Zoë was cast as Gatsby Garcia for West Drive when she was only 11-years-old. She'd been acting her entire life and spent her first five school years jumping between public school and private tutors on set, but her casting on West Drive signaled the end of her public schooling and she transitioned to full time tutoring on the West Drive set.
At first, she'd only been the little sister of main character Reagan Garcia, but she was in almost every episode from her first day on set. She joined just in time for the kickoff of a new generation of the West Drive universe, and the character Reagan became the darling of the entire show. Gatsby was created to be her younger, bratty sister, the girl who would never get what she wanted. Zoë ended up the youngest of the main cast by nearly five years and spent her time on set alone for the most part. The actress who played Reagan, Natalie Young, made minimal efforts to connect to her "set sister", but ultimately spent all of her free time with the co-stars that were her own age. Zoë didn't mind. She reasoned that as soon as she joined the high school plotlines and had her own "classmates", she'd have friends enough. She was willing to bide her time, "pay her dues" as the bratty tween, until it was her time to shine.
Zoë spent her days pulling faces at the camera when she was directed to do so and spending her off-camera time either with a personal tutor or being coached by her mom in a back room, learning things like how to perfect her autograph and how to pose for the camera. It was tedious and dull but she got by. It wasn't like there was anything better for her to do. She was a child star! Everyone wanted to be famous.
About a year and a half after joining the cast, Zoë's numbers started to climb. She gained popularity in a sudden burst of ratings, and just like that Gatsby Garcia took off. She got juicy storylines, like Gatsby attracting the stalker pedophile who Reagan had to chase off with a bat, and that one time Gatsby tricked two boys into taking her to a middle school dance. The writers accelerated their plans for Gatsby and when Zoë was just shy of 13, Gatsby became a freshman. They cast a whole new group of kids to be her freshman year mates, most of them winding up 14 and 15 year olds and leaving Zoë still one of the youngest cast members. But Zoë didn't care. She was the veteran now. And she was quickly becoming the star, Gatsby outpacing Reagan's popularity within five episodes of joining the actual high school cast.
Becoming friends with her cast mates was harder than Zoë had expected. When she had gone to school before, Zoë had been in and out of the classroom so much she'd never made any real friends. After almost 2 years on set, rarely if ever seeing kids her own age, she was extremely rusty. She knew all the latest trends, by virtue of having to be on top of that for her image, but she'd missed out on some of the new slang and the way that teens talked to one another. Zoë's mom had managed her social media until she joined the main cast proper. She'd handed over the controls to all of Zoë's accounts as a sort of "present" for the promotion, and she had to learn all the hashtags and internet jargon practically from scratch and reading back on her own image blogs.
Zoë wasn't as good at social situations as her character Gatsby was, so she ended up pretending she was Gatsby in a good portion of her interactions, just to get the ball rolling. The line between Zoë Rivas and Gatsby Garcia blurred a little, but that was alright with Zoë. A good actress should embody her role. And it made the new cast members like her faster than if she was the girl asking questions about the right way to "meme". She quickly picked up on internet speak and was running her blogs like a pro in no time, and she actually had people to hang out with between takes for the first time. The older cast members respected her now.
For the first time Zoë could remember, she wasn't on her own.
It went well for a while like that. Then they introduced a new recurring character named Mel, a sort of younger version of sweet and responsible Reagan. Her actress, Gabby Jordan, won over the hearts of every single cast member within an hour of showing up on set. Even Zoë liked her. Gabby seemed just as sweet as Mel was meant to be, and she was closer in age to Zoë than any other cast member before her. Zoë found herself hanging out with Gabby most those first few weeks and Zoë thought she'd finally found a best friend, someone she could talk to and actually open up to.
It was her mistake.
Zoë confided in Gabby that she had a crush on the son of their showrunner, a teenage boy named Mike. He was seventeen, a far cry out of the league of little thirteen-year-old Zoë, but he was always nice to her and he never made her question her social skills like so many other people did. Gabby dared Zoë to go up to him at the craft services table one day and spill something on him. "That way you can be all apologetic and help him clean up!" Gabby had said. "It's the only way you'll ever see him out of his shirt, Zo. It's just for fun!"
Zoë spilled grape juice on his polo shirt and apologized profusely, blushing bright red as he pulled his shirt over his head and she grabbed as many napkins as she could find. After five minutes of fussing she turned back to Gabby, big grin plastered on her face, to find Gabby was gone. It struck Zoë as odd, but she figured Gabby had been called away to shoot a scene and texted Gabby variations of "omg" and "that was the best!".
She never got a reply.
Suddenly, Zoë could never find Gabby on set. She'd see her off and on, but when Zoë would try to talk to her Gabby would mysteriously vanish. At the same time, her other cast mates started acting strange towards her. They became distant, standoffish, even downright rude. Zoë was confused. She didn't know what had happened to change their attitudes towards her so drastically.
She found out about two weeks later.
Zoë walked up to a pair of her cast mates one day and asked an innocent "what are you talking about?" with a smile, only to get laughter in return. One of them, a boy named Joey who played Zoë's current love interest, made a gesture like he was shoving something at his mouth and poked his tongue into his cheek. Zoë frowned. She'd seen that gesture before, hadn't she? But she couldn't remember what it meant, and anxiety ripped through her gut. "Come on guys, what's going on?" she asked, her tone going flat as she tried to keep her cool.
"Nothing, Zoë. You don't have to talk to us lowly "extras", you can go find Mike and get some more tips on how to impress his daddy," Joey had mocked.
"Uh, what?" She'd asked, trying to follow. She had no idea what he was talking about. She hadn't seen Mike in a week, and she'd been avoiding him since spilling juice on him.
"Later, Rivas." Her two cast mates turned their backs on her and walked away.
It took another few days, but she found out what was going on. Gabby had taken a picture of her wiping off Mike's chest, but it was from behind his back so the napkins weren't in view and it just looked like she was stroking his bare chest. She'd told everyone that Zoë had told her she did stuff with Mike so that his dad would write her the best storylines, and that all of Zoë's fame and popularity came from her sleeping her way to the top. That Zoë thought of all her co-workers as expendable, that she didn't respect any of them and talked shit behind their backs.
Zoë had never been more humiliated in her life. She tried to defend herself, but none of her cast mates believed her, and she realized with a sinking heart that none of them had ever really liked her. Not a one.
She went to her mom, tears streaming down her face, begging for comfort. Instead, her mom had ignored her pleas for hugs and reassurances and had gone to the showrunner, demanding Gabby be fired, and that everyone who spread those vicious rumors be punished. Gabby wasn't fired, and suddenly not only was Zoë a whore, but a tattletale who had tried to get everyone fired.
Months of isolation and taunts made Zoë's life a misery, until one day she looked at herself in the mirror and clarity struck. If they were going to think she was a villain, she'd be the villain. If they were going to spread rumors about her, she was going to embrace those rumors. She wrapped herself in the rumors of her promiscuity like armor, her vindictive streak running through her veins thick and black as tar. Within a year, she got Gabby fired by planting seeds of doubt in writer's ears, she won the allegiance of every new guest star, acted her ass off to realize the dreams of every director. Her cast mate's faded in her presence, and all the rumors, bad and good, fueled Zoë's popularity, her grip on the direction of West Drive.
The power drowned out her loneliness, but it festered in her until it rotted her chest. Even the popularity couldn't dull the ache in her, and when a boyfriend-of-the-week guest star showed up with pills in his bag and offered her one, she took it without so much as a thought. Uppers, downers, hard drugs, it didn't even matter. So long as it crowded out the ache, Zoë took it. So long as she didn't have to feel, she didn't care if she ended up on every tabloid cover in Canada.
But the writers and directors finally had enough. Even her character's popularity couldn't save her from the fear of their liability if she overdosed on their set, and she was kicked to the curb.
Her mother screamed at her for 4 hours. For the first time in ages, Zoë reacted to the hatred from someone's mouth. Her own mother… but didn't that confirm what Zoë had always known? Her mother's love was conditional.
No one would ever love Zoë for herself.