“Tell me about the acting. Is it everything you wanted it to be? Do you love it?”
“It’s . . .” I chose my words carefully. Again, I didn’t want him to think I’d made any mistakes, but if I expected him to be honest about his work, I had to be as well. “I want to be able to tell you, Manning, but you can’t get upset or overprotective about it like you did with my job.”
He took a deep enough breath that I felt it through my whole body. “That means it’s bad.”
“No, not bad. It’s just so different from what I was used to. From what I thought it would be. It’s competitive and you have to have thick skin. Sometimes I’m outside in the cold waiting in line for hours or I’m running on nothing but coffee all day or I’m up until four in the morning memorizing lines. That’s just the start since I haven’t even been auditioning long.” The sad thing was, I enjoyed it. I was living a fantasy I’d started to develop my first year in college, when actors would come to our classes and talk about the struggle of their early days. And since I’d suffered for my craft with others who were in the same boat, I’d become close to my classmates fast. It wasn’t like the high school friends I’d had in Orange County. I hadn’t spoken to Mona or Vickie in a couple years. These were real friendships, like what I had with Val and Corbin, only my classmates and I shared the same weird, deep desires I did. I wasn’t going to feel bad about my career choice just because it worried Manning. “If you come here,” I said to him, “you have to be able to let me do my thing without getting upset.”
I felt his silence more than anything. When I checked his expression, he was looking at the ceiling. “The graveyard shift really bothers me, Lake. I don’t like the idea of you walking home in this city at that time. The rest of it, I don’t know, we can work it out. I can bring you food and blankets while you’re waiting. I can run your lines with you.”
“You won’t always be able to, Manning. Sometimes you’ll have to work or sleep or I’ll need to run to an audition right when I hear about it, even if we’re in the middle of something.”
He nodded a little. “I hear you. I’ll work on it. If your skin is thicker, I guess mine will have to be as well.”
“The city will do it for you.”
“Yeah?” he asked. “Is that what it’s done to you?”
There were plenty of memories to choose from, but there was no failure like the first. I’d moved here heartbroken, penniless, and lost—I must’ve ridden the subway to every borough at least once by accident—but the icing on the cake came right before my first semester. “You already know I’d been accepted to NYU. I deferred a semester. But I also had to apply for the drama school and undergo an artistic review. I was denied.” In high school, I’d always been so focused on the core classes like science, math, and English. Dad had never allowed me to consider my drama elective as anything more than a hobby. “I took general education courses my first semester and at night, I attended these acting classes in some basement. It was enough to get me in the following semester, but not enough to turn me into an actress.”
He frowned. “Why do you say that?”
“We had to do these workshops where we’d learn and practice technique. Well, at the end of my second semester, one of my professors kept me after class to tell me I was getting a ‘D’.”
“Excuse me?” Manning teased. “Lake Kaplan got a ‘D’? Have you ever scored a grade lower than a ‘B’?”
“No.” I smiled. “I was devastated. I could handle the written work and book study, but when it came to theater, I wasn’t a natural.”
“She who at excels at everything,” Manning said.
“Apparently not. I’d never had a teacher criticize me, and here the professor had ‘firmly suggested’ I change majors.” I crossed my arms over his chest, resting my chin on them. “Not only that, but nearly everyone around me had been acting since they were children. The closest lessons I’d had were piano. I was the slow one in the class, and that was true up until graduation a few days ago.”
“Did you switch classes?”
“I wanted to.” I remembered standing in the registrar’s office during winter break, ready to give up. Val and Corbin had gone home for the holidays and I was looking at a Christmas and New Year’s by myself. I’d been in New York a year, but I’d still acutely felt Manning’s absence in my life. I was used to spending Christmas morning opening gifts with my dad and Tiffany while my mom prepared a three-course dinner. I’d had a wonderful life. I’d failed at nothing until I’d failed to win Manning, and after that, things had just fallen apart. Maybe the real me was a failure, and I’d been coddled my whole life, but the alternative was eating crow and majoring in something my dad would’ve chosen for me, like business. At the last minute, I’d turned away from the office and gone back to my empty apartment. “In the end, I decided not to. All I’d had left at the time was school. So, I repeated the class the following semester.”