Page 17 of Catch Me
With a groan, I rise from my chair, stretch, and head to the kitchen. The thought of cooking anything physically hurts, which is why the idea of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich starts to sound enticing, until I open the refrigerator.
There’s a post-it note on the side of a takeout carton.
“I knew you would be tired and not in the mood to cook. Enjoy!” It’s written in Mya’s swirly cursive letters. I open the carton to pad thai from my favorite Thai restaurant. The second carton is a salad from the same restaurant. On top, Mya’s left another post-it reminding me to eat my vegetables.
I snicker as I pull both cartons of food from the fridge.
Just as I’m sitting down to enjoy my dinner, my cell phone rings. Ms. Shelby meows loudly, evidently not liking the sound of my phone’s ring.
She saunters off toward the kitchen.
“Hello? Rebecca?” I answer since that was the name that popped up on my screen.
A beat of silence ensues, and I start to hear my heartbeat in my ears. Is this the moment she fires me? Is that why she’s calling? To finish the meeting she never got a chance to in her office?
I thought that since I’d made it through the day after that encounter with Rebecca and Andreas in her office, that I was safe. Maybe I was wrong, got too confident.
“Your attendance is requested on set Monday morning, six, a.m. sharp,” she says without any preamble.
“I-I’m sorry?”
A forceful exhalation is my clue that I’m testing her patience.
“Michael Keith’s movie,Late Nights, begins filming on Monday. You’ll need to be there at six a.m. to assist with the costumes throughout the duration of filming.”
My head spins. Rarely do assistants to the assistant costume designer show up to the filming of the actual movie, at least that’s what I was told when I began working for the company.
“I expect that you will have all of the designs and costume changes for the movie memorized and ready to go for each day of filming.”
A number of questions swim through my mind. The variety of tasks she mentioned could easily fall into the realm of someone else’s job, but I don’t dare complain.
“I suppose even you can handle that,” is one of the last things she says before hanging up.
I allow the thinly veiled insult to wash over me. Mainly because my mind starts to work overtime with all of the tasks I need to do between now and Monday to be ready to work on an actual movie set.
But even as I work through the mental list of what I need to prepare, I wonder what brought on this about-face. Earlier, she didn’t want me anywhere near this project.
Even after the attempted firing that she never got around to completing, she gave me tasks throughout the day that were on side projects of the studio’s, not any of the major films.
What changed her mind?
CHAPTER 6
Andreas
Irritation courses down my spine from the buzzing of my cell phone in my pocket. I already know who the message is from before looking at the screen.
Stan:
Did you see my last message?
He’s at it again with this damn business proposal with Amber Jones. His insistence is one of the reasons he’s lasted for nearly thirty years in this business. Typically, it’s one of the traits I appreciate about him.
But not about this.
“Shall we run the scene again or do you have to go?” Victor, my acting coach, asks from the small stage at the front of the room.
We’re in his modest, yet popular acting school that’s been around for forty years. Some of the greats have come and gone through these four walls. You wouldn’t know it by the looks of the room, though.
