Fame, Fate, and the First Kiss
Kasie West
Dedication
To my Donavan, who has a big heart, a curious mind, and a contagious laugh. You make life better and I love you!
Dancing Graves
INT. THE GRAHAM MANSION—NIGHT.
SCARLETT, seventeen-year-old daughter to wealthy estate owner and zombie hunter LORD LUCAS GRAHAM, paces her bedroom, a fire glowing in the fireplace. She nervously awaits the return of her father and BENJAMIN SCOTT, the man she hopes to marry, from a hunt.
SCARLETT
Where are you?
EXT. A FOREST—NIGHT
In the forest surrounding the mansion, on horseback LORD LUCAS and BENJAMIN SCOTT, nineteen-year-old suitor of SCARLETT GRAHAM, fight off a horde of angry zombies.
LORD LUCAS
Only kill if you must! There is still hope for them. The cure is closer than ever.
BENJAMIN
There are too many!
LORD LUCAS
Retreat!
One
“Your face is falling off.”
I reached up to my chin, where Grant’s eyes were glued, and felt the long piece of fake skin that the makeup artist had adhered to my real skin hanging by a thread.
“My face is supposed to be falling off. I’m a zombie.” I was a zombie! Acting in my very first movie role alongside Grant James. Superstar Grant James. We’d been on set for a week now, but I still couldn’t shake the excitement of that thought.
“I don’t think it’s supposed to look like that,” he said.
“My face is falling off,” I said, turning toward Remy, the director. He was behind a camera and a monitor with about ten other people.
The boom operator to my right groaned and moved the pole to his shoulder. This was at least our twentieth take of the scene; his arm was probably sore.
“Makeup! Leah!” Remy called. “We need a face fix!”
Even with the large light box blocking the direct rays of sun from the scene, the heat still radiated off the soil around us. It was hot in Los Angeles for September. We were shooting in a graveyard today, and if we were out here much longer, I knew I’d start to feel like an actual zombie, slowly melting away.
Leah hurried forward with her bag of supplies and got to work on my face. Remy stepped into the shot as well. “I need you both to add some chemistry to this scene. I’m not feeling anything.”
“I’m not either,” Grant mumbled.
We weren’t projecting chemistry? We’d had plenty of chemistry when we auditioned for the part. Guess my becoming zombified wasn’t helping.
I could fix that. I may have been the newbie on this set, but I wasn’t new to acting. I had been in a few commercials, a dozen high school plays, and had made four guest appearances in The Cafeteria, a long-standing television show. Sure, approximately three people remembered me being in the show, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t good. This movie was my big break. And my first real chance to prove I was star material.
I stayed perfectly still while Leah poked and prodded at my chin. Grant paced behind her, stepping over mounds of dirt and around fake headstones. He mumbled his lines, completely forgetting two. I didn’t say anything. That was Remy’s job.
Leah took a step back, gave my face a once-over, and said, “Perfect.”
I smiled. “I look pretty?”
She swatted at my arm playfully and then took her place behind the monitor again.
“Okay,” Remy said. “Places, everybody.”
Three hours later, Remy yelled, “Cut. That’s a wrap.”
Leah stepped forward to remove a premade section of my zombie face that she never let me take off myself (too valuable, she once told me). I started to say something to Grant, when, past the lights and monitors, I noticed my dad weaving his way through the crew, his eyes glued to Remy. I shook my hands, hoping that would help Leah move quicker. The second she was done, I rushed to intercept my father. I wasn’t fast enough. By the time I got there, my dad was talking about the appropriate number of breaks for an underage actress. Remy’s expression was unreadable.
“Dad,” I sang out. “You’re here. Again.”
He didn’t miss a beat. “I’ve been here for two hours, and there wasn’t a single break.”
“We’ll keep that in mind,” Remy said.
“Thanks, Remy,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I hooked my arm in my dad’s and forced us both toward my trailer.
“Lacey,” Dad said. “I wasn’t quite finished.”
“Didn’t you have that talk with him yesterday?”
“And obviously nothing changed.”
“Dad, I feel great. We had plenty of breaks, I promise. Half the time, we’re just standing around waiting for the lights to get moved anyway.” We had at least two more months of filming. This could not keep happening.
“That’s not the same as an off-set break,” he said when we stopped in front of my trailer. He looked at the door, then back at me. “Aren’t you coming home right now?”
Right. Home. I was underage, which meant that I was the only lead cast member who wasn’t living in my provided trailer, which was towed to each location along with the rest of the equipment. I had to trek at least forty minutes (depending on where we filmed for the day) home every night to my dad’s apartment . . . a place that didn’t feel like home at all. It had been seven years since I’d lived with my dad full-time, and we were still getting used to it. When he’d offered to move down to LA with me, I thought he was finally supporting my acting career. What I didn’t realize until we were down here was that he just wanted to micromanage it.