The Summer Set Read online

  A knock rattled the door. “Is there a Sierra Suarez in there? You’re up,” came the stiff voice of one of the directing apprentices.

  “Yes! Coming! Awesome!” she said. She could feel the butterflies now, the thrill of it! And then something else.

  She darted back into the stall. Heaving. And threw up.

  Sprinting out again, she glanced once more in the mirror. “I. Am. Juliet.” Kicked the hat up from the floor, gasping when it actually landed in her hands, and pushed through the doors, down the twisting labyrinth through the nearly pitch-black wings and on to the exact mathematical center of the stage. So many faces staring back at her.

  “Sierra Suarez, reading for the role of Juliet,” she told them. Then spun around, her back to the audience, deep breath, and slowly turned to face them again:

  “‘Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?’” She quickly dissolved into the lights and the words until she wasn’t quite there anymore.

  * * *

  Sierra couldn’t remember what happened before Chase Embers—Chase. Embers!—burst through the door at the back of the theater and strutted up the aisle toward the directors, collecting all the eyes in the room.

  The very fact that she couldn’t remember anything meant that whatever had transpired between her first words as Juliet and Chase’s entrance must have actually been very good. That was how it was if things were going well onstage: her mind knew the lines; her voice knew how to deliver them; her body knew how to feel them. An intersection of reflex, muscle memory, practice. The only time anything came easy.

  But with that door opening, sunlight streaming in from the lobby and this divine creature, Chase Embers, slipping out of her fantasies and into her living-breathing reality, a switch flipped and she was aware of the world again. And once that spell was broken, she didn’t know how to get it back. She was going to blow this audition.

  Who could blame her though? Chase Embers wasn’t someone you would ever be able to ignore. So untouchably beautiful it didn’t even matter that that wasn’t even his real name. She’d had a crush on him for as long as she’d had crushes. As did the whole world. That was how he had famously landed on the Forbes list as a teen. (She was an infant when he was a teen, but she knew every inch of his biography. He was honestly destined for greatness ever since making his film debut as a baby playing Denzel Washington’s son in that thriller.) He was now thirty-seven but more gorgeous than ever, the build of an action hero (which he was), lit-from-within glow. It had been announced after she got the apprenticeship that he would be here—otherwise the competition to get in would’ve been even fiercer. She just wished he wasn’t here at this particular moment.

  “You’ve distracted Ms. Suarez,” Nicholas Blunt said to Chase, loud enough for the room to hear and snicker at her expense.

  She realized she had been not speaking for a horrifically long time. Just standing frozen on the stage.

  “Ms. Suarez? When you’re ready,” Nicholas directed her. A few rows back, Chase grinned, talking to an apprentice. She couldn’t see who.

  “Right, sir.” She had no idea where she had left off. Wait, she squinted in the lights, yes: Chase was speaking to Harlow, whose audition had been flawless. Best of the day, so far. Harlow had the confidence and the chops. Sierra wished she hadn’t had to watch. Why did they have to audition in front of everyone like on one of those TV singing competitions? “I’ll take it from the top.” Sierra turned her back to the audience. She just couldn’t remember where “the top” was. Head down, fists opening and closing, grasping for the words. The spotlight burned so hot, sweat trickled down her forehead. She faced front again, cheeks flushed. She knew Romeo and Juliet backward and forward. But now it was gone. Say something! Anything! Preferably from this play!

  “’Tis torture and not mercy. Heaven is here...’” She knew the minute she started that it was dead wrong. It was Romeo. But she gave in, went through with the whole thing. Then she exited stage left, through the wings, and kept walking until she got outside. Breathing in the sweet June air, sun coating her skin, mountains watching her from the distance, she managed not to cry. Eventually, she returned, through the lobby, listened at the doors for the monologuist to finish and slunk into the back of the orchestra. Just in time.

  “Ethan Summit, reading for Mercutio,” Ethan said in his faint twang, that same shyness he had on the field. But as soon as he began, he metamorphosed: voice modulated deeper, no trace of his country roots, posture straightened, eyes alive.

  Engrossed, she watched, losing herself until a hand squeezed her shoulder, firm and quick: she looked up to see Chase Embers. Walking out the door. He gave her a salute and approving nod before disappearing beyond the theater. It took a few seconds for her to remember to breathe.

  7

  IF ONLY WE WERE DOING THE TAMING OF THE SHREW!

  When the theater doors crashed open, Ethan thought he might be hallucinating. He had only just wrangled his heart back from its breakneck beat, seizing it, slowing it down like he used to lasso wild calves as a kid. That was how this always felt to him: the stage.

  “A FUCKING DORM?” a familiar voice shouted.

  Ethan—and the entire audience—turned to discover Charlie Savoy stomping up the aisle, eyes set on Nicholas Blunt. Sierra grabbed Ethan’s forearm in shock, as though watching the twist in a movie. Charlie passed by, a meteor blazing across Ethan’s sky. She looked just as she had in his favorite film, Midnight Daydream. Same tangle of long, wavy hair, same red lipstick. He had seen her in person only once, despite weekly visits to her theater. He started going there before he knew she owned it, just for the movies you couldn’t see anywhere else. But the day after her crash, he’d arrived early, as if staging a one-man vigil, to be sure she was okay, and had been relieved to spot her inside the glass doors.

  “If only we were doing The Taming of the Shrew,” the costumer whispered too loudly to her fellow department heads seated onstage.

  Ethan’s anger flared. Don’t they know who Charlie is? An Oscar nominee. An otherworldly talent. The force that had gotten him through high school. He would steal his dad’s rusted-out Chevy pickup, make the hour-long drive every Saturday morning to that art house in Austin before his family was even awake, and he would see whatever was playing. Midnight Daydream had shown for almost two months straight. It broke his heart when it had finally left. That time had been precious. He could shed the social atrocities he had suffered at school that week and allow her film—about an insomniac outsider—to heal him.

  “Seriously, Nick?!” She reached the front row, stepping onto the armrest of an occupied seat and climbing onstage with a graceful leap. This, all of it, was exactly what made Charlie exotic, fantastical, worthy of the sites clicked and ink spilled chronicling her.

  “Let’s take five,” Blunt announced to the group. Charlie folded her arms, glared. “Ten, take ten.” Then, to Charlie he said, “You—” and pointed, signaling for her to come with him. She threw her head back, annoyed. As Ethan watched them disappear offstage, he instantly knew he’d made the right choice declining the American Repertory Theater summer program to come here.

  He just couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to his letter. The one his friend Miles had insisted on passing along to Charlie. The one Miles said Charlie had never read.

  8

  PEOPLE FUCKING LOVE ME

  Nick didn’t want to have to physically turn around to confirm that Charlie was still following. That might show the cracks in his authority. So he simply kept walking out of the theater, into the lobby, down the photo-lined hallway—a who’s who of Chamberlain alums—listening for the angry footsteps of her oxfords. Why was she exactly as he remembered? Why was he still possibly, probably, kind of, somewhat in love with her even after the irreparable damage she had caused his career? This was a bad idea. Could she tell he was nervous about this? Them? The whole summer?


  When he reached his office, he noticed her clip-clop had stopped. He pivoted slowly, prepared to continue their argument in the hallway if necessary. But when he saw what had captured Charlie’s attention, he granted her a moment. The theater complex had been redone in the two decades since she had performed here. A gallery of glossy framed photographs now lined the corridor leading to the staff offices: so many accomplished actors on the Chamberlain stage through the years. Their names, shows, engraved in small golden plaques. Their own Walk of Fame. She stood before one of the photos, transfixed. This picture had been blown up nearly poster-size and placed at the center of one wall, anchoring a solar system of smaller photos that orbited it. It showed Charlie, just nineteen, onstage beside her mother in Much Ado about Nothing. Both so young, joyful. A celestial glow in the stage lights. That was that summer, when Nick had met her.

  Only a few paces away from where Charlie stood hung another time capsule. Nick paused before this other photo. He had walked past it every day since arriving a month ago, but hadn’t really looked at it. Snapped that same summer, at the opening night party for Much Ado, it showed Nick smiling proudly beside his since-departed mentor, Grayson Crestway, world-renowned director and founder of the Chamberlain Summer Theater. The man who had left the theater in Nick’s care. That mighty responsibility weighed heavy in Nick’s heart, more now than ever.

  So ensnared was Nick that he didn’t realize when Charlie arrived beside him, gazing at the same portrait. Neither said a word. After a moment, Nick nodded, then moved on toward his office. Charlie followed this time.

  “So, now that it’s just...us—” Nick sat at his neatly ordered desk, straightened a stack of scripts.

  “Look—” she said, not letting him finish. She leaned against the wall. “You know I’m not like that.”

  He slouched in his chair, trying to appear cool. Trying to not keep thinking about that long-ago summer.

  “I just want to be treated like everyone else. The actors. I know they’re not rooming with apprentices. This place was Airbnb before Airbnb was invented.”

  He listened as though they were in another courtroom, but he was the judge.

  “And yes.” She rolled her eyes. “When I was here before I did want to be in the dorms, but that’s because I wanted to be treated like everyone...then...too. My...peers, or whatever. Which went...not very well, in retrospect, I guess.”

  He remembered: she had literally been the definition of peerless. An accomplished stage actress at nineteen, here as part of the professional company when the other nineteen-year-olds in the program were students with credits in college shows.

  “Are you going to actually say something?” she asked, pulling him from his thoughts. “Or am I doing a one-woman show over here?”

  “Right, no.” He click-click-clicked his pen. “Listen, if you think you can get along with your castmates—” He cleared his throat.

  “People fucking love me,” she cut him off.

  “If you think you can get along with your castmates,” he repeated, scribbling down an address on his personalized stationery. “Then there’s a spare room here.” He slid the paper across the desk, trying not to smile, then sifted through a drawer.

  She grabbed the paper, glanced at it. “Really?” she asked, registering the address. “Is this the same—?”

  “Same place. It’s still where the company stays.” It was indeed the same house where her mother had stayed all those years ago, and she had too—once she got the dorms out of her system. “Your castle awaits.” He tossed a set of keys at her—which she caught in one hand—then leaned back in his chair, feet on his desk, pretending to look over notes.

  “So you were...always planning? You were just kidding? With the dorm.”

  He glanced up. She was smiling coyly, hands on her hips.

  “Well, look who’s gone and gotten himself a sense of humor,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” he said to his notes.

  “Thank you.” She opened the door to leave.

  “Listen,” he said, stopping her. “I’ve got a pack of wild baby thespians to tend to—” he checked his watch “—so go now, but we’re not...finished here.” He said it with an ease he was proud of. It was obviously an epic understatement. “Dinner, later this week or something?”

  “Fine,” she said, like it was another sentencing. She started to pull the door shut behind her, but tossed out, “We can talk about how incredibly boring it is that you’re doing Romeo and Juliet.” The door closed.

  “Hey!” he called out. “People love Romeo and Juliet!” She opened the door, and he continued. “You’re the only person in the history of the theater who thinks Romeo and Juliet is boring.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true,” she said, closing the door as she left, again.

  “Don’t start with me!” he called out.

  She opened the door again and said, “I don’t mean boring—Shakespeare was revolutionary in his day, I get it, I’m down. I just mean that I suspect what you, specifically, have planned is excruciatingly boring—”

  “Charlie,” he cut her off with an exasperated sigh.

  “I’m going now.” She closed the door yet again.

  “Goodbye,” he said.

  She opened it fast. “We’re gonna have to talk about those casting choices.” And shut it once more.

  “I haven’t even told you about the casting!” he shouted through the closed door. Two quick knocks and it opened again, slowly. His heart revved involuntarily. “So we’re knocking now, how—” He stopped when he saw his septuagenarian volunteer box office manager, Mary, appear. “Civilized.”

  “Did you misplace a troupe of young actors, Mr. Blunt?” Mary asked brightly.

  “Oh. Right.” He shook his head, gathered his notebook, the remnants of his iced coffee. His phone rang again. Another familiar number. “I’ve just gotta—”

  “I was hoping Charlie would be in here,” Mary said, mischievous.

  “Nicholas Blunt here, great to hear from you,” he answered the call. “Tell ’em I’ll be right there,” he whispered to Mary, who nodded and let herself out. “No, this is a great time,” he said, sitting down again. “Especially if you’ve got good news which—”

  He had a splitting headache now and rummaged through his desk drawer. “Really? Because we’ve sold out the entire run already for the first—” he found Tylenol but wished for something more, like Vicodin “—I believe there’s no greater proof that what we’re doing is innovative and... Stunt casting?... That demeans the artistic foundation this theater was built on, I’m shocked to hear that...” He had actually heard this before. “We’re an award-winning regional...” He squeezed his eyes shut, kneaded his forehead. “No, the ‘glory days’ are happening now... I’m sorry you feel that way, that couldn’t be farther from the truth...and I respectfully rescind your invitation to invest in the Chamberlain.” He tossed his phone at the door.

  9

  THE BALCONY IS A GAME CHANGER

  Duffel bag slung over her shoulder, Charlie wandered Warwickshire Way, the main drag with its many new storefronts—yoga and Pilates studios, a day spa, bars, eateries, boutiques—hanging a left on leafy Avon Road, and there it was.

  The storybook Victorian home, all turrets and decorative trim. She could feel the house’s history but note its transformation: fresh paint, new windows, the crow’s nest restored. The once-warped wraparound porch mended, shellacked in an earthy jade hue. A new glider hung there, which likely wouldn’t squeak like the old one used to when she sat there with Nick.

  As she had walked toward the stage earlier that day, Nick had shape-shifted into that boy she had first met, the aspiring director in Converse shoes, T-shirt, jeans. He was less muscular then, more clean-shaven, his hair wet from an early swim at the lake. Script tucked under his arm, hope in his chest, dreams of making a name fo
r himself.

  The front door opened, and on reflex, she darted to the side of the house. To cover, she pulled out her phone, scrolling through texts. From the shadow of a craggy oak, she watched one of her roommates strutting in joggers and a tight T-shirt, yoga mat bag on his fully inked arm: Chase Embers. She groaned, involuntarily, audibly. Luckily, his earbuds were in. He glanced side to side, as though waiting to be noticed, like a heartthrob rolling into the cafeteria in a movie about prom hijinks. He had starred in several of those—and then the dark, paranormal one with Charlie, which had actually been good—before playing a drug-addled college kid in that gritty festival-circuit film everyone loved, his breakout several years ago.

  Charlie had slept with him exactly once—at the end of their film shoot—caught up in the finality of it all, young, foolish, drunk and too immersed in their lovesick characters for their own good.

  She tapped out a WhatsApp, You’ll never guess where I’m staying, and snapped a photo of the porch swing. Everything is the same here, fixed-up, but the same. xx.

  Her mother responded instantly: A lot of good memories there, Charlie. This is the first thing you’ve done in ages that makes any sense. Perhaps this will inspire nostalgia for another relic of the past: home. London is no farther than Los Angeles. It’s been quite some time since your passport was stamped. You are always welcome with open arms. Give Chamberlain my regards and don’t waste this time, it’s a gift. Take good care, will you? Love, Mum.