I'm Glad About You(10)

When she walked into the holding area for the auditions—a long hallway, Formica floors, plasterboard walls, fluorescent lights, metal folding chairs—her heart sank. So much for her theory that they wouldn’t spend an unnecessary amount of time auditioning twenty-something actresses for a two-line part about people running. The hall was lousy with girls of every stripe and color. Tall, short, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, Indian, redheads, blondes, brunettes, a couple with crazy pink and blue streaks in their hair and pierced tongues and noses. As a white girl standing five foot ten, with long shaggy brown hair and a camisole top over jeans and heels, Alison was most definitely among the more conservative choices in this group. She felt her palms start to sweat. Oh well, she thought, just get it out of your head that you could land this. Just do a good audition. Just get them to remember you. It was pathetic making yourself feel better before you haven’t gotten the job, but at the same time it helped. Her brother Andrew was obsessed with basketball, and there was a period of time when he just kept lecturing everybody on the fact that the journey was the goal, and the goal was the journey. Megan and Jeff finally got sick of hearing about it and yelled at Andrew anytime he brought it up, but that deceptively simple idea had entered Alison’s spirit and at times it peeked its head out, when she really needed it. The journey is the goal, and the goal is the journey, she told herself. It did; it made her feel better.

She went up to the exhausted metal desk which had been shoved up against the wall at the end of the hallway and leaned in politely to make sure the girl sitting there saw her. The girl was wearing a pink sweater and had loads of Hello Kitty paraphernalia cluttering the corners of her desk. She was all impatience, and elbows.

“Hi,” Alison started.

“Just a minute,” said the girl, who held up a finger as she made notations down the side of a page filled with names. Alison did as she was told and waited patiently until the girl looked up, sudden. “What’s the name?” the girl asked.

“Alison Moore,” Alison told her politely.

“We have you down for eleven,” the girl reported, reading off the page. She glanced up at the industrial wall clock bolted to the wall right above their heads, which reported that it was only 10:50. The girl at the desk looked at Alison with a raised eyebrow.

“Oh!” said Alison, startled at the accusatory nature of the glance. “Yes, I realize I’m early.”

“We’re backed up as it is,” the girl at the desk reported, as if this fact were also Alison’s fault. She ran her pen down the second page of appointments until she found Alison’s name somewhere near the middle. “There’s no contact information. Who made the appointment?”

“Ryan Jones, from Abrams,” Alison stated with brightness and confidence. She was just repeating what Lisa had told her to say.

“Is he representing you?”

“He’s hip-pocketing me right now,” Alison stated. She barely knew what that meant, but the girl at the desk accepted it and wrote it down. “You have a head shot?” she asked.

Alison dutifully handed over her head shot. It was easily the most beautiful picture that had ever been taken of her. Her long bangs hung perfectly over the startling intelligence of her green eyes, and the way her cheekbones tilted toward the light made her look like she might carry some sort of Cherokee blood in there with all the Irish-English-German–Eastern European mutt that the rest of her was. Her smile was wide and joyful for once, rather than cocky. She looked like a movie star; it was the smartest $1,500 she had ever spent. The girl at the desk didn’t even glance at it. “They’ll call you when they’re ready,” she informed Alison. “But like I said, they’re already way behind.”

Alison nodded politely at this and scooted herself down the hall, to the first open chair that she spotted. She ended up sitting between an ill-tempered Hispanic girl and one of the Goth chicks, the one with blue streaks in her hair. Hispanic girl in a bad mood wouldn’t even look at her. Goth chick grinned, hapless, and stuck out her hand.

“Hi, I’m Rae,” she informed Alison. “Are you reading for the witness?”

“Yeah,” said Alison, appreciating the gesture of camaraderie. “There are a lot of people here.”

“For a f*cking two-line part! Like, how much are they going to pay if you get it, even, seven hundred bucks? Bite me with your seven hundred bucks.”

“Well, I’m just glad they’ll see me,” Alison admitted. “I’m pretty new here.”

“Oh no, totally, you got to do it. Got to be seen. Those f*cking agents, they’ll drop you like you got the plague or something, if you can’t even get seen for this shit. It is such a cataclysmically shitty time. They keep using this shitty economy as an excuse to drop people, my agency, they just let half their client list go. I’m, like, f*ck, what the f*ck! I don’t know why I’m still on the rosters. Last year I had a good year, I ended up with a four-show arc on Blood Brothers, that might be why they haven’t axed me yet. Who knows. I hope this Goth thing works. It’s a totally retarded look I’m well aware but I had to give it a shot. I have got to land something.”

It was a lot of people running, there was so many people, Alison thought. She watched the far end of the hallway, where a tall skinny blonde in six-inch platform heels swung out of the doorway, looking like she was trying to not look unhappy, while behind her some guy in jeans and a crummy blue windbreaker, wearing a baseball cap, leaned over the girl at the desk to see who was his next victim. “Maria Isabella Rodriguez!” called the Hello Kitty assistant. The Hispanic girl to Alison’s left stood slowly, stretched, took a piece of gum out of her mouth, and deliberately stuck it to the bottom of the folding chair she had been sitting on, before strutting down to the waiting auditioners.