Brooklyn has a role on a blockbuster teen TV series, but she's the overlooked sidekick who never gets the good lines. Cade is the brooding star all the girls swoon for, and of course it's just when he starts to notice Brooklyn that democracy in Amer...
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A week after we film the finale, I have an audition.
Mom drives me there after she gets off work, just like the old days. Though today's studio address is a lot glitzier than they were when I was jockeying for commercial jobs or bit parts. It's for a movie, and the director attached to the project is the one who did the Bad Boys Gone Wild franchise, so it'll probably be pretty big. The shooting schedule would wrap a week before I have to be back to film Season 5 of Rise Up, so it's good timing, too.
I slouch in the passenger seat of my Mustang, sweating against the leather.
Mom glances over once, twice. I really hope she doesn't want to talk on the way over. Lately, the only time I feel anything is when I'm acting. And that's just about the only time I bother to speak, too.
"Look, sweetie, I know breakups are hard."
Do parents really think they're being comforting when they say crap like that? They always say it like they really mean, "We know you think you're upset but you're not old enough for your emotions to be officially valid yet, so insert platitude here and now can we please talk about my adult problems instead? Great, thanks."
I know she feels bad, though, so I give her a quick, tense smile.
"If it makes you feel any better, I think you did the right thing," she continues, and I hold back the eye roll, looking even more determinately out the window. "You've been telling me since you were old enough to talk that all you wanted to be was an actress. Any boy who wouldn't respect what's most important to you isn't worth crying over."
I nod. Cade said acting was the most important thing to him, too. And just because he was willing to give up the best role he'd ever had, he thought I should be willing to do the same. Well, joke's on him.
Everybody says the official declaration of war on Norway is coming any day now. I couldn't have stopped it. Even with his grand gesture of quitting, and going out in a glorious hail of blank bullets, he didn't manage to stop it. And who's to even say we should? Probably the people running the country know a lot more than we do. Whatever's going on behind the scenes in Norway might actually be more important than a few people hitting hard times down here in Atlanta.
It's not like they need us to lead the movement, anyway. The hashtag is popping up everywhere. In murals all over town with anti-war statements. On people's homemade MeVid clips, telling their stories. On community cleanups and fundraisers. They say it's the first truly bipartisan popular movement, though that just means more arguing between supporters on what #StandUp was supposed to mean in the first place.
"How's Rae?" Mom stops at a red light and I curl more tightly into the passenger seat. It's not the best subject change she could have picked.
"Good. Driving the doctors crazy because she won't do any of the early grasping exercises they want her to do to prepare for later. She says she wants the first thing she picks up to be the phone, to call the governor and demand charges be brought against those cops for pepper spraying everybody without cause. Until she can pick up a phone, she's not touching anything else."
