And I was certainly faking it: perched at the end of a bench, nervously toying with the strap of a bag so laden with textbooks and notebooks it was a wonder it hadn’t snapped. I wasn’ttheNadine Heywood yet; just Nadine—anxious scholar, socially inept, and beautifully desperate. My hair was still its natural strawberry blond; frizzy curls scraped back into a bun,and I wore the same denim shorts and oversized T-shirt as half the girls present.
“You think you’ve completed the hard part,” our lecturer intoned, andno, my pulse pounded because I didn’t think the hard part was over at all.
Surely at some point, an academy this prestigious would realize what a mistake it had made letting in the kid who’d never had any sort of formal training. Everyone here likely had connections or generational talent; and my family’s greatest contribution to the arts was the artifice in their every forced smile.
I’d be out before I could even start to make those smiles real.
“But here you will be tested. Pushed to your limits. And asked to leave if you fail to keep us interested.” He clapped his hands—something I’d seen him do in tapes. Clive Bellingham, legendary Shakespearean director, now, somehow, my own teacher.Christ.This was real. “Let’s begin.”
Excerpts were handed out. Monologues for us to prepare for the following week. Two of each—and everyone began muttering as they realized we would be up against one another. Of course we were. How could we receive feedback without a comparison point, a mirror to move against?
And there I was at the end of the row, holding two sheets because somehow, impossibly, we were an odd number.
And then Harper breezed in—late, effortless, and bringing the room to a standstill.
I could never work out why she had that effect on us—thecaught breaths and halting conversation, the drawing of every single eye. She was beautiful, but most people in that room were. CADS taught one of the most competitive drama courses in the world, but in 1992 it was clear the “stage presence” they’d auditioned us for paid particular attention to jawlines. We didn’t know then that Harper was the daughter of Greta Liao and Declan Moore, though it wouldn’t have mattered if we had. Liao and Moore were hardly the most famous ancestors of anyone in that room, nor the wealthiest or best connected.
That was the hardest part of being at CADS; it was a precursor to the industry as a whole: that we were all incredible, talented, beautiful people and together it made us ordinary.
Clive had turned to arrange his notes, the only one not impacted by Harper’s immediate, unshakable presence. She slipped beside me. There was barely any space left on the bench so her bare thigh pressed against mine, warm and soft and as immediate as the rest of her. She plucked the paper from my hands and whisperedthankswith the smile that would later make her famous—a girl-next-door, everyone’s-a-friend-you-just-haven’t-met-yet grin.
But acting meant everything to me. I took it very seriously. And while the rest of us might have nearly ruined ourselves in our desperation to secure one of the forty-eight spots in this course, Harper made it clear from the start that she did not particularly value hers.
We were competition from the off.
But if there was a rivalry to be found, it was only this: I cared too much, and Harper did not care at all.
———
Our first day continued in a dizzying haze of introductions and exercises, so that by the end I had chanted tongue twisters and clutched hands and zipped, zapped, and zoomed every classmate, but I had not truly spoken to any of them.
Harper was the first, dabbing on a watermelon Lip Smacker and sliding her hair free from the elastic band she’d slung it into. “Are you coming to the pub?”
As though this were predetermined. Maybe it was. Maybe they’d discussed it over lunch while I’d darted past her to student services to inquire about tour guide opportunities. We weren’t allowed part-time work—CADS felt it would “interfere with the flow and fecundity of our studies.” But we could pick up odd jobs—like showing prospective students around campus. I imagined I could do it well, as instantly enamored as I’d been with the school.
I knew I should say yes to her—though admittedly Harper had a way about her that madeyesthe only thing you wanted to say.
(I know, I know. It obviously did not remain that way for long.)
But I could picture it: clustered into a tiny oaken pub on a street corner, cracking jokes around a table of my peers, trying to work out who would take who home by the end of the night,maybe even stumbling back with one of them myself. My bedroom back in Yorkshire was covered in posters of beautiful young actors and actresses—a pursuit I’d finally begun to admit wasn’tentirelyscholarly—and now I was surrounded by high cheekbones and waifish silhouettes—my mood boards incarnate.
But I could also envision awkward silences and hesitant excuses not to buy rounds and all that desperation festering inside me leaking.
Before this, I’d skirted by at school, where my anxiety about getting it all wrong was construed as a haughty aloofness that made me if not cool, then adjacent to it. The closest I’d come to anyone was a boy on my school bus who loaned me his Discman when he wasn’t using it (and stopped when he began dating Rachel Watts, who thought sharing music was a step away from sharing saliva) and a girl who painted the sets at my local community theater (she’d broken up with me before I even realized we were dating—and yet, still, somehow left me thoroughly heartbroken).
At CADs I thought I might actually crack deeper, true companionship rather than the utility of the past. I’d pictured study groups, rambunctious debates about our favorite performances, and gatherings of hastily run lines that would stretch until sunrise. All of it centered around the one thing no one else in my life has ever understood: my obsession with the craft.
Well,almostno one else—but dead grandfathers don’t count.
“I have to go to the library, I’m afraid,” I said, slinging thatoh-so-heavy bag across my shoulder. I’d visited the secondhand shop off campus before class and rushed to buy the substantially discounted, severely battered copies before someone else got there and left me with the “good as new” ones with their “nearly new” price tags.
“The library,” Harper scoffed. “It’s the first day. What do you possibly have to revise?”
I did not have to revise. I had to photocopy pages of plays. CADS didn’t let you check out texts for core classes. You could only read them on library premises. But in the flurry of professors printing syllabi and sports societies demanding posters, they had temporarily dropped charges for copier use. I intended to make the most of it.
But I didn’t want to explain that, the same way I didn’t want to explain the relief I felt at evading an evening of carefully calculating the cheapest drink and trying to subtly hop the barriers for the tube.
So I shrugged instead. “I just really don’t want to waste my time here.”
