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Scheduled for Friday
by Anton M.

20: Alec's Studio

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Wednesday, January 25

The weather looked bleak and rainy on early Wednesday morning. Mom's chirping had become more tolerable as coffee began to replace blood in my bloodstream, and I was curled up in the corner, texting Alice (still sick but recovering) when I felt mom's eyes on me. She'd spent her hummingbird energy on doing her make-up, getting dressed and flying from one room to another with the checklist of an aircraft operator.

"He has a girlfriend," mom said, quietly, having transformed back to a normal human as she ate her toast next to me.

Observation of the year, ladies and gentlemen. Detective Renee Swan has made a major breakthrough in our newest mystery: Bella Swan - The Life.

I raised an eyebrow at her.

"You are not going to go between them, are you? Nothing good ever comes of that."

"Of course not."

"What is that, then?"

Mom looked at my black leggings and Edward's massive hoodie reaching my thighs. It was big and warm and comfy and I was swimming in its scent.

"He'll never know."

"Sweetie…"

"He's not into me, mom," I reassured her as much as I stabbed myself with the knowledge. "He's told me multiple times. I know it's pathetic, but… I will never get to date my crush, so I just want to—" Staring at my coffee cup, I shrugged. "I just want to feel like… like somebody cares, you know? I'll likely not get to date like a normal person for a while, so just for today, I want to pretend I have a cute boyfriend who gave me his hoodie for a day. I'll give it back tomorrow, mom. I didn't wear perfume or anything, he'll be none the wiser."

Mom made a disapproving sound. Dad paused the video he was watching on his phone and took off the earbud, eyeing us.

"Are you mad because our daughter is making a choice you disagree with," he asked, "or because you're Edward in this scenario?"

Mom's jaw dropped.

"A gun in a knife fight," I warned. "I repeat, a gun in a knife fight."

My parents looked at me before both grinned, and mom scooted closer to dad before she put her temple on dad's shoulder. Her grey hair covered his shoulder. "Maybe," she replied, squeezing his knee. "But dad and I got lucky. I just don't want you to get hurt, that's all."

"I think it's too late for that," dad said before he gave me an empathetic look. "I'm not going to stop you from pining after him. You had a rough day yesterday, but… these stories don't always end up like ours. Be careful."

Mom and dad had (at least) had a fabulous time up until 8:30 PM when Alice's mom called them to ensure that my parents were aware of me not staying at their place. My parents, the coolest people in the universe, pretended to be 100% updated on the situation on their phone call with Linda to make sure that one potential mishap wouldn't result in Alice never being allowed to stay over. Then, a moment later, when their calls to me kept going straight to voicemail, they left the restaurant, began to contact my friends (and colleagues), and got the police involved.

Turns out you don't need to wait 24 hours to do that. Who knew.

Ever since I was a kid, my parents had always had the most perfect, evil tactic for punishing me. Truly, they could've been dictators. Relying on my guilt, of which I had a bucketful—because not only did I fail to inform them of where I was, I also ruined their only night out—they asked me what I thought the fair punishment would be.

They couldn't take away my phone without causing themselves another heart attack. They couldn't stop me from going out without putting my job in jeopardy. They couldn't limit my internet use because I needed internet for school.

They couldn't really ground me because, again, I had a job to go to. I only had a few months of normalcy left in my life, so they didn't want to limit my interactions with my friends.

So, being the stupid, masochistic girl I was, I told them they should make me call people myself from now on. I was joking.

Sadly, that was the night my parents lost their sense of humor because they agreed.

So, from now on, for the rest of time, I had to call people myself. Tanya, the dentist, my friend's parents, ugh. Forever.

I swore that the first thing I'd do when I got myself an assistant (look at me, all fancy, getting myself an assistant) was to make them call everyone on my behalf. Even my parents. Just for a while. Wasn't that what being rich was all about? Delegate that shit.

Actually, maybe not my parents. They've gone through enough. But everyone else for sure.

Alice? Oh hi, this is Bella's hot six-pack-owning assistant Craig, a part-time gym owner who walks around half-naked for no reason, hello yes. Bella wanted to know if you're coming over at seven or eight. Yes, I'll still be half-naked. Oh, six you said? Definitely, definitely, and I'll be working out in the living room while you watch Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Oh you're in the car already? Fabulous. I'll let Bella know.

It could work.

I got Jasper's number from Alice to ask him about his helmet, but he had another extra and was totally cool with me returning it on Thursday. Edward, too, had another jacket, and so I masochistically wore his hoodie for the day.

Not going to lie, a part of me hoped that he'd be walking past Alec's Recording Studio on 11th Street in the middle of a school day and see me in my knee-length boots and his hoodie with the Whiniest, I mean Sexiest Man Alive (TM) casually heading for lunch together.

Not that he'd care, but a girl could dream.

Alec, a geeky-looking, absent-minded owner of the recording studio, ushered my mom and me to the tape storage the moment we stepped in his studio. One of his fancy Neumann microphones had broken and Alec was worried he'd have to use an old Samson because his backup MXL had gone missing. It was too many names for me to register anything beyond: microphone broken. Needs fixing. The folks repairing the Neumann, obviously, hadn't signed an NDA, so they couldn't see me (probably because they'd seen Mike). Seeing one of us was fine but seeing us together, even if I was virtually unknown, could cause people to start connecting some dots. (So even if I wanted to imagine Edward catching Mike and me heading for lunch together, that would've never actually happened because Mike and I couldn't show up in public together before our teaser was out.)

So, instead of starting off in Alec's high-ceilinged, black-walled, pentagon-shaped live room with Mike, I found Mike lying on an old couch in the tape storage room scrolling on his phone with a fidget spinner in his left hand. The tape storage, cluttered but clean, looked like it had been a living room at some point even if two of its walls were now hidden behind floor-to-ceiling shelving.

Mom nodded at Mike in greeting, sat behind a table, put her headphones on, and began to work. It was nice that she let me be without hovering even if her presence next to me was mandatory.

Mike took his feet off the armrest of the couch to make room for me. I unzipped my awesome knee-length boots (totally chosen and owned by me, of course, definitely not my mother) before I curled my legs under myself and hoped the wait wouldn't be so long that I'd be forced to strangle Mike.

Wouldn't make for great headlines, you see. Might have to control myself.

Right on schedule, the Master of Whiners touched the back of his head against the wall as he groaned. "Wish they'd just called us," he complained. "I could be at home with my girlfriend right now."

Okay, fair enough. If I had Edward naked in my bed I'd never leave my room. The mere thought of waking up against Edward's warm, bare chest as he squeezed me closer made my heart hurt and skin tingle. He'd kiss my neck and slide his palm in my panties to squeeze my butt and…

Oh my God, was this how Lauren got to wake up? Were Edward and Lauren having sex?

Nope, nope, nope, refused to think about that. Edward had never had an inappropriate thought about a girl and he'd certainly never had sex. Nope, nope, nope.

"I'm sorry," I told Mike, trying to extend some compassion.

I pulled Edward's hoodie over my knees, curling up inside it, but I immediately reconsidered and took my knees out of it. I loved being in it but I didn't want to make it obvious by stretching it out.

"That your boyfriend's or something?"

"And if it is?"

"Good for you." Mike threw the fidget spinner across the room into an open box, and held out his hand for a high five. I complied.

"Why good for me?"

"Because," Mike shrugged, tearing his eyes from his phone. "Dating is not the same after you get famous. It'll be good for you to have someone who knew you before shit hit the fan."

Mike rested his chin on his palm as he scrolled on his phone, but I just had to interrupt him.

"How is it different later?"

He paused, turning. Mike had a very generic face, a handsome copy-paste of a dozen other actors, but even I had to admit… the man could act.

When he'd first shown up with brown hair and eyebrows, I'd never felt like it suited him. But now, almost a year later, I'd grown so accustomed to the brown that his previous blond felt alien.

"It's harder," Mike replied, with a big enough pause that I had to remember what I'd asked him. "Dating is harder later, I think. People don't date you, they date their idea of you. They date your image. And even if you're a good person of your own right, nobody ever lives up to their image. It's a little bit like… you ever have a crush on someone for a long time? Not someone you know closely, someone you interact with but who doesn't run in the same circle. You build them up to be something in your head, but if you were to actually date them, they'd fall flat 'cause the person you're actually dating is not the one you built in your head, you know?"

I didn't. The more I got to know Edward, the closer I wanted to be to him and the deeper I fell. It was the opposite of what he described, but I understood what he meant.

"How do you date, then?"

"Carefully." Mike chuckled. "It can be a bit of a catch-22. You can want to date some down-to-earth girl all day but most of them can't take the reality of your public life. You can date the people with the same level of public pressure but now you've doubled the interest in your private life. Ideally, you'd find someone who understands public life but doesn't live it, but with our schedules, when are you ever going to meet them? And whichever person you find, you will still have the struggle of them having infinite access to everything you've ever done in twenty pages of your Wikipedia and building you up into a person you could never be on a daily basis. If they also have that, now you, too, are dating her image, and if they don't, you have an unequal starting point to getting to know each other. It's a hot mess, honestly."

Holy shit, Mike had a brain. He had thought about the world and himself in it, and he opened a whole new dimension of himself to me.

We interacted on a daily basis, and we'd grown to be casual friends, but we'd always had the pressure of the next scene or rehearsal or interaction looming in the distance. Now, with only a few recording sessions in the weeks leading up to the release of our trailer, most of the pressure was off, and I didn't realize I'd never actually gotten to know the person behind his image.

Maybe I'd judged him too soon.

"Did you find a house yet?" he asked, politely, as if he hadn't just poured his heart out to me. I was still reeling from being allowed to peek into how Mike really felt about his life, and it was as fascinating as it was terrifying. I didn't realize how much his advice might've helped guide me. I had a thousand questions for him but decided not to push.

"We did," I replied. "It's just behind Mableton's border with Smyrna."

"Oh, you going to Campbell High School? Julia Roberts went there."

"How do you know that?"

"She told me."

Ah, yes. The normal world in which famous people casually talked to each other; a terrifyingly, absurdly close step into my future that I wasn't ready to acknowledge.

"No, my parents and I are talking to my school to see if I'd be allowed to stay in Willie W. Smith."

"Well, not to be a buzz kill but you guys are ambitious," Mike replied. "With you turning sixteen so soon I'd be amazed if they didn't take full advantage of your new working hours on set the moment shooting for the second season begins."

"I know," I replied, surprising myself with my honesty. "You're right but I think my parents and I need this delusion because… it's too much, otherwise. It's going to be… surreal." I rested my knees against the back of the couch, facing him, giving him a bittersweet smile. "How do you handle it?"

"What?"

"The fame. All the stuff people say about you. How do you handle it?"

"At first, it was… addicting." Mike crossed his ankle over his knee and rested his elbows on his thighs, almost like I was interviewing him. "Probably not wise to admit that, but it is. It's exhilarating. You will feel like the centre of the universe. Then, you start to feel the pressure and see fame for its flaws, and if you've surrounded yourself with good people, over time, you learn to… disassociate yourself from your image. The first time you hear something blatantly incorrect about yourself, I promise you will have the wildest urge to correct it, and I did that for a few years, but… it's not worth the hassle. Don't do it. You are only drawing attention to trivial shit nobody cares about. The only way to move forward is to see your public persona almost like a different person, a tree that grows roots and branches as the media wants it to, and you're only a vessel to their image of you."

I unwrapped my arms from around my legs and crossed my legs under myself, blinking at him. I'd never had time or energy to expect depth from the man, but now that I caught a glimpse of it, maybe the public admiration of him wasn't as unwarranted as I'd thought.

"I can see why you were the sexiest man alive last year."

Mike laughed so hard he dropped his phone. When he'd retrieved it and leaned back against the couch, he shook his head.

"Finally, the girl comes around, and there is nobody here to witness it."

My mom was focused on her work, so Mike was correct.

Ignoring his words, I asked, "Are you ever scared that your career will vanish into thin air?"

Mike grinned his face off. "Did James Lipton reincarnate as Bella Swan and move to Atlanta to torment me about my insecurities?"

"Maybe."

Laughter died in his eyes as he grew more serious. "Obviously, yeah. I think you'd be stupid not to feel that way in our line of business. But I don't think I'm scared of becoming irrelevant as much as having work opportunities pulled from under me. You'll be fine, though, if that's what you're getting at with this question."

"How do you know?"

"You're smart. You have something many other actresses don't have, and I've met my fair share."

"What's that?"

"Character."

I laughed.

When Mike joined in and we made eye contact we both knew that he'd deny he ever said that if it came out. But a moment later, Alec, our Sound Assistant Kadie Jalloh and my tutor Mrs. Haisley arrived. Our second second AD Timothy had purchased a new Neumann. It was being set up, and we were free to go to the control room. I stood up and held out a hand to Mike, an offer of friendship, real friendship, and he smiled as he took my hand.

"Last episode of the last season we film together, you and I are going out for drinks with our significant others and getting shitfaced at the Red Phone Booth," Mike said, low enough not to be heard above everyone's chatter. "Deal?"

"Deal," I agreed, and I relished his whiny groan when Kadie announced that Mike would be sitting out the first two hours of recording. Sexiest man alive or not, his whining was now almost a funny constant I could rely on.

…