.
Her mother stood up, took a deep breath and looked down at Kristy, who was still holding the mirror and tweezers, the newly plucked skin red and raised. ‘Girls can be mean, Kristina,’ she said again. ‘Try not to be one of them.’
At the time, Kristy was certain her mother would never forgive her. She stayed in the bathroom a long time after her mom had left, pondering what it felt like to hurt someone you loved so much, examining the contours of this new and particular pain. At the same time, she was amazed she had the power to inflict it. Wondered how these things were fixed, or if they were even fixable. It was in these moments she desperately wished she had an older sister. Someone who had already committed all of these emotional crimes, who had stepped on all the cracks and broken their mother’s back but who knew, also, how to repair it. But this siblingless-ness, too, was her doing. If only she hadn’t felt the need to batter her way into the world, feet first and furious.
The next day, when Kristy had left for school, her eyebrows well and truly distinct from one another, her mother’s daily goodbye felt cursory and there was no Have a great day or I love you.
But when she came home that afternoon, she’d found a big Kmart bag on her bed. Inside was a three-pack of lipsticks, a yellow tube of mascara, a packet of razors and some shaving cream. An eyelash curler. A curling iron. Hairspray and body spray that smelled like watermelon Jolly Ranchers. Her own pair of tweezers.
It’s the same eight-year-old peach-colored lipstick she finds in the drawer now, as she does her best to look like a sugar baby. She’d bought a dress from the Irvings sale rack on paycheck credit – she’d just have to forgo her morning, afternoon and afterwork Starbucks for the next few months. It’s a teal bandage dress that had been on one of the new ‘body positivity’ mannequins near the ladies’ room for weeks, and Kristy used to pass by it multiple times a day. Looking at herself in the mirror now, she is flooded with doubt and loathing. But she has no other option besides her prom dress – and she doesn’t think floor-length satin is the way to go. Besides, that dress is too full of Max to even look at.
She walks past her parents on her way out the door. They both stop what they are doing and gawk at her.
‘You look nice, honey,’ her mom says, ‘where are you off to?’
‘Denise’s,’ she lies, and scratches Mercy behind the ears before heading out the door. She senses their eyes on her as she walks across the dirt yard to her parents’ car, tugging at the hem of her dress as it rides up her thighs. She can feel the heat of their constant worry, their unrelenting love and their ceaseless guilt – but it is the beam of their hope that leaps across the driveway and lands across her shoulders, weighing them down like an iron shawl that, try as she might, she can’t shrug off.
SHARKS
Mara isn’t prepared for how her mom looks after the procedure. The bruises on Lillian’s thin skin are like purple plums leaking through a waxed paper bag. Shocking, actually. By the time Mara gets her home, Lillian is weepy and exhausted. Pilar coaxes her into having a few sips of chicken broth and then she and Mara get her into bed. Lillian looks like a child sleeping in the bed of a giant, Mara thinks; her mother has become so very small and wispy.
Mara spends some time dutifully sitting in the plush armchair by her mother’s bed, aware, as she always is, that if she were the subject (or object, if you think about it) of one of her own programs, she’d want to be seen playing the right role. She knows how to be so many different Maras, she sometimes wonders which one is real. Again, Eric’s face blazes in her mind; she shakes her head, trying to dislodge him and focus on her mother. Right now she is Doting Daughter. No matter that she’s using the time to catch up on some work emails on her iPhone; that just makes her Tirelessly Ambitious Doting Daughter – even better.
She opens an email from Noah with the subject line: Casting Week 2: Contenders. He’s CC’d Ramiro, which sends an electric pulse of rage sizzling through Mara’s body. Ramiro doesn’t need to be across the casting process at this level. When they’ve – scratch that – when she has approved their girl, she will inform Ramiro. That’s the way this works. What is Noah trying to do? Sly bastard.
Hey Mara, the email begins, way too casual for her taste, Hope all is well with your mom and that you’re enjoying a little time back home. We’ve had a good week with casting. As you know, we’ve searched far and wide and Troy, Alicia and Jerald are supervising street casters on the ground in twelve key states. Of the nearly 75 briefs the street casters submitted, we had a follow-up Zoom chat with 15, and 3 of those are, we believe, serious contenders. I have a personal soft spot for Kelly from Albuquerque . Briefs attached – looking forward to hearing your thoughts. X, Noah.
Mara does not like his tone. Nor does she like his fucking smiley face and his ‘X’ sign-off. She has a feeling she’s not going to like Kelly from fucking Albuquerque either. She opens the briefs.
Name: Kelly Thurston
Age: 24
Height: 5’1”
Weight: 168 lbs
Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico
Street Caster: Janine Platt
Casting Producer: Alicia Hicks
Notes from Skype Interview with A. Hicks:
My first impressions of Kelly are that she is a total sweetheart without a mean bone in her body. Her basic backstory is that she and her ex-husband, Paul, owned a little but mildly successful Tex-Mex restaurant downtown. As you’d expect, they both put on quite a bit of weight, eating burritos every day and stuff. Apparently one of their regular customers was this CrossFit trainer who became good friends with Paul, and eventually convinced him to try CrossFit. Long story short is that Paul got super ripped and decided he wanted to sell the restaurant and open a CrossFit gym instead. Kelly didn’t think that was a good idea, and things started to go downhill with Paul until one day Paul basically told her that she disgusted him, that everything about the restaurant disgusted him, that he was sick of serving fattening food to fat, gross people and that Kelly either needed to join him, start doing CrossFit and change her lifestyle along with him or that he was going to do it without her.
Kelly was worried about money and firing all their staff, etc. Plus she was super intimidated by CrossFit and the pressure to get super buff. Apparently people pee their pants and vomit when they start CrossFit. She told him she needed a little time to think it over. In the end, she said she was actually going to go along with his plan, to try to save her marriage. But when she went down to the gym to tell him, she pulled up into the parking lot only to see Paul in the passenger seat of the car next to hers, making out with some super-hot CrossFit chick. He didn’t even get out of the car when he noticed her, he just rolled down the window and told her it was over, and that he was in love with the CrossFit girl.
That was about a year ago, and Kelly now works as a manager at her old restaurant, as they had to sell it during their divorce, and Paul opened a small boutique CrossFit gym and is doing really well and has, according to Kelly, gotten crazy buff. He’s no longer with the CrossFit chick. Kelly says she’s had an Aha moment. She really believes that Paul, even if his methods were insensitive, was right about the need for them to have a lifestyle change. She’s not happy in her body and wishes that she had followed Paul into his new life. She is absolutely convinced that if Paul could see her in a new light, she’d win him back. She says they were really in love when they met, and she showed me some pictures of them from happier times. I think Kelly could be our The Shot girl!
Oh, do you now, Alicia? Mara reads through the other two briefs, which are equally unremarkable. Besides, even if there were the slightest hint of something compelling about Kelly Thurston of Albuquerque, and Mara’s not saying there is, this is not the way they are going to do things. Mara is the captain of this ship and she’s not going to let Noah and Ramiro form some little affirmative action boys’ club against her. She composes her reply, CC’ing not only Ramiro but all the casting producers and Brixton as well. Time to bring all the little soldiers to attention.
Hi all,
Thanks Noah.
I appreciate the effort here – and understand how hard you’re all working. However, Noah, I am a little concerned about these briefs. I was under the impression that you were keenly aware of the unique qualities we are looking for in our first The Shot participant. If you have any confusion, now is the time to tell me, as it’s vital we are on the same page here and I think I’ve been quite clear.
To be blunt – the three ‘contenders’ you’ve sent through are unacceptable:
1. Kelly Thurston is a weight loss story. This isn’t The Biggest Loser. And she’s only 5’1” – we can’t make her taller, and the chances that her ex wouldn’t be suspicious are slim. Also – CrossFit is a brand, and while I’m all for bringing on a good sponsor, we’d have CrossFit in virtually every scene = boring and repetitive. It would be like one big CrossFit infomercial. And that is really the biggest flaw with the Kelly story – the gym would be their primary location. Not only is that, again, boring and repetitive, but how could we contrive to get Kelly there often enough to win him back? If she goes as a client, that’s one hour a day max. We need to consider these details, Noah.
2. The Patricia Hendricks brief . . . I can’t believe I have to state this after our initial production meeting where I made this unambiguously plain: NO KIDS. Period. There is no story strong enough that we can get away with a Total Body Transformation of a mother! The press would rip us apart. Psych would never approve it. Please – let’s not revisit this again, okay?
3. Finally – Annie Walker. Maybe . . . MAYBE . . . when we’re in our fifth, sixth season we could possibly consider an ex-prostitute. I recognize the rehabilitation-triumph-bad-girl-makes-good storyline you’re interested in here, but it’s too soon for us. Absolutely not a Season One! And the ex she’s trying to get back is her old pimp, for Christ’s sake! I don’t care that he’s an elected politician now. No No No.
I understand that this may seem harsh – but it’s imperative that we are on the same page here, and that we don’t waste time barking up the wrong trees. Casting producers – you’re all doing a great job – please keep it up, and don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly if you have any questions. Noah – let’s talk soon.
Thanks,
M
Hitting Send has never felt so good. If Noah is smart, and she’s not sure he is, he’ll respond to all in total agreement with her, and then send her a private email pushing back just enough to let her know he’s got some balls. She’ll just have to wait and see.
