Only Child

“I’ll see you later, miss,” Cyn mock-hissed at her.

“The bar is called The LSAT,” Rejji said, the minute she walked into the motel room. “That’s for ‘Law School Admission Test.’ The story is, the owners were planning on going to law school, but they got such a low score on this test—I guess you need to get a certain number to get into any law school—that they decided to open up this bar instead.”

“And it’s the right crowd?” I asked her.

“I think so,” she said. “There’s a little college not far from here, but it’s pretty much closed down for the summer. So there’s only the trade from the camp, and how much could that be? This isn’t the kind of town where a lot of the young people stick around after high school. It’s got a few bars, but they’re either gin mills or topless joints—either too rough or too expensive for college kids to hang out in. No, this is the only one it could be.”

“All right,” I told them both, “let’s play it that way. Tonight’s Friday. We’ll give it two nights. If she doesn’t show, we’ll take a ride over to the camp on Sunday.”

“That’s probably the worst time,” Rejji said.

“Why?”

“Visiting day. The parents will be up, they’ll have all kinds of activities.... No way the counselors would get any time off.”

“You know a lot about this stuff, Rej?” Cyn asked her, curious.

“Yeah,” Rejji said. She got up, went into the bathroom, closed the door.

“Want to dance?” The guy was standing at our booth, arms crossed so he could puff out the biceps his neatly cut-off sweatshirt displayed.

“I’m with him,” Cyn said, pointing at me.

“What about you?” Muscles asked Rejji.

“Me, too.”

“You’re both with him?”

“Sure,” Rejji said.

“You their father?” he asked me, leaning forward, locker-room aggressive.

I looked at his tanned-and-bland face, wondering if those big white teeth were caps. “Their manager,” I said.

“Yeah? What do they do?”

“We’re entertainers,” Cyn told him, no smile.

“That means we get paid to entertain,” Rejji said helpfully, her mouth as flat as Cyn’s.

Muscles stood there for a minute, downloading. Then he went away.

Rejji’s hand, under the table, on the inside of my thigh, squeezing. “That’s her! That’s her!” she whispered.

“You sure?”

“Let me go talk to her, I’ll tell you in a minute.”

“You know what to—?”

“Yes! Let me out, Burke. Quick, before she gets stuck in a booth.”

“I don’t know anything about a videotape,” the girl said. Her long black hair and hawkish nose gave her a proud, near-exotic look, but her eyes were like tiny Japanese lanterns—bright light behind fragile paper.

“You brought me all the way up here for this?” I said to Cyn, sharp-voiced.

“You said yourself she’d be perfect,” Cyn said, half-annoyed.

“But if she’s not the same one who—”

“You don’t want an audition?” Rejji asked the girl, brisk and businesslike.

“That was supposed to be an—” the girl said, then cut herself short as she realized what she had just admitted.

“I’m not responsible for amateurs,” I said, clipped and impatient. “I have to look at miles of tape just to get a few winners, every time. That’s the way it works. We’ve been casting for a few weeks now, and your loop turned up in a huge pile of stuff. Cyn over here, she spotted you first; got me to take a look. And I agreed, you might be perfect. But, you understand, those things are not my decision; it’s the director’s call.”

She opened her mouth to say something. I held up a hand to cut her off, said, “Look, if it’s not you on the tape, there’s nothing to say. The camera loves some people. Others, it doesn’t. I need the quality I saw on the tape. If that’s not you, I’m sorry we bothered you. But if it is you, I hope you won’t let whoever sold you a bill of goods spoil your chances in the business.”

“What would you...? I mean, if I was...?”

“It’s the same for everyone,” I told her. “You know how it works. I’m the casting director. Myself and my crew interview the prospects. The best ones, the ones we think the director will love— those we put on tape. Free-form, no set lines. We’re looking for a quality, not a specific performance. If you get through the interview, you go on tape. And if they pick you...”

“It was me,” she said, biting her thin lower lip.

“Don’t go too heavy on the makeup,” Cyn said to the girl through the open bathroom door. “When you get on the set, they’ll create a look for you right there.”

She came out, a little self-conscious, but not nervous. Maybe it was that half-hour she’d spent on the phone, on our tab, in one of the other rooms we rented. Or maybe it was the minibar we’d left her the key to. Cyn pointed her toward a chair with a spiral back and a round, padded seat. Rejji tightened the locknut on the tripod, adjusting the minicam, while Cyn rheostatted the lights up and down until Rejji nodded agreement.

“Come in tight,” I told Rejji. “Tight on her eyes, tight on her lips.”

“She’s not miked,” Cyn reminded me.

“We need some tape of just pure expression,” I said. “Eyes and mouth, that’s what talks. It doesn’t matter what they say.... What we’re looking for is expressive, got it?”

I turned to the girl. “Tell me about your audition,” I said. “Tell me with your eyes as you talk.”

She arched her back, widened her eyes, said, “Well...it’s a little complicated. It was a play-within-a-play, like Hamlet. Only it was a different form. Unique. We didn’t really have lines.”

“Like improv?” Cyn asked her.

“No. Not like improv at all. Because there was a script. Only I was the only one who knew what it was.”

“How did that work?” I asked, making a “Give me more!” gesture toward my face.

“It’s a new form of verite,” she said, darting her tongue quickly over her upper lip. “Very complicated. They...the other girls...they were supposed to be auditioning for parts in a movie. I mean, the movie was that they were supposed to be auditioning. Like, that was the plot. Only, there were two plots. The real plot was that Adrienne had humiliated me at school, and I planned the whole thing to get even. The movie, I mean. It was all a fake. Am I telling this all right?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I assured her. “Just keep talking, so we get enough tape. And bring your hands into it a little. Just touch your cheek once in a while. Like...that! Yes, exactly!”

“Perfect,” Rejji pronounced.

“I had the only acting job, actually,” the girl went on in a cat-with-cream voice. “But the others never knew it. I had to make it real. Like, I really had set the whole thing up myself, just so I could give it to Adrienne. See, they were acting like they were acting, that was the script. The plot, I mean. One of the plots. But I was acting like I wasn’t acting, see?”