Page 41 of Marisol Acts the Part

I wake up the next morning to a stomachache and three missed calls and a text from Delia.

Call me ASAP

That was from ten minutes ago. I don’t bother scrollingthrough the rest of my notifications; I immediately sit up and call her. Whatever this is about, it must be seriously important for her to be calling me at four in the morning LA time.

“You’re in the news again,” Delia says in lieu of a greeting, back to business as usual.

“Is that a good thing?” I ask, even though, based on her tone, it isn’t. Though the rest of my team isn’t with her this time. So at least it isn’t catastrophically bad. Or good, for thatmatter.

“You tell me.”

Before I can ask what she means, my phone buzzes with a new text from her. A link to an article on Stars Weekly. Dread rushes through me, along with a sense of déjà vu. The last time I opened one of these links, it led me to an article plastered with photos of me mid–emotional breakdown.

This article is no different. A photo is the focal point—blurry this time, at least. No HD close-ups of the snot on my upper lip.

It’s hard to make out the details at first, but the site does me the courtesy of zooming in about a hundred times until the blocky pixels start to take on a more recognizable shape.

Me, kissing Jamila outside of set yesterday.

“Shit.”

“Good shit or bad shit?” Delia asks, already typing at top speed.

“Bad shit,” I mumble, scanning the article to confirm there aren’t any more pictures. Luckily, it’s only the one.

Even luckier, Jamila isn’t visible.

My mind goes straight to her. All you can make out from the photo is the back of her head, her curls tied up in a messy bun instead of down her back like usual.

She’s not so public a persona that people can immediately identify her—not yet, at least. But it wouldn’t be hard to connect the dots.

Our head shots side by side in the cast announcement.

Her thick dark brown curls woven through my fingers.

It’s only a matter of time before someone figures it out, if they haven’t already… .

What also strikes me as odd is the angle. The photo is blurry, thanks to it being taken through a pane of glass, but there’s no denying that it was taken from inside the building where we were shooting. Most likely from the doorway a few inches away from where we were standing.

Which means someone from The Limit took this. Someone who had a way to get access to our phones.

“I can try to get this taken down, but no guarantees,” Delia says with a sigh. “ Stars Weekly would rather eat their own asses than retract an article.”

She reassures me that this isn’t the end of the world, making a promise to call me back if she can get the article taken down. As soon as we hang up, I immediately text Jamila.

We need to talk

In retrospect, I definitely could’ve worded that text better.

“I thought you were breaking up with me,” she hisses once we find each other on set later that morning.

“Sorry, sorry,” I mutter, doing my best to keep my voice to a whisper despite the panic coursing through me. I’d made sure to follow up my text with a link to the article, but apparently, I didn’t do it fast enough.

Jamila leads me to a darkened corner on the opposite end of the room, behind a stack of ten-foot-high plywood, shielding us from view.

We don’t have enough time to make it back to our trailer before she’s needed for her first scene of the day, but we can’t wait around to talk about this.

The PAs haven’t come around to collect our phones yet, so I pull up the article where it’s already open in my search tab and hand it to Jamila.

She sighs and toys with her curls as she scans the headline.

“At least they can’t tell it’s you,” I offer, but my voice doesn’t sound very convincing. “My agent’s working to get it taken down,” I add, leaving off the part about her not making any promises.

Jamila remains quiet, eyes glued to the blown-up photo of an unfamiliar hand cradling my jaw, running their thumb across my lip.

“Someone from the crew must’ve taken this,” she says, noting the same thing I did when I first saw the photo.

“Or the cast,” I add. I’d like to think our castmates would understand the value of privacy, but we can’t rule anyone out. “But I have no idea who.”

Jamila bites her lips, glancing past my shoulder where everyone is buzzing to set up for the first scene of the day. The thought that someone here—anyone—could’ve set us up for disaster sets me on edge. I already struggled to feel comfortable here. Now there’s no shot of that.

“I think—”

“Marisol! Jamila!” Rune cuts Jamila off.

Despite being hidden, we jump apart and keep our hands to ourselves. We exchange a worried look, and I wish I could loop our fingers together again, give hers a reassuring squeeze the way she did for me, as we step out from our hiding spot.

Rune is in the center of the room, holding a stack of papers in his clenched fist. A circle clears around him, the crew backing out of his warpath as he scans the room for his targets—for us.

When he finally spots us in the crowd, my body tenses, freezes as he starts storming toward us like a heat-seeking missile.

“Care to explain this ?” he spits, throwing down the stack of papers onto a table to our left. It’s a printed-out copy of the article—the paper so crumpled you can hardly make out the headline.

“We—”

Rune doesn’t let me finish, snatching the papers back off the table before Jamila can even begin. Apparently, the question was rhetorical.

“We assembled this cast the way we did for a reason,” Rune announces to the room like he’s delivering a speech.

“Chemistry. Dynamics. This ”—he points to the grainy photo—“interrupts those dynamics. No dating between castmates, between crewmates, between anyone on this set. Do you understand?!” he shouts, spit flying from his mouth and onto a nearby camera.

The room is so silent you can hear a pin drop. My mind races, unsure what this means. Is he demanding Jamila and I break up? Is he even allowed to do that? Rules on set are one thing, but dictating what we do with our personal lives doesn’t seem fair, even for Hollywood.

A throat clears tentatively, and the entire room turns in the direction of the sound, every eye suddenly on Miles. He fumbles under the rapid influx of attention, his cheeks flushing when Rune fixes his gaze on him next.

“Actually,” he says diplomatically, clearing his throat again and speaking louder this time, his voice echoing through the room. “Marisol and I dated before we were cast on the show, and our relationship hasn’t ever caused any issue with the ‘dynamics’ of the cast. Now or then.”

God bless Miles for being the voice of reason. I’d bear-hug him if I wasn’t too terrified to move.

“Why do you think I cast her?” Rune replies, brushing him off with a wave of his hand.

“She’s the primary antagonist of the series.

What better way to bring that to life than with two people with real tension?

” he says as if that’s a totally normal way to cast a show—to use our personal lives as fuel for our on-screen relationship.

I swallow hard, realizing what this means. That maybe I didn’t get this role after all. Or at least not the way I thought I did. Based on merit and my performance ability. I got it because I was Miles’s ex-girlfriend.

Rune has never operated logically—that much has been clear since day one. But this takes things to a whole new level. We’re fighting a losing battle. There’s no way we’ll ever be able to convince him to change his mind, because he never wants to admit that he’s wrong.

And no one ever tries to stop him.

“This seems a bit intense, though, doesn’t it?

” another voice says, to my surprise. It’s one of the adult actors—Miles’s character’s dad—who chimes in, sitting up from his own director’s chair, cup of coffee still in hand.

He says it casually, the way only a seasoned pro can.

Someone who’s seen their fair share of overly demanding directors.

“They’re kids,” the actress who plays my mom adds. Coming to my defense like she’s my off-screen mom too.

“And they’ve been together for weeks,” a PA chimes in, someone who ran our notes back and forth for us. “No one has noticed anything off about the dynamic.”

There’s a general murmur of agreement throughout the room, both from our castmates and the crew.

Esther, to Rune’s left, nods hard enough to make her topknot come loose.

Hope swells through me as I take in the dozens of nodding heads, finally turning to Jamila.

Her attention is still so focused on Rune that she startles when I reach for her hand.

For a moment, I expect her to pull away, but she doesn’t.

She smiles and steps closer to me, our linked fingers pressed between us.

We can stand up to him, put an end to his tyranny for good. Together.

But not everyone stands in support of us.

“It’s incredibly unprofessional,” Dawn interjects, hopping off her director’s chair to step between us and Rune. “We should be focused on our performances. Making sure we have our lines memorized and ready to go. Not making out between scenes.”

She doesn’t direct this at me, but her target is clear.

It’s a not-at-all subtle jab at my struggles to keep up with Rune’s line adjustments.

My nails dig into my palm as I clench my fists to keep myself from screaming.

What the hell is her problem? What did we ever do to her to make her think she’s so much better than us?

All we’ve ever done is be nice to her—even when she clearly didn’t deserve it.

Suddenly, a thought hits me. An accusation that I wouldn’t make out loud but that my gut tells me must be true. That Dawn is the one who took the photo. I wouldn’t put it past her to insist on getting her phone back. Or even having more than one on her.

“I know my script back to front,” she preens before I can figure out a way to voice my thought without outright accusing her. “Everyone’s lines. Not just mine. That’s professionalism.”

Well, hooray for her, but that doesn’t change anything.

Except, apparently, it does.

“On the grounds of unprofessionalism”—Rune claps his hands together before turning to me—“Marisol, you’re fired.”

Everyone gasps collectively, disgruntled whispers surrounding me like the buzzing of insects as I stammer out a choked “Wh-what?”

“You can’t do that!” Jamila protests, never letting go of my hand, tightening her grip.

Rune shrugs and folds his arms across his chest. “I can, and I have. Read your contracts.”

There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s right. That somehow, we missed some loophole in my agreement that allows him to do exactly this. Or maybe we let it slide, didn’t bother fighting it. Because we never thought it would come to this.

“Dawn, you’ll step in for Marisol,” Rune commands, and she looks like she won the lottery. “We’ll reshoot your scenes once we’ve brought someone else in.”

“You did this, didn’t you?” I shout at Dawn this time, not bothering to think of tact or a subtle way to go about accusing her. “You took the picture of us?”

Clearly, there’s only one person who stands to gain something if I’m kicked off the show. It’s the same person who’s acted like I have no right to be here since day one, and she just got exactly what she wanted. Dawn gasps, glaring me down, but she can’t shake me. Not anymore.

“I had nothing to do with it. We’re not even allowed to have our phones,” she snaps back, and I see it. The veneer that separates the real Dawn from who she becomes whenever she performs. A strange lilt to her voice, a subtle tilt of herhead.

She’s lying. And she’s not even doing a good job at it.

“Next time you want to land a part, you should try doing a better job at your audition,” I spit back, whipping around on my heels before I can see her reaction.

All hell breaks loose throughout the room, PAs and producers clamoring to get Rune to see some sense, cast members shaking their heads in confusion and disappointment.

Dawn yells something back at me that I don’t quite hear, but I flip her off anyway.

Screw having her on my good side. I don’t need to be associated with someone like her to advance my career when she’s trying to tank it.

Jamila stands in front of me, blocking an escape route, and she cups my face.

“We’ll figure this out, okay?” she says, her voice nervous and borderline frantic. “He can’t do this.”

Except he can. Esther already warned me of that.

I’ve seen it with my own eyes—crew members fired one morning and back the next.

And why would he change his mind when he has Dawn, the Hollywood golden child, ready and willing to take over my role at the drop of a hat?

We can fight and claw our way into forcing him to let me stay, but is it really worth the effort?

All I’ve done since the table read is try to be the person Rune so desperately wants me to be in the name of trying to prove myself as an actor.

But what do the color of my hair, what clothes I wear, or my perfume have to do with who I am as a performer?

I know I’ve given the best performance I possibly can, and if that’s not enough for him, then what else is there left for me to give?

He can try to strip me of everything that makes me me, and I can keep telling myself it’s worth it to change my career, but I’m done.

I’m Marisol Polly-Rodriguez. That’s who I am as an actor. And Rune can never take that away from me.

“It’s fine,” I say, my voice lost under the general chaos of the room.

My hand rests on top of Jamila’s, pulling gently until she lets go of my face.

I give her hand one last squeeze and back away slowly, the fight seeping out of me like sand through my fingers.

“I don’t want to be a part of this show anymore. ”

With that, I let go of her hand and finally walk away from the thing I thought I wanted most.