Havoc (Mayhem #4)

Step, step, step, step. I glance down at my feet, and someone shouts, “CUT!”

“No, no, no, no, no!” Jillian complains as she marches up to me. “Who put this one here?” She shakes her head at Dee, sunglasses threatening to fly off the top of her head, and I realize she wasn’t talking to me at all. Everything about Dee’s stiff posture screams that she’s ready to go toe to toe with the producer standing in front of her, who’s preparing to get rid of her, but Jillian defuses her in an instant. “Sorry, honey, but you’re way too pretty. You’re taking attention away from Hailey. I need you somewhere else.”

Jillian snaps her fingers, and a few staff workers rush over to show Dee where to go.

“Are you sure you don’t want her to be the star?” I ask, looking over Dee’s shoulder at Jillian when Dee wraps me in a hug. Jillian waves dismissively at me as she walks away, and Dee whispers in my ear.

“This is your moment, Hailey. Trust me, this is meant to be your moment. Show them what you’re made of.” She pulls away, smiles at me, and adds one more piece of super helpful advice. “Make my dress look good!”

She leaves me. Quite happily, she lets herself be escorted away, and then I’m just standing there literally shaking in my boots.

“Okay, everyone back in position!” Paul the director shouts, and everyone around me starts moving back into the trees. I follow their lead, shrinking under the spotlight. “Eyes toward the pond. Slow and steady. Backs straight. Aaand three, two—”

The clapboard slaps shut, and we start walking again. We do one take, two takes, five takes, nine takes. On the tenth take, Paul starts walking up to me, and I don’t know whether to be ashamed that I let everyone down or relieved that they’ve finally realized I’m no star.

He’s a skinny guy in skinny jeans, gray at his temples and long in his chin. “Hey, Red, listen . . . What’s your name?”

Everyone is staring at me—the extras at my sides, the staff on the grass, the band out on the pond, Dee somewhere that is extremely not helpful to me. My voice is tiny and shy when I answer, “Hailey.”

“Hailey,” Paul repeats softly, smiling at me. “What’s your last name, Hailey?”

“Harper.”

“Hailey Harper.” Still smiling, he places his hands on my shoulders. “You’re my star, Hailey Harper. Jillian was a genius casting you. We love everything about you. Your dress, your hair, your walk. You’ve got this really sweet, really sexy vibe going, and we love it . . . but we need to work on your face.”

“My face . . .”

“It’s gorgeous. Your big amber eyes and your long eyelashes. I love that you went with a nude shimmer for your lips. Really, beautiful.” He squeezes my shoulder. “But Hailey, you look scared to death.”

An embarrassed blush stains my cheeks, and I struggle to swallow.

“Let’s talk about your motivation, okay?”

“My motivation . . .”

Paul smiles and nods. “Have you ever had your heart broken?”

I think about it a moment, and then I shake my head.

Frowning, he asks, “Really? Not even once?”

“I don’t think so,” I say, and after a moment, a light chuckle escapes him.

“No, a pretty girl like you, I guess not. Okay, well, can you pretend? Can you think of a time you were really sad or depressed?”

An image immediately enters my mind, but it’s not of the past—it’s of the future. I imagine a scenario I’ve imagined a thousand times: having to move back to Indiana. I picture leaving school, saying goodbye to my new friends, never seeing Mike again. That last part chokes me, and I nod my head.

“Great! Okay, so tell me about it.”

“Uh—” I panic, unwilling to surrender my secrets. “When my puppy died,” I lie, chewing on my bottom lip.

“Perfect!” Paul says, and I’ve never seen someone so happy to hear about the death of a puppy. “I want you to remember how you felt when your puppy died. I want you to remember feeling like you’d never recover from that loss. And then I want you to imagine that freedom from that pain is within reach. Happiness is waiting for you on that platform over there—”

He points, and my eyes lift to see Mike standing on the platform, arms crossed over his chest, watching me. Rowan waves, and the rest of the band watch me too. But it’s Mike that I focus on when the director says, “Imagine that you’re walking toward that feeling. Maybe happiness is a color. Maybe it’s a sound. Maybe it’s your puppy. In the video, it’s going to be a song. That song is going to make you love life again, Hailey. You just have to walk through the darkness to get to it.

“Okay?” he asks, and I pull my eyes from Mike to nod.

One last squeeze of my shoulder, a few last words of encouragement, and then the director takes his place behind the big rolling camera again. His fingers count three, two, one.

A clapboard slaps shut.

My eyes lock on Mike.

And I walk.





Chapter 32




It’s insane, how much filming goes into a three-minute-long music video. We cut after every shot, every angle. Paul films shots of me standing in the woods, emerging from the woods, walking toward the pond. Fifty zillion takes, from at least a gajillion different cameras. Then he gets shots of me walking through the crowd that’s rocking out around the pond. “Be a pebble through water,” he instructs me, and I try to be a freaking pebble.

The moon gets higher and higher, and not all of the shots include me, thank God. Paul gets plenty of shots of the band playing onstage, and I enjoy just watching them as their new song pours out of the speakers hung around the clearing. Even though the prerecorded song will be in the final video, the band scraps the production team’s plan and insists on playing it live for the fans, and the fans’ enthusiasm is authentic. Hands in the air, wild excitement on their faces. Paul gets shots of them jumping up and down to the song, of the band playing it, and then we do it all over again for the drones that fly overhead.

The final shots are of me walking onto the dock while the band is playing, and then of me walking onto the platform after everything has been cleared off of it. It’s just me walking out into the middle, and then spinning around and around with my arms spread wide and my red dress twirling out around me.