But Harper was CADS. Harper and her ripped jeans and loose pages scrunched up in a fraying tote bag, like that sheet of inky black hair alone didn’t speak to nutrition and wealth I could only dream of. Harper carefully removing her polished gold hoops at the start of each class just to throw them into a grubby pencil case. Harper and her secondhand plays, beat-up copies with annotations she meticulously erased, like her performance, might become a palimpsest too.
Harper is practically all I remember of CADS.
And with our weekends spent in rehearsals with a constant rotation of scene partners, she was inescapable.
We were finally paired together as autumn fled the city, abandoning London to such a sharp and sudden winter that our breaths clouded the studios and we all layered ourselves in scarves and jumpers between scenes, picturing ourselvesalready on a set in a foiled coat, sitting in a chair printed with our names.
We’d been assigned a character and were supposed to use the Chekhov technique to consider them from all angles. It was Clive, so of course they were Shakespearean characters, and it was Harper, to whom things the rest of us coveted seemed to naturally flow. So we had Lady Macbeth.
“When are you free?” Harper asked after class, throwing herself onto the bench beside me to lace up her combat boots.
“Whenever,” I shrugged. “We could just do it now?”
Harper paused, her fingers hesitating on the laces. “You’re freewhenever? Nadine, tell me you don’t mean that literally.”
I regarded her—it was clear she was trying to condescend, and I didn’t know how to react with anything that wasn’t outright scorn.
“Alright,” Harper said when I didn’t reply. “Saturday. We’ll do our assessment, and then you’ll come with me to Lewis Stamper’s birthday party at Langstone House.”
I was already being forced to spend time with Harper—I didn’t need an evening in a members’ club with her whole posse of wannabe socialites.
“I won’t, but thank you.”
“Nadine!” She did that often—would say my name a dozen times while speaking to me. Watch her on any late-night talk show, and you’ll notice she still does the same, like she could force some false sense of intimacy. “Lewis’s father is the headof the Stamper Agency. There are going to be agents, directors, and producers there.”
This was marginally interesting but not particularly convincing. “I don’t think I’m going to land an agent or my first role because I met the right person at a party, Harper.”
“Oh, don’t be naive.”
Making connections was something that led me to apply for drama school. I was from the middle of nowhere and knew no one in the arts. Until I went to CADS, I didn’t really know how films got made.
This could take me to thatnextthat felt so intangible. This could give it shape.
But I also knew you only got one shot with some of those people. Better I woo them onstage than stumble over my own feet at a party.
“They’ll be invited to our performances,” I protested. “There will be after-parties. They can see me in action, which I imagine will garner far more opportunity than desperately schmoozing in a bar.”
Harper smiled like she found this idea adorable. “You can play the idealist, Nadine. I’m sure the whole ‘dedicated to the craft thing’ will be a good hook for promo, but don’t actually fall for it. Look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under it and all that. I’ll see you Saturday.”
———
“Well, well, well,” Harper tsked as I sprinted into the studiothat Saturday. “Nadine Heywood, five minutes late. This is unheard of. This is apocalyptic. I must tell the dean!”
“We don’t have a dean,” I growled as I caught my breath.
“Well, thank god you let me know; I was just about to sound the alert.”
“Are you done?”
Harper smiled, mischief lighting her eyes. “I wouldn’t want to burn myself out of all my hilarity before this eve.”
“Oh, is hilarity what you were going for?” I asked, letting my bag fall to the floor and stretching out my arms. I was sure Harper hadn’t used those five minutes to warm up, but she didn’t rush to do it now either.
Harper cocked her head to the side. “Everything’s okay though? You’re alright?”
“I was participating in a study for the psychology students at UCL. They ran over. So I am as fine as you can be, having been probed about your avoidant attachment style and whether your mother hugged you enough.”
Harper’s eyes grew wide. “What on earth would possess you to sign up for torture like that?”
