Page 18

Kat

Kat was not very good at shopping.

When she was growing up, someone had always dressed her.

At first it had been her mom, laying out the right outfits for each audition on a hotel bed the night before.

Her mom hadn’t understood anything about dressing for a certain part.

She’d only wanted Kat to look respectable, and not give them any reason to feel less-than in front of the rich TV people.

And so Kat had shown up at the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon to audition for the roles of sassy preteens while wearing frilly pink church dresses with tights.

Once Jocelyn had entered the picture, she told Kat’s mother what to buy: black leggings and neon sweatshirts and long-sleeved T-shirts full of funky patterns and artful rips.

She’d sent an assistant to Hot Topic to buy Kat an armful of bracelets—brightly colored plastic ones, fake leather bands with white-and-black checkerboard patterns, chunky ones emblazoned with emojis and phrases like BFF and LOLZ .

Jocelyn called it her “quirky but clean-cut tween with perfect comedic timing” costume. Producers had loved it.

Once she was signed on to major projects, stylists had taken over.

She’d had the perfect leather jackets for signings in malls, the perfect jean-jacket-and-hat combos for kids’ awards shows (why oh why had quirky hats been such a thing during those years?), and the perfect athletic clothes for ridiculous televised field days in which she played kickball or Jell-O wrestled with other child stars.

Even after the show had ended, Kat had (at Jocelyn’s suggestion) paid a stylist to fill her closet with designer shirts and jackets and shoes, so all Kat had to do was pick one of her prearranged outfits.

But all those clothes were meant to make her look like a glamorous straight woman.

Which was why phase two of Jocelyn’s plan was for Kat to go out and buy some queer-looking clothes.

Normally, Kat would have paid a stylist to do that for her.

But stylists were expensive, and their taste in clothes tended to be as well.

With a rental in New York, a mortgage on her apartment in L.A.

, and no income for the past two years, Kat needed to save wherever she could.

So, for the first time in over a decade, Kat had to actually buy her own clothes.

She invited Jude to go with her. When Jude had texted asking if they could see each other again, Kat had been filled with a giddy rush.

She’d smiled at her phone like a fool as she asked Jude to meet her in SoHo on Tuesday afternoon.

She didn’t tell Jude that she was trying to piece together a new look, but still, the thought of changing up her wardrobe felt less intimidating with Jude by her side.

Unfortunately, so far, the trip had been a total disaster.

Kat had felt a little cool the first time she’d pressed a discreet button and they’d been buzzed into a hidden upscale shop, where a manager had pressed champagne flutes into their hands as they browsed.

But after visiting four of the ten stores on Jocelyn’s list, Kat had bought nothing.

The problem was that Kat had no idea what she was looking for.

When she thought of queer-looking clothes, she could only imagine the kind of clothes that Jude wore—men’s button-downs and suits—which didn’t feel like her style.

If she wasn’t butch, how was she supposed to signal her queerness through her fashion?

“This is terrible,” Kat groaned as they left the fourth store, her head fuzzy and her mouth sour at the edges from champagne. “I’m sorry I dragged you along on this.”

Kat scrolled through the list of stores on her phone.

None of the names inspired confidence. When she’d pictured this date, Kat had imagined the two of them laughing their way through SoHo, weighed down by designer shopping bags.

She’d imagined herself trying on clothes while Jude turned into the literal definition of the heart-eyes emoji.

She’d imagined feeling cool and confident and more secure in her queerness, not less.

But she’d forgotten how soul sucking trying on clothes could be.

The way the lights showed off every flaw of her body.

The way stylists, or in this case salespeople, pursed their lips as if the clothes weren’t wrong—she was.

Kat had a sudden strong memory of being trotted out of a dressing room so the showrunner could make a call on whether she should wear a bikini during a Jet Ski scene.

It had been for Pag-Agent, a blatant tween knockoff of Miss Congeniality that had flopped at the box office, largely because no one could pronounce the name.

It had featured an extremely serious and uptight tween spy (who secretly had a heart of gold) who was forced to work with a quirky, unintelligent tween beauty pageant star (who secretly had a heart of gold) in order to stop a crime syndicate from stealing the head judge’s famous jewels.

Kat must have been thirteen at the time.

She could still remember the showrunner’s cold stare.

She had fought the urge to cross her arms and hide as he assessed her body, his lips pursed, before finally shaking his head and saying to the stylist, “No. It won’t work. Change her back into the wetsuit.”

It was one of those memories that just wouldn’t go away.

Eleven years later, Kat still caught herself wondering what, exactly, hadn’t been working.

If her thirteen-year-old body had been more appealing, could it have saved Pag-Agent at the box office?

Could it have saved her career so she wouldn’t be in this whole mess, doing every desperate thing possible to scrape up a role?

She wondered sometimes if that had been the root of it all. The restrictions and the overexercising had started around then. Had that been the moment that flipped the switch in her brain and set her up for the next seven years of constant calorie counting?

It was impossible to say. There were too many memories just like that one. No one moment had caused anything—it had been the atmosphere, the unapologetic scrutiny, the dismissive way people shrugged and said, “That’s just Hollywood, kid.”

“Uh-oh,” Jude said. “I know that face. Come on.”

She put her hand lightly on Kat’s shoulder and steered her down a side street.

“Where are we going?”

“Clearly, you are having a shopping-induced blood sugar emergency,” Jude said. “We need cupcakes.”

Jude held open the door of a bakery with a pink neon sign. Kat started to protest—eating baked goods during a shopping trip? Right before she would have to try on clothes and look in mirrors? But then she caught a whiff of melted chocolate and frosting, and she closed her mouth.

Jude bought them a Brooklyn Blackout and a raspberry-lemon cupcake and led Kat out the back into a small courtyard, looped with fake but appealing strands of ivy. She found them a table tucked up next to a soothing little fountain.

“Here.” Jude cut the cupcakes in half and pushed the chocolate one across the table. Kat took a bite and moaned. Jude smiled. “My mom used to take me here whenever I’d had a bad day. Mostly when I got bullied at school. She always said there was no problem a cupcake couldn’t fix.”

Kat finished her cupcake halves with alarming speed. She was surprised to find that she felt better almost immediately. More alert, less grumpy. Less full of existential shopping despair. “You know what? I think she might be right.”

“So, are you looking for anything in particular from this shopping trip?” Jude asked as she chewed.

Kat bought herself some time by taking the knife Jude had used to cut the cupcakes and licking it clean, determined not to waste any of the precious frosting. Surely it couldn’t be bad to admit she was changing her look, right?

“I’ve been feeling like I want to dress a little differently lately. More”—she paused, the word feeling unfamiliar and potentially offensive in her mouth—“queer.”

“Do you have any idea what kind of style you want to have?”

Kat winced, then shook her head. She should have prepared for this more.

She should have looked up queer celebrities online and taken notes or made some sort of vision board of how she wanted to look.

But that hadn’t even occurred to her. After all, she was supposed to be figuring out her own personal style.

Shouldn’t she just know what it was when she saw it?

Instead of scoffing at her like she deserved, though, Jude grinned. “I have an idea.”