Page 36 of Sizzle Reel

She shrugs. “Honestly, I just don’t give a shit if someone gets a bad picture of me. I post terrible pictures of myself on Instagram every week.” She sips her drink. “How was the first day?”

My leg taps from under the table. “Good. I can’t believe Brendan was just down to potentially let me touch a camera.”

Valeria smiles. “Small production goes pretty far. He watched your horror short and thought you had spark. Keep going the way you are, and I’m sure he’ll pull you into his next picture. He’s rising fast, and I’d love to see you work under him.”

My leg is still tapping, but now the room seems sharper. The Whopper wrapper and the little chicken drawing on my chicken fries box are a brighter color, Valeria’s voice is coming in clearer, even the smells of the greasy food are stronger. Is this what excitement feels like? “I’m—I feel like I can’t say thank you enough.”

“All good.” She takes a sip of her drink. “Like I said, if you’re happy to put in the work, I’m happy to help.”

As I take a bite of chicken, I’m shaken into an out-of-body moment. We’re sitting in a lull, like the day’s over twelve hours of work have finally hit us. I can see it in her face, and I’m sure the same weariness is reflected back at her in my own features. We’re just two people sitting in a crappy fast-food restaurant eating exceptionally crappy fast food (sorry, B.K.) because sets provide only lunch. Neither of us is wearing makeup, Valeria’s got us both wearing these Burger King crowns, and it’s just…it feels normal. It feels like I could be sitting across from Romy or Wyatt and there’d be this same lack of pressure. How can it be this easy?

What can I get her to talk about in this environment? Who is Valeria if it took only five minutes to uncover that she dresses like a teenage boy on the regular and is into Pokémon? It’s almost comforting how weird she is. I find it endearing, but I can easily see how Steven would be at odds trying to keep Valeria’s otherwise classy, intelligent, sexy persona in the forefront. I’m almost tempted to scroll through her Instagram and find a ratio for how many weird/quirky pictures she has versus model shots.

“Did you go to college or just go straight into acting?” I ask.

Valeria gives a weak chuckle. “I…” She shakes her head. “I was one dissertation approval away from a Ph.D. in culture, media, and creative industries at King’s College.”

Now okay, I could see her having gotten a bachelor’s degree. Plenty of actors went to college. Hell, Natalie Portman went to Harvard.

But Valeria just said she almost got a Ph.D.

You have to be fucking smart to get a Ph.D. in anything.

“That’s amazing.”

She shrugs. “It was almost amazing.”

Valeria was one step from getting a Ph.D. I can’t even properly process that. I’m sitting across from someone who might as well be called “Doctor,” who’s intellectually on par with the various professors I encountered in undergrad. Was that what she really wanted to do? Work in academia?

“What did you study?”

“I had a focus on music and culture, and the dissertation was on the Beatles.”

Now I’m the one shaking my head. “You were a legitimate Beatles scholar before acting?”

She nods. “I’m sure the twelve other Beatles scholars in the world were very angry I didn’t become the thirteenth. But life happens.”

I’m suddenly flashing back to freshman year. I was enrolled in this honors G.E. track, and one of the classes I took was all about the intellectual analysis of popular culture. The T.A. in that class, it’d been this guy who looked exactly like a short Warren Beatty, and I used to poke into his office hours every week so he’d explain the theorists to me. It hadn’t even just been that he was cute; I could just absorb his words about theory for hours, entranced by the idea that he had so much in his head—that he knew all this. That probably 99.9percent of the population would never be able to say what he was saying.

Now I’m sitting across from someone who’s in that 0.01percent. And she’s wearing a Detective Pikachu crown. “Do you have a favorite theorist?”

She shrugs. “Judith Butler is a superhero, but if we’re talking specifically pop culture–type stuff, Baudrillard is my favorite. Sontag and ‘camp’ are also great.”

These names all genuinely sound familiar, coming back to me in soft waves. “Camp is kitsch, right?”

She holds up a fry as a pointer. “Technically camp is the consumption or performance of culture, and kitsch is the work itself. But, like, no one gets kitsch. That Met Gala? Like ninety percent wrong. Kitsch isn’t about bright colors; it’s about being so unappealing and in such low art taste that high art is able to accept it. It’s a…” She shakes her head. “It’s like a co-opting of pretentious people who want to enjoy low art, and the only means to do it is to act like you know it sucks. But everyone at that gala, for instance, still made their looks, like, good. Kitsch is…” She looks around. “Kitsch is literally the image of us sitting in this Burger King actually eating while wearing the crowns. It’s the greatest.”

She’s smart. Smart in that way where she could teach a class on this shit. And now I’m imagining her in a tweed blazer with glasses and it’s getting hot in here. Tweed jacket, glasses—actually, she doesn’t even need the glasses. A T.A. office with four empty chairs, us facing each other. A paper as thick as a novella between us, her long fingers flipping through the pages. Meeting each other’s gazes and—

Valeria’s looking at me right now. Chewing on a half-eaten fry, but still looking. “Am I boring you? Most people would’ve told me to shut up by now.”

I dig one nail into my thigh. “No, you’re fine. This is all really interesting to me.”

She exhales. “Can we talk about your horror short, though? I can analyze it through a pretentious lens if it’ll get you going.”

It sure feels like I go bright red at the suggestion, but maybe I don’t, because Valeria is carrying on like nothing happened.

And my level of flirting back, if this is flirting, is to say: “Oh my god, I need to pay you back for the food.”

---