This Will Only Hurt a Little(34)

After my audition, Eric and I went to the Venice boardwalk and sat in the sun and had lunch and I remember breathing in the salty air and looking at all the weirdos wandering around the boardwalk and just thinking, “This is about to be my life.” We went to the LMU campus, which isn’t far from Venice, and Eric took me on a tour, introducing me to his friends. Then we walked over to the admissions office for me to turn in my application. There wasn’t anyone behind the desk but after a moment, a man poked his head out of a back office.

“May I help you?”

“Oh, hi!” I said brightly. “I just wanted to drop off my application for next year. I’m in town ’cause I was auditioning for CalArts and I thought I’d bring it by.”

“Great!” he said with a smile. “Save some postage!”

He grabbed my application and started to open it as I introduced myself to him.

Have I talked about being a sparkly human yet? Well, I have a theory. There are certain people who are what I call sparkly humans. These are people who have things just happen for them or to them because other people see them and seemingly inexplicably want to help them. Because they sparkle. From the inside out. I was always a sparkly human (still am, for the most part, on most days). Adults just liked me and wanted to help me. Not kids at my school. Sometimes sparkliness isn’t recognized by peers until much later. Sometimes sparkly people are even bullied as kids. Because other kids want to put that light out. They don’t understand it and they want to kill it. The secret is, if you’re truly sparkly, you survive all that bullshit and you don’t let them put it out. And at some point, you start to get rewarded for it. Sparkly humans aren’t always entertainers, and they don’t always become famous. There are sparkly humans everywhere. And there are also plenty of people who are wonderful and amazing, but aren’t sparkly. It’s a very specific thing.

So anyway, I’m sparkly. And in this case, the man who took my application turned out to be the head of admissions at LMU, and even if my grades and SATs weren’t exactly what they were looking for, he thought I was funny and engaging and loved my essays and my collage of pictures from my life. I got accepted to LMU for one reason: because I was sparkly.

Soon after that, Mrs. Carrick announced that there was an open casting call for an anti-smoking commercial and that they were looking for real teens to star in the spot. All of the kids from the theater department went after school to audition. I brought my headshot and trumped-up résumé and waited my turn with all my friends as they brought us in one at a time. They asked me to dance around while miming smoking and burning someone with my cigarette. They asked me if I smoked and I lied, “Only sometimes, if my friends are.” They seemed satisfied with that. They called my mom the next day and she told me that I’d booked the lead part in the commercial.

“BUSY! Congratulations, honey! That’s SO GREAT!”

I was beyond excited. We shot all day, in a warehouse in downtown Phoenix called the Icehouse that I had spent many Saturday nights dancing in, high off my face. In the commercial, I was dancing in a mosh pit (thankfully, it was a faux mosh pit, and since I was the star of the commercial, I wasn’t in any danger of dislocating my knee) and accidentally burning people with my cigarette until two dudes got fed up and crowd-surfed me and dumped me into a trash can. For the dancing, they played the White Zombie song “More Human Than Human” on repeat, and to this day, when I hear that song, I immediately think of being in that anti-smoking commercial.

I was positively high at the end of the day. This was what I wanted. I wanted to be on sets and work so hard I could barely see straight and hang out with people who I would probably never see again and eat craft services and get my hair and makeup done and get paid to act.

I found out I got into both CalArts and LMU and decided that LMU was the better call since I wanted to start acting professionally as soon as possible, and in the conservatory program at CalArts, working was frowned upon until you graduated.

I was chosen to give a speech at graduation, which in and of itself was fairly hysterical, since it was questionable whether I would be able to graduate at all, with the whole Government debacle. But I finished the course online to the satisfaction of the vice principal and was cleared to graduate. Afterward, my parents took me out to dinner to celebrate with Brett and Craig and also Shawn Harris, who wanted to come to my graduation. There’s a super-hilarious picture of all of us, standing in front of the Chart House in Scottsdale where I’m in between Shawn and Craig, my arms around both and smiling this shit-eating grin, like, Oh fuck! I don’t think I was even still sleeping with Shawn, although I guess that’s possible. Craig was more or less my boyfriend by that point.

I had one moment of panic over the summer that maybe I should stay in Arizona and just go to ASU with all my friends. Plus, Craig was a year younger than me, and I didn’t want to leave him. I actually looked into it, but my mom was having none of my cold feet.

“Elizabeth. Absolutely not. You’ve been waiting your whole life for this! Don’t be an idiot.”

She was right, obviously. I had been waiting my whole life to move to L.A. and try to make my dreams come true. And as we’ve already established, I’m a lot of things, but I am not an idiot. So in August, right after my eighteenth birthday, we packed my car, I kissed my parents and my friends and Craig goodbye, and I drove myself to my new home, a dorm room at Loyola Marymount University in Westchester, California, which was about as close to Hollywood as I could get.