This Will Only Hurt a Little(46)

The second weekend I was there, Michelle and I both had a Friday and a Monday off. She told me she was flying back up to New York and that I should come with her. So I did. She was newly friends with a guy I’d done the Oxford School of Drama with (Zach Knighton, later on Happy Endings), and he came over and we drank wine and hung out. She took me shopping in SoHo, and I remember seeing the price tags on the vintage Levi’s and not being able to imagine spending that much on jeans. She had books everywhere in her apartment in TriBeCa. Stacks of them, against each wall. She was never not reading at least three at a time. But it didn’t feel forced or pretentious. She was a girl who had been working since she was a child, so she’d missed out on traditional school and had decided that she needed to educate herself beyond what on-set school tutors were capable of.

We met some of her friends in Central Park on one of the days, an artist she knew and Gaby Hoffman, who had just returned from backpacking around Europe with friends. She took me to the Guggenheim because there was an exhibit she wanted to see. We met another friend of hers and sat outside at a café in the early afternoon and were served wine, even though Michelle was a month shy of twenty-one. Everyone seemed so worldly. They lived in New York. And New York was magical. I had never really spent time there as a grown-up, only doing my Barbie job, which was mostly just work and hotel and work. But those four days I really fell in love. I guess with both the city and Michelle. She’s easy to fall in love with; anyone who really knows her will tell you that. And probably some people who barely know her will tell you that, too.

Back in Wilmington, I tried to get my footing on the show. It was clear that what I was used to on Freaks and Geeks wasn’t how things worked on the Creek. There was no room for improv, and I would be corrected if I said one word wrong. On set, it was clear that Katie was the star.

One day I was having an issue getting a fairly long speech out “word perfectly” and the director came over to me. “Listen, yeah, that was terrible but don’t worry if you can’t get it. We’ll just cut to Katie. That’s what we mostly do anyway, because . . . I mean. Look at that face!”

He laughed and walked back to the monitors. Katie looked at me sympathetically and reached out to hand me the script. “Here. You want to look at it again?”

“Nope!” I said. “I’m good.”

I wasn’t good. I was barely okay. I was homesick already and I missed Craig. We talked all the time, but between my work schedule and the time change, it was difficult. Finally, I was able to fly back to Los Angeles for a few days. My friends and I had tickets to see Madonna at the Staples Center and I’d been away for over a month. I was going to miss Michelle’s birthday while I was gone, but I got her a cute present and we had plans to go to Deluxe when I was back and celebrate.

But at the end of the trip, on the morning I was supposed to head back to North Carolina, I woke up to my mother calling me super early. “Busy! Busy! Do not go to the airport, honey. Something horrible is happening.”

Sometimes my mother sounds hysterical even when it’s just like, the dog needs new cataract eye drops. So it’s difficult to tell when something terrible really is happening. But for some reason, that morning, I just knew.

I went into the living room and Emily came out too, fresh from the shower. “My mom says to turn on the TV.”

We turned it on and watched in horror with the rest of the world as the events of September 11 unfolded. I yelled for Craig to wake up and come out of my room. Our friend from high school worked in one of the towers, but no one knew which one. Jeff’s girlfriend Liz still lived in the city and he obviously couldn’t get in touch with her. All the phone lines were jammed. We didn’t know what to do. Emily wasn’t sure if she should go to work or not, so she got dressed and went in. I called Caleb, the production coordinator on Dawson’s Creek.

“Hey, darlin’,” he said. “You didn’t already go to the airport, did you?”

I told him I was at home.

“Yeah, just stay there. I don’t want you waiting there all day. It doesn’t seem like there will be any flights out today. Maybe tomorrow. I’ll call you when I know.”

In retrospect it seems so insane, like there would have even been a possibility that I would’ve been able to fly out later that day or even the next day. No one knew what the fuck was happening. All day, Craig and I watched TV and cried. His brother didn’t go to work and came over to my apartment and hung out with us. Around lunchtime, we decided we couldn’t cry anymore, so we turned off the TV and walked to a weird sports bar in my neighborhood. We sat there, shell-shocked, and drank beer and hung out with a ton of other people who didn’t know what else to do but drink at 11:45 a.m. Emily called and said everyone was going home, so she met us at the bar and we sat there until six or seven, when we decided we probably should eat and we all walked back home.

We found out our high school friend was okay the next day, although he got covered in white soot and debris from when he ran away from the collapse. It’s hard to explain to millennials and younger kids what was such a fundamental shift in the world. What it felt like before and then after. I remember asking my mom if she felt that way after JFK was shot.

“Oh, Busy. That was horrible. Just horrible. We were all so devastated. But this is different.”

I flew to North Carolina the very first day they reopened the airports. Despite the national tragedy, the show literally had to go on. They were able to take one insurance day shutting down production, but after that, we had to keep shooting. So on September 13, I got on a flight from L.A. to Charlotte. There were very few flights going out; they were only for those who had to travel. I was panicked and crying and smoking outside when an actor named David Monahan—who was also going to Wilmington to guest star on the show—found me. “Hey,” he said. “You must be Busy? Caleb told me I needed to find a crying blond girl and make sure she gets to Wilmington.”