Pretending to Be Us Read online

  36

  Lucy

  Movies are generally not shot on location. This is because locations, generally, suck for movie making. Soundstages, however, are great for shooting movies. They can be built to look like anything, but they have all kinds of areas to hide cameras or crew in, insert greenscreens, add on rooms if it would look better... they’re even great for hiding recording devices.

  The entire soundstage for the fake Lone Star Lounge was wired up with more bugs than the USSR’s embassy in Washington DC circa 1985. I’d been surreptitiously putting innocuous looking microphones everywhere I could possibly think of.

  Once I had the soundstage done, I’d done Darcy’s trailer. It had been mine, but now it was hers. I tried not to let that get to me, especially when I'd been ordered to wipe everything down with Lysol wipes in order to “get the smell out.” That had just felt petty.

  It had taken a little more than two days of constant, infuriating put downs and insults, but I was finally done with phase one of my plan. I’d gained Darcy’s trust. Well, probably not, but at least now she thought that she’d broken my spirit. I’d convinced her that I was a compliant little assistant. Now all I needed to do was get Darcy to admit what she did on one of the many recording devices now hidden all around the set.

  Daniel had worked it all out. California, the state where Darcy was from and spent most of her time, is a two-party surveillance state. That means that both people being recorded on a device have to consent to the recording. Texas, on the other hand, is a one-party surveillance state. Only one person has to agree to the recording. And guess what? I totally consented to being recorded on Darcy’s upcoming confession recording.

  While I was working to obtain a confession from Darcy that could be used to invalidate her forged contract, Daniel, Santiago, Emma, and Vanessa were all working behind the scenes to save the production. Vanessa and Emma were working to create a usable finished movie out of the 99% completed filming that we’d already done. Santiago was working to undermine Darcy with her contacts and pave the way for discrediting her. And Daniel was working to get his law license back so he could properly represent us when the time came.

  It all sounded pretty good, but Darcy wasn’t exactly being forthcoming with my end of things. I’d been trying to engage her in conversation all afternoon to bait her into admitting her deception, but she wasn’t biting.

  “Lucy, come over here and lace this corset tighter,” she snapped at me.

  I came over to lace her into the Tinkerbell costume. Isabelle had already been in to do her up, but apparently she wasn’t satisfied.

  “It’s already all the way tightened,” I told her, looking at the laces.

  “Ugh,” Darcy replied, staring at herself this way and that in the mirror. “Why do you have to be so fat? If this had been made for me, it would fit.”

  “It’s a standard Hollywood size four,” I told her, remembering what Isabelle had told me. “That’s a street size two.”

  Darcy nodded. “So basically, morbidly obese.”

  She was skinnier than me, that much was true, but I was not morbidly obese. I was tall. I decided not to defend myself. It was easier.

  “Are you happy now?” I heard myself asking. “Because you don’t look that happy.”

  She glared at me. “What?”

  “All this work you went through to trick and lie your way to where you are now,” I told her. “Are you happy with how it turned out?”

  If she could shoot lasers out of her eyes, I’d be dead. “I’m thrilled, Princess.”

  “Do you feel guilty about switching out the contracts?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She obviously did, but she just fiddled with her nails instead of admitting it.

  “How’d you manage to figure out how to alter that original contract?” I asked her. “That was clever.”

  Darcy looked over at me. Or rather, she looked over her own reflection in the mirror to see me standing over her shoulder.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I heard that contract clause wasn’t in the contract that everybody signed. You know, the one that made you Queen of the movie?” I was trying to lead her to admitting what she did, but it wasn’t as easy as I expected.

  Darcy smirked. “Queen of the movie?” She asked. “I like that. It’s much better to be a Queen than a Princess.”

  I frowned at her. “Did you pay off Elliot?” I asked. “Was he the one that did it?”

  Darcy rolled her eyes. “Princess, you have a lot to learn about this business if you think I paid anyone off.”

  “You tried to pay me off,” I reminded her.

  She nodded. “I was trying to be nice,” she replied. Her eyes said otherwise. “If you’d had any sense in that silly blonde head of yours, you’d have taken my money and run.” She pursed her lips. “Now look at you. What a shame...”

  I managed not to slap her. Somehow. Instead, I managed to scrape together a shrug. “You won. I just want to know how.”

  Darcy laughed at me. “I bet you do.”

  I frowned at her. “So, it wasn’t Elliot? Then who? Santiago?”

  I knew it wasn’t him, but she was really playing hard to get.

  Darcy shook her head at me. “Wrong again. Come on, Princess, you don’t think I’m really going to tell you how I managed it, do you? You must think I’m a complete idiot.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  Darcy turned around to look me in the eye. “I’m smarter than you’ll ever be,” she told me. “I saw that tape recorder in your purse three days ago. I’ll never, ever, under any circumstances admit to anything incriminating.” As I stared in horror, she walked over to my purse. She plucked the stupid, giant tape recorder that Daniel falsely claimed was lucky and held it up to her mouth. “I’m completely innocent in all this,” she said into the microphone. “It’s you, Lucy, who are the liar. You’re the one who lied to everyone about who you are. You’re the one who almost destroyed this entire production with your talentless performance and ridiculous scheme. I’m the good guy here. I’m the one who figured out how to fix what you broke.”

  I was too shocked to speak. Too shocked to move. I stared at Darcy and she stared back at me with an expression so hateful that I could barely draw breath.

  “You know what the worst thing is?” Darcy asked, interpreting my silence as a chance to go on a full-on villain monologue. “It’s Peter.”

  “What about him?” I stuttered.

  “I think he actually liked you,” she said, shaking her head back and forth. “The poor man. He was taken in by your little act. I mean, he probably just felt sorry for you, but once you put out, he probably grew fond of you. It’s really too bad.” Her expression of concern was not remotely believable. “The only good thing is that now he’s had the opportunity to see where you belong and realize who he should be with.”

  “Where I belong?” I was reduced to repeating parts of her sentences in disbelief.

  Darcy smiled. “Yes. You belong in the background. You’re not a princess. You never were. You’re a servant. You’re help. A man like Peter Prince doesn’t belong with help. He belongs with,” she paused dramatically and looked back at herself in the mirror. “He belongs with a queen.”

  37

  Peter

  “Well, we got fucked,” my dad said to me the next time we saw each other. I was right in the middle of the disastrous reshoots and he was right in the middle of a legal battle with Darcy’s production company and I really couldn’t disagree. “Let’s have a drink to celebrate.”

  My dad had come by the set that night and we just happened to be standing in the middle of the fake Lone Star Lounge. He looked at the tap on the bar, but I shook my head.

  “It’s fake,” I told him. “Plus, we can’t touch anything while we’re still shooting. I’ve got some beer in my trailer.”

  “I guess that’ll have to do,” he said, following me out of the soundstage and around the corner to
my little dressing room/rest spot. “How are the reshoots going?”

  I shot him a look that told him everything he needed to know.

  “That bad, huh?”

  I shook my head. “Worse. So much worse. Since we lost Vanessa, Darcy’s been trying to direct it herself. Act in it, direct it, and rewrite the script. All at the same time. It’s going about as well as you would expect.”

  “This is all her fault,” my dad said, looking at the trailer labeled “Eva” next to mine.

  “Darcy? Yeah, it sure is.” I’d never disliked anyone quite as intensely as I disliked Darcy at the moment. If I had a gun with two bullets and was trapped in a room with Darcy, Mussolini, and Hitler, I’d shoot Darcy twice.

  My dad cocked his head to the side. “No. Not Darcy. She’s just the symptom. Just an opportunistic woman with an inflated ego. I mean Lucia Antonia Bergen, her royal pain-in-the-ass.”

  I managed not to explode. Barely.

  “It isn’t Lucy’s fault,” I told my dad through gritted teeth. “Will you please stop saying that?”

  My dad looked unconvinced. “It is her fault. Look, I know you liked her, but she started this.”

  “No, she didn’t, Dad,” I told him. “Darcy started it.”

  “I mean really,” he continued, not listening to me, “impersonating royalty. Can you believe it?” He huffed like it were capital murder. “I called the Swedish consulate you know.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “I called to let them know that a dual citizen had been publicly impersonating a member of their royal family.” He looked horrified. “I figured since I’ve been working on all these distribution deals with the northern European governments that they should listen!”

  My dad had been droning on about his distribution deals in Europe for ages now. I had no idea what he was talking about and I didn’t really care. What did worry me, however, was that he’d told on Lucy. “What did you tell the consulate about Lucy, exactly?”

  “The truth. I told them what she told me, her employer, about herself.”

  I swallowed. Was that a crime? “What did they say?”

  His eyes were huge. “They didn’t even care! They laughed at me! Can you believe it?”

  I exhaled in relief. “They didn’t care?”

  He shook his head, clearly all worked up. “No! They didn’t care one bit! They thought it was hilarious and kept going on about how the monarchy was purely ceremonial or some shit.”

  “Didn’t Lucy tell us that herself?” I reminded him.

  “I thought she was just being modest!”

  “She is modest.”

  “She’s a fraud.”

  Lucy was a lot of things, but she wasn’t a fraud. In her way, she was purer than my dad had any idea about. She believed in doing right by her family and she was uncompromising in her commitment to make that happen. She was also determined to save this film, even if her plan was kind of silly and doomed to fail.

  “Dad, this is Hollywood. We’re all frauds.” Technically we were in Austin, Texas. But he was a genius. He got the idea.

  “I just can’t believe that I ever wanted you to marry that girl,” my dad said, looking like he’d just swallowed a toad. He took a deep drink of his beer. “I have half a mind to go pull out my rolodex until I find someone that knows the King of Sweden and call him up.”

  “He’ll probably tell you the monarchy is purely ceremonial,” I replied. I took a drink of my own beer.

  “Well, it shouldn’t be.” He harrumphed again and then settled down in his chair sulkily. “Considering the amount of time and effort I’ve invested in these Northern European cultural film distribution deals...”

  I cleared my throat. “These what?”

  “Cultural films,” my dad told me, taking in my horrified expression. “What?”

  My dad had been going on and on about the distribution deals he had lined up. But this was the first I’d heard about them being European.

  “Did Tommy pick them?” I asked, wondering if my older brother who specialized in only the biggest Hollywood blockbusters was somehow getting artsy. Was I rubbing off on him?

  My dad shook his head. “No.”

  “Derek?” My next oldest brother was more of the artsy type. He was on Broadway at the moment, but maybe he’d be doing something like this in his free time...

  “No.”

  “Holden?” My very oldest brother was the least likely of the three as he’d recently retired from acting to spend all his time directing. He was working on his dream film right now and I had no idea how he’d had the time.

  “I picked these myself,” my dad said proudly.

  Oh no. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. My dad was smart, and he usually spent his money well, but sometimes his taste in film was lacking. That’s why I or one of my brothers always picked our projects.

  “What the hell is a ‘cultural film’?” I asked.

  “You know, documentaries,” he replied, looking excited. “The first one is an in-depth look at the Edelweiss flower to be distributed on Austrian public television.”

  Holy shit. My dad had been working on the European equivalent of a Chinese documentary about ferns.

  “I thought you were arranging distribution rights for big name productions in Europe,” I stammered. “Not folksy flower shows.”

  My dad frowned at me deeply. “This is your cultural heritage, Peter.”

  “We’re Polish! Not Austrian.”

  He shook his head at me in clear disappointment. “I don’t know why I can’t make you understand why I care about this project. It’s our family legacy, our story. Our roots come from central and northern Europe.”

  I sighed. “You’re right. You can’t make me understand.” I took another sip of my beer and stared at him, thinking about the film and the fact that we were sitting here toasting this shitshow of a production and looking forward to distributing nature documentaries in Europe. It was all too bizarre. I might as well add to it. “Just like I can’t make you understand why I’m in love with Lucy.”

  My dad nearly spit out his beer. “You’re what?!”

  38

  Peter

  “Where’s Lucy?” I asked Isabelle the next day when I ran into her. Lucy hadn’t come back from lunch and I was wondering where she’d gone off to. “Do you know where she is?”

  “I haven’t seen her in a while. Maybe she’s in her trailer?” she answered. Then she made a face. “I mean, um, Darcy’s trailer.” I grimaced and Isabelle’s expression shifted. “Do you want me to go look for her, Mr. Prince?”

  I sighed. If I’d been the sort of movie star that thought everybody was their own personal slave, I could have said yes. I could have avoided going over to the trailer that used to belong to Lucy and now belonged to Darcy and risked seeing Darcy. But I was a big boy.

  “I’ll find her,” I told Isabelle, who looked instantly relieved.

  I walked over to Darcy’s trailer with all the enthusiasm of a man headed to the gallows. We were shooting the sex scene later that day.

  “Oh, I fired her.”

  “What?” My heart sank. I’d been expecting to hear that Darcy sent her to San Antonio or something to pick her up a tuna melt. I’d never thought in a million years that she would actually fire Lucy.

  Darcy seemed unconcerned by it. “Yeah. She was crying all the time and it got old.”

  “Oh.”

  “Did you know she was trying to sabotage me?”

  I blinked. I turned on the charm. My head was spinning but I knew in that moment that something pivotal was about to happen. I wasn’t sure exactly what that thing was, but if Lucy had been fired, that meant that her plan had failed.

  I hated to admit it, but I wasn’t surprised. The idea that Darcy was stupid enough to admit to her scheme would have been much too easy. Darcy wasn’t dumb.

  “I had no idea,” I said, putting on the same impression of dislike and betrayal I’d been phoning in about Lucy i
n front of Darcy. “What was she doing?”

  Darcy shrugged. “It hardly matters. But I figured it out and now she’s gone.”

  I attempted a smirk. “Good.”

  I felt anything but good about the fact, but Darcy seemed to buy it. For whatever reason, I seemed to be able to fool her. It wasn’t my incredible acting skills, either. It was the fact that she was extremely attracted to me, I suspected, that accounted for my ability to charm a woman who honestly ought to be very suspicious of me.

  But she wasn’t.

  “It is good, isn’t it?” she crooned.

  I grinned at her, pretending to agree. “I think it’ll do us good not to have her around anymore. I feel like she was really killing the mood on set.”

  Darcy nodded, drifting closer to me. “I absolutely know what you mean. She was just so pathetic and sad. That’s why I offered her a position you know... I felt bad for her.”

  “You’re too nice,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief.

  Less true words had never been spoken, but she did not pick up on my sarcasm. If anything, she fell more deeply under my spell. I was no great seducer, but apparently, I had my moments. Or rather, my moment. And this was it.

  “That’s always been my problem,” she said with a little sigh. “I’ve always let other people in, and they just betray me. They always betray me.” She frowned. “It’s like the staff. Everyone’s quitting!”

  “People in this industry aren’t reliable. Or trustworthy,” I told her, thinking she was the perfect example.

  She nodded. “I just can’t believe we lost three more people today. It’s ridiculous.”

  We’d been bleeding staff lately. Everyone seemed to have a better opportunity to pursue somewhere. It must have been the extremely toxic, oppressive atmosphere on set. I couldn’t blame anyone for leaving. Being the sort of actor who walks out on a half-finished film was not a reputation I wanted, but my career would probably survive it. What was keeping me here, however, was nothing to do with a contract. My dad had already told me to quit and we’d settle out of court if necessary. But I wasn’t about to quit on this film. Or Lucy.