Page 13 of Hollywood, Ending

I went outside into the crisp Pittsburgh darkness and poured myself a cup of coffee at the beverage station, then knocked on Kai’s trailer door.

He opened the door. He looked down at me and at my blood-soaked blouse. The props team really had that fake blood pouring out of my nose and onto my shirt. He tilted his head, gesturing into his trailer. Kai’s tight white shirt was glued to his skin, his arms still prickling sweat from the heat of the lights. “You okay?” he asked.

I nodded as I closed the door behind me and sat down on his couch. “This stuff is fun for me,” I assured him, which I’d been saying for so long—on set, in interviews, to acting coaches—that it might’ve been true.

“You’re so good,” he said. “You make it easy.”

“Right back at ya.”

He was quiet for a while, our eyes settled on each other. “Are you okay?” I asked, and he shook his head a little and then started to cry. I got up to give him a hug, but I was thinking about the blood on my shirt and how I didn’t want to fuck up his costume, so it was awkward. “It’s a lot,” I told him. “And it’s your first movie. But you’re doing amazing, Kai. You really are.”

He extricated himself from the hug and looked down at me, silent tears falling. “I’m trying to bring my whole self to it,” he said at last. “But I know I’m fucking up. After every take, Kathryn tries to tell me what to do, but I just can’t do it. I can’t get there.”

“How do you get there?” I asked. “What’s your process like?”

“I don’t know how to do it except to make it real,” he said. “I’m not like you. I can’t just prepare my way into it. I have to make it real. Have to think about my own self, my own life, my own…history or whatever…and then take that and use it. But this. This scene. I knew it would be this one that cracked me. I tried to run it a thousand times in my mind, but I’m not good enough.”

“You are plenty good enough.”

“I keep trying. But to really embody the worst thing that ever happened to Jude, I have to embody the worst thing that ever happened to me, and I keep blocking off from that. It’s too much.” He was really crying now. “I can’t do this, Juniper.”

I let him cry for a while, and then finally said, “Listen, Kai. Whatever’s happening in there is not real.” I touched his head. “It’s not really happening. What’s really happening is that we’re tired as shit stuck in a trailer in Pittsburgh.”

“I need to use it but I can’t,” he said.

“Define it.” I needed Kai to be ready for this, to be up for this. Getting this scene right was absolutely essential to our movie.

“I can’t, Juniper. I can’t. I can’t define it and I can’t use it. And it’s blocking me.”

“It is the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

“Yeah, I need to use it but I can’t use it. I need to use it to get fully open, but I’m scared to, or I keep trying and it overwhelms me.”

I was curious, of course, but knew better than to ask.

“Hey. When you felt these feelings in the past, wherever you felt them, you weren’t safe. But this is safe. That’s what acting is. It’s going everywhere you can go…but safely.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. Thanks. Sorry, it’s just intense for me.”

“Don’t be sorry. But the worst thing that ever happened to you, that’s not happening now, Kai. Now you’re with me.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Right.”

“And if you need to use something to break everything down when we go back, use it. It has no power over you, whatever it is, because you’re here and you’re surrounded by people who care about you and are rooting for you.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay. I think I’m gonna play video games till they call us back. Love you.”

Weirdly, I believed him.

When we got back to set, he crushed it. After two takes, Kathryn announced we were moving on. “Don’t know what you said,” she whispered to me between set-ups, “but keep saying it.”

9

Sunday morning, I was deep into the Realm, still in my pajamas reading Gods of Andromeda, when I heard a knock at the door. I got up and glimpsed Kai through the peephole wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates hat and jersey. I opened the door.

His smile was bright as morning, his hands clasped behind him. “Wanna go to a baseball game?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.