Page 19 of Marisol Acts the Part

Angry as I am with Miles for not giving me the respect of a private breakup, that doesn’t erase the almost four years I spent loving him.

I still care for him now, and maybe I always will.

And today, I’m really damn proud of him.

No one knows how hard he worked for this role like I do, and even if this show is what ultimately led to him dumping me in the first place, I can’t shake off the pride of seeing him absolutely crush it the way I always told him he would.

“Thanks, Mari,” he replies with a smile that brings me back to the early days of our relationship.

The bashful compliments after every scene, the cautious hugs, our arms around each other.

Something shifts in his eyes, his lips parting slightly, and I wonder if he feels it too. The pull of our shared past.

“You were great too,” Jamila adds, disrupting my nostalgic fantasy.

Which is definitely for the best. I’m not here for Miles, I tell myself as I clear my throat and straighten out the hem of my dress. I’m here for me. This isn’t about rekindling what we had on Avalon Grove —this is about proving myself to him, to the world, to myself.

Rune calls out for quiet on set again before I can reply to Jamila’s compliment.

The two of them take their seats in the chairs beside me, their names monogrammed on the backs, and let the adults playing our parents take the lead for a bit.

We spend the morning knocking out a dozen more scenes—capturing several takes of each until Rune is satisfied.

Before beginning each scene, Rune, without fail, makes his line adjustments. It’s comforting that not everyone adapts to the sudden changes as easily as Miles and Jamila did. Even some of the more seasoned actors stumble, Dawn included, easing my worries that I’m the lone disaster of the cast.

“Dawn, take ten and restudy the script,” Rune calls out to her, and I resist the urge to whisper You have done this before, right?

to her as she stalks past me in a rage. I’m not a petty person—most of the time—and as stuck-up as she might seem, I definitely don’t want to be on the bad side of a Hollywood golden child like her.

By the time my next scene comes around, I’m feeling less on edge.

Miles and Jamila give me whispered words of encouragement as I head back onto set, the two of them slinking off to go grab food during their break, while Dawn, wrapped for the day, heads toward the exit.

Sure enough, Rune approaches me and the actress playing my mom once we’ve taken our marks, heavily marked-up script in hand. Only difference: I’m prepared.

There’s only so much I can do in the minuscule amount of time that he gives us, but at least I know what to expect.

I quickly scan the script and repeat the revised lines over and over until they start to erase the memory of the originals.

I square my shoulders and bite back a smile as the lights go up.

The crowd goes silent, and I prepare to completely blow them all away.

“Mom, you can’t—”

“Cut!” Rune calls out before I can even finish the line, and I realize with a chilling dread that I completely skipped the first five lines of the scene.

So much for blowing them all away.

“Marisol, your first line is ‘What are you doing here?’?”

“Right, yes, so sorry,” I apologize at a rapid clip. My fictional mom gives me an odd look, and I focus my attention on a painting on the wall opposite her shoulder because facing her will only make my panic worse.

We reset and run the scene from the top.

“Mom, what’re you doing here?” I say, correctly this time.

My scene partner doesn’t even get to read her first line before Rune calls cut again. I bite back a groan of frustration, putting on my best polite expression when I turn to face him.

“Don’t say ‘Mom,’?” he says so sharply it cuts straight through me. “We adjusted this.”

“O-of course.” Don’t say sorry. “So sorry.”

Dammit. A jellyfish has more spine than me.

Rune doesn’t respond to my apology, just twirls his hand in a gesture for us to get a move on.

My partner doesn’t bother to hide her annoyance now.

Thankfully, it suits the scene. All the nerves I worked to put aside during the break come flooding back, my hands trembling as we start the scene yet again.

“Mom, I—”

“CUT!” Rune shouts, and it takes every bit of strength I have not to burst into tears.

“I’m sorry, I need a minute to—”

“Esther!” Rune calls out for one of his various personal assistants.

A petite girl with pin-straight black hair and an all-black ensemble to match appears at his side practically out of thin air, handing him an extra-large tea.

He takes a disgruntled sip, the crease in his brow slackening once he’s swallowed.

Note to self: Tea calms the beast.

“Go practice lines with Marisol until she has them down perfectly.” He places enough emphasis on that last part for me to know that stumbling again isn’t an option.

Esther nods, gesturing for me to follow her to a back room while my scene partner rolls her eyes and heads back to her own seat.

We pass the lunch setup on our way to an empty production office, and I spot Miles and Jamila sitting beside each other at a table laughing at Miles’s phone.

Something in me twists uncomfortably watching them shift in closer, their heads pressed together as they smile for a selfie.

Something I won’t let myself believe is jealousy.

There’s no point in being jealous. I’m not here for Miles, and he sure as hell isn’t here for me.

“C’mon,” Esther calls out from the nearby office, and I squash down that uneasy feeling in my gut. I’m already screwing up more than I should be. I can’t let myself get distractedtoo.

It takes almost twenty minutes for me to get my lines to a place where I’m sure I could recite them in my sleep.

In the back of my mind, I know it probably shouldn’t have taken me that long to learn a handful of line adjustments, but if I’m being honest, we’re lucky it didn’t take longer.

Embarrassment, fear, and panic are one dangerous cocktail.

Thankfully, my new scene partner (Esther Cho, intern turned PA and recent NYU grad, I learn during our brief conversation) has the patience of a saint.

“Don’t worry,” she says after we’ve run through the scene for a tenth time, now well assured that I know every line perfectly. “He’s a dick to everyone.”

“He is?” I ask with a raised brow, shocked by her casual boldness. And because it sure doesn’t feel that way so far.

She shrugs, taking a sip from her Hydro Flask.

“He made half the cast cry last season. Especially Eli.” Shit.

If Eli Rowan—breakout star of season one, and the first-ever nonbinary performer to win an Emmy—wasn’t safe from Rune’s wrath, none of us is.

“And don’t get me started on the crew. It’s pretty much a rite of passage for him to fire you at least once a month. ”

I gulp, the sound audible in the empty room.

“It’s not so bad,” Esther says when she notes the panic written all over my face. “We all get our jobs back within aday.”

That does little to reassure me. I know firsthand how grueling shooting can be sometimes—long hours, very little sleep.

Some days the only thing that gets you through a production is “passion and belief in the work,” the mantra that keeps half of Hollywood running.

But I don’t know that I’d ever be passionate enough about something to put up with that kind of erratic behavior.

Then again, aren’t I already?

Esther escorts me back to set before she can scare me off with any more horror stories from season one.

Rune is clearly disgruntled by the time we return to set, and I tighten my grip on my script, hoping he won’t take any of his frustration out on Esther instead of me.

Thankfully, he accepts the apple she brings him—apparently, he needs a snack every two hours or he goes really off the rails—and calls everyone to attention for another set of takes.

For the second time that day, the room goes silent. But, this time, I know it’s not because everyone is watching in awe, hanging on to the edges of their seats to get a glimpse of a once-in-a-lifetime performance.

It’s because they want to see if I fail.

As we take our marks again, I close my eyes and inhale deeply, walking myself through one of the dozen guided-meditation ASMR videos I watch before bed. There’s the click of the clapboard, the hum of the lights coming to life, the whir of the camera, and when I open my eyes, I’m not me anymore.

I’m not scared and insecure and worried about what people think of me. I’m powerful, strong, and angry as hell.

We get through the first several pages of the scene flawlessly, my confidence slowly building back up with every line I don’t stumble on. Even my “mom” seems surprised by my performance, hints of it showing in the cracks in her own line readings.

“Just leave me alone!” I shout, my heart pounding wildly as we make it to the last moments of the scene, adrenaline pumping through me. “I don’t—”

“CUT!” Rune shouts midway through my line, and I stop like I’ve been unplugged.

“Wh-what?” I stammer out, still trapped somewhere between myself and my character as I whip around to face him. “That was the line, I—”

“You should be blond,” he interrupts, tapping his pen to his lower lip.

“What?” I say again, sounding like a broken record.

It’s a small comfort that the rest of the crew seems startled too, an unsettling air of discomfort closing in on us. This day has been exhausting for me on multiple levels, and probably twice as exhausting for the crew who had to be here even earlier than the cast.

“Your character. She should be blond,” Rune repeats, gesturing to my fictional mom’s platinum blond hair. “You two should be mirrors of each other.”

My scene partner and I exchange a confused look.

Of course we don’t immediately pass as family, with my tan skin, brown hair, and brown eyes, and her pale skin, ice-white hair, and blue eyes.

But she’s not that far off from Mom’s complexion, and people never doubt that we’re related.

Plus, that’s the magic of television: you don’t have to resemble anyone to make an audience buy into the fantasy.

“But—”

“Have hair and makeup reach out,” Rune interrupts again, speaking to Esther this time, and I have to bite down on my lip to not let my short temper take over. “Once that’s done, we’ll reshoot her scenes from today.”

Wait—what?

Esther nods, shooting me a sympathetic frown before disappearing—likely to go find the hairstylist in charge of transforming me into my fictional mom’s “mirror image.”

So, all of the work I did today was for nothing?

I’m no stranger to reshoots, but usually I haven’t busted my ass this hard to get the scenes done in the first place.

I grit my teeth hard enough for my jaw to ache, unclenching my fists only for the sake of not breaking off any of the acrylic French tips I spent an hour in the salon for.

“See you bright and early, people!” Rune addresses the rest of the crew, giving a hand signal for everyone to wrap up production for the day, leaving me gobsmacked and speechless without another word.

No asking if I’d be okay with completely changing my appearance for the role or negotiating whether we can try a wig instead of bleaching my hair, or an apology for making me have to start over from scratch. Nothing.

I inhale sharply, the breath coming out as a shuddered exhale. No ASMR guided meditation can calm me down, but I have no choice except to put on a brave face.

Because this is pushing myself out of my comfort zone.

This is what I wanted.