“I’m just saying,” Alice says. “You have to stay professional, right? So stop being weird around him.”
“I’m not being weird.” My cheeks burn. I very well could be acting weird around him, but I can’t help it. “I try not to be weird.”
“Well.” She raises a brow. “Keep trying.”
“You’re the actual worst,” I say.
Before I go to bed that night, I send an email to Ms. Jacobson about interviewing Penny Livingstone. Penny plays Emma, a friend Marius’s character makes at the conversion camp. As the least famous, she’ll probably be the easiest cast member to get a meeting with before we leave for Austin.
When I wake up the next morning, we have a meeting set for three o’clock at a restaurant in downtown L.A. I blink a few times to make sure I’m reading correctly. I figured it’d be easy to get a meeting, but not this easy. Maybe Penny’s Disney Channel upbringing makes her eager for any sort of press.
“Do you have the money to eat here?” Alice whispers as we walk inside. “It looks like it’s out of your price range.”
It isn’t that bad. Everything is made out of wood. Flowers hang from the ceiling, and there are floor-to-ceiling windows. People eat from bowls filled with fruit of strange colors. It’s like a hipster haven—a haven I probably can’t afford without using a serious chunk of my prize money.
Deep Focus sent me plane tickets and hotel reservations, but I still have to pay for Alice, since she wasn’t exactly part of the deal. Plus, there’s the issue of food and other expenses. Ms. Jacobson told me to keep receipts from everything so they can reimburse me, but that doesn’t really help right now.
“I just won’t get anything.” I bite my lip, looking around for Penny. “Water is free.”
“She’ll think you’re pitiful.”
“I don’t care.”
“Can I help you?” A woman materializes in front of us. She’s dressed in jeans and boots, even though we’re in L.A. “A table for two?”
“Uh, she’s meeting someone,” Alice says, nudging me forward. “Can I sit at the bar?”
It takes no time to spot Penny. Not only did I just see her in Incident on 57th Street, but she looks the same as she did three years ago, when I still watched her sing and dance her way through high school on Disney Channel. Her hair is flaming red, and there’s a handful of freckles on the pale skin around her nose. Most of the baby fat from her cheeks is gone. As I get closer, I see there’s something different about her nose. It’s straighter.
She stands up as soon as she sees me, but instead of standing there, like Marius did, she shimmies out of her chair and actually pulls me in for a hug. I freeze. My arms hang at my sides.
“It’s so nice to see you,” she says. I can’t tell if she means it or not. There’s a polished air about her. The smile on her face is warm but guarded. “I looked at some of your writing, and it’s so impressive.”
“Oh, wow,” I say, sitting down across from her. “Thank you.”
She watches in silence as I pull out my pen, my notebook, and my recorder.
“Do you mind if I record you?”
She frowns. I blink in surprise. It’s the first time anyone has hesitated when I’ve asked. Then again, Marius is the only person I’ve interviewed in person, one on one.
“I don’t have to,” I say, gripping the recorder in my hand. It’s empty since I already uploaded yesterday’s interview to my computer. “It’s just easier for me. I’ll be able to remember everything later and make sure all of the quotes are accurate.”
“All right,” she says, chewing at her lip. “As long as it helps with accuracy.”
“Great,” I say, setting it on the table between the two of us. “So, you know I’m working on a profile about Marius, but I’d love to start out asking about you. What have you been working on lately?”
It’s just an icebreaker; I’ve done my research on her, too. This isn’t the first movie she’s done since Disney Channel, but it’s the first indie movie after a stream of box-office disappointments where she didn’t even have lead roles.
“Oh, that’s a big question,” she says, shaking her head. “I guess my biggest project would be trying to get a head start on my summer body.”
I frown. She’s pretty skinny. It doesn’t help that the whole summer body thing just irritates the hell out of me, no matter who it’s coming from.
“That’ll be easy, then,” I say, clicking my pen. “Your perfect summer body is whatever your body looks like in the summer.”
Her eyebrows rise before she bursts into laughter. I want to smile. I also want her to know that I’m serious. She’s shaking her head like I just said something hilarious.
“That’s great,” she says after a few seconds. Her face is red, making her freckles even more pronounced. “I’ve never thought about it that way.”
That seems to get her to open up. When I ask about her time on Disney Channel, she can’t stop talking.
“My parents used to drive me an hour to the Disney studio every morning for work,” she says, picking at the bread in between us. “And we didn’t leave until around nine at night. I spent most of my time there. All of my friends were other kids on set, but nothing was really real. Then my manager tried to push me into singing.”
“How’d that work out?”
“Horribly.” She smiles, sharp. “We all knew I couldn’t carry a tune, but no one would tell me the truth because they were thinking about the money.”
I bite my lip. A waiter comes up to the
