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“Like, because you grind your back teeth in response to dudethings. Maybe.” Katie was sitting on the floor of the suite her parents had built into the walkout basement of their house. She’d set her laptop up on the little coffee table in front of the squishy love seat. After her mom’s party, she’d come back down here to its pink and gray and white womb-like squishiness to cuddle her cats, talk to April, and—
There had been the thing she’d done before she cuddled her cats. In the small suite’s tiny, blissfully blackout-shaded bedroom with its gray gingham wallpaper and crispy white duvet, with the door closed and locked, and a pillow she’d ritualistically folded in half and straddled, her hand under her shirt, thinking about the white-blond baby hairs along Wil’s hairline that she’d noticed when Wil had run her fingers through the hair at her nape, a little nervous in response to Katie’s questions, and the way her breath had been soft against Katie’s cheek when they’d quickly hugged good-bye at the end of the party.
Katie still felt warm from how hard she’d made herself come.
Before Wil left, Beanie had taken a picture of them together with her phone, and Diana had clearly tried to stop herself from reminding Beanie not to show anyone the picture she had just taken, and then failed, making Beanie visibly embarrassed she had taken the picture at all.
The exchange had made Katie’s stomach cramp into a sharp ball. The old guilt at what she’d put her mother through ten years ago, as fresh as ever.
Sometimes Katie still had dreams where she woke herself up crying for her mom to come and help her, the phantom feeling of tears slick against the glass screen of the phone taking ages to fade.
When she came back to herself, April was studying her closely. “And Kennenbear makes your teeth ache in this manner?”
Katie smiled, but she could see herself in the little thumbnail screen, and her smile wasn’t convincing. “It’s mostly the termjoint,but yeah, maybe also Kennenbear. I’m a little iffy on the whole ‘written and directed by a man’ situation at this point.”
“Like you are literally referring to a joint.” April smiled.
“I know. Because words likeauteurandfilmaren’t good enough anymore? Or cool enough? I forget the difference.”
“Fuck him. Fuck Kennenbear.” April said this decisively. “Besides, the man is a multimillionaire, get a fucking pedicure. Those Jamaica pictures still haunt me.”
“I’m intrigued by the Latener project.” Katie sifted her hair away from her ear and shoulder, her mood lifting with her thoughts about the beautiful script she’d read on the plane on the way to Green Bay. “I love Gloria Latener, and I love the script.”
“But?”
“Hmm. There’s no buts, actually. It’s something that would be a top-of-the-pile, one-hundred-percent yes at literally any other moment.”
“But we want more.” April smiled again.
“We do.”
Katie looked away from April and ran her hands over Phil’s body, stopping at his tail base to give him the scritches he asked for at the end of each pet that turned his purr motor on high. Her conversation with Madelynn had raked up a lot of feelings. A lot of knee-jerk risk aversion that had led to her calling this meeting with April to consider roles in the first place.
A fallback.
For when she fell.
But she hadn’t told April that. If she did, April would want to brainstorm it, workshop it, challenge it, call someone in. But Katie didn’t want that.
She’d always loved reading scripts. She loved how it felt in her brain to make them live in her head, loved making the characters and rewinding and rereading and lingering over little moments,writing down snippets from them to say out loud to herself and think about.
She loved memorizing them and letting the words saturate her body before she ever began working on the character, even, just sitting with the words, and she loved when the character started talking just to her, then inside of her, and how the world around her began populating with the story and engaging with the character in her body.
Since she was a little girl, she’d had these feelings and sensations reading books, sometimes listening to other people tell a story, watching people, reading scripts and play texts and song lyrics. The stories worked inside of her like a mill, pulling feelings and ideas out of the depth of herself and letting her look at them.
Every single moment of guest directingMary Wants Itwas one that Katie had relived and relived, her brain humming with pleasure. She’d loved the tools, the camera, she’d loved taking the script to the set, to the table read, she’d loved building the vision for the episode in layers and layers in her mind’s eye. Working with the actors from behind the camera made her feel hot and giddy every day she was on set.
After her first guest direction stint earned her an Emmy, it had been an open secret that Katie wanted a feature film project. But she was still considered too young, too big a commodity by most studios as a leading lady box office draw. She felt the responsibility of that, the jobs her craft made for so many, including her team.
But making a whole entire film wouldalsomake jobs and opportunities for others, giving Katie the chance to break open what was a very conservative and backward town and guide other creatives over the rubble to make something even bigger than a film.
She could do that, just as long as she kept Honor happy, wrote an amazing script, and perfectly played her most important roleever as the woman in Madelynn’s imagination—the one sitting in a director’s chair, vetted, funded,trustworthy.
April was watching her again. Katie had been silent for too long.
She sat back and gave her agent a smile that looked weary, even in the tiny square floating above April’s head. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve got this.”
“Hmm.” April reached up and pulled the pencil out of her curls, gathered her hair up again, and stuck the pencil through it. Her thinking move. Very dangerous. “You talked to Madelynn.”