No Strings Attached (41 page)

“Bend over and kiss your ass good-bye?” Nick suggested playfully.

“Stay upstairs,” Eliot said. “The stairs could collapse, and falling debris could hit you in the head. Stand in a doorway, or against an inside wall. And wherever you are, get away from
all windows. By the way, Nick, did you ask Jared where the main gas line is?”

Nick had not.

“Okay. We can check it out tonight. We have to know how to turn it off. Where's it located, Jared?” Eliot asked.

Jared threw his hands up. “How am I supposed to know? This is my uncle's house. And somehow, the subject of the freakin' gas line never came up.”

Eliot banged his fist on the table. “Well, it should have. We've got to find it. Unless, in the event of an earthquake, you want to take the chance of being blown sky high.”

“Whoa, chill out, E. After the game, I'll find it,” Nick said soothingly.

“How will you know where to look?” Sara asked.

“My old man's in construction; I'll figure it out. And,” he added, with a stern look at Jared, “I'll show you, in case the subject does come up.”

Jared pressed his lips together. “You guys are taking this way too far. This is ridiculous.”

Eliot shrugged. “Dude, you want our rent money? There's a few things you're gonna have to deal with—we should have figured this out back in June. Since we're talking about your life too, maybe you want to take it more seriously.”

“You go, E-man!” Lindsay, borderline sloshed, clapped her hands.

Jared decided to push Eliot's buttons. “What makes you so sure it'll be an earthquake, anyway, not a wildfire? Or a tsunami?”

“I'm not sure,” Eliot responded. “I bought gas masks for all of us, and helmets, in case of that. They're in the cabinet with the earthquake preparedness kit.”

It was all Jared could do to keep from pissing his pants. Tears of laughter rolled down his face. His question had been facetious.

Eliot was steaming.

Lindsay put her forefinger to her lips and tilted her head. “Eliot, when's your birthday?”

“What's that got to do with anything?”

“I bet you're a Leo. 'Cause, baby, you are a passionate one. You roar, boy! Am I right? Are you a Leo?”

“His birthday is August twelfth,” Nick said.

Lindsay squealed, “Oh, my god! I was right! And that's next week—we are so having a party.” She jumped up and pirouetted around the room, “Par-
tay
! Par-
tay
! I say—par-tay!”

“Lindsay, sit down and deal the cards. It's your turn,” Jared said.

“Only if you say okay to a party.” She plopped into Jared's lap and kissed the tip of his nose.

No way could Jared resist Lindsay. Who, Eliot wondered, really could? So when, as dealer, she insisted on a “new game,” they all went along with it.

“Here we go,” she grinned maniacally. “Only one card each. I deal it facedown. You can
not
look at it!”

They indulged her.

“Now,” she said. “I want each of you to take the card—don't look—and stick it on your forehead so everyone can see what you have, only you can't.”

“You're making this up,” Nick said skeptically.

“I am not!” Lindsay protested, “It's called Schmuck Poker. Am I pronouncing it right, Jared?”

Jared was laughing too hard to speak, but he nodded his head as he pressed his card, a five of clubs, on his forehead.

“Come on,” Lindsay urged, “everyone do it.”

Eliot shook his head in disbelief. Lindsay had a jack of spades; Sara, a seven of hearts; Nick, a queen of hearts. He had no idea what he had.

“Now we bet,” Lindsay declared.

“On what?” Nick asked incredulously.

“On our cards, silly,” she answered. “This is poker. Jared, you start.”

“I bet five dollars.” He tossed his money into the pot.

Which sent Sara into a whirl of laughter.

“You think you have me beat?” Jared challenged, “with that piddly card on your forehead?”

“I raise to ten dollars!” was her feisty response.

Lindsay, sure she had the table beat—'cause after all, she
was Lindsay—capped the betting at twenty-five dollars—but not before everyone had dissolved into hysterics and finger-pointing. By that point, Nick, Eliot, and Sara had folded, believing Miss Thing the probable winner.

Which is how Lindsay scooped the pot away from Nick and Eliot, who, it turned out, both had her beat. She'd bluffed.

Triumphantly, she crowed, “I win! I win! Now we have to have a party. We'll celebrate Eliot's birthday, and callbacks for the audition. Sara's and mine.”

Sara, giggling at Lindsay's antics, finally managed to say, “You're gettin' ahead of yourself. No one's called—”

Precisely at that moment (she could not have staged it better), Lindsay's cell phone rang.

A half second later, so did Eliot's.

Pumped or pissed. Lindsay couldn't decide what she was more
of. Getting the callback meant she'd made it to the next round of auditions, trounced hundreds of Cherry-wannabes. Yesss! She was smokin'! Lick fingertip, raise it high in the air!

But so—
damn
—had Sara! What was up with that?

For the benefit of the housemates, she'd fronted “knowing” they'd both get callbacks, when naturally, she knew nothing of the sort.

Wait … take that back. She did know one thing: She'd kicked
ass
at her first audition. 'Cause that's the kind of thing, as she'd joyfully recounted to Jared, you just “know” when you're doing it, and get confirmed by the looks from the casting directors when you're done. They lean over, whisper in each other's
ears, write on their notepads, nod encouragingly, and say—this is key—“We'll be in touch.”

As opposed to the dismissive “Thanks for coming.” The English-to-Hollywood translation: “You sucked.” Forget about a follow-up. Only good news nets the phone call.

So when Amanda herself rang during the poker game, Lindsay shot off her chair as if she'd been launched.

When Eliot sang out that Lionel was calling for Sara, Lindsay crash-landed, her good mood up in flames.

How'd
that
happen? She'd personally seen to it that Sara gave the wrong kind of audition. Told her to do the reading all sugary and saccharine when the full script confirmed they were going for Cherry Bomb, not Cherry Vanilla.

So what'd happened? Had Sara only pretended to believe her, and gone balls-out the way the casting directors wanted? Or worse, had Sara read Cherry's lines dripping with toothache-inducing sweetness, and won the judges over anyway?

The second scenario was Lindsay's total nightmare.

'Cause if that'd happened, it meant the girl from nowhere had “something”—the indefinable unquantifiable charisma. The “thing” that must not be named.

The dark art Lindsay had no defense against.

She couldn't share her insecurities with Jared. She'd sort of not told him about deliberately trying to undermine Sara. Jared
played by Hollywood rules—winning at any cost, that is—but there were some things he was stupidly stubborn about.

Like wanting Lindsay to win the role fairly. Like it was okay to procure the script and insider info, but not okay to screw up someone else's chances. Especially when that someone else was rent-paying Sara?

Lindsay had played her own game. It'd backfired. Somehow, Sara Calvin, a nobody from nowhere, now had the same exact chance of nailing this role as Lindsay had. Where was the fair in that?

Lindsay's stomach churned. She really, really didn't want to lose out to her own housemate.

The first round of
Outsider
auditions had taken place in the casting directors' offices in Beverly Hills. It'd been a cattle call, the waiting area jammed with dozens of would-be Cherrys. They came in all stripes: blondes, brunettes, redheads, African Americans, Asians, Latinas, tall, tiny, short, stocky, curvy, stick-thin. Some wore cowboy hats (did they think this was a remake of
Bonanza
?), others decked out in prim 1960s dresses. More than half the girls had anxious stage mamas and papas at their sides. Several paced, others perched, many couldn't decide how to calm their stomach-churning nerves. Silently or out loud, all were going over the audition scenes in their heads—and overtly or covertly, wishing the worst to every other person in the room.

They waited an excruciatingly long time to be called in, one by one, for their tryout. Then they got five minutes to make a lasting impression on the casting directors with a stellar reading. And then, coming out, one by one, by turns hopeful, dejected, deluded.

Two weeks had passed since the heinous cattle call, and the field had been whittled down considerably. According to reliable sources—i.e., Galaxy office gossip—there were now about twenty girls in contention. Eighteen others besides Lindsay and Sara.

This second round of competition took place at the Warner Brothers studios in Burbank in front of the movie's director and producers. The crop of actresses who made it through would then have a final audition for the studio boss. Rusty Larson had a weekly tennis game with the head of Warner Brothers studios. Should Lindsay be Galaxy's only client in the finals, she was in.

She had to make it through this round. Two obstacles stood in her way: the director, Katherine McCawley, and Sara Calvin. She didn't know the director at all, didn't know what card to play to win her over. She knew Sara all too well.

To better her chances with the first, she'd rented the DVD of the director's first movie, and rehearsed a gushing suck-up speech about it.

To better her chances of beating Sara, she planned to sneak
into the girl's audition: Whatever Sara did in her tryout, Lindsay had to do it better. Slipping in unnoticed was the easy part. She needed one piece of luck: for Sara to be called before her.

“Lindsay Pierce, you're up first!” A clipboard-clutching assistant summoned her. Clue number one that the good luck goddess might not be smiling on her plan. Sara, from across the room, gave her a fingers-crossed signal. Which was, she had to reluctantly admit, sweet of her. Which Lindsay had deliberately not been toward her. She prayed the karma gods weren't out today.

Her stomach churning, she managed to wave back.

Gamely, she followed Assistant Lady from the waiting area to the set, which turned out to be the one that used to be the stage for TV's
Smallville
. Made sense, Lindsay conceded, as that show took place in small-town America, as did
The Outsiders
. She smiled inwardly: Being tested in this setting reinforced her instinct about what to wear. In the 1983 movie, Diane Lane had done most of her scenes in buttoned-up blouses and skirts. Today's Cherry, at home in this setting, would be clean-cut, prepped up, in Lucky jeans, midheel boots, layered pink polo, carrying a Kate Spade bag.

Lindsay Pierce? Check!

She'd used a curling iron to give herself long, loose waves, brushed her bangs to the side and clipped hem back with a ribbon bow—her one homage to the beribboned actress in the original.

The casting agents, director, producer, and random assorted assistants huddled in a row several feet from the stage, to which Lindsay had been asked to ascend. Huge spotlights from the overhead beams lit the area, an instant reminder of her days spent on a stage not unlike this one, as Zoe Wong.

Her stomach settled. She no longer worried about the good luck gods. She waved at her audience. “Hi, I'm Lindsay Pierce, and I'm a big fan of—”

“We know who you are,” one of the producers interrupted her. “We know how thrilled you are to be here, and we're running late.”

She gulped. Okay, so they'd heard this all before. Whatever. She lifted her head confidently, and smiled graciously.

“We're going to do two scenes,” he told her. “We'll start with Cherry and Dallas at the drive-in movie, then we'll move on to Cherry and Ponyboy. Are you ready?”

She drew a breath. “Locked and loaded.”

He called the actor who'd be standing in for Dallas Winston: Lindsay was caught off guard. He was tall, scruffy, rugged … omigosh! The boy from the park! What was his name—Mark? For a moment, she forgot herself, gave him a huge smile, and started to ask how he'd done on that other movie. The young actor saved her from what would have been a huge gaffe. He got his Dallas on immediately.

Caddish, cocky, sexy, he pretended to offer her a soda. His
reading was half sneer, half come-on. She knew the lines, knew when and how to toss the soda at him … she also knew she'd gotten flustered. Had screwed it up. She'd meant to play it haughty, righteous, and cool. Instead, she knew she came off unsteady, unsure of herself.

Mark-as-Dallas did his next line.

Cherry's comeback to him was supposed to be flippant, a one-up. Only she didn't do it right! Another half-assed reading—Lindsay was starting to panic. Where was her inner nasty when she needed it most? Lindsay so wanted a do-over. Otherwise, based on that stinky reading, it'd be
all
over.

“Okay,” called the casting director, “now we'll do a Ponyboy scene.” The actor called on to read with her this time turned out to be Tom Welling, the actor who starred in
Smallville
. Lindsay didn't know him, was surprised he was reading for Ponyboy: He was much too pretty for the part.

She did the line pointing out what an original name Ponyboy was. She did it without any sarcasm. She then told him everyone called her Cherry because of her hair color. She'd planned on tossing it, but didn't.

The next scene they were asked to do was further on in the script.

A strange sensation came over her as she read with the handsome young actor. Gazing into his chiseled face, his jade-green eyes, she saw not an actor, but … but … Jared? She
didn't have time to think about it. Instinct said: Go with it.