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“Hey, guys, there’s an adjustment to the syllabus,” I say as I start the lecture, just barely avoiding sending a smirk in Maeve’s direction. “I will be holding office hours on Wednesdays twelve to two in Professor Arko’s office.”

The look of utter panic and anger on Maeve’s face says she gets it. Game on.

CHAPTER FIVE

Naturally, my first office hours visitor the next day is Trevor, the guy who seemed to think access to me was included in his tuition. This guy swaggers in—I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it. He doesn’t even sit down. Just leans over the desk and shakes my hand. The whole thing feels like the hundreds of interactions I’ve had in my seven years in Hollywood, so I take it with a relaxed smile. I can’t wait for Maeve to see how good I am with the student interactions when she takes her space back.

“Trevor Lewis,” he says, maintaining uncomfortably intense eye contact.

Now, all my USC knowledge might come from Luna; Luna’s partner, Romy; and Steven’s old assistant, Wyatt, but this guy seems very business school. I’m curious to see if I’m right.

“Valeria,” I say. I’d been going back and forth on it—was my full name too associated with Hollywood?—but ultimately I figure it’s professional without being standoffish. Plus, it is pretty. Sometimes I wish I’d picked a stage name so I didn’t feel so disconnected from my full name. Time to reinvent it along with myself.

He takes a seat, leaning back in the couch. Major manspreading. “Yeah, I could never get into Goodbye, Richard!, too preachy, but Stroke and Needlepoint are amazing. Effervescent performances.”

Translation: Your most popular movie is too feminist for me, and I just described your performances in your most depressing/harrowing movies as vivacious.

“Thanks,” I say. “What’d ya need from me?”

He asks how common it is to get famous and if I think it was because of my looks, my talent, or because I knew someone. His enthusiasm wanes as I tell him it was pure luck. As if a guy like him doesn’t make his own luck.

Once he leaves, another guy comes in. He’s got honey-brown hair instead of blond but is otherwise alarmingly similar to Trevor. I can only hope he’ll be a little better.

“I’m Jamie,” he says, just as confidently as Trevor before him.

This one takes a seat, then offers to shake my hand.

“I wanna be an actor,” Jamie says. “But I don’t know if I could do the nude stuff like you did in Needlepoint. I mean, that’s like, tits and snatch just…available. I mean, do you think about that? Is it weirder because you’re gay? I’m gay too.”

Is this guy talking about my nude scenes during professor office hours? My disaster interview with Winston was tamer than this, for god’s sake.

“And I just—dude.” He’s still going, and I pray the color of my face has remained constant. “I think about girls jacking off to me and it’s like…it’s weird.”

I pause, look over at him. His face is expectant, like he asked something completely on topic and reasonable. I’m not going to impress Maeve talking to students about nudity in commercial film. We’re not even talking about musicals.

“Someone will inevitably leak your nudes if you get famous enough, so if you believe in the art, might as well get ahead of the curve,” I reply. “But you also have every right to do as much or as little nudity as you want.”

He squints at me. “Can I not do it if I wanna be on premium cable, though?”

I give a tight smile. I can’t even get a premium-cable starring role without the guarantee of simulated sex and/or nudity. And that was before I started only getting the shitty scripts. “Sure.”

And, thankfully, that’s all he wants. I take a deep breath, drum my fingers on my thigh, trying to telegraph how offended I am by his questions. This is fine, though. I’ve heard worse. Hell, it’s all over my social media. I can handle this, even if I have to clutch one hand around the other one to stop it from shaking. Someone will want to talk about the class. I won’t let this escalate to anywhere near where I was at the Winston interview.

My next visitor is a girl named Ginger, who starts by asking how I balanced academia and acting (I didn’t) and ends with asking if I’d show her reel to my manager (no). She walks away looking downtrodden even after managing to get an answer to her question about MLA format.

At least one question was about school. It’s a start.

The students keep pouring in.

They mostly don’t ask about class. Each missed shot feels like I’ve added a new brick onto my shoulders.

Before I know it, I have only five minutes before Maeve will be in.

I place a hand on my chest, willing my heartbeat to slow down. Not only am I starting to forget what last class’s lectures were about, but the past two hours were a trial. I don’t feel as panicked as I did that night in Winston’s studio, but I still feel like I’m scrambling to return to reality, to remember what I’m supposed to be doing. I try to calm down. There will be more office hours, more chances to impress Maeve. I’ll just give her the raw statistics on how many students came in. I can tell Charlie all the stories when I get home.

I glance at the door. No one else. I run a hand through my hair. Whether I’m primping myself for Maeve or calming my nerves, who knows. Then a student walks in. The girl with the Avatar: The Last Airbender sticker. She’s tentative, sticking to the doorframe before I offer her a smile. No handshake. She just sets down a small notebook and a pen after she takes a seat.

“So I know Professor Arko has office hours after this, but I was wondering if we could talk about last week’s lesson,” she says.