Fallen star, p.7
Fallen Star, page 7
The craft services on this production were frankly disappointing. Where were the Twix bars? And the Butterfingers? They always had Butterfingers in LA, but here all they had were Hershey’s Miniatures. What a rip.
“I do not,” Grace said as she dug around in the big plastic jar for a Mr. Goodbar. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not fifteen.” She changed her mind and exchanged the Mr. Goodbar for a Krackle.
“Dex got me into it,” Scott said. “It’s pretty fun.”
That explained it. Dex was like an enthusiastic puppy in the body of a six-foot-four-inch black man, and even Scott seemed to have fallen under his spell.
“Check it out.” Scott leaned in close and held his phone up in front of her face.
“What the heck is that?” Grace asked, appalled.
“The face swap filter.”
“Yikes.” She stuck out her tongue, and the image of her face that was superimposed on Scott’s head stuck out its tongue back at her. It was funny, but also sort of horrifying.
“And here’s one that makes you look like a beauty queen,” Scott said, swiping to another filter.
“Double yikes.” Grace scrunched up her nose, and the beauty queen version of her on the screen scrunched her nose too.
“How about a flower crown?” As Scott tapped the screen, the image softened and a tiara of flowers appeared on top of her head. It wasn’t the worst. He leaned in close again, smiling into the camera, and the image froze for a moment.
“Did you just take a picture of us?” Grace asked as Scott pulled the phone away and tapped the screen some more. “Are you posting that?”
“Yeah.” He grinned at her. “It’s a great picture of you.”
See, this right here was the problem with actors. They basically oozed charisma out of their pores like a plug-in air freshener, so if they were even mildly friendly to you it felt like they were flirting when they weren’t. It was easy to mistake the intensity of Scott’s smile and all his casual touching for signs of genuine interest, when in reality it was more like the kind of professional flirting that bartenders and salesmen did. Tempting as it might be to play along, it would be pathetic to let yourself believe there was anything real behind it.
But contrary to the appearances Grace worked hard to maintain when she was at work, she was not made of stone. She was a flesh and blood woman possessed of a heart and feelings and stuff, and when a former People Magazine “Sexiest Man Alive” smiled at you while saying you looked great, you had to be dead not to feel something.
Which was dangerous. She wasn’t allowed to actually start liking Scott Deacon, because liking him led to liking him, which led to Trouble with a capital T.
Grace helped herself to a whole handful of Hershey’s Miniatures, half-heartedly wishing Scott would go back to acting like an entitled dick instead of being so damned charming.
Okay, so maybe Grace downloaded Snapchat after that and created an account for herself—but only because she wanted a better look at that picture Scott had taken of her. And yes, she’d had to start following Scott in order to see the picture, and he’d immediately followed her back.
Sure, fine, she may also have saved a screenshot of it on her phone. It wasn’t like she’d set it as her wallpaper or anything.
Not that she hadn’t considered it—briefly—before coming to her senses.
It didn’t mean anything though. She just liked the picture. It was a flattering filter, okay?
It had nothing at all to do with Scott, or the way his eyes were all soft and crinkly as he grinned into the camera, or how cozy the two of them looked with their faces right up next to each other.
Oh man.
She was so screwed.
The next day, Scott posted a shirtless selfie to Twitter. He was at the gym, drenched in sweat, all bulging biceps and veiny forearms.
One week out from my first fight scene in 4 years. No fear.
Grace stared at it for five solid minutes, because she was shallow and weak.
And then she saved a copy to her phone.
Yep. She was definitely, totally, completely screwed.
6
Late on Friday, Scott was handed new script pages for Monday’s scene. This wasn’t just any scene, it was a pivotal moment: the turning point of his character’s arc, when he learns the full extent of his best friend’s betrayal. The whole film hung on the audience buying into it, and unlike the lighter, more dialogue-heavy scenes they’d shot so far, this one would live or die on the emotional depth of Scott’s performance.
He’d already been feeling stressed about it, and that was before he had new lines to learn.
“Did you read them?” Joe asked when Scott tracked him down to complain.
“No, but—”
“Read them. This is a big improvement. It’s gonna make the scene even better.”
Not if Scott couldn’t learn them by Monday.
Memorizing lines had always been a struggle for him. He’d tried all the techniques, every trick in the book, but nothing seemed to help.
It wasn’t just the memorizing that was hard for Scott. It was the reading itself. He could read—the on-set tutors he’d had growing up had seen to that much at least—but it always felt like a slog. No matter how hard he tried to concentrate, his mind always seemed to lose focus after a few sentences.
His education hadn’t exactly been a priority growing up, so it hadn’t really mattered. As long as he could read well enough to pass the tests he was given to satisfy the state’s requirements, everyone had been satisfied. Beyond that, no one had cared whether he’d excelled at his studies—least of all his mother—so long as his acting career was thriving and he was bringing in a paycheck.
The only way he’d ever been able to learn lines was to have someone else read the script to him aloud. It had never been that much of a problem, because Scott had always had plenty of people around him to help run lines.
Until his career had gone tits up, and Scott had found himself mostly on his own for the first time. The entourage of employees and friends he’d surrounded himself with most of his adult life had disappeared with his employability, leaving him to fend for himself.
In a way, he was grateful. When you were famous it could be hard to separate the real friends from the sycophantic suck-ups trying to worm their way into the inner circle for their own purposes. Now Scott knew with absolute certainty who he could trust when the chips were down, and it was a very small group of people. So few that he could count them all on one hand.
Unfortunately, none of them were in New Orleans with him. He was on his own out here, with ten pages of new dialogue to learn and no one to help him.
“Look,” Joe said, “I know this isn’t the way you like to work. I get it. Those last revisions were total bullshit, which is what I told the production company. But these—” He shook the rolled-up tube of salmon-colored pages in his hand. “These rewrites are worth the extra effort. They don’t just give the scene a polish, they give it more heft. You’ll see when you read them.”
“Fine,” Scott said, rubbing his forehead. There was no point in arguing when Joe felt this strongly. And he trusted Joe’s judgment, even if he didn’t like it.
“And you’ve got all weekend,” Joe added. “Plenty of time.”
For most people, sure. For him? Maybe not.
Scott tried not to let his anxiety about Monday’s scene show, but he apparently wasn’t successful because Grace texted him a couple hours later.
Grace: Everything okay?
* * *
Scott: Fine
He didn’t want to talk about it, which was why he’d retreated to his trailer rather than take his bad mood out on everyone else. He just had to get through the rest of today, and then he’d have the whole weekend alone to work on the new pages and brood in private.
Scott stared at the text from Grace, oddly touched that she’d checked on him. That wasn’t something she would have done a few weeks ago. Maybe she didn’t hate him so much after all. Maybe his plan to win her over was actually working.
She was difficult to read, so until that moment he hadn’t really known if she was just tolerating him because she had to, or if she’d actually started to warm up to him a little. But she wouldn’t have texted if she was just tolerating him, would she?
The more he thought about it, the more he started to worry his one-word response might seem rude. He didn’t want one bad mood to undo all the progress they’d made.
After several more minutes of consideration, he sent Grace another text.
Scott: Thanx for asking tho
When he got home that night, he made himself read the new pages. It took him almost an hour. Joe was right though. They were better.
All day Saturday, Scott worked on the scene. He didn’t just have to memorize the new dialogue, he had to rework his performance. The rhythm of the scene was different, the emotional beats falling in new places. He practiced it over and over again, pacing from one room of his house to the next, struggling to read from the script as he experimented with different deliveries.
On Sunday he tried to go off book. It didn’t go well. His brain just couldn’t seem to hold on to the words when he read them off the page. He needed to hear them spoken aloud.
He tried using one of those apps that let you record yourself saying the dialogue and played it back for you, but he was so distracted by his own labored reading in the recording that he had trouble focusing on the lines he needed to memorize.
After a couple hours of struggling with the app, Scott took a break and went for a run, hoping it would help clear his head. While he made a circuit of the park, he tried to run through the scene in his head, but he still couldn’t get all the way through it. He kept hitting a big blank space where the words should have been but weren’t. Every time he started the scene over, he hit the wall in a different place. He could feel the words dangling just beyond his reach, but he couldn’t make them appear on command.
In the shower after his run, he tried going through the scene some more, but had no better luck. At eight o’clock, when he’d been at it for almost forty-eight hours and still couldn’t get through the whole scene without fucking it up, Scott threw his script across the room in frustration. The more he messed up, the more it made him mess up.
He’d gotten too far into his own head. He was giving himself the yips again.
As he stooped to retrieve his crumpled script from the floor, he heard the sound of Grace’s television next door. She was watching nature documentaries again. The sonorous murmur of the narrator’s voice had a calming effect that drew Scott nearer. He leaned against the wall, clutching his script in his hand as he listened.
Grace was just on the other side, probably only a few feet away from him at this very moment. He contemplated the door, picturing her sitting on her couch as she watched television.
They saw very little of each other outside work, for all that they were neighbors. It was rare that he managed to catch a glimpse of her coming or going. He could hear her TV sometimes, the opening and shutting of her front door, and her footsteps creaking on the wood floor upstairs, but the life she lived right next door to him remained mostly a mystery, just as his life must be to her.
She could help him work on tomorrow’s scene. But that would require admitting he needed help.
His fist clenched around the script. They’d been getting along better, but he still wasn’t sure she actually liked him.
The last time they’d run lines together it had been an enormous help. Working with her one-on-one had helped him get over some of his nervousness. It was almost like it had created a conditioned response, so when he’d looked at her the next day on set, instead of feeling like a failure, he’d felt more confident, remembering the work they’d done together.
That was what he needed now.
Before he had a chance to change his mind, Scott knocked on the door.
Grace startled at the knock on the door that connected to Scott’s house. Despite all their texting, he’d never knocked on her door before.
Tossing aside the blanket wrapped around her legs, she brushed the cookie crumbs off her T-shirt and ran a nervous hand through her hair before opening the door.
Scott stood on the other side, one hand propped on the doorframe like he was posing for a photo shoot. That was where the pin-up look ended, however. His hair was sticking up haphazardly, his T-shirt was misshapen and stretched out at the neck, and there were circles darkening the skin around his eyes.
Grace blinked at him. “Hi.”
“Hi.” The smile he gave her didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Are you busy?”
“No.” She stepped back, gesturing him inside.
He walked past her, his eyes skimming around the room, taking in the box of cookies on the coffee table and the nest she’d made for herself on the couch. “Nice place.”
She shut the door and swept the blanket and extra pillow off the couch, tossing them onto the chair by the window to make a place for him to sit down. “What’s up?”
He glanced at the couch but continued to stand, shoving his hands in the back pockets of his jeans. “I was hoping I could get you to do me a favor.” The corner of his mouth curled in a familiar, flirty smirk, but it only had half its usual wattage.
“Okay,” she said without hesitation. Two weeks ago, she would have been surly and resentful at the idea of lifting a finger to help Scott outside work. But that was two weeks ago. Now she was volunteering to help him without even knowing what he wanted from her. Things really had changed between them.
His eyes locked on hers, his expression unreadable, then lowered to the floor. She saw the muscles in his jaw clench before he spoke. “Would you mind running lines with me?”
They’d gotten new pages on Friday for one of the scenes they were shooting tomorrow—and also, it suddenly occurred to Grace, Scott had seemed sort of tetchy and distant toward the end of the day. She hadn’t put the two together before, but now it crossed her mind that the one might have been the reason for the other.
“You were upset about the new pages Friday, weren’t you?” she said. “About having to memorize them over the weekend.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw and he looked away, which was all the confirmation she needed. She thought back to the way he’d behaved on the first day of shooting, and a light bulb went off.
“Wait—is that why you were so pissy on the first day? Because we’d gotten new pages at the last minute?”
Scott paced over to the window and ran a hand through his hair before answering. “Yes.”
She studied his profile: the stern jut of his chin, the hard line of his mouth, the apprehension creasing his brow. He was genuinely upset, and she was having trouble understanding why. Script changes were an annoyance, but they were also a fact of life. It wasn’t like they’d had all that many compared to some projects she’d been on. “You know, there are techniques you can use to help with memorization if—”
“I’ve tried them. All of them.” He sounded angry. “You don’t understand.”
“You’re right,” she shot back, his tone making her defensive. “Why don’t you try explaining it to me instead of getting snippy?” If he was going to knock on her door asking for a favor, the least he could do was not act like an ass.
He didn’t look at her as he spoke. “I have a hard time memorizing lines off the page. The only thing that seems to work is for someone else to read them aloud with me. If you don’t want to—”
“I didn’t say that.”
Scott turned, and when his eyes finally met hers, Grace realized he wasn’t angry at all—he was ashamed.
She felt a guilty pang in the pit of her stomach. “Sit down.”
He hesitated before stalking over to the couch. Dropping down on it, he bent his head and ran both his hands through his hair. No wonder it was so messy.
Grace dug her script out of her bag and sat down at the opposite end of the couch, pulling her legs up under her and twisting her body to face him.
There was something she wanted to ask him, but she wasn’t sure how he’d take it. Actually, no, she had a pretty good idea how he’d take it: badly.
His eyes slid her way warily. “Go ahead and say it.”
“What?”
“Whatever you’re thinking.”
“Do you have dyslexia?” She’d worked with a few actors with dyslexia, and she knew they sometimes had more trouble with their lines.
He looked surprised. “No.” His forehead creased. “That’s where you mix up letters right? I don’t have that. It’s more like…” He shook his head again, frowning. “Anything more than a few sentences and I can’t seem to hold on to the words—it’s like they disappear from my brain as soon as I read them.”
Grace nodded slowly. “Have you ever been tested for a learning disability?”
He snorted. “No.”
“Maybe you should be. I’m no expert, but I think it’s possible you might have one.”
For a second he looked like he wanted to protest, but then he pressed his lips together, frowning. “Maybe.”
“You could have told me, you know.”
When he lifted his eyes to her, his expression was so wary and mistrustful it made her chest feel tight. “I’m telling you now.”
“But you could have told me sooner, instead of spending the whole weekend trying to do this by yourself and getting all stressed out.”
“I don’t like to talk about it. I don’t like people to know.”
“I can see that.”
His entire body was rigid with tension, like he was bracing himself for an attack. “When people look at me, all they see is the strung-out asshole I used to be. Everyone’s already expecting me to fail. I don’t need to give anyone another reason to think I’m going to screw up.”
