One Less Problem Without You Read online

  The night before had been rough. She’d been out far later than she had planned to be with her friend Andrew, an eccentric playwright who was having “an utter breakdown.” They had been friends in high school, and though they hadn’t always been best friends—he could be exhausting (witness current exhaustion)—they had always remained in touch. Since he’d moved to the city, they were each other’s lifesaver in the water that was D.C. He had rubbed shoulders with a lot of people that she would give anything to be in a room with, and he loved having her on his arm for his own image. Apart from just really liking each other, they were the perfect professional pair.

  Struggling playwright and struggling actress. How dramatic the pair of them were.

  Andrew was the kind of person you’d find yourself up all night with—going through a couple of bottles of wine and mental breakthroughs—before you knew it. So when he’d called the night before at eleven thirty complaining about the utter breakdown, in his usual overdramatic way, she had not felt quite like going over, even though he was only one Metro stop away. Tired as she was, though, she was left with no option. It wasn’t exactly because he needed her—if she went over every time that happened, she would live there—but he was writing a script for a local director who had moved from Manhattan in an effort to boost the theater scene in D.C., and thus perhaps she needed him.

  Of course, she agreed to go over.

  She put on a swingy white tank top, black harem pants, and her red lipstick. On went the wool hat that went perfectly with the Oh, I was just off to bed when the fashion police showed up knocking at my door! look.

  It was an outfit she would wear anywhere. Coffee shop. Beach boardwalk. City sidewalks. But when she looked at herself in the mirror, something stopped her.

  It was too bare. This wasn’t a date. At this rate she didn’t know if she’d ever date again.

  She pulled on a black hoodie and left without glancing at her reflection again.

  She walked down to the Metro in her costume of anonymity, knowing at least that she would have the excuse of the late hour to lean on if he criticized her “thuggish look.”

  But he didn’t, because she hung the hoodie on her purse before he opened the door.

  Her fashion choices had the desired effect. Andrew, diminutive and performing from second one, rested the Marlboro Red in his lips (Chelsea just knew he enjoyed the dichotomy of his diminutive appearance and his “cowboy cigarette”) and exclaimed, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, girl, you always look like you stepped off the pages of French Vogue.” His observant gaze glanced downward before he turned back around. “Ew, except that hooded sweatshirt. Throw that away.”

  His living room was one of those minimalist types that didn’t have a piece of furniture that wasn’t selected on purpose and at great cost. Andrew was the type not to have a sofa at all, for example, until he found the Perfect Sofa. Which is why on past nights, she had perched on cushions that were slightly too small and thin to be floor cushions instead of on the firm gorgeous sectional she now reclined on.

  They had a bottle of Chardonnay, something probably hard to get that she probably didn’t appreciate half as much as any of his other friends did, and she breathed in secondhand drama and secondhand smoke until three in the morning.

  “If I could get past this stupid”—he made a spiraling motion in front of his forehead—“block that I have. It’s the perfect time. People are paying attention to my writing. They’re listening right now. And of course, it’s the driest time of my life.”

  “Almost.” She smiled and gave a warning gesture at the glass of wine sloshing in his hand, although somehow he never spilled it, no matter how much he gesticulated.

  He rolled his eyes, a smile playing at his lips, and took the last swig of it. “I’ve got to find something. I’ve got to find something to write.”

  This was not her wheelhouse. She wasn’t sure what to say, even though this wasn’t the first—or last—time they’d have this conversation. “Well, what do you want to do this time? Comedy?”

  He shook his head. “That was a disaster last time. I mean, I involved an actual rubber chicken. And the rest of it wasn’t ironic enough to support that. Why didn’t you stop me?”

  She raised her eyebrows and jutted her chin forward to ask if he was kidding her.

  “Okay, fine,” he said. “I wasn’t listening.”

  She nodded. “Tragedy? Dramedy? Stage horror?”

  He bit his tongue and then leaned forward, tilting his head thoughtfully. “Hm.”

  “Which one?” she pressed.

  “Dramedy.”

  “There you go, that’s a start, right?”

  “Tragic hero.”

  “Or—”

  “Or heroine!” He slapped his forehead. “God, I haven’t done a female lead in ages.”

  She looked around the room, not sure if trying to act like she didn’t think of herself as an option was the right choice. But he wasn’t paying attention anyway.

  “Dramedy. Heroine. Something scandalous. Something big. Scary. Taking the classic ‘let’s make light of this in a slightly terrifying way’ thing, but taking it darker.”

  Chelsea watched him.

  One thing she would give him was that he was an actual mad scientist when he really started working or had a stroke of inspiration. His eyes simultaneously unfocused and intensified, as if he were focusing on something in another dimension that no one else in the room could see, something he knew he had to capture while it showed itself to him or it would vanish.

  “Spunky girl. Sweet. Smart but trusting.” At this point, he was making senseless gestures in the air, like a wizard conjuring his vision. “Dark filthy corner of hell on earth, one which she never even saw coming. She can’t lose that mojo, though.”

  Chelsea could tell he was about to digress into disjointed details, and she would need to be silent. But she also knew she needed to stay and be part of it in his mind. She removed the wineglass from his hand, which didn’t shake him from his reverie. It reminded her of posing as the statue.

  When she returned, the glasses were refilled with a Syrah blend she’d found on the counter.

  “Did you do a red wine rinse?” he asked, accepting the glass, still zoned out.

  “Yes?”

  He took a sip and then gave her a teasing glare. “Another night…”

  She leaned back and let him keep thinking. It wasn’t until his silence had lasted nearly twenty minutes, and she envisioned the hangover she would have in the morning if she continued to sip her way through the discomfort, that she decided she needed to be smart and leave.

  “I’ve got to go now,” she said, making a point of yawning and stretching broadly as she stood up. “We’re both up too late.”

  “Probably true. Let me call a car for you.”

  “Oh, no, no, I’ll take the Metro.”

  He looked aghast. “Darling, you are way too Gigi Hadid for that.” He went to his leather man purse on the desk and took out a fifty. “Uber, cab, I don’t care, but no Metro at this hour. Besides it’s closed by now.”

  Knowing she’d make a profit, she reluctantly accepted. It was what he’d intended; neither of them acknowledged it, even while they both knew it was true.

  And that’s how, a mere six hours later, she came to be exhausted but on the train, relieved to have even twenty minutes to lean back on the window and rest.

  She drifted fast into something resembling sleep but awoke with a start when the train rattled to a halt at her stop. Despite her exhaustion, she managed to stand, then floated like a ghost to her audition.

  The waiting room was filled with girls that looked so similar to Chelsea that it might have been a casting call to fill her role in the story of her own life. Instead, it was just a small part in a political drama taking place in the city, Veto. Veto was centered on Connor McNamara, an intense, completely misogynistic—but sexy!—“right hand of the president” type. He knew everyone’s secrets, but hid his own
.

  In season one of the show, he described his perfect woman as “a tall, waifish thing with an ass I can grip with one hand and lips I’m afraid to puncture with my teeth.” So far, every woman—except for one—his character had been with had been some version of this. Evidently, since these were callbacks, which meant everyone in the room had already passed some level of acceptance, this season’s character would have big eyes and no tits.

  That explained what she was doing here. At least her titlessness could come in handy for something.

  “Chelsea Cole?”

  Chelsea’s gaze shot up. She’d been staring at the girl across from her and thinking that there was about a hundred percent possibility that she spoke in baby talk most of the time.

  “Yes, that’s me. Sorry.” She grabbed her clutch and the script, its pages curled backward from her countless rereadings.

  Feeling like she was being led into a doctor’s office, Chelsea followed the girl who’d called her down a hallway and into a big room with fluorescent lights. Unlike in a doctor’s office, however, there was a panel of people waiting to judge her, even on her most subtle inflections.

  A camera was set up, pointing at a spot in the middle of the room where she was presumably about to stand and then sink or swim.

  An audition begins the second you enter the room, Chelsea knew, and so she always became whoever she needed to be before crossing the threshold. This time, though, it wasn’t easy. Back in college, the most she’d have to fight through to give a good audition was a mild hangover that lasted till early afternoon. Sometimes, she had performed even better then. Something had been working, because she had gotten a lead in everything she auditioned for. She’d been Liza Doolittle in a dinner theater production of My Fair Lady; Anna in a production of The King and I; Lady Macbeth; Hedda Gabler; even Mary Shelley in an indie play called Chillon about the writing of Frankenstein. It was almost impossible for Chelsea Cole not to get a good role. She had been a shoe-in every time. Everyone had secretly hated her for it, and she didn’t mind that one bit—because back then, she knew she would be the one who really made it. She knew it the way everyone says you’ll know.

  You’ll know when you find the right college.

  You’ll know when you find the right guy.

  You’ll know … you’ll know.

  You’ll know.

  But she had been wrong. And now she never believed she knew anything.

  Today she was hangover-free, and yet her mind and body were in a complete state of unfocus. She was tired. So tired from being up half the night with Andrew.

  When she’d started studying for the initial audition, she’d done everything right. She’d watched the show so she knew exactly what the other characters were like. She had read and reread the character description in the audition blurb. She had decided that her version of Hadley Anderson would be a combination of coy Audrey Hepburn and the side-piece bimbo in Gone Girl, infused with a bit of the sly cleverness that lay deep in the eyes of every character ever played by Kate Hudson.

  She looked at her reflection in the mirror and practiced the dumb-girl pout, the clever narrowing of her doe eyes, and added the posture of someone trying to act tougher than she was. It was the perfectly mixed cocktail, and she hadn’t been surprised at all when she got a callback.

  But right now, her lips weren’t pouting, her posture was timid, and her eyes probably looked more Bambi-watching-the-gunman than anything else. To make things worse, by the last time she read through the lines out in the waiting room, she had started to feel like she didn’t even have half of them memorized.

  “I’m Chelsea Cole, and I’m here to audition for the role of Hadley Anderson.” She straightened her back and gave a small smile.

  She was nervous. Where had these nerves come from that suddenly plagued her before she ever put herself on display?

  “Hello, Chelsea. If you want to place your things right over there on that chair and return to your mark, we can begin.”

  “Perfect,” she said quietly and then took the direction.

  When she returned to the spot, a woman with dark hair and glasses cleared her throat. “All right, now, there’s been a bit of a change in the script. And, well, really in the character. So if you could…” She licked her thumb and forefinger and separated one pack of stapled papers from a stack. “Just go ahead and read these. It’s a different scene, taking place later in the episode. The character is close enough that it shouldn’t seem unrecognizable.”

  Chelsea stepped forward, thinking briefly and unexpectedly of the shop and wondering exactly what Prinny’s plans were. She cleared her head. She was about to do a cold read. This was no time to think about work.

  The pages seemed stark and too bright, the letters too close together. Her lines were highlighted in blue—the most difficult to read. Why couldn’t they have chosen classic yellow?

  She smiled.

  “Begin whenever you’re ready. Tim will read Connor’s lines.”

  She gave a nod and then zoned in on the page.

  “Connor, please, I can’t keep doing this—you can’t keep doing this. If we get caught—”

  “We won’t get caught!” Tim read the lines with a booming, intimidating voice that made Chelsea feel even more underprepared and even more underwhelming. She tried to funnel the timidity washing over her into something useful.

  “So what am I supposed to do?” She had no context for the scene. No idea what it was they couldn’t keep doing. She could guess, but she didn’t know. Was she supposed to be angry? Sad? She should have glanced over the lines before launching in. “Christ, Con, it’s like you think I’m some kind of—some kind of—”

  “What, Hadley? Some kind of a hooker? Some kind of a prostitute?”

  Shit, thought Chelsea. Even she wanted to hit the guy. “Don’t you dare say that to me. This is different. You know it is.”

  “How is it different? I pay you. We fuck. You do everything I want. How is it anything more complicated than that? Huh? You want to tell me?”

  “I do everything you want because I lo—” Chelsea was surprised to feel tears starting to sting her eyes. “Because I want to.” Her voice cracked, and she felt the attention in the room focus on her. “It may have started out that way, but you know damn well it’s not like that.”

  “You’re going to tell me what it’s like? You know who I fucking am, Hadley. You know I—”

  “You’re goddamn right I know who you are, Connor. I know you have a hell of a lot more to lose than I do.”

  “You better hope that’s true, because you’re about to lose everything. But before that…” Tim hesitated, as the script instructed. “I need you to get on the bed.”

  Chelsea stared at Tim, who was reading the lines with a blank face behind the table. She felt briefly unaware of the camera or any of her nerves. This was what she loved. That high that meant she had broken into being someone else. It was like finally reaching a meditative state.

  “I guess you can’t have everything you want after all. Not even if you pay for it.”

  It was the last line of the stapled pages. It indicated that she should walk out, but she was practiced enough to know that they didn’t expect her to stalk off away from her mark.

  “All right,” said the woman. Her flat tone shook Chelsea from her meditation and reminded her to be nervous again.

  “We just have a couple more scenes for you to read through, and then you’re set to go.”

  Heart pounding and skin hot, Chelsea read through them in a haze. She read nothing as well as the first scene. She left feeling unconfident and idiotic. She hated when she couldn’t rid her mind of other thoughts enough to focus on the task at hand. The worst part was that the stress over her bad audition would be what distracted her from whatever else she needed to do later.

  She was walking out of the building when her phone buzzed. A text from Andrew:

  Thank GAIA for you queen, thanks to our convo, I believe I’ve
finally got my lead character. She’s spirited, tough, eternally authentic. Like you used to be before you got bodysnatched. Haha. Xoxo

  Her stomach twisted like a wet rag being wrung out. It was far from the first time he’d jokingly told her how much she’d changed lately. The worst part was that she knew how true it was. Anyone who knew her could tell.

  The hell of it was, she didn’t even have a good reason to pin it on.

  She needed to get back into life. She couldn’t let a breakup break her.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Twenty-one Years Earlier

  It happened exactly how Kathy always thought it would.

  It’s not as if she’d ever really sat around dreaming about these moments, but she doubted if any girl could say with complete honesty that she hadn’t even envisioned it.

  For nearly all four years of high school, she had kept to herself. Well, to herself and her best friend, Judy. And really? It wasn’t that bad. She had never been dying to be part of the cool kids’ clique. She never longed for the everyday scrutiny that popularity invited. If anything, she wished simply that she looked a bit more like those girls. She wished she looked like one of them—with their shiny hair, clear skin, even smiles, and perfect, tiny bodies—but wasn’t one of them. She was smart. She knew that would make her infinitely cooler. At least someday.

  Yet she couldn’t help dreaming of the shallow qualifications for popularity. She envisioned herself tanned and narrow, her brown hair actually holding a curl long enough to look beachy and casual instead of lank and in possible need of washing. She had pale green eyes—the one thing strangers always complimented her on. Unfortunately, like the dreaded “she has a great personality,” it was a compliment that seemed to carry an invisible “but” with it. But she has great eyes!

  When those girls, the Others, pulled on their jeans, they buttoned them easily and didn’t have to shimmy into them and tug on belt loops to get them into a comfortable place. They could wear tank tops without spilling out of them. They could wear loose sundresses and look like they just climbed off the pages of Teen Vogue, instead of looking like they were trying to cover up “problem areas.”