false prophet / chapter one: liquid courage.
It was supposed to be a one night stand.
I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend. And to be fair…I didn’t get one. “Boyfriend and girlfriend” is a simple concept, and what Nick and I had was far from simple.
I met Nick on the night of Halloween in 2014, the third year the show aired. my original plans that night had been to stay in, as my plans were every night. The showrunner was taking advantage of me being newly eighteen; my call time for Espionage had been three o’clock in the morning, and the shoot had lasted well into the evening. Long gone were the days of being whisked off set by the studio teacher because I could only work a certain amount of hours. I was practically falling asleep on the steering wheel as i drove back to Los Feliz, with the sun setting in front of me. The minute I unlocked my apartment, I beelined to the small kitchen, reaching for my favorite mug and my kettle and making myself sleepytime tea.
I shared the apartment with my best friend, Jackie. She wasn’t an actress, but she was making a valiant attempt at being one. She would schedule five auditions in a day and just drive around Hollywood when she wasn’t pouring coffee at the indie cafe around the corner. When she came home, bags under her eyes, reporting that they gave the role instead to some popstar who wanted to break into acting, I found myself feeling guilty for how easily it came to me.
My origin story as an actress went like this: I had never acted before. Never even thought about it. I was, like, thirteen, i I mostly thought about glitter eyeshadow and my math homework. Somehow my mom, Rachel, got her hands on a casting call for a dark-haired teenage girl and a hair up her ass, and next thing I knew, I was on a plane to los angeles, and then I was reading the monologue from Freaky Friday where it’s Lindsay Lohan talking to the teacher, but she’s actually Jamie Lee Curtis, to a room full of emotionless men in suits. and I got the role and we never came back, except to pack up our house.
When Jackie came home that night, she had the bags under her eyes, as usual, but she also had this pep in her step.
“Did you get a role?” I asked eagerly, sitting up straighter on our thrifted couch. We’d broken the bank with the application fee, security deposit and first month’s rent, so pretty much everything else in the apartment was secondhand. Thanks to Jackie’s incredible eye, though, it all looked perfect in the space.
“No, but I got something even better,” she declared, toeing off her shoes by the door. something I asked her to stop doing, because I tripped over the pile that had accumulated pretty much every morning when I was leaving before the sun rose, and something that she would never stop doing. It was annoying and comforting all at once. No matter how much things changed, there would be Jackie’s shoes by the door, and I would trip over them. “We’re going to Nick Silver’s Halloween party tonight. Jackson got invited, and he asked Nick if we could come.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ve been up since 2:30am. Before that, if you count the ten times I woke up and checked to see how long it was until my alarm went off or made sure it didn’t turn itself off.”
Now, it was her turn to roll her eyes. “Annie, you don’t turn down a Nick Silver Halloween party. It’s the stuff of legends. People would kill to be invited.”
“If by legends, you mean inadvisable hookups and underage DUI arrests, sure.” Both of which i had heard about in the aftermath of last year’s party. “I’m not going. I don’t even have a Halloween costume,” I protested.
“I anticipated you might say that, so i took care of the problem post-haste.” She held up the drugstore bag that had been hanging by her side. Through the wrinkled plastic, I could make out the shape of cat ears. Dammit. I was quickly running out of excuses.
“I don’t think that’s what post-haste means.”
“Close enough.”
“I’m getting you a dictionary for Christmas.” I sighed. “You’re not going to let me get out of this, are you?”
“No,” she confirmed. “We’re going. Now go get ready, before I drag you into the shower.”
“I’m going, I’m going.”
-
Nick Silver lived in The Hills proper, in a McMansion that reminded me of when Rachel and I used to drive back from the studio where Espionage was filmed after I was done with my scenes and fantasize about living somewhere flashier than our two-bedroom bungalow.
The party was already in full swing when we arrived. the music blaring so loud we could already hear it as our Uber made its way up the winding driveway, costumed bodies crammed into pretty much every inch of the house. The stuff of fire marshals’ nightmares.
Almost immediately I caught the eye of my former coworker Gabrielle Cienfuegos. Clad in a very cropped blazer and flippy plaid miniskirt that approximated Cher from Clueless’s signature outfit, if it was sluttier, complete with a blonde wig, she abandoned whoever she was talking to — I vaguely recognized him, but I didn’t know his name — and headed towards me. Jackie and Jackson had already disappeared into the throng of people in their Scandal-themed couples costume. “Oh my god, Rhi! You look so hot! I didn’t know you knew Nick!”
“I don’t, really. Jackie got us invited, she’s been seeing Jackson Moore and they’re on Newland Falls together,” I explained.
“Jackie and Jackson,” Gabrielle repeated, clicking her tongue. “That’s ridiculous.” Her slurred speech told me that she’d already liberally taken advantage of the open bar.
“It’s ridiculous,” I agreed. Jackie and Jackson’s relationship wasn’t long for this world, anyway. They seemed to have nothing in common, and their conversations quickly devolved into bickering about their differences in opinion. I privately suspected that Jackie had only agreed to go out with him because of his proximity to Nick, in order to weasel her way into this party. She’d always been a schemer.
After a quick catchup, with Gabrielle insisting we go to dinner soon, she was beckoned away by a group of problematically sexy inmates. (Orange is the New Black was big that year.) Leaving me the closest thing to alone that one could be in a room with 300 other people.
I decided then and there I was leaving. The strap of my American Apparel halter dress was digging uncomfortably into the side of my neck, Jackie and Jackson were nowhere to be found. and, anyway, I hadn’t wanted to be at the party in the first place. I wanted sleepytime tea and to zone out in front of the four episodes of The Bachelor languishing on my DVR because of my late nights working.
“Can I get you a drink?” The question came from none other than Nick Silver himself. He was dressed as Clark Kent, with a white shirt unbuttoned to reveal a shirt with the Superman logo across the chest, black glasses, and gelled hair. From the myriad instagram photos this event produced each year, I knew this to be his signature costume. “Rhiannon Drake, right?”
“I’m on my way out, actually.” I held up my phone, open to the Uber app.
“C’mon, just one. If you still hate it, then you can leave.”
“I’ll still hate it,” I warned, an indirect concession.
He took my phone, pocketed it, and grabbed my now-empty hand. “We’ll see about that. What’s your poison, Rhiannon Drake? Actually, let me guess. You look like a vodka girl. Vodka Red Bull?”
He was right, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
“Everyone just calls me Annie, you know.”
“I think Rhiannon is pretty,” he declared as he led me through the crowd. The bar was set up on the marble island in the middle of his spacious kitchen, with two bartenders, one an angel and one a devil, pouring drinks, dutifully ignoring that most of the party’s attendees were not yet 21.
Hell, Nick wasn’t even 21 yet. Hollywood certainly came with its perks.
“Can I get another Jack and Coke? And a Vodka Red Bull?”
“Sugar free, if you have it.”
We lingered in the kitchen after getting our drinks, him leaning against the wall, since it was the only place not absolutely teeming with people, and the deafening music — right now, it was a remixed Lady Gaga song — was muted.
“I'm glad you made it. I was hoping you’d come, when Jackson told me he was bringing Jackie.”
“You probably say that to everybody,” I retorted, ignoring the way my heart beat faster because of his words. Nick was a notorious fuckboy, with a different girl on his arm every weekend, the low-definition, overly-filtered photos plastered all over social media. he’d most recently been seen with Winnie Rose, who had the number one song on Billboard, but that seemed to have run its course, like all his relationships did.
“I do, but I don’t always mean it.” He shrugged and sipped his Jack and Coke. “Why were you leaving? Before i intercepted you.”
“I didn’t want to be here,” I responded simply.
To my surprise, Nick looked genuinely hurt. Or maybe he was just putting his Teen Choice Awards-winning acting skills to good use. “Ouch.”
“Sorry,” I said quickly. “It’s not you, it’s me. I just don’t like parties. And I've been awake since 2:30am, my call was 4.”
Nick cringed, a show of commiseration. If there was one thing that actors could bond over in perpetuity, it was a mutual hatred of early mornings. No one wanted to be having camera-ready makeup, sure to cause a hellish breakout, shellacked to their face or be trying to remember their lines when they could still be in bed, asleep, with the rest of the people who had smartly committed their lives to normal jobs with normal hours. “That’s brutal. She shouldn’t have made you come, you get a break.”
“Does that mean I get to leave?”
“Nah,” he said, tone bright. “You’re here now. You might as well stick around.”
Though I'd been desperately searching for an out, I actually found myself wanting to stick around. Not wanting to examine the true cause of my sudden change of heart, I decided to chalk it up to the Vodka Red Bull. A little bit of liquid courage always made me more social.
“I've gotta go mingle.” Nick told me, the hand that wasn’t clutching his drink — in a glass; even though this was basically a frat party for Young Hollywood’s finest, the meticulous details did not belay that fact — first adjusting my crooked lace cat ears and then resting tenderly on my bare shoulder. “But I’ll come find you?”
Dumbfounded, the skin underneath his fingers tingling, I simply nodded.