“Hey,” I say, standing up. “I have to go to the bathroom. Just give me a second, okay?”
“Oh, yeah,” she says, brow furrowing. “Sure.”
I don’t even know where the bathroom is, but I rush into the other room before Marius has the chance to come over. The open bar is extremely loud. People are laughing and almost shouting into each other’s ears. I spot Savannah, Alice, and a couple of people who must be other interns dancing in the center of the room. I turn away and head down another hall.
Here it’s much quieter and there are only a few lights. It’s almost eerie. There are various doors—one marked “Staff Only” and another marked “Maintenance.” I finally spot the bathroom symbol and am about to head over when I feel a gentle hand on my shoulder. I scream.
“Oh my God!” a feminine voice says behind me.
A familiar voice. I slowly turn to see Tallulah Port. I’m still shaking.
“Jesus Christ,” I say. “You scared me.”
“I didn’t mean to,” she says. “I saw you come here and—”
“You followed me?” I ask. Usually, you’d think this would happen the other way around. “Why?”
The lighting is so dim in this hallway, I can only vaguely make out her expression, but I see her swallow.
“If I talk to you,” she says, “it has to be off the record. All of it.”
I blink probably a million times. I don’t have my notebook. I don’t have a pen or a list of questions. I’m completely unprepared for this. I swallow my anxiety anyway.
“Um,” I say, “okay. I can do that. Can I record you on my phone?”
“Not yet.”
My hand freezes over my pocket.
“You need to know how serious this is,” she says, eyes piercing into mine. “Penny wrote about it in her emails. I understand why she feels like this is important, and I want to help.”
“Okay—”
“But this isn’t a game.” Her voice isn’t harsh, but there’s something firm about it. “You need to understand that. And if you print anything I say, I’ll deny everything and send my lawyers after you. Understood?”
“Oh.” I swallow. “Uh, okay. That’s understandable.”
“I want to believe you’re trying to help.” Exhaustion is plain on her face. “There just comes a point when that’s not enough.”
“Of course.” I’m nodding like some sort of broken doll. “I know this must be difficult—there’s no denying that. But I think it’s really important that we do something to make sure you’re all heard. And it might help to know some other people who have gone through the same thing.”
“There are a lot, from what I know,” she offers. “But it doesn’t matter, since no one is going to talk about it.”
“Right,” I say. “Well, I’m glad you are.”
I hold my phone up, already open to the voice recorder app. Tallulah takes a deep breath and nods.
“Can you tell me how you first met Roy Lennox?”
She’s silent for a long moment. I almost want to hold her hand, but I’m not sure how she’d feel about it.”
“The thing is,” she starts, “well, Roy is the reason why I have an Oscar.”
“Okay.” I glance down at my phone, ready to Google. “It was 2011, right?”
“Burning Heat,” she says, more like a sigh. “It was my third movie, but it really catapulted me. A lot of people have said he made my career. That’s what—what makes it—so hard.”
I can’t see well enough to tell if she’s crying or if I’m just imagining it. I hope she isn’t. If she’s crying, I’ll start to cry. Gently, I put a hand on her shoulder.
“Do you need to stop?” I ask. “We can take as many breaks as you need.”
“No,” she snaps. “No, I’m fine.”
“All right,” I say. “So on the set of Burning Heat, how did he behave around you?”
“He tried to force me to give him a blow job,” she says. She shifts and I see tears on her cheeks. Shit. “Never when we were filming. I know it was different for Penny. But it was during the press tour—I could just never get away from him. He was everywhere.”
I didn’t expect her to share this so fast. I quickly scan through the list of questions in my brain to catch up.
“Was there anyone else around?” I ask. “Anyone who could’ve seen or overheard?”
“No.” I wish I could give her a tissue. “I was drinking the first time it happened. Never did that again, because I figured something would happen—not that it made anything better. He’d go, ‘Tally, what’s wrong? Why are you so worked up? Relax.’ And I couldn’t do anything because he’d be touching my knee under the table at press conferences. If I freaked out, he’d just turn it around on me.”
“What a bastard.” It slips out before I can stop it. “I’m sorry, but not really, because he’s such a fucking piece of shit. I don’t even have the words.”
Everything feels hot—my chest, my forehead—and I just want to slam my fist into a wall.
Someone laughs, loud, and Tallulah jumps. My body goes stiff. I guess we could run into the bathroom, quick, before anyone notices us—
The sound is gone almost as quickly as it appeared. We stand in silence for a few more moments. Tallulah starts to wipe her cheeks.
It’s hard to swallow. I want to cry along with her. I want to tell her about what happened to me, but it’s different. The boy who followed me into the bathroom was horrible—probably still is—but he was a boy. Roy Lennox is a man. Not just a man, but the man. He snaps his fingers and gets millions of dollars for a movie without even telling the studio what it’s about. He makes and breaks careers.
When Ryan King followed me into the bathroom, I scratched his arms and his face. I tried to bite him. I kicked and bucked like a wild animal, even though I was still in middle school and didn’t understand
