Page 24 of Let’s Make a Scene

Patty reaches out her hand and takes mine in a firm grip.

“I promise you,” she says, murder in her eyes, “I will find the person who did this to you. I will make them pay.”

“All right, Mr. Neeson.” Liam nudges her in the shoulder. He turns to me, sympathy all over his pretty face. “I expect it was a bad breakup, was it?”

I would love for this conversation to end.

“No, no breakup,” I say, tucking my much-maligned hair behind my ear. “Honestly? This is my first real acting job and I’m totally out of my depth. I thought if I got a sophisticated haircut, it would make me feel… more together. Only that was a disaster, and actually this whole thing has been a disaster, and I am very, very worried that I’m about to single-handedly bring down an entire movie, probably destroying several careers and bankrupting multiple studios in the process.”

My breath is coming fast now, and I feel perilously close to tears.

“Well, fuck,” Patty says after a moment. “I guess I’d better fix your hair, then.”

“You poor thing.” Liam nudges me toward the chair between them, the one facing the mirror. “Why don’t you tell us all about it? You wouldn’t believe the problems that get fixed in here… I swear the UN only needs a hair and makeup department, and the world would be sorted like that.” He clicks his fingers.

I sink into the chair and Patty brandishes her scissors. “Sophisticated.” She tilts her head, frowns in concentration. “I can do that. And the good news is you’re wearing wigs on-screen, so shorter is actually more manageable.” She gestures to the shelf behind her, which holds half a dozen wigs arranged on mannequin heads. “Go on then, give us the whole story.”

So I do. I tell them I’m a waitress without so much as an A-level in drama, that acting has been my dream as long as I can remember, that I scrimped and saved for a six-week acting class, signed up for every amateur society I could. I tell them about the casting call and the audition, about the table read and what I heard Jack say. I tell them about the argument we had afterward, about the week of rehearsals and how anxious I am, and all the time, they fuss over me, playing with my hair, smearing my face with delicious-smelling lotions. Liam takes my hands and massages them.

They make sympathetic noises, and gasp and laugh at all the right places.

“Sounds like Jack is a right monster,” Liam says with a loyalty I’m not sure I’ve earned.

“Not surprising.” Patty pauses in her snipping and leans forward over my shoulder. “I worked with his mother once—my god, what a nightmare. I hear his dad’s the same.”

“Incredible actors, though,” I murmur.

“Oh, of course,” Patty agrees, turning her attention back to her work. “But that’s part of the problem if you ask me: so much bad behavior in this business gets put down to artistic temperament.” She scoffs. “They call it genius; I call it being a dickhead.”

“Was Caroline Turner really awful then?” Hannah asks, obviously delighted by this bit of A-list Hollywood gossip.

Patty rolls her eyes. “Oh god, yes. Nothing was good enough for her. She had a rider that was like a copy of Ulysses. A thousand pages long and made about as much sense.”

“A rider?” I ask.

“Oh, sweets!” Liam coos. “You have to have one! It’s the list of demands the talent make… you know, like ‘I must have a thousand rare orchids arranged in the shape of my beloved dead Pekinese, Alfred, or I can’t possibly work.’ ”

“Ah.” I nod. “I think Gayle asked me about that. I said some tap water would be great.”

Patty lets out a bark of laughter.

Liam shakes his head. “We need to work on that. At least ask for a set of crystals—rose quartz for sure, maybe amethyst. When they’re fully charged they’ll help with all this anxiety and negative energy.”

“How do you charge a crystal?” Hannah asks, perplexed.

“You don’t charge them, silly,” Liam replies, dabbing something shimmery along my cheekbones. “The moon does.”

“Forget moon crystals,” Patty advises. “Go straight for the hard liquor and personal masseuse.”

“You love a Mars bar,” Hannah supplies helpfully. “Maybe you could ask for some of those. Oh! Or how about crisps and bread so we can have crisp sandwiches like we used to make when we got home from school? You can probably even have branded ones. Oh my god! You can probably ask for Kettle Chips. I bet film stars eat Kettle Chips all the time.”

While crisp sandwiches are an elite snack, I don’t think her suggestions are striking a very worldly, sophisticated note. I wonder what’s on Jack’s rider… Probably a giant pyramid of Ferrero Rocher and gold-plated underpants.

“Anyway,” I say, steering the conversation back on track, and my mind away from Jack Turner-Jones’s underwear, “you were saying about Jack’s parents…” I can’t help my curiosity—after all the pair of them did manage to spawn Satan himself.

“Oh, yeah.” Patty shrugs. “It just sounds like the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. They’re both incredibly rude. You can tell a lot about a person by how they treat the crew on a film set, and Caroline Turner treated everyone like dirt on her Jimmy Choos.”

“Patty,” Liam chides, “you’re not being very discreet.”