You Are Not Alone(70)
Six weeks later, Valerie’s agent called. She’d won an audition for a supporting part as a traumatized woman in an independent film by an up-and-coming director.
Valerie read the 116-page script in one sitting, then immediately flipped to the first page and began highlighting her sections.
She wouldn’t have many lines. Most of her emotions would play across her face.
She rehearsed every chance she got, creating an elaborate backstory for her character as she rode the bus to and from her restaurant job, and envisioning her scenes in rich detail as she lay in bed at night. She strategized about what to wear to the audition, finally settling on black jeans and a plain black T-shirt: a simple background canvas that wouldn’t distract from her acting. She carried the script with her everywhere, like a talisman.
She poured everything she had into the three minutes she was allotted to channel the character in front of the casting director and the producer. It felt as if the emotions she’d kept tamped down for so many years—the fury and pain and bitterness that had consumed her in the weeks before she quit high school—had finally been uncorked in the small, plain audition room.
It wasn’t as if this part had been created for her, Valerie thought. It was as if she had been created for it.
Valerie saw the producer glance at the casting director and give a little nod just before she left the room, and she knew she’d earned a callback. She walked outside, into the bright California sunshine, tears still dripping down her face.
Her roommate Ashley was practicing yoga in the living room when Valerie’s agent delivered the news that she’d made it to the next round, and Ashley heard Valerie’s excited squeal. Blond, leggy Ashley was twenty-six—the part called for a woman in her midthirties—and Ashley looked more like a surfer girl than a haunted single mom. She and Valerie almost never competed for the same roles. Still, Valerie was evasive about the details, more out of a superstition about jinxing herself than wariness.
The director would be at the studio for her callback, which was scheduled for the following Tuesday at nine A.M. Valerie would have a full scene with one of the actors who had already been cast. She became her character in the days leading up to her second audition—dressing like her, walking like her, and thinking like her. She even had a nightmare that reflected her character’s trauma.
But Valerie never made it to the studio that Tuesday. Before she had a chance to win the part, she learned it had been nabbed by another actress: Ashley.
* * *
A week later, Valerie broke her lease and flew cross-country, reversing the journey she’d made at the age of seventeen. It wasn’t just that she now wanted to get as far away from L.A. as possible. She was running toward something again.
Her instincts told her to seek out Cassandra and Jane. Even though she’d only seen them a few times since she’d fled from their hometown, they were the touchstones of her childhood. The memories she held of them seemed like the only good pieces of her past: the three of them lying in a row on Valerie’s bed, flipping through Tiger Beat magazine. Making batches of dough for chocolate-chip cookies—but usually eating most of it raw out of the bowl. Grabbing a hairbrush as a microphone and leaning in close together while they sang the lyrics to Madonna’s “Holiday.”
Plus, she had nowhere else to go.
She knocked on the door of Cassandra’s apartment and saw the shock in her eyes. Valerie knew she looked terrible, as if the trauma she’d endured had wreaked havoc on her body, stealing the color and vitality from her face, sharpening her limbs, and aging her. She moved slowly and wearily. A car wreck survivor, a casting director observing her might think. Or someone who barely escaped a terrible natural disaster.
She sat between Cassandra and Jane on the couch, a vodka and soda untouched in front of her, as the words poured out of her: about the customers who yelled at her when the kitchen got their orders wrong, about the assistant director who’d slid his hand up her skirt, about the casting directors who’d looked Valerie up and down, then spoken a single word: No. Some of them wouldn’t even bother to say anything at all.
Then Valerie took a deep breath and began to talk about her gorgeous, perky roommate, Ashley, who’d wished Valerie luck when Valerie had gotten the callback and then stolen her part.
“I woke up the day of my audition feeling so tired and heavy it was almost impossible to move,” Valerie had said. “I could see the sun peeking through my shades. It was too bright to be early morning. I reached for my phone on the nightstand, where I always kept it. But it was gone.”
Valerie told the rest of her story; she’d gone over it in her mind so many times by now that she could almost see herself running into the kitchen and checking the clock on the microwave. It was 9:07 A.M., seven minutes after her audition was supposed to begin, she told Cassandra and Jane.
Her missing phone held all the pieces she needed: Its alarm had been supposed to wake her up; its calendar contained the studio address and directions to the audition room. She couldn’t summon an Uber, as she’d planned—or even call to say she’d be late. “My mind felt so thick and muddy,” she told Cassandra and Jane. “Like I’d had way too much to drink the night before. But I only had a single glass of wine.”
By the time she borrowed a neighbor’s phone and reached her agent, she was hyperventilating. “Calm down, I’ll see if they can get you in later today,” he’d said.