“Lancelot, where have you been all my life?”
“Hey, listen, I’m serious.” She arched her eyebrow in surprise. For all her flirty irony, she really was, somehow, a total innocent. “You need to call somebody, tell them where you are.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a commodity, you’re like a valuable thing to them. You can’t just run off, it freaks them out.”
“They should be freaked out. They treat me pretty shitty, if you want to know the truth.”
“They treat everybody shitty. You have to take it until you have enough power to treat them shitty.”
“Why can’t they just treat me well, and then when I have power, I won’t want to treat them shitty?”
“Because that’s not the way it works. And besides which, they don’t think they’re treating you shitty. They put you in a movie and they’re making you a big star, they think that’s pretty nice of them.”
“But they don’t talk to me like I’m a human being!”
“You’re not a human being.”
“I am too.”
“Well, you have to try and forget that for now.”
“That’s right, you had to apologize to me because you were so mean to me on the red carpet.”
“I was not mean to you. But I did have to apologize and get it out into the Twittersphere that I wasn’t sexually harassing you. Because if I didn’t it would have wrecked my career.”
“Such as it is.”
“Well, precisely. I know what I’m talking about. You need to call somebody right now and tell them where you are and that you weren’t feeling well and you’re so sorry you had to go home and get some rest. Have your agent do it.”
“I don’t have my cell phone, I left it in my trailer.”
“You can use mine.” He reached into his pocket.
“Do I have to do it right now?”
“Yes, you have to do it right now.”
“Once I do it, this will all be over,” she warned him. “Like, we escaped, we really did, for six hours. And once I call in, we won’t have escaped anymore.”
You really need to kiss her right now, his brain informed him. But the cell phone was already in his hand, an anchor holding him in place. Its cold weight tugged him back into the reptilian subcortex which innately understood the narrower rules by which the demimonde operated. Something she had said earlier had been lurking there.
“Gordon is personally approving your costumes?”
“Yes, it’s a complete pain in the ass. They have to send him swatches.”
“What do you mean, swatches?”
“For all the dresses. They have to make them, because he was like, he didn’t like anything that they shopped, so they’re building all these dresses for me and he’s more or less hyperobsessed and you know. He wants to see fabric swatches.”
“The head of the studio. Is looking at fabric swatches. For your costumes.”
“Stupid, right? Plus he can’t make up his mind, so they have to build like two or three versions of every dress. It costs a lot of money, everybody’s all worried about the budget but he keeps going, ‘That dress sucks,’ and he keeps reshooting things.”
“He’s ordering a lot of reshoots? For what?”
“No one knows. Or at least they’re not telling me. No, wait, the one we were supposed to do today? They reshot it three times, and now it turns out he wants me to be putting lipstick on. While I’m talking on the phone. Which you know is harder to do than you’d think, and besides which, nobody does it. If you’re going to put lipstick on, you set your stupid cell phone down. Which is, that’s all I was saying and then everybody stormed off the set.”
He had heard a lot of crazy things as an entertainment reporter, but this creeped him out. And it was bad, that she had dropped the wig. You just innately knew that people were not going to have a sense of humor about that. “You have to call in, Alison,” he said. He held out the cell phone. “You have to do it right now.”
She grimaced and for a moment it seemed like she was simply going to refuse. A fierce argument hovered, just behind her lips. It reminded him of the moment they had met, when she was so quickly irked by his pretentious babble. He wished that he had just taken her home that night, and fallen in love, and married her. Maybe you should just do it now. But she had taken the phone, and she was dialing dutifully. She smiled at him with a rueful obedience.