This Will Only Hurt a Little(47)

He held my hand through security and onto the plane and asked the woman who was sitting next to me to switch so we could be together. Everyone was really quiet. In the airport and on the plane. It was eerie. Like people were concentrating so hard, willing things to be normal and okay. It was a giant plane, like one of the ones you take to Europe, and it was probably only half full. The pilot came out and gave a little speech on the loudspeaker about how things were going to be okay, that he had personally made sure that all the security inspections were done, and then he walked up and down both aisles of the plane and said hi to everyone.

We made it to Charlotte, where production had hired a stretch limo to drive us the four hours to Wilmington, since there was only limited airline service and commuter flights were still suspended. I felt so silly at work the next day, dressed in a costume for the Halloween episode. The world was fucking ending and I was trying to get Joey Potter to come to a party with me. I remember there were a lot of pep talks about how this is what we do. We make entertainment for people so that they can escape the real world for forty-three minutes a week. It’s not without value or merit. It’s important to not just tell stories, but also to remember to entertain. And anyway, someone’s got to. May as well be us.

And so we did.

Not long after that, I got an apartment downtown; Caleb helped me find it. It was in a big Victorian house that had been cut into four units, two downstairs and two upstairs. I went to a Ross Dress for Less and outfitted it with pillows and blankets and candles to try to make it feel more like home, but I never felt right in the house. I was always kind of creeped out by it. I was sure there was a ghost. A woman. I thought a few times in the middle of the night I heard someone crying outside my door and would open it and find no one. The South is haunted like that, though. There’s weird energy flying around.

Also, I was just so lonely. Tracey and I would go out most nights, and I would try to get just drunk enough that I would be able to fall asleep before scaring myself. I called the police twice because I was convinced there was someone in my house. I should’ve moved to the beach and been closer to the rest of the cast, but I thought I wanted to be near the downtown strip so I could walk to bars and restaurants and not worry about driving drunk out to the beach, which seemed so far. Plus it was more expensive, and I was responsible for paying my rent in Wilmington since I had been given a “relocation fee,” which means they pay you a lump sum and then production is off the hook for your rent and plane tickets. As a rule, relocation fees are never advantageous to the person relocating. I also had to buy a car in Wilmington. So this job was costing me money.

For Halloween, Michelle, Tracey, and I went out together. I dressed as Valentine’s Day Barbie with this amazing vintage dress I’d found. Michelle went as Angelina Jolie with a vial of Billy Bob’s blood around her neck. I did her makeup and was really proud of myself. Tracey went as Miss Patriotic USA (there were a lot of random patriotic costumes that year, as well as many people dressed as the twin towers, which still makes me feel weird). We went first to a party at Katie’s house, where she was dressed like Marilyn Monroe and her boyfriend Chris Klein was dressed kind of like a farmer, though his costume was unclear.

I frowned at him. “Wait. What are you?”

“I’m half a scarecrow!” he told me proudly, like that was a thing, “I wanted to be Joe DiMaggio, ’cause, you know, Marilyn, but we couldn’t find a costume in time, so this is what I am!”

“You could’ve just been Arthur Miller, I guess? That would have been pretty easy.”

He looked at me like I was an idiot. “Ummm. Okay. I’m half a scarecrow, Busy.”

Got it. Cool.

The three of us went out downtown afterward, and Michelle and I got trashed; then she slept over. It was fun for her, I think, to be in costume and not have people know who she was. She was clearly very famous, and in Wilmington, the college kids who attended UNCW were always seemingly on the lookout for one of the Dawson’s kids, which is why I think that by season five they’d all retreated to the beach to be left alone. When a group of college kids would recognize Michelle, and later me, they’d rudely scream out across the bar, or across the street at us, generally something lame about the show: “HEEEEEYYYYY, GIRL FROM DAWSON’S CREEK!!! WHERE’S JOEY????” Or “ISN’T GRAMS GONNA GET MAD AT YOU????”

It wasn’t super fun. It was confusing (to me, anyway). I had spent my whole life wanting people to notice me, and then all of a sudden it was happening and it felt invasive and rude.

I paid for Craig to fly out to see me. He only wanted to come for a few days, because he didn’t want to take too much time off work. I’m not sure what he was doing at the time. I think working at California Pizza Kitchen as a waiter and trying to figure out what he was going to do next. I offered to pay for headshots and he took me up on it. I even asked him to come to Wilmington and live with me. I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t. I mean, he was just waiting tables in L.A., which he could do anywhere. He obviously thought that was ridiculous and didn’t understand why I couldn’t see that it was a totally unreasonable request.

I just loved him and wanted us to be together. But more than that, I was lonely. I was used to being around a ton of people I knew. I spent a lot of time on the phone with friends back home and with my high school friends in Arizona. I flew back to L.A. as much as I could, but I was low on the totem pole in terms of scheduling. They would obviously need to make Katie and James and Josh and Michelle happy before me, so getting a Friday and a Monday off was rare.