WHEN MASON SHOWED ME THE SCRIPT SIDES FOR THE CHILD soldier, I jumped on it.
“Think about this,” he said. “The segment could be huge. Is that how you want to make your career?”
He talked a big game, but this segment was special. He had to know it, too; I was the only one at our agency he’d even talked to about it.
I said, “I’ll take my chances.”
“All right,” he said. He looked serious, but I was pretty sure he was just full of it.
The best gig I’d had so far was the front half of a black bear for a nature documentary. It was on cable.
I’m not complaining—you have to pay your way at the agency, and rent be not proud—but I needed to earn some more, soon, and “bear half ” didn’t set your career on fire.
Face time was an upgrade. And this wasn’t some bit part as a muddy orphan in an establishing shot. This was the big time.
This was the evening news.
That night I walked under our painted motto (Let Those Who Would Be Fooled, Be Fooled) into the dining hall, packed with kids from the Lowers that the agency hired out as sympathetic faces on news segments for the Uppers to go watch when they were feeling generous.
I sat down, grinning, next to Bree.
“I’m in the audition pool for a soldier.”
She barely looked up from her vegetable mash. “Oh? Congratulations.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s big. Investor backing for the cause, too, so the pay is pretty solid.”
“Wonderful,” she said. “I was beginning to worry you’d aged out of your best work. It’s nice they’re skewing older on something.”
I was sixteen. Bree was nineteen, and kind of a bitch.
“What’s the story?”
“My brother is missing,” I said, “and he was the last thing I had left of home. Now I’m fighting the people who took him since I’m dead inside anyway, grenades exploding on us any moment, blah, blah, blah. They wanted someone who can handle a gun, not for crying or anything.”
Bree’s fork wasn’t moving anymore. “Is this for some newspaper?”
I grinned. “The evening news.”
Now she was looking up, her head angled by instinct to catch the best light on her face. “What?”
“Yup.” I shrugged like it was nothing. “I was handpicked. If the segment breaks big, they’ll probably have to retire me.”
Bree looked stunned. After a second, she recovered and said, “Dream big.”
“I’m going to get it,” I said.
She smiled. “I’m sure,” she said. “And if that doesn’t pan out, there’s always a place for you on Naturewise.”
She was acting like I’d been the back half of the bear.
I stood. “I’m going to rehearse.”
“Break a leg,” said Bree, like she meant it.
When I was still a kid, Bree had gotten a gig as a grieving bride whose husband was killed by government troops on his way up the stairs of the church.
(She was still in the dorms with me, then; she wouldn’t be a teacher until after that segment.)
It was supposed to be a small part, a background tableau in the middle of a bigger story, but Bree wasn’t a person who played small parts.
In the on-scene segment with the news man in front, she had clutched her veil in her fists as she wept over the body of the guy who’d been her husband.
He was from some other agency. I hadn’t seen him since—she’d kept him in the spotlight too long, and his face was too famous after that. She’d taken his career down. Bree played for keeps.
In the grainy newspaper shots (meant to have been taken by a wedding guest), Bree had cradled his head in her lap and lowered her mouth to his mouth, their lips almost touching but not quite.
(“You’re not supposed to kiss before marriage in that country,” Bree told me the night before filming, when everyone else was asleep.
“There’s nowhere to go with that,” I said.
Bree said, “Watch me.”
At the time I hated that we shared a dorm. Our beds were pressed up against the walls, separated except for her voice, and I was trapped listening to her; but there was no question that the advice had done me good.)
The bride segment had been aimed at a regional station, to drum up sympathy for the insurgents in a couple of key cities, that could be pushed over the edge of public opinion by a sob story on the news.
(Stations hired out their news stories now. It was easier and safer than going looking for news, and our stories never went sour on you the way they did if you trusted them out in the wild.
And it’s not like audiences knew the difference. To the Uppers, one tragedy on their television was as surreal as the next. Let those who would be fooled, be fooled.)
Bree was paid for a segment on the independent channel, and a picture in the locally edited newspaper.
She ended up on the cover of Planet magazine.
(“The segment tested so well they’re thinking of extending the war,” Bree told me. “The Uppers love to watch a cause they can donate to.”
Her voice sounded strange.)
She had one of the first editions framed above her bed. It was a close-up, her tear-stained face half hidden by a gold silk veil; her gaze sliding sideways with smeary, kohl-rimmed hazel eyes looking out at the viewer.
The headline: the Weeping bride on the mountain path.
The article was ten pages about the plight of the fleeing insurgents. The quotes came from the insurgents, too; Planet was classy enough to do research like it was still real. They’d even called the agency to get quotes right from Bree and not from our publicity office, because Bree had done such a good job with the part that they didn’t want the performance to be diluted.
(I listened in, of course. I hated her, but I knew when to take notes from a master.)
“I can never kiss him, until we meet in Heaven,” Bree had sighed into the office phone, her voice shaking, and on the other end of the line the Planet guy muttered, “Holy shit, that’s great,” and started typing.
(Her hands were shaking, too; Bree never did anything by halves.)
The article won a Pulitzer. Before the year was out, that government fell apart, and the insurgents got the revolution they’d paid for.
At the agency, they treated Bree like she sweated gold nuggets, and added the leader of the insurgents to their list of references for when the next guys called up the agency looking for the kind of story that couldn’t happen by accident.
They had pulled Bree out of the audition pool for good after the story faded, because there was no way people would ever forget her face after that.
If you ask me, she was doomed from the beginning with eyes like that, anyway. No hiding those; I don’t care how big your crowd shot is.
Now Bree had a look like she thought this was all beneath her. She shouldn’t: she was still here, teaching. (The insurgents were good for publicity, but they hadn’t paid so great. Wherever the Uppers’ money had gone, none of it had made it to Bree.)
She was the only person at the agency who had ever been retired because of success.
So far.
Bree knew how to act above it all, but everybody has their tells, and I knew I’d gotten to her when I saw she’d signed up for phone privileges.
She made a lot of calls; she was a Lower, but she had parents on the outside. They came to visit once a year, and brought books for her (Bree could read), and told her how happy they were that she had done well for herself.
It hadn’t made her any friends, but I guess when you have parents, you can take or leave the rest.
I pulled a muscle in calisthenics to get out of the session early. It took some doing to wrench my arm without breaking it, but it was my only option. No good faking anything. The downside of working in a casting agency was that everybody was on to your act.
“Ice that down at the nurse, now,” said Miss Kemp, as I headed out. “You’d better look like you know how to carry a gun at the audition tomorrow.”
I wasn’t worried. I was tall for a girl, and wiry. I could carry half a black bear suit; I could manage a gun.
“Don’t worry,” I told her, and grinned. (I had all my teeth. My smile was priceless, even on Miss Kemp.)
The phone room was on the office floor, so it was easier for snoopy adults to catch snoopy students. Not that it mattered. With Bree, you never had to get any closer than the landing.
“Mother,” she was saying, “you’ve got to do something about the part they want this girl for.”
Bingo.
Her voice, tense and serious, echoed down the hall. “It’s not fair. She’s sixteen, but she’s never done anything! I don’t know why they’re doing this at all. There’s got to be someone else who could use her.”
One success can really turn a petty person sour, I thought.
“Yeah, she’s good enough,” Bree said. “Can’t you buy her out? She’ll find some other way to earn out of her contract.” And a second later, meaner, “Well, decide faster.”
I snuck back down the stairs before the call was over. Listening to someone jealous themselves into a heart attack wasn’t as fun as I’d thought.
I flew down the hall on stocking feet, and was in the nurse’s office before Miss Kemp could even call down to check on me. What took everybody else five minutes, I could do in three.
That night, Bree pulled me aside on the walk back from the dining hall to the dorms.
“Mason told me to help you run lines,” she said.
She could read.
“I can get Miss Kemp to do them with me,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I want to get a look at this part, and you need the help.”
I had no idea who she thought she was fooling, but this I had to see.
We went through the script in one of the empty schoolrooms. It wasn’t much on paper. I reminded myself that Bree had done more with less, which gave me some courage.
“I’m a pretty good shot,” I said, and then I closed one eye and mimicked taking down some scrabbly mammal at a hundred paces.
“Don’t worry if you can’t hit it,” Bree said. “They’ll probably hold on you while you shoot, and then just rig one to explode in pickups.”
The way she said it threw me, for a second.
The newsman would ask me what had happened to my family, what I thought about the government and the war, how I felt about being a soldier. I breezed through the lines, the picture of a ruined kid who’d grown up too soon.
(They could have just gone outside, where the city was overrun with Lower kids trying to stay out of the ratcatchers’ way long enough to eat, but there was no telling what would happen if someone started in on a story like that. Uppers didn’t like being reminded of a problem so hopeless, a problem so close to home.)
When Bree read her lines, her exterior thinned, and the hardened war reporter devastated by what she was seeing sprang to life in front of me.
She shouldn’t have been so bitter about what happened after the weeping bride. She was too convincing, too good; whatever role she’d gotten would have been her last.
At the very end, I was supposed to look up at the newsman (cheating my face to the camera) and say, fighting tears: “I miss my brother.”
“Wrong,” Bree snapped, the first time. “It’s not a sandwich, it’s your brother. This is the evening news—you have to fool ten million people. Now, picture something you’ve really lost, and make me feel it.”
I closed my eyes. I had a dim memory of being hot and hungry and frightened, from before the agency bought me off the ratcatcher who’d brought me here. But all I had ever really known was the classrooms and the dining hall and the winding upstairs corridors with little dorms on each side, and the overhead signs for pediatric ward, where they dormed the really little kids.
“I can’t,” I said, opening my eyes.
Bree looked disappointed. “You’ve never lost a friend?”
“You’re one to talk,” I said.
After a little silence, she said, “You have to nail this line.
There’s no point in them keeping you around if you don’t sell this, you understand me?”
I didn’t understand. I couldn’t believe she was so upset; maybe this was the hallmark of an artist.
“Okay,” I said. “What am I supposed to do?”
She slapped me.
The pain took a second to reach me; then it pooled where her hand had struck and sent a jolt up my nose like she’d shoved a nail in it. My eyes watered, but I was too scared to close them, in case she tried it again on the other side.
She said, “Give me the line.”
I had forgotten to breathe, and when I exhaled it stung my throat.
“I miss my brother.”
“Good,” she said. “Again.”
I got to take the white van to the audition. I pressed my face to the glass, watching as the alleys full of street kids gave way to clean sidewalks and tall buildings and stores that were open for business.
Mason came with me, but in the waiting room of the building (ten full stories up), he sat a little apart, with the rest of the school reps. The kids all sat in one long, silent line, waiting to be called.
The girl ahead of me was fourteen, tops, and she stared at her folded hands like she was about to faint.
I recognized her. Magpie—the puppeteer from the Naturewise shoot. She had manipulated the bear’s face in the close-ups, hunched under a fur drape, with her arms extended, fingers pulling blindly at a hundred tiny strings.
“Were you a black bear face a few years ago?” I asked.
She looked up, surprised. “Yeah,” she said, and a second later, “Poppy, right?”
I nodded. “What are you doing here? There’s no puppet stuff, is there?” I was crap with puppets.
Without looking at me, she held up her right hand, which now had only three fingers.
“Infringement,” she said.
I didn’t understand. I looked at her.
She shrugged, recited as if by rote, “Someone from another agency tried to poach me at my last audition. My agency adjusted my value as a puppeteer.”
She folded her hands back in her lap. “They were just protecting their investment, they said. That was all.” She took a breath. “I didn’t do anything wrong. They weren’t angry with me.”
When the manager called her name a few minutes later, she slid off her chair and waved to me and walked inside, and I still hadn’t said a word.
“I got the part,” I said.
Bree had walked downstairs from the teachers’ rooms. She was silhouetted in the window at the end of the dorm hall, the only one awake.
“When do you film?”
“Next week,” I said. “There’s not much left to do. They found some foothills near where they filmed the bear thing, and the newsman’s been cast already.”
“How did the audition go?”
“I only had to read it once,” I said. “They took my picture and booked me on the spot. Mason’s already signed.” I grinned, willing her to be proud of me, for once.
“Well,” she said, after too long, “let those who would be fooled, be fooled.”
It wasn’t even the insult it should have been; it was the saddest thing I’d heard from her since the weeping bride.
Bree made no sense.
I dreamed about a black bear.
It was real, and close enough that I could smell its wet coat, but when it looked at me it didn’t attack, so I must have been wearing my bear suit.
The bear had sharp black eyes and fur that gleamed in the sun, and this close to it, I saw how careful its expressions were: the muscles above the eyes, the flare of its nostrils, and the soft brown lips that curled back a little from its teeth as it smelled the air.
At the shoot, they told us to move deliberately, and I had operated the piston that swung its heavy head to and fro, and they had said, “Good enough.”
This bear was real, and looking at it, it seemed impossible that anyone could ever have been fooled.
(“What happened to the real bears?” I’d asked.
The director shrugged. “What does it matter why something dies out?” he said, and then pointed to the cameraman. “When you swing the head right, brace the legs and shake the back like you’ve just seen him. Close cover, watch the angle of the head here for pickups!”
Close cover was Magpie.)
I looked at the real bear, which was so close I could see that its eyes weren’t black at all, but brown and flecked with gold.
“You’re beautiful,” I said.
It grinned; two fingers dropped out of its mouth.
When I appeared in the back hall to the teachers’ offices and yanked Bree into the mostly empty pantry, she didn’t even seem suprised.
“They cut off Magpie’s fingers,” I said.
Bree blinked. “What?”
“Magpie,” I said. “The puppet handler for the bear. Someone tried to poach her, and her agency found out and cut two of her fingers off.”
“Oh, Poppy,” she said, “you’re so easy to shock, it’s like you’ve never heard of good business practice.”
It was a decent act, but her hands had gone white under the nails because of how hard she was gripping her book bag, so I knew better.
I said, “She didn’t do anything.”
“Lucky for her,” Bree said. “She’s better off than some.”
The hair rose on my neck.
After a beat, Bree looked me right in the eye. “Do you still want to do this part?”
I held her gaze. “Give me a reason not to.”
One of the kitchen kids opened the door.
“Frankly, I’m tired of all this insecurity,” Bree said, her neck getting longer by an inch. “Either you can do the part or you can’t. I suggest you just quit.”
She shouldered past me harder than necessary.
The kitchen kid gave me the once-over. He was even thinner than I was; they kept us hungry because it made our eyes shine.
“Break a leg,” he said.
All through dinner, I thought about what Bree said. If you couldn’t do the job, the agency expelled you. And now I knew that before they expelled you, they probably made you useless for other places, too.
If you weren’t in an agency, you were on the streets. On the streets the ratcatchers were waiting, and if they couldn’t sell you, they just disappeared you and brought in your skullcap for government cash.
(Once, the pediatric acting coach had told me that the rat-catcher had brought me to the agency because I looked so clever. She said it to make me feel better when I was failing some exercise, like the school had taken me for some reason besides my being young enough to be trained. She hadn’t lasted long.)
You’d have to be a bigger bitch than Bree to wish the streets on anybody.
And no way would she tell someone to skip out on a contract. Bree was a teacher. Bree made her money when the kids made money. She had the best interests of the agency at stake.
What was so awful about this part that it would be worth telling a student to take a risk like that?
I dreamed about crumbling in front of the camera, about scalding dust coating my lungs as I struggled to speak. I dreamed about my fingers being trapped inside the bear head, about Mason sighing and pulling a hunting knife out of his pocket to do what had to be done.
“I like the dark circles,” Mason said, the next time he saw me. “Very soldier. Good work.”
Mason didn’t come with me to the shoot.
“Today you belong to the director,” he said, opening the door to the van. “Do well for the agency, all right?”
I nodded, uneasy, and ducked into the seat.
As the engine roared to life, Bree appeared in the open doorway, her book bag over one shoulder.
“I’d like to go,” she said to Mason. “She’s been dropping the intensity in the second half, and when I’m there it helps her focus.”
“You slapped me,” I said.
She shot me a glare Mason couldn’t see, and said too calmly, “And it was the only time you’ve done it right.”
Mason looked at her for a second. Then he shrugged.
“I guess if anyone understands a performance like this, it’s you,” he said. “Be careful not to get in anyone’s way on the set.”
“Of course,” she said, and then she was sliding onto the bench seat beside me, and the van was pulling away, and suddenly she had horned in on my big moment.
I folded my arms. “What the hell is going on? What are you even planning to do when we get there?”
“Wait till we get there, and see,” she said.
The guy playing the newsman was from one of the adult agencies, but he was still young, and handsome enough that my palms went sweaty when we shook hands.
Then he looked up, placed Bree, and went wide-eyed. “And you’re the weeping bride,” he said, grinning as he held out his hand. “This is a pleasure. I’m such a fan of the work you did on that segment.”
“Good luck today,” said Bree.
When she was gone, he looked me over again. “Well, if she’s your teacher,” he said, “then I’m really looking forward to today.”
I tried not to blush like an idiot.
We did a run-through with the director, standing in the shade of the trailer, as the cameramen worked on angles and lights for the rocky outcrop where we’d be sitting.
I knew this place; I’d spent four days in these woods filming for the bear. The hazy skyline of New St. Vincent was ahead of us, out of sight; and near the rocks there was enough wilderness to fool the camera into thinking we were in scrub country.
Below us, farther down the rocks where the ground leveled off near the flooded riverbank, was the swampland that seeped into your costume and reeked, and made your legs weigh a hundred pounds more than they told you it would, and looked like a charming springtime meadow when you viewed it through the lens.
“Good,” the director said, after the first rehearsal. “Poppy, you’re so natural with the gun, that’s great, but maybe you could work on the sadness a little? We want the Uppers to really ache for the cause. And Prentis, I like your interest in her—let’s play that up on this round, increase the focus.”
“Sure thing,” said Prentis, and winked at me.
Bree cut in. “I’d like to see you to work on those last few lines, Poppy. Full costume, please.”
I slid off the stool, mortified, and sulked over to the edge of the set, where Bree was waiting.
“You have to go,” she said, under her breath.
I could have hit her myself. I’d never been so furious. “Are you trying to get me fired? Do you know what’s going to happen to me if they drop me from this piece? I don’t need help from you if this—”
“They’re going to kill you,” she said.
I stopped talking, with my mouth still open. My stomach dropped to my boots.
I wanted to scream that she was lying—she had to be lying—but a lot of little things were beginning to make sense in a hurry, as if I had just looked at my stinging arm and seen the ants devouring it.
(Think about this, Mason had said.)
“How do you know?” I asked.
“The grips have been laying wire along the rocks while you were busy. Don’t look,” she snapped, like I would have.
“But you knew before this,” I argued. “You never wanted me to take the segment. You came with me.”
She came with me to save me at the last second. That was too strange to think about.
She looked absently across the scene they were building, slid the strap of the book bag through her fists.
She said, “I know what a setup looks like.”
I thought how real it had looked on film when the groom fell back from the gunshot; how I had never seen him again. I thought how stunned Bree had looked in the pictures as she bent over the body, tears falling from her wide-open eyes.
Just quit, Bree had told me, and I hadn’t understood why she was so upset.
Let those who would be fooled, be fooled.
When I nodded, Bree’s shoulders sank with relief.
“What do I do?” I asked.
She slid the strap of her book bag into my hand.
“Hope you’re faster than the grips,” she said, “and that your memory’s good.”
I was already looking at the ground, that sloped away beneath us. Down was faster than up, and if I made it to the city, then…then…
I glanced back at her. “What will happen to you?”
She shrugged, half smiled. “I was supposed to die at the church door, too. I know how to handle myself.”
Suddenly, I didn’t doubt it.
“When you reach the city,” she said, “get work on the trains, if you can. By the time you’re over the mountains, there’s decent work for Lowers, and you’ll be too far for us to find you.”
When I reached for the bag, I clasped her hand for a second, and she jerked back in surprise before she could get hold of herself. (Everybody has their tells.)
“Can I have a bathroom break?” I asked, loudly enough for the director to overhear.
Prentis raised his hand. “Seconded.”
The director checked his watch. “Fine. Meet back here in five.”
Bree gave me one searching look; then she was walking back up toward the director. Her face was in perfect light, and as she started talking, he was already grinning.
I swung down behind the first of the outcroppings and headed for the forest.
Five minutes from now, when they realized I was gone, Bree would be as surprised as anyone, and she’d throw a fit and slow them down, but she had nothing to worry about—I’d be under tree cover by then.
What took everybody else five minutes, I could do in three.