Page 24 of This Changes Everything

“No.” I felt rejected before I’d even stepped into the audition room. “You can’t come in with me when they call my name.”

“Why not?” His face fell. “Can’t I watch?”

Looking at Rory as he leaned against the brick building, lit up by the sun and removed from how I knew him, turned him into another version of himself, leaving me feeling lightheaded. I scanned the group of girls and noticed at least half of them were looking at him, too.

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“What are you going to do in there?” he asked curiously.

“I don’t know. They’re probably going to make me dance. I can’t tell you how many auditions I’ve been to where I’m dancing in front of people judging me. They want to look at my body to make sure it looks the way they want on camera. Commercial auditions are weird like that. It’s filling a quota. It’s not actually about me.” I told Rory the spiel I often told myself.

I don’t know what came over me. I brushed my knuckle against the back of his hand. He reacted by taking his index finger and hooking it around mine. I looked down at our hands, and everything inside me seized.

I was called into the studio, and they asked me to do the same as always. I danced and they watched. But this time it was different. This time, I had backup.

Chapter 9

NEW YORK 20 years old

BEN AND I STOPPED AT TRADER JOE’S ON OUR WAY HOME FROM school, and he grabbed the ingredients to make a creamy Tuscan chicken dinner from our electric skillet, which sat near the end of our beds. I was to make the salad.

In just five months, Ben had become my closest friend. He and I had already exchanged a lifetime of words. I don’t know if it was our intimate classes together as scene partners, sharing our darkest moments and most vulnerable sides, or if it was our middle-of-the-night, pitch-black laughing fits from our separate beds. Still, somehow along the way, Ben had come to know me better than anyone. He knew me better than my sister, better than Kara, better than Zoë, better than . . . well, a lot of people. He caught my faraway stare when I was thinking about Rory on countless occasions and would take his dirty socks off and shove them in my face unexpectedly to snap me out of it. We would take each other to Central Park when we were having bad days. If it rained, we would pack snacks and sit under the Glen Span Arch at 102nd Street. He would memorize lines or study, and I often found myself writing short stories in one of my school notebooks, inspired by the spooky stone arch trapped in the woods.

Ben knew who I was and who I wanted to be. He knew what made me happy. He knew when I was sad before I did. He knew what made me tick, because it made him tick, too. Our friendship came as naturally and as comfortably as the rising sun.

I came out of the hot shower and pulled on my striped pajama bottoms and an old swim club tank top. Ben was standing over our skillet in a thin gray T-shirt that draped over his muscular build, and his pajama pants hung. His dark-blond hair had grown out a bit and waved into a mess.

“It smells so good!” I breathed in deeply.

“Can you pull out the table?”

I giggled as I took off the lamp that sat on our nightstand. I cleared our schoolbooks, plays, and notes, my lucky golf ball, my jewelry, and his phone. I then dragged the nightstand toward the foot of our beds and pulled out a tealight from the drawer. I lit the candle and put it in the center of the tiny, square, makeshift table.

“Oh shit. We’re cute.” Ben looked at my setup while plating the chicken.

I knelt on the floor as Ben placed our dinner down on the table, then sat cross-legged across from me. My first bite almost knocked me over. It was creamy and shockingly delicious, considering it was made in our non-kitchen and cooked in an electric skillet.

“Ben,” I said with my mouth full, looking him dead in the eyes. “Yum.”

He chuckled softly and took a bite for himself. “Have you decided if you’re going to ask Justin to meet his agent, or, like . . . give them your résumé or something?” Ben picked our conversation right back up from earlier in the day, after I told him my boss’s LA agents were coming into town to discuss a strategy to get Justin’s production company more press and better scripts.

“I’m worried it would look bad. I’m just an intern.”

“What’s the worst that could happen, he says no?”

“I’m pretty sure the worst that could happen is looking like an asshole,” I retorted. But I considered Ben’s argument. Justin was a dick, but we were close in age, and he knew I was trying to be an actor, too. I didn’t feel like an actor in Vancouver, to the point where I had become embarrassed to admit that’s what I wanted for my life. There were no real, meaningful credits to my name, and I constantly felt like an imposter when I told people that’s what I was, because I wasn’t. I was a student. I was a fraud. In Vancouver, I wasn’t real. In New York, I was.

“Stop worrying what people think about you,” Ben said with his mouth full. “You’re not asking for a part or anything. You’re asking for an introduction to his agent, and for him to see you as something other than an intern. Stop being so Canadian and be bold.”

“Oh, I’m Ben. I walk into a room like an American. I’m beautiful and take up space. Make way, world!” I pitched my voice up and rolled my eyes to the ceiling. Ben dropped his fork and leveled his glare at me.

“I walk in the room like an American? What does that mean?” His look was a mix of amusement and annoyance.

“Like you know you belong there.” I lifted my finger and booped him on the nose. I surged to my feet, pressed my hands into my pajama bottoms, straightening them, then charged out the front door, leaving Ben on the floor at our tiny table.

Coming back into the room, I flung the front door open with so much bravado that it slammed into the wall, knocking down our framed Fight Club movie poster.

“Oh no.” I broke character and lifted my hands to my mouth.