Page 9

TAKING MEASUREMENTS , or the Tale of Oliver Teller’s Sprained Wrist

On Monday, the costume shop started taking measurements.

It was a necessary evil of costuming, but it was still sort of horrible, to see bodies reduced to a series of numbers. There was a lot of anxiety on the actors’ parts, and on our parts, too—it was an act of intimacy to get that close to someone, to wrap a measuring tape around their hips and write the number down. Benna divided us all into pairs and told us her three rules for the actors and us: You weren’t allowed to say anything negative about yourself; you weren’t allowed to talk about things you should do , e.g., I should eat less chocolate cake ; and both you and the costumer had to thank every part of your body that was measured.

“Thank you, elbow.”

“Thank you, thigh.”

“Thank you, inseam. That’s the ball game. Thanks for coming!”

I was partnered with Phoebe, who worked quickly and efficiently. She made people trust her. She made me trust her. She wielded the tape and announced the numbers, and I wrote them down on the charts we were given. Monday and Tuesday passed by in a blur of numbers and brief introductions to actors—I met the actor playing Jack from Into the Woods , who complimented me on my railroad-stripe overalls, as well as a handful of the Trojan women, all of them shockingly beautiful, each in their own way.

On Wednesday, the measurements nearly all taken except for a few stragglers, Phoebe and I walked over to Café Trapdoor and treated ourselves to a late lunch. With Into the Woods opening in a week, the pulse of the campus seemed to be quickening. All around us came the staticky crinkle of people talking on their walkie-talkies, including the director of Abominable , who could be observed in the far corner of the café talking heatedly on her walkie—whether to her assistant director or her divorce lawyer was anyone’s guess.

“Do you feel like you’re getting more of a handle on things?” Phoebe asked, sitting down with our food—BLTs for both of us, with sparkling lemonade.

“Yeah. I do,” I said. It had been only a week and a half, though in some ways, it felt like an entire season had passed. “At least I know not to try to pet Jacques.”

“You’re doing really great,” Phoebe said.

“I mean, it’s not exactly a challenge to color in shoes,” I said. Phoebe and the other costume-shop employees, meanwhile, were sewing up a storm, making last-minute changes to the Into the Woods costumes. It was hard not to feel useless sometimes—that I didn’t know half of what the other costumers knew, and that there was no way I’d catch up in time to be a helpful colleague.

“No, but it does take patience,” Phoebe said, which made me think of my mom, the promise I’d made to her at the start of the summer. I took a deep breath and told myself to slow down, that I could beat myself up for not contributing enough later.

“How did you get into costuming?” I asked Phoebe.

“Godzilla,” came her immediate response.

I nearly spit out my lemonade.

“Come again?”

“I was obsessed with him as a kid. My dad showed me the movies, and I was so amazed by the suit. Have you ever seen it?”

I shook my head no.

“We’ll fix this,” she said, and pulled it up on her phone: The monster loomed over a cityscape, his skin rough and scarred seeming, his snout like a shortened crocodile’s, his eyes surprisingly expressive. There were three rows of stegosaurus spikes down his back that gave way to a long, powerful tail; his short arms reminded me of a Tyrannosaurus rex .

“Remember, this was 1954—no CGI, no animation. There’s a man in there, wearing the costume,” Phoebe said. “The first suit they made was too heavy to perform in, and the second one weighed over two hundred pounds. The poor actor. Later one of the other actors got shocked by lights in the fins. But the suit is also incredible. They used so many different techniques to build it—the fins, for example, were papier-maché and then covered with rubber on top of that. The eyes and mouth were controlled by a brake wire from a motorcycle that ran out through the back of the tail. It’s this work of art. It changed how we think about costumes. It changed how we think about designing monsters. It made me want to work in the field.”

She was so good at talking about all of this. I squirmed, feeling once more like I knew nothing.

“Can I ask you something? Honestly, sometimes I still kind of can’t believe that Benna hired me.”

“Oh,” said Phoebe, sliding her phone back into her pocket. “She hired you because of me. Benna sent the internship offer, and of course she’s the one who had final say. But she’s been trying to give me more responsibility this year—it’ll look good on college applications—and one of the things she let me do was look over the other internship applications. I made my recommendation on who I thought would be the best fit for the position.”

“Why me ?”

“Because you seemed qualified and like you’d be invested in the work,” Phoebe said. “I’m not trying to burst your bubble, Celia, but this isn’t exactly the West End. It wasn’t like it was the most competitive applicant pool.”

“But I can’t even sew,” I said. “My portfolio was like… feeble.”

“Strong disagree. Those flamingo Halloween costumes had heart,” Phoebe said. “Besides, I can teach people to use a sewing machine. But you can’t teach people to care.”

I felt myself blush with pride. It was the sort of compliment I wanted to text to Touch and Ros right away—though, as soon as I thought of Ros, I thought of Jess Orlando in her plant kingdom, punching all the customers she didn’t like. It occurred to me then that Phoebe, as a local, might be a useful resource in the Jess Orlando department. I took a sip of my sparkling lemonade and worked up the courage to do some digging.

“Uh, Phoebe,” I said. “Can I ask you something totally unrelated to costumes?”

“Is this about Ros? I’m still disappointed it didn’t go my way.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “They tend to have that effect on people.”

“It’s fine.” Phoebe sighed and flipped her hair dramatically, which made me laugh, as was her intention.

“It’s actually not about Ros,” I said. “I was just wondering—what did you mean the other day when you said Jess Orlando was an asshole?”

Phoebe’s face fell. “Ah, man. I feel bad for saying that.”

“She’s not an asshole?” Already, I didn’t like where this was headed. I wanted to hear that Jess was a monster worse than Godzilla, and under no circumstances should she be dating my friend. But Phoebe was taking a different tack than she had that day in the street.

“No, she’s really not. Audrey’s right—I can be a little harsh sometimes. It really was Dennis’s fault that that fight broke out; Jess was just defending herself. I don’t know Jess super well. That’s the truth. The reason I said that… she was dating this girl in my art class and was just, like, cheating on her a lot. I don’t actually know either of them that well, and I have only, like, tangential information. I think she’s done things that an asshole would do. But lots of people love Jess. It’s her brother that was the real problem. He was older and kind of a bully—picking on queer kids, Jess included. And maybe Jess has reformed; I don’t know. As far as I know, she hasn’t dated anyone since that girl in my art class. So maybe she’s changed.”

“Now she just punches people at parties.”

“I mean, I think we can all agree that Dennis was the problem in that scenario—he started the whole thing and called her a slur. And look, I’m more of an indoor kid, but I wish I knew how to fight. It seems like a useful skill to have. Maybe we should all get Jess to teach us.”

“Fighting stresses me out,” I said. “I don’t mean fighting like Jess was fighting. I just mean, like, regular fighting. I try to avoid it at all costs.”

“Well, that sounds healthy, Celia.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll probably just explode one day, go Godzilla on everything.”

Phoebe laughed. “Why are you asking about Jess Orlando, anyway?”

“No reason,” I said. I was a little disappointed with Phoebe’s description of Jess, to be honest—I wanted Jess to be an asshole, so I could have some legitimate reason to warn Ros to stay away from her. But instead of a damning review from Phoebe, some elaborate description of why Jess was to be avoided, she just wound up sounding… normal, verging on sympathetic.

“Hmm, okay,” said Phoebe, looking a little suspicious. She checked her watch and looked back to me. “Are you okay to get the rest of these measurements on your own? Benna invited me to sit in on the production meeting.”

“Sure,” I said, with a little twinge of nervousness in my stomach. I didn’t want to let Phoebe down. “I can handle that.”

My last measurement appointment was late. I told Phoebe I didn’t mind sticking around. Then, alone in the costume shop with only a melancholy cat to keep me company, and against my better judgment, I typed Jess Orlando’s name into the Google search bar on my phone.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. It wasn’t like Jess was famous—best-case scenario, I’d find something like her Instagram page or a bio on the Hidden Fern website. And even then, what was I hoping for? I wanted confirmation from the outside world that Jess really was the villain I was making her out to be in my head. I wanted something along the lines of Jess’s favorite plants are lilies and succulents, and, oh yeah, your friend should definitely steer clear .

I had to wade through a bunch of results—Jess Orlando the marketing executive, Jess Orlando with the vegetarian blog—in order to actually get to anything on the actual Jess Orlando in question, and even then, there wasn’t the definitive answer I was looking for. As a child participating in a youth boxing tournament, she’d defeated someone 3–0 in Ring B. When she was in sixth grade, she won honorable mention for a local middle school poetry contest for a poem entitled “My Fists.” 6 ( Great , I thought. Poetry—another thing in common with Ros. ) The juiciest bit of information was a small featurette in the Lovesick Falls Gazette about her being the only girl on the boys’ wrestling team. “I’d tell other girls to try for things they want,” Jess was quoted as saying in the article. “There’s nothing that says girls can’t fight.”

Well, plenty of people did say that, but I saw her point.

There was no social media I could find.

There was no bio on the Hidden Fern website.

There were no news stories about violent behavior at wrestling matches; no criminal record, either.

Nothing about her—or her brother—being a well-known asshole.

Nothing about her being personally responsible for climate change or drinking the blood of innocents.

I put my head down on the desk, feeling more depressed than Jacques. Jess just seemed like a normal person. There was, tragic though it may have been, no reason for Ros not to be with her.

In an effort to cheer myself up, I put on one of my favorite episodes of Power Jam on one of the big shop computers, where the jammer and the blocker you’ve been rooting for the whole time finally kiss in this madly passionate, perfect way at the team’s away match at regionals. The episode is extremely idealized and unrealistic, and even though they lose the match, you feel like they won because these two finally, finally got together.

Regrettably, I’d also forgotten—or somehow blocked out—that this episode was big important character development for Blade Mendoza, who finally confronts his manipulative father and then skates away angrily (everyone is always skating everywhere; in an interview I read with him, he said that since joining the show, he’d felt as though his calves had been Frankensteined from another person’s body) and then at a park meets a girl from the rival team known as the Enemy, and they have sex on the merry-go-round 7 while leaving their roller skates on. 8

Double regrettably, this was exactly when the real-life Blade Mendoza, also known as Oliver Teller, walked in.

Triple regrettably—and contrary to what Ros had assured me—he 100 percent remembered me.

“Oh, Jesus” is what he said when he saw me—just how everyone longs to be greeted. As if that weren’t bad enough, his expression of exasperation quickly morphed into one of shock and horror as he realized what was playing on the monitor. The volume was up tragically high, blasting some extremely embarrassing knockoff Rihanna song that went something like “It’s good to be bad, yeah, yeah, yeah” while Blade and the Enemy made out. I managed to turn off the monitor, but the sound still persisted, which meant that I banged at the computer like a full-on ape for another minute or two before finally finding the switch to the speakers that were hooked up to the computer.

“Seriously?” he said. There may have been a trace of a smile on his face, but I was busy figuring out how to draw the blood down from my face, because if I blushed any harder my skin would probably melt off.

I remembered an interview Oliver had given in which someone asked him what quality he found most attractive, and Oliver had replied, “Confidence.” I’d rolled my eyes at it then—next you’d tell me you loved women who took risks and who weren’t afraid to be vulnerable with you—but although it was unoriginal, it seemed actually helpful now.

I tried to straighten my spine and pull my shoulders back, make my body project confidence I didn’t feel. “Fittings ended at four,” I said crisply, like a woman who was utterly in control of her life, not someone who’d just been caught watching soft-core roller porn by the star himself.

“Sorry,” he said. “There was—I had to—”

He was stammering now. I sort of liked it, honestly.

“I forgot,” he said finally.

I sighed dramatically and picked up a spare measuring tape from the table. I’d once heard Touchstone say that sometimes all it took for him to unlock a character was the right piece of clothing—a heavy watch, or stiff shoes, or a flashy hat—and so I draped the measuring tape around my neck the way I’d seen people in the costume shop do, and I swore I felt myself stand up straighter. I was no longer Celia Gilbert, Deranged Superfan; I was Celia Gilbert, Extremely Competent Costume Apprentice.

“Wait,” he said. “ You’re going to measure me?”

“Is there a problem,” I said—just like that, a statement, not a question.

“I mean, I prefer not to be touched by people who were last seen spying on me from inside a tree.”

“I wasn’t spying .”

“Uh-huh. Sure,” he said, and there it was: his trademark Power Jam arrogance. I was beginning to find him annoying, which, honestly, set me off. It was one thing for him to think I was nuts, but I really didn’t want him to ruin the show for me. Blade Mendoza needed to remain sacred.

“Look,” I said. “I was looking for cell service, just like you. Believe it or not, we—what did you call us? Fools?— also have lives in this—what was it? Godforsaken hellhole ?—and as such, occasionally we have to make phone calls during the day.”

Oliver looked shocked. I was kind of shocked myself. Where had this assertiveness been my whole life? I needed to start wearing a measuring tape everywhere.

“You’re right,” Oliver said finally. “I shouldn’t have assumed.”

He stepped onto the pedestal. Unfortunately, I hadn’t fully prepared myself for the effect of Oliver standing in front of a triptych mirror. It’s not like he was wearing anything remarkable—worn black jeans and a gray T-shirt, a few bracelets on his wrist, like an upscale version of what Ros and I used to make at summer camp. But thanks to the mirror, His Beauty was multiplied by three, and there was a whole new series of angles from which to behold him, and all of them seemed just right . The sharpness of his nose was more visible in profile; he was leaner and shorter than he appeared on camera, exactly my height. I suppose the roller skates added a couple inches.

I measured him quickly, in silence, making notes on the sheet that Phoebe had left behind. I tried to stay professional, but I confess, at one moment I broke out in a cold sweat while measuring him. One can stay only so calm when looping a measuring tape around the hips of your celebrity crush.

“All done,” I said after a few minutes of quick work. “Thanks for coming by.”

I waited for him to leave, but he lingered.

“I’m really sorry for what I said that day,” he said.

“It’s fine,” I said stiffly.

“The other day—you caught me—or I caught you—it was strange,” he said.

“It’s really not a big deal,” I said. I really didn’t expect an explanation from him, though now that he’d nudged the door open, he seemed intent on barging through.

“The thing is, I’d just flown in from Australia. I was scrambled. I was mostly ranting to my agent. I’m doing this theater festival mostly as a favor to him—the festival’s artistic director is a friend of his—and I was feeling taken advantage of. I thought I was alone. I’m sorry I was rude to you. I’m sorry I was late today—I fell asleep. And I’m glad you watch the show; I’m really glad that people watch the show. I’m really—sorry, it’s just been a hard first week here. I’m not really this way. I don’t think.”

I felt myself soften. Weirdly, it was the I don’t think that did it for me—a hedging over his own self-assessment, the slightest moment of self-doubt that struck me as extremely human and made me more inclined to believe him.

“I don’t know your name,” he said. “What is it?”

“Celia Gilbert,” I said.

“Hi, Celia Gilbert,” he said. “I’m Oliver Teller.”

“I know,” I said. “Remind me which play you’re in?”

I was relieved to find that I had actually forgotten this piece of information, which helped assuage any lingering fears that maybe I had been stalking him or I was a deranged superfan. Sure, I knew that he’d sprained his wrist while filming a sex scene on roller skates, and I could now tell you the exact measurement from his knee to his ankle in both inches and centimeters, but I didn’t know everything about him.

“The new play,” he said cautiously.

“Oh, right. Abominable ? What’s that one about? I haven’t heard very much about it. Besides, um… what you said. That day.” And that the director was in the middle of a divorce with its star.

“It’s about scientists,” he said. He was clearly trying to be diplomatic, to speak cautiously and generously this time around, especially having just asserted that he wasn’t an asshole. “In search of the yeti. It takes place in the Himalayas.”

“Oh,” I said again. Oliver obviously had opinions about the play—I’d heard them loud and clear while I was hiding in the tree, and I could see them bubbling now just below the surface—though I didn’t quite see what the problem was yet. “I mean, that doesn’t sound like”—what was the phrase he’d used?—“horrible, unrivaled rubbish. What’s your role?”

At this he put his head in his hands.

“That’s just it,” he said miserably. “I’m the yeti.”

I tried hard not to laugh. Really, I did. We’d already gotten off on the wrong foot and then kept walking on it for a while, but in spite of all of that he actually did seem sort of nice, sort of normal, almost, and the last thing I needed was to upset the delicate, tenuous balance that existed between us—

But I just couldn’t help it. I collapsed into a fit of giggles.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“That’s okay,” he said miserably.

“You’re not the yeti! You’re not.”

“Oh, I am,” he said. “It is funny. You know, originally, I wanted to play a different kind of role this summer. I’m always the villain. I wanted to prove I could do something other than brood and punch people, and then instead I do this favor for my agent, and I get cast as a literal monster. I don’t even have any lines. At least not in English…”

I was laughing harder. “Stop.”

“It’s true,” he said, and he chuckled a little bit, too, surprised at himself. “Like, it’s a big part, I’m onstage the whole time, but everything written in the play is either like, ook , or a grunt .…”

I wiped a tear from the corner of my eye.

“And the director keeps telling me I have to find my ‘inner beast.’ She’s said it now like six times.…”

I was totally gone now, the world a watery blur, and much to my surprise and delight, Oliver was laughing right along with me. His laugh was different than it was on TV—on the show, he had kind of a villainous huh-HA , a laugh that always sounded like a victory lap, like he’d won something and was rubbing your face in it. Now, though, he was just straight-up giggling—the sound was so goofy, so bouncing , and it made me think of curlicues and ringlets, twisty rainbow lollipops, bags of shoestring licorice I used to drool over at the farmers’ market. This laugh—his actual laugh—suited him so much better.

There was a horrible yell at the door that startled me back to myself. Jacques the cat had emerged from his Cave of Melancholy, no doubt disturbed by all the levity, and was now sitting a few feet from us, screaming at us in disapproval. His teeth seemed sharper than they had at the start of the week.

“Who’s this?” Oliver asked.

“Don’t touch him—he’ll bite your face off—”

But Oliver was already crouched on the ground with an extended fist, clicking his tongue softly at Jacques. My hands flew to my face; I saw the headlines take shape in my mind’s eye— YOUNG STAR MEETS TRAGIC DEATH AT THE CLAWS OF JOY-HATING FELINE; COSTUME APPRENTICE BARELY ESCAPES WITH HER LIFE —but a strange thing happened: Jacques actually rubbed his head against Oliver’s fist.

“Hey, sweet one,” Oliver said, to which Jacques actually raised his chin , exposing his neck for more pets. “Good boy. Such a good boy.”

He pet him for a moment longer and then stood, brushing Jacques’s loose fur from his jeans.

“I don’t think you realize this, but you just tamed a lion.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Talk about finding your inner beast. That cat might be a good model.”

“I miss my cats,” he said.

“You have cats?”

“My parents do,” he said. “Here.”

He pulled his phone from his back pocket, and I brushed off the all-too-recent memory of my tape measure lassoed around his hips.

“That’s Edna, with the sort of messed-up tail—she loves a lap—and that’s Benny, who’s essentially this ghost who just shows up in places—wait, there’s a better picture that really captures his essence.…”

He flicked over to his favorites and through a series of photos featuring a long-haired cat in increasingly unlikely locations: perched on the top edge of a swung-open door, head peeking through the slats of blinds. The photos were poorly lit and unmanicured—I could see the edge of a socked foot in one—and it occurred to me that these were not bits of information one could gather from the internet or from interviews. This was a piece of him that he was sharing with me, specifically. I was seeing a slice of Oliver Teller’s real life.

And then he flicked too far. Benny was replaced—just for a split second, before Oliver flicked the screen off—with a photo of two smiling faces. Well, one smiling face. Oliver’s. The other face, which belonged to his costar Ronnie, was smooshed up against his cheek in a gleeful kiss, like she couldn’t get close enough.

Oliver cleared his throat, shoved his phone back into his pocket.

“Anyway,” he said.

He was suddenly awkward. Embarrassed. I mean, I guess it was a little awkward, to have accidentally flashed this private moment with his girlfriend in front of my face. But more than feeling awkward, I actually felt grateful: Maybe Oliver had a candy-store laugh and some normie cat photos, but he was still Oliver Teller, star of Power Jam and boyfriend to the very hot Ronnie Ruthless, and I was still Celia Gilbert, future founder and CEO of Planners-R-Us. What did I think—that he was going to show me a picture of his cats, and suddenly we were going to be friends? I needed to remember that we led different lives, and mine was much, much smaller than his.

“What’s next?” he said.

I slung the measuring tape over my neck again, imitating Benna and Phoebe. Professionalism restored.

“Nothing else,” I said. “We’re all done. Thank you for coming by. Best of luck with the show.”

“Okay—really?”

“Really. We’re all done here.”

“All right,” he said. “Thanks.”

“No problem at all.”

With that, he took his leave.

Footnotes

6 Though I did scour the internet, I was sadly unable to find a copy of this poem.

7 While hot and spontaneous in the moment, this backfires wildly: She turns out to be a spy for the other team, which threatens Blade’s new, cautious standing in the group. Naturally everyone blames Blade when their coach’s playbook is stolen and winds up in the hands of the Enemy—only it turns out it’s not Blade’s fault at all, but his father’s, whose arc at the end of the second season goes from manipulative to straight-up diabolical.

8 Oliver actually sustained a wrist injury during this scene. It still clicked when he twirled his wrist.