Pretending to Be Us Read online

  “Daniel is my friend.” Lucy was playing with the ends of her long blonde hair like she was nervous. “He’s not just my assistant.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” I told her. “A lot of actors don’t have friends.”

  “Do you have friends?” She asked.

  I paused. Lucy was weirdly magnetic, and despite my better judgment, I wanted to tell her about myself. That was new. “A few. Not many though. Especially not close ones. The movie business is extremely good at making people paranoid, isolated, and eccentric. I have an uncle that actually fit all of those criteria, actually.”

  “Connor Prince?” she guessed.

  “You really did cyberstalk me, didn’t you, Lucy?”

  She made a very ice-princess-y face. “I didn’t need to cyberstalk you to make that connection. He was the biggest name in Hollywood and then he was just gone. I’d have to be living under a rock not to know about that.”

  We lapsed into a short silence.

  “I thought you’d be all egotistical and full of yourself,” Lucy said eventually. “But you aren’t.”

  I smiled. “How do you know I’m not?” I asked, repeating her own words back to her.

  “Why would someone like you even care what people think?” she asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I care what people think?” I shrugged. "I’m an okay guy.”

  “Is that why you’re being nice to me? Because you’re an okay guy?”

  If I stayed here any longer, I knew I’d start flirting with her. I also knew that was a bad idea.

  It was time for a course correction. I needed her to dislike me because despite my best efforts it was obvious that I was incapable of disliking her. I laughed my most condescending laugh. “You caught me. The only reason I’m being nice to you is to feed my own ego. I’m just a really good actor who knows it’s important that people like me. Since I scared off your bully, everybody will think I’m a great guy now. Thanks for that.” I got up and started to walk away. She was visibly confused by the change in my demeanor. It was for the best. Maybe if she thought I was a psychopath she wouldn’t be nice to me anymore and it would be easier to hate her. “See you around, Princess.”

  10

  Lucy

  “Nothing like a little royal blood dripping down your leg to start a movie off right,” I grumbled, fishing in my stolen Prada handbag and looking for a spare tampon. I was doing a last-minute fitting since filming started tomorrow. It had been a long day at the table read, but it wasn’t over yet.

  Isabelle, who apparently did all the odd jobs on set for the costume designer, Kate, burst out laughing and her demeanor totally changed. Her frightened exterior thawed a bit and she flashed a pretty, white smile at me. “You’re really normal for a princess, let alone an actress,” she said, shaking her head. “I was worried you’d be a total weirdo.”

  “Oh, she’s definitely a weirdo,” Daniel chimed in. “She just happens to be a weirdo whose great-great-grandfather was the king of Sweden.” He winked at Isabelle. “It’s all the inbreeding you know,” he stage-whispered. “She never really had a chance.”

  “This thing is really tight,” I said, ignoring Daniel and staring at myself in the mirror of my trailer. The corset was working to make my waist incredibly tiny, but the cost was most of my lung capacity. “Who was it made for?”

  Daniel smirked. “Not your fat butt, clearly.”

  Isabelle looked over at Daniel questioningly and then back at me. I rolled my eyes at Daniel.

  “You’re not fat at all,” Isabelle said, clearly worried that Daniel was going to upset my fragile ego. “You’re just tall so some of this stuff doesn’t fit you quite right.” Isabelle tugged the laces tighter as I winced. “This was made for nobody in particular,” she answered eventually, “but we couldn’t just wait until the casting was finalized. It’s a standard Hollywood size four.”

  I blinked at her. I should probably know what that meant, but I didn’t. “So, a small size two?” I asked.

  She nodded and went back to lacing and zhuzhing.

  The skimpy Tinkerbell costume fit, but just barely. Thank God for the laces in the back and a poverty diet, although I worried that I’d spill out the front if I bent over. Luckily, Isabelle had come prepared for that eventuality, and had double-sided garment tape to secure my boobs and some nifty nude pasties just in case. When coupled with the shapewear, the thigh high hosiery, and all the pins, however, I was about as trussed up as a Thanksgiving ham. The fact that I was perched on a pedestal in my trailer while Isabelle did my costume and dabbed me with glitter added to the surreal feeling.

  “I look pretty good,” I said eventually. The sexed-up Disney thing was growing on me.

  Isabelle looked worried. “Pretty good? You don't like it?"

  I winced. “I didn’t mean it like that at all,” I clarified. I didn’t want to offend her. She seemed so earnest and sweet, and lord knows those were qualities in short supply in this business. “You did a wonderful job. I just feel strange being dressed up like this.”

  She paused and stared at me in the mirror as if trying to figure out if I was messing with her. “Don’t princesses get dressed up by others all the time?”

  Daniel laughed. “I’ve tried to help her as best I can,” he interjected. “But some people are just hopeless.”

  I shook my head at Isabelle who was still staring curiously. “Not this one,” I answered her. I frowned. “I’m not exactly Kate Middleton over here.”

  “That's putting it mildly,” Darcy’s voice said from behind us, having snuck in from who-knows-where.

  I paused. “Isabelle? Daniel? Can we have a moment please?” I asked, swallowing hard. The two read the feeling in the room and split. Darcy looked me up and down dismissively as soon as we were alone.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she asked. “How dare you show up today?”

  I took a deep, cleansing breath. “I got the part fair and square,” I told Darcy. “It was you who told me to lie about who I am.”

  Her voice was icy cold. “I brought you to that audition to make a point to Wallace Prince.”

  “What?”

  Darcy laughed a mirthless, cruel little laugh. “He’s obsessed with royalty and he and Emma Williams were taking for-fucking-ever to make a selection on the lead actress. You were the last audition. I figured once you, an actual fucking princess, went down like the Hindenburg, they’d be forced to pick the only other viable actress they hadn’t turned down yet.”

  “You were just using me to talk up some other actress and make sure she got the role?” I frowned. I wished I could be surprised, but I wasn’t. “Who?” I’d heard that I’d beat out Brie Larson for the role. It was probably her. I still could barely believe any of this was real. Brie Larson had an Oscar. “Who was it?”

  “Me.”

  I managed not to laugh, but my expression must have betrayed me because she scowled. Darcy? She’d told me when I signed on as her assistant that she’d been an actress when she first got into the entertainment industry. She’d done a lot of commercials but no movies before realizing that the field was too competitive and deciding to go the business route. For the past decade she’d been a moderately successful indie producer. Her production company, Fantasy Pictures, specialized in romantic comedies. She was here in Texas shooting three movies at once, capitalizing on Austin’s burgeoning film industry.

  “Um, sorry?” I stuttered eventually. “But you can’t tell them I’m not Princess Lucia now. It was your idea to tell them that I was.” I stood myself up straight, Tinkerbell costume and all. “Tattle on me and I’ll tattle on you.”

  “I’ve come here to offer you a way out before you get yourself in any deeper,” Darcy said, speaking slowly as if to a particularly dense child. “Tomorrow is the first day of shooting. You’re not going to be able to pull any of this off. You’re going to get fired and humiliated. I’ve got a solution that could save you from that.”

  She w
anted to pay me off. She should have done that in the first place, because last Friday it totally would have worked. But now? Now that I knew I could do this? Now that I’d made it through the table read and everybody still liked me?

  No way. I wasn’t for sale anymore. Especially not to her.

  “I don’t want your money.” I would make plenty off this role, and I wanted this role. I didn’t want to be paid off, either. I wanted to earn my salary and work. I didn’t like lying, and I knew it was risky, but I couldn’t just let Darcy win. Especially not like this.

  “This is your last chance.” She sneered. “I won’t make this offer again.”

  I put on my best, most aloof princess impression. “Good, then let’s pretend that this conversation never happened. It’ll be less humiliating for you later on.”

  I walked out of the trailer and almost straight into Peter Prince. He was right outside. We stared at each other in shock. Then he smiled at me, slow as molasses and my knees went weak.

  “Nice wings, Tinkerbell,” he told me. “The costume suits you.”

  “Don’t call me Tinkerbell.”

  11

  Peter

  “I was wondering if you wanted to come to dinner,” I continued, watching Lucy’s pale skin turn pink above her low-cut bustier. Her cheeks matched.

  “Dinner?” she stuttered. I’d been cold to her all afternoon, so she was reasonably confused.

  “Everyone else has already left for the restaurant, but I didn’t realize you were doing a fitting.” I added. Lest she think I was asking her out on a date. Which I wasn’t. Because of my rules. But my rules said nothing about not having dinner as a group...

  Lucy looked over her shoulder and I saw Darcy emerging from Lucy’s trailer looking like she wanted to murder someone, and her tight, upright posture told me to steer clear. She slunk off without a backward glance. “Oh right. Dinner. Yeah, that sounds good. I’m starving,” Lucy continued awkwardly. “Give me two seconds to change.”

  “Is everything okay with you and Darcy?” I asked, wondering what was really up between the two women. What I’d first interpreted as mere prying curiosity I was now beginning to suspect was actual hostility on Darcy’s part.

  Lucy nodded. “Yeah, fine,” she said, looking frustrated. Then she smiled at me, clearly trying to diffuse the tension. “Everything’s great. I’ll meet you at the restaurant in a few minutes.”

  “Do you want a ride?” I asked, and then regretted it. I never should have come over here, although I told myself it was just friendship toward a colleague that motivated it. I definitely shouldn’t be angling to spend time with Lucy alone. It was a bad idea. I blamed the Tinkerbell outfit, although I'd walked over here not knowing she was in it. I was already struggling with my own damn rules and it hadn’t been twenty-four hours yet.

  Lucy blinked up at me. “I’ll meet you there.” Her voice was soft, almost like she wanted to accept the offer to ride with me but was afraid to. Maybe she didn’t date her costars either. Smart. I walked away wondering if I had any chance in hell of resisting her if she didn’t share my rules.

  “So, tell me,” Vanessa asked me at dinner that night. “What made a big-time action star want to do a small indie romance movie in the first place?”

  “Blackmail,” I answered, setting down my beer and regarding her seriously. “Pure, undiluted parental blackmail.”

  She raised an auburn eyebrow. “Really?”

  I shook my head. “No. Not really. But my dad is looking to expand his entertainment presence, and this was a good way to help him out while also helping me out.”

  Lucy was sitting across from me and talking to Emma Williams about experimental French post-modernism, which was a subject I could offer exactly nothing on, but I could almost see her ears perk up as we talked. Her eyes flashed my direction. She frowned.

  “You mean your family wants to take over the rest of Hollywood?” Lucy asked. “From what I can tell, the Prince family already owns most of it.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. She wasn’t wrong. With me, my three older brothers, and my uncle all starring in movies, and my dad financing and in some cases producing them, we had a sizeable Hollywood footprint. As the youngest Prince sibling, I’d been lucky enough to basically step right into a film career when college got too boring. “He really wants to get into large-scale distribution,” I added. “This project is meant to help establish his new distribution company.”

  Lucy frowned like the idea was distasteful. “Why? So, you can buy up the rest of the world’s entertainment industry like the oligarchs you are?”

  “So, you were just hiding the fact that you’re prim and judge-y, huh Princess?”

  “Just like you were hiding the fact that you aren’t really nice.”

  Fair enough. “Well, unlike some people, we’re not at risk of inheriting an entire country, so we’ve got to work at building our empire.”

  She was awfully entitled to call me entitled. I mean, she was literally entitled.

  She rolled her eyes at me. “Sweden’s not an empire, for one. For two, I don’t own Sweden. The King doesn’t own Sweden either. Sweden is a democracy. It’s got a parliament and a prime minister. The monarchy is purely ceremonial.”

  “Should I take notes?” I teased. “How long is this lecture going to be? Will there be a test? I guess I ought to tell you now that I dropped out of college, so I’ll probably fail.”

  “And all that getting punched in the face afterwards for movies probably didn’t help either.” She shot me a pitying gaze. If arguing with her wasn’t so much fun, I’d despise her.

  “All art requires sacrifice,” I replied with a smirk. “It just so happens mine has probably robbed me of some brain cells along the way.”

  “Do you really think so?” More pitying looks.

  “Why do you ask, Princess? What’s with all the questions? Was cyberstalking me all weekend not enough to quench your curiosity?”

  Any other woman might have been embarrassed having this sort of a conversation in front of an audience. Lucy just rolled her eyes.

  “You wish,” Lucy replied. “You could be shooting Action Dude 19 in Hollywood right now. Why this movie?” She clearly wanted me to answer Vanessa’s original question.

  “We’re on Danger Ranger 8, thank you very much. But the franchise won’t ever win me any Oscars.”

  My flagship franchise was light on plot and big on explosions.

  “Neither will this,” she countered.

  “Well, at least I get to kiss a princess.”

  Lucy turned pink and Vanessa and Emma laughed. Considering that I’d been trying and failing to engage her in conversation all evening, I rounded this argument up to progress.

  “Maybe I’m trying to overhaul my image,” I joked, but not really. “I wanted to try a different flavor of film. I can only be the big jock tackling the bad guys so many times before it gets old. Or I do.”

  “Is that really it?” Lucy asked. She looked genuinely interested. “You don’t want to make action movies anymore because you’re artistically bored and your movies are, well, um, objectively vapid and childish?”

  “Vapid and childish?” I probably should have at least attempted to sound offended, but I was too amused by her blush. Instead, I went for sarcastic. “Careful, you’re going to wound my delicate actor’s ego.”

  “Didn’t you beat up a gorilla with your bare hands in the last one?” she replied, recovering her composure.

  I laughed. “So, you have seen my movies!”

  “That was actually in the previews.”

  “Well, if you’d seen the movie, you would know that not only did I fight the gorilla, I won. I beat the crap out of that gorilla. How’s that for high cinema?”

  “Do you really want me to answer that?” she asked, fighting a giggle.

  “No. It was rhetorical. I already know the critics hated it. The fans loved it though.”

  In the last Danger Ranger movie, I did indeed beat
up a gorilla. An evil, space gorilla, to be more precise. To be even more precise, it was my stunt double, Mark. And the gorilla was just a guy in a motion capture suit. But was that vapid and childish? I think not. That was entertainment.

  She blinked. “I mean, they’re just not that artistically complex or anything...” she trailed off awkwardly.

  Emma nodded solemnly but Vanesa was hiding a smile.

  I shrugged it off. “Choosing this film resulted from several things at once,” I admitted. “My dad’s been nagging me for years to not get typecast. He’s been building up his new distribution company and I found a script I really liked and a director I wanted to work with, and it just sort of lined up.”

  “So, it's not because your movies aren’t cerebral enough?” Lucy asked. “You’re just looking for your ‘The Notebook’ project?”

  “Did I say that?” I asked with a laugh. “I guess I kind of did. I like making action movies, they’re fun, but most of my movies aren’t meant to be, um, cerebral. Nobody thinks deeply about my performance punching dudes with my shirt off, but it does eventually get old.”

  “So, are you saying you’re tired of being a piece of meat?” Her eyes roved around my face like she was trying hard to figure me out. It was distracting.

  “I actually love being a piece of meat. It keeps me from starvation.” I flashed my best, movie star smile at her. “Plus, I’m really photogenic when I punch.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Okay. Sure.”

  “You don’t like action movies much, do you, Lucy?”

  It was fairly obvious that she didn’t. “I like them fine.” She smiled. “But I won’t pretend your movies are Citizen Kane, either. You pretty much admitted that I’m right already.”

  “I feel like I’m being outmaneuvered and talked into a corner here,” I said.