Harper shook her head with an amused smirk. “Oh darling, I’m passionate. It just doesn’t fit into your neat little definition of what a true actress is. And to come back to your original point—Idon’thate you. I admire you. And that’s my problem. You’re good. You know you’re good. The whole fucking class knows you’re good, Heywood. You don’t have to work yourself into the ground to prove it. You’re talented, and you keep covering it with this studious little workaholic mask. It’s exhausting to watch. You don’t need to justify why you want this. Own it. Want it because you want it.”
I could feel my teeth grinding—but I was too scared she might be right to give voice to my anger. I didn’t want to spend another second with Harper, whose condemnation of my entire existence seemed planned and formulated and—
I looked at her sidelong. Was this a way of putting me off my rhythm? I was Harper’s real competition for the Wilfred Allen Award, and that was before we’d both chosen the same play, tightening that net of ours all the more. Telling me I didn’t deserve this, worse that I should relax and take a step back. Well, I could think of one very good reason Harper might want me to stop trying so hard.
That malicious little bitch.
“Was getting us lost in the woods just preparation for the Bride?” I asked, testing my theory. “Running off with Leonardo into the deep dark forest?”
“Oh no,” Harper said. “I’m going for the Mother. You should definitely use this though if you’re trying out for the Bride.”
“I’m undecided,” I said. “But I very well might.”
Which was when chatter echoed from up ahead, a door opening and closing and spilling the sound of the lodge out into the woods for us to follow.
Zoe Holland was obviously going to get the role of the Bride. I wanted the Mother. She was the emotional heart of the whole story. Young people’s love was ordinary, hundreds of roles in a thousand different stories. But the Mother was a part with teeth, the sort I wouldn’t be able to play for another twenty years outside of these halls. I wanted to portray a woman who had suffered and would suffer again, in all her strength, hope, and devastation.
And knowing what lengths Harper was willing to go to be assigned it, I determined to show her just what a combination of talent and hard work could get me.
———
I had never prepared for an audition with this intensity—not even for all of those drama school applications.
The pressure of the end of term cracked a lid on something in the school. You could not walk the halls for method acting Bottoms colliding into you, unable to see past their donkey’s masks. Boys in cafés would hit on you in iambic pentameter. Tents littered the small lawn outside our lecture halls with people who had decided the small, dying square was the ideal place to “connect with the themes of nature and forestry” that all our plays shared.
“Only at CADS, eh?” Ivan said through his laughter, handing me the flower a passing sprite had gifted him. “I have another present, actually. Behold!”
He’d had it ring bound, a service I was pretty certain the university printers only offered for dissertations.
Do You Hear Me, Adeline?
By Ivan Drozdov
“Oh my god,” I said, snatching it from him even though he was holding it out for me.
Ivan had been obsessed with his screenplay but refused to tell me anything about it. And this was an appalling time to give it to me, when I could not focus on anything butBlood Wedding.
Which is why I am not merely being kind when I say it was genius.
I feigned enthusiasm without reservation, went home intending to sate my curiosity with a single page, and finished it an hour later. Then I grabbed my pens, formed a neat color-coded key at the front, and scrawled all over it.
I phoned Ivan at three in the morning.
“Ivan, what the fuck?”
He chuckled. “That bad?”
“Don’t fish. You know it’s brilliant. I know it’s brilliant. I just … didn’t realize it would bethisbrilliant.”
“Brilliant then, that’s the final verdict?”
I didn’t know where to begin. On its surface, it was a locked-room horror. Scientists at a remote base who find somethingthey shouldn’t. But it was a facade, because the real monsters were the people within. Ivan had managed to explore our potential for darkness, our capacity for hope, and our innate fear of the unknown—especially that living within the depths of one another. He’d written a poignant love story. A tale of friendship. And a slasher.
All with crackling dialogue and cues I could see in motion. I found myself acting out the expressions as I read, like they could not be contained to the page.
“It’s a shit title,” I finally said.
There was silence on the other end. What Ivan and I did most during our film marathons was critique them, challenging ourselves to find fault with even the best. To work out where space for us existed in this industry, where we might find opportunity.
