This Will Only Hurt a Little(45)

I turned around to where he was looking, and across the street at the mini-mart, Michelle Williams was walking out. I’d been prepped by Jon Kasdan that Michelle and James would be my friends, I guess because Michelle and James were his friends, and he and I were friends. Michelle walked over to say hi and introduce herself. She was tiny and adorable, her perfect face makeup-free. She was carrying Fig Newtons and water. She asked if I wanted one, and we walked over to her room and sat in the rocking chairs so I could smoke. We started talking about bands we liked and books we were reading. I liked her immediately: Jon was right, of course. She talked quietly, as if the things she was saying were just for me, but I loved when she would have moments of laughing loudly or shrieking in agreement at something I had said. She was wearing the most beat-up Converse I had ever seen, and I made a mental note to get a pair of Converse and start wearing them in ASAP. She told me that she was going to be moving to the beach in a few days but her house wasn’t ready yet because there were still summer vacation renters in it.

“You don’t own a house here?” I asked, and she shook her head.

“No. No. I just rent houses. And honestly, I wasn’t sure if I was going to come back this season. I sort of asked if maybe I could leave. I was thinking of trying to go to college this year but . . .”

I nodded as she trailed off. “Well. I’ve been to college. Trust me, you’re not missing out on much. And I feel like most college students would be super stoked to be on a TV show so . . .”

She laughed. “Yeah. You’re probably right. Are you hungry? Want to go get dinner? There’s this place that we eat at a lot. It has the best steak.”

We all ended up at Deluxe, a super fancy restaurant within walking distance of the hotel. She was right. The steak was fucking amazing. She and I realized that we had just missed each other the year before when I was in London visiting Colin. She was there shooting a movie and was staying in the same hotel, at the same time. I remember seeing her costar from that movie in the lobby, but somehow I never saw her.

I started work the next day with a wardrobe fitting, and I also met the hair and makeup teams. Wardrobe was really disheartening. The woman looked at my body skeptically.

“Hmmm. I think the trick with you will be to just accentuate your chest and push up your boobs and maybe show your legs, and then just try to hide from here”—she pointed to right under my boobs—“to here.” She pointed to right above my knees.

I was confused. There needed to be a trick? My body was a problem? I hadn’t realized that yet. I just assumed because I’d gotten the part, they wanted me the way I was. I didn’t know there were parts of me that should remain hidden. But I would be learning a lot, I guess.

The makeup department was no better. “So, I guess we have to cover all these moles? What have people done in the past about it??”

I looked at the makeup artist in confusion. “What do you mean? No one has ever asked me that.”

“Oh, honey, okay. Yeah. I guess the network and producers don’t like all these moles on you, so we’re supposed to cover them up. Although I’ve never had to do that, and it seems insane.”

It seemed insane to me, too. I called Lorraine, and she agreed to get to the bottom of it. But in the meantime, I needed to just do what they wanted. Which I could do. After all, this was my job. But I was so offended. The network and producers don’t like my skin? I’d gotten the job on Freaks and Geeks and was fine the way I was, but clearly the message here was a little different.

The hair department was a hilarious mother/daughter team. The daughter, Tracey, seemed like she was only a few years older than me, with a short asymmetrical haircut that was dyed purple. She was smoking when I walked up to the trailer.

“HEEEEYYYYY!” she said. “I’m doing your hair! Wanna smoke?”

I knew right away that we were going to be friends.

I met Katie Holmes my first day on set. She’d been shooting another scene and was coming to the other location to rehearse and shoot my first scene with me. Right away, she jumped out of the transpo van and hugged me. “Jon Kasdan told me you’re wonderful!”

Thanks, Jon! He really did pave the way for everyone to be extra nice to me. I wished I had more scenes with Michelle, but she and I hung out when we weren’t working. We drank a lot of wine and went out to fancy dinners, spending money I hadn’t yet started to make, a real theme to my life. She told me all the good places to go in town, like the local indie record store, CD Alley, which was owned by an amazing man named Fred, a soft-spoken Southern man in his late thirties who loved indie rock and would sometimes convince bands to take a detour from the real venues in Chapel Hill and play in his loft apartment in Wilmington. I saw a lot of great bands there, and would spend much of my free time hanging out and buying records.

With Dawson’s, it was immediately clear to me that I wasn’t walking into a situation like we had on Freaks and Geeks, where everyone hung out all the time. Maybe that was how it had been when the show first started, but by the fifth season, when I showed up, the main cast didn’t really hang out together that much and they obviously had some fairly intense dynamics going on. It was clear that Joshua Jackson and James didn’t really like each other, and while Katie and Michelle were friendly, it didn’t seem like they were very close. Kerr Smith was sort of friendly with everyone. Josh really fancied himself “one of the guys” with the crew. The Creek’s very own mini George Clooney! He’s a good guy and just wanted to be well-liked but I wish I’d known the term “mansplaining” when I met Josh. His ability to turn a conversation into a dissertation was incredible. Katie was very sweet, but we didn’t spend that much time together. I knew she worked out a lot. She didn’t seem to like to drink very much, and while I knew she’d sneak a cigarette every once in a while, she wasn’t really like a hang-out-and-smoke kind of girl. I went over to her house a few times and she showed me some artwork and arts and crafts she was working on, since she knew I did that kind of stuff too, but I had a hard time really connecting with her. She’d been going out with Chris Klein for a while, and he came out to Wilmington and spent a good deal of time there, so she was mostly off with him. I mean, also, look . . . by the time I got there, those kids had already been thrust into a very specific kind of fame—a kind I wasn’t used to. And they’d all lived there, with each other and the crew of the show as their only friends, for the majority of the previous four years.