I frowned.
Mr. Edman shook his head. “Terrence, buddy, happy to meet you, but you really put us in a pickle.” With that, he turned back to the baseball cap–wearing smoker.
Interesting: The director of Eve of Destruction wasn’t happy to meet me. He didn’t even consider me worthy of being acknowledged. Yet I was the one who’d won the contest “as guaranteed by the rules”… blah, blah, blah. Terrence tucked his hands in his pockets, something he did whenever he got nervous or embarrassed. I felt for him. In similar situations I fiddled with one of the two extra scrunchies I always kept on my wrist.
“Listen, Eddie, it has to work,” Norman Edman continued, as if we weren’t there.
Aha! This was Eddie Payne, the so-called wildly charismatic genius. Funny: he looked like a grown-up version of Max, minus the baseball cap and cloud of smoke.
Eddie’s eyes flashed to Terrence. He dropped his cigarette and stomped it out under his Converse high-tops. “Shit. It is what it is,” he said. (More croaked than said. Eddie sounded like Mr. Welsh, our math teacher, who had a carton-a-week habit, or like an evil frog villain from a fairy tale who also smoked a carton of cigarettes a week.) He vanished into one of the trailers.
Mr. Edman sighed and approached us. “I’m Norman Edman,” he said.
It occurred to me that he hadn’t introduced himself to me at the welcome party. Not that he had any reason to; it was just interesting that I hadn’t officially met him.
He extended a hand to Terrence.
“You want to shake?” Terrence asked, folding his arms across his chest.
“Pardon?” Mr. Edman said, his Hollywood smile intact.
“You know, with me being not white and all.”
I cringed but bit my lip to keep from laughing.
Mr. Edman’s Hollywood smile faltered. “Excuse me?”
After that I closed my eyes. I could envision how this would play out. Terrence would get us kicked off the movie set. Which was probably all for the best in the long run, except that I wanted to see Freddy White again. (I’ll admit that here. Best just to get it out of the way.) But when I opened my eyes again, I saw that Terrence had accepted the handshake.
“It is what it is,” Terrence said in a dead-on impersonation of Eddie Payne.
Now Mr. Edman looked as if he were about to vomit. He still tried to be sunny. “I’m not racist,” he said, pulling away. “I have plenty of black friends.”
“Good for you,” Terrence replied. “I have hardly any.”
Then I actually did laugh. I couldn’t help it. My stepbrother laughed too. That made things better. It got rid of Mr. Edman, at least.
At 11 a.m. I commented—very quietly, to nobody in particular—that we’d arrived at 8 a.m.
Terrence’s stomach growled. He’d been too busy earlier this morning trying on different clothes to eat breakfast. I, on the other hand, had eaten breakfast and was hungry just the same. Another vice of mine—when I was nervous I liked to eat.
A very ominous “it’s time” was yelled over a bullhorn. That was meant for me. I got up, everyone staring, and walked over to the set like I was walking down the green mile.
Astrid climbed into the 1954 cherry-red Chevrolet convertible beside me and snickered. “Thank God you won Miss A-Bomb. I don’t have the upper-body strength to hold that thing up.”
I could be wrong, but it sounded like a clever way of calling me fat. I smiled. I was going to take the high road all the way to hell if I had to.
“Now, just wave,” Norman said to us. “Just wave to the crowd when they’re here. Just wave, smile, and wave, like you have no care in the world. You just won, Laura. Astrid, you came in second.”
I gave a short laugh. No laughing, Laura, I said to myself, because when I did, the pins holding this monstrosity dug into my skull. I was going to have to wear this all through breaks. Kitty would come and do a touch-up, but I was instructed not to move. If I did, there would be bloodshed—as in my own.
“Don’t be all high and mighty. I asked Norman to give someone else this part. An extra. I did not want to wear that godawful thing,” Astrid said, poking at the mushroom cloud that was possibly digging into my brain. “Think of my poor head. My hair. I’m good with coming in second.”
“Lunch!” someone screamed, and everyone stopped what they were doing and, like a hog heading for a trough, they ran.
Just like in the school cafeteria, everyone sat in their respective cliques. Crew on one side. Production on the other. Talent ate in their trailers. Terrence and I? Well, we found a picnic table next to the Porta Potties. We liked to keep it classy. Individual boxes filled with sandwiches and a little package of potato chips, a pickle, and a cookie. Terrence and I each grabbed a lemon-lime soda from a cooler.
“You’ll enjoy tomorrow. Sloppy joes,” said a scruffy-looking man. His gray hair went every which way, his beard was unkempt and looked like a Dalmatian’s, and the dark circles under his eyes were large but were slightly covered by huge black-rimmed glasses. “I’m Dylan Paige,” he said. “Cinematographer. You’ll see me around. Usually with a handheld.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“You too,” he said. “You two seem to have manners, unlike some people.” He looked over his shoulder down the lane toward the trailers. “But I’ve been around worse.”
“How many movies have you worked on?” Terrence asked.
“Thirty or so,” he said. “But I’ve only been on this job for the last five or so in my career.”
“That’s impressive, man.”
“Well, I did take a pay cut to work on WarGames.”
“So you’ve met Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy?”
He nodded. “I was hoping that they’d be in this too instead of the talent we have,” he muttered quietly. “They’ve got attitude problems.”
“Yeah, they’re not that friendly,” I said.
“Except Freddy,” Terrence said.
“Oh, yeah, Freddy’s nice,” Dylan said. “And Owen at least keeps to himself… But the girl.” He shook his head. “Sometimes stereotypes are true. We’re already taking bets on how many takes it will take for Astrid to die. I’ve got my money on six. You want in?”
Terrence and I looked at each other and nodded. We decided to go in on eight.
By the time we got back from lunch, we were already behind schedule according to Tyson, who kept on relaying that message from Norman, the director. Well, I guessed he could be annoyed. It was his picture, after all. But Astrid was in a mood and took it out on anyone she came in contact with. (Kitty, Raymond, Eddie—even Norman. They could do no wrong, but she was right. All the time, or so she claimed. A lot.) Like the guides say to tourists on African safaris, don’t make eye contact. She was a predator and we were her prey.
But like the tabloids screamed with their headlines, Astrid Ogilvie was an entitled whiner with unreasonable expectations for life. I rolled my eyes but didn’t move anything else for fear of decapitation. I looked like a fool sitting here in my pink dress and Miss Atomic Bomb crown. Astrid didn’t. She wore white—or, as she called it, virginal white.
“It pays to come in second place,” she said, snickering.
I wanted to lean over and send the full force of my mushroom cloud over her head. But I didn’t. I had self-control, and my body physically wouldn’t allow it without doing bodily harm to myself.
We sat in a bus at the end of “Main Street,” which in real life was Sixth Street. Terrence sat beside Freddy. Astrid didn’t want to sit by me, but it being the only seat, she had to. Sometimes we had to do things we didn’t want to do to get from point A to point B.