“What is wrong with you?” I ask Kai when Phil bids us farewell and heads to his office for a conference call.
“I’m sorry, is that Lucy-speak for ‘thank you’?” Kai asks. “Because now Phil thinks that this extra training was your idea, and he seemed impressed. So suck it up and deal.” He grabs his duffel bag and strides toward the nursery. “That’s Kai-speak for ‘you’re welcome.’ ”
Anger simmers in my bones, but he’s not wrong. When we reach the nursery, he sets up a tripod and a camera, then pulls a plastic baby doll out of his duffel and tries to hand it to me.
“Um, have you lost your mind?” I ask, ripping my hat off and stepping sideways to avoid the doll. “No.”
Kai sighs. “It’s a prop. You’re going to be shooting with Keeva soon, and I want you to be prepared. So just take the doll and pretend it’s her.”
“ ‘Take the doll and pretend it’s her’?” I repeat, narrowing my eyes at him. “Sounds like somebody bought an inflatable girlfriend after his last breakup.”
To my delight, the faintest hint of a blush creeps over his cheeks. “Grow up, Lucy. Either you want to get better or you don’t.”
I eye the doll’s wide blue eyes and creepy, open-mouthed expression. “I’ve seen Annabelle, and that thing looks possessed.”
Kai stuffs Annabelle into my hands, rolling his eyes. “It would be great if you didn’t make it so difficult to help you.”
He just made me look like an obsessed fan in front of my boss, and somehow I’m the difficult one?
“Helping me?” I ask, hoisting my hat in the air. “Is that what you’d call your behavior back there?”
Kai smirks. “No, that was me having fun.” He nods toward the hat. “But those go for $39.99 on my website, so you’re welcome.”
“Turning quite a profit from that child labor in Sudan, huh?”
Kai’s head snaps up from where he’s bent over the camera, and he shoots me a look that could freeze his fiery birthplace. “If you knew anything about me, you’d know that all Wild Side memorabilia is made through fair trade labels. Sustainability and ethical sourcing are especially important to me.”
Mia lets out a breathy sigh of appreciation, and I chalk up another point for Elle and Sam.
“Oh,” I say, impressed. “Good to know.” Now I feel bad about tossing my hat onto the ground so rudely.
Kai pats the camera. “Think of today as an expedited version of exposure therapy. The sooner you realize the camera is a tool, not a rabid dog, the sooner you can relax in front of it.”
If only it were so simple. I don’t know how to explain to Kai why I freeze up in front of a camera, intimidated by its power to capture a humiliating moment and make it eternal.
“Look, I’m not asking you to earn an Emmy here,” Kai says, noticing the terror written all over my face.
“Our mom has an Emmy,” Mia says from the bench outside the nursery, her notebook open on her lap.
There’s no subject I’d rather avoid more than Karina, and I shoot Mia a look that says, Stop talking, or I’ll feed your fairy bread to the petting zoo goats. But she’s looking at Kai, not me.
Kai, his interest piqued, glances from me to Mia. “Seriously? Who’s your mom?”
“Doesn’t matter,” I say at the same time that Mia announces, “Karina Katona,” with a distinct note of pride in her voice.
“She was on Guilty Pleasures,” Mia continues, oblivious to my discomfort.
“Guilty Pleasures?” Realization dawns across his face. “The show about the private investigators that ended on a cliffhanger?”
“That’s the one,” I grumble.
Guilty Pleasures was abruptly canceled after its seventh season, leaving a string of unsolved murders and love triangles in its wake. Fueled by a long-standing feud between the writer and the network, the sudden cancellation sparked the start of a decline in Karina’s career and an intense fury among fans demanding to know (A) which bed-hopping characters ended up together, and (B) the culprit behind the merciless Malibu Fish Hook Killings.
“Mom played Kitty Conway,” Mia adds.
Kai’s jaw drops, and I contemplate thrusting Annabelle’s plastic hand inside his mouth and using it to rip out his tongue.
“Your mum is Kitty Conway?” he asks, unable to hide his shock.
“No, our mother is Karina Katona, who played Kitty Conway,” I say testily. “The people in the box are actors, Kai. SpongeBob doesn’t actually live in a pineapple under the sea.”
He raises an eyebrow at me. “Clever.”
Karina’s character Kitty, a sweet-faced Georgia peach who moved to California and discovered a passion for stilettos and crime solving, was a fan favorite for her generous bosom and silky blond hair that she never pulled into a ponytail, not even while she chased bad guys down alleyways and through abandoned warehouses. Basically, my mother is super-hot. So when Kai says, Your mum is Kitty Conway? in that disbelieving tone, I interpret it as the same question I’ve asked myself since I was a kid: Why don’t you look like her, you tiny-boobed, frizzy-haired disappointment?
“You didn’t tell me your mum was an actress,” Kai says, aiming the tripod at me.
“You’re right. I must have skipped that tidbit when we reviewed our family trees. I should also mention that my cousin Bobby’s a line cook at Benihana.”
Kai rolls his eyes. “I’m just saying, it’s interesting that you struggle with the camera, considering your mum was a TV star.”
And it’s interesting that you struggle with dumbassery when your mom is Charlotte Kimber, I want to snap back, but I don’t. Instead, I shrug. “I guess sometimes the apple falls pretty far from the tree.”
“Yeah,” Kai says, studying me for a long moment. “I guess it does.”
“We came here to practice, right?” I ask, refusing to engage in further discussion of Karina. “So let’s practice.”
Kai nods. “First things first: the mechanics of the camera.” He rattles off something about static versus tracking shots, and Mia takes notes while I try not to convulse with anxiety. I’m okay as long as Kai’s spouting off terms like aperture and lens and boom pole, but the instant he powers the camera on, it’s game over. I’m going to sweat my ass off until I melt into the ground, leaving nothing behind but a pile of khaki and a ponytail elastic.
“Okay, now tell me about Keeva,” Kai says. He fiddles with the camera, causing a red light to flash on, and my hands turn so clammy that fake Keeva slips out of my grip and lands on the cement floor with a thud.
I bend down to pick her up, detesting the way the camera steals every ounce of my confidence. But when I straighten back up, I’m shocked to see that Kai’s not laughing at my clumsiness. Instead, he gives me a reassuring nod, as if I didn’t just drop an endangered baby gorilla on her head.
“You’re fine, Lucy.”
“Go, Lucy!” Mia cheers, taking a bite of fairy bread and sitting back to enjoy the show.
“So, um, Keeva,” I say, a cyclone of nausea swirling in my stomach. “Keeva is a baby. A gorilla. A baby and a gorilla.”
“Describe your plan to integrate her into the troop,” Kai says, motioning for me to take a deep breath.
I take a long inhale, but it only leaves me light-headed. “Um, okay. Well, we’ll, you know, bring her here. To the nursery.” I gesture to the space behind me, accidentally smacking Annabelle into the mesh barrier. The blow’s impact twists her plastic head to an unsettling angle, and Mia winces.
“Okay, this is stupid,” I tell Kai, wanting to die of embarrassment as I wave the nearly decapitated doll toward the camera. “I told you, I can’t do this. It’s nice that you’re trying to help, but let’s face it: I’m hopeless.”
I can’t help but think that Lottie would never knock the head off a baby gorilla. Maybe Kai was right after all; maybe I’m just not up to the challenge. Maybe I’m destined for a lifetime of being stuck in a junior keeper role while Lottie and Jack and Scotty the intern fight their way up the food chain to CEO. I picture myself in ten years, still earning a pittance of a salary and living at Nona’s while my new boss Scotty assigns me all the grunt work. Nick will be happily married to Margo from Guest Relations, and their eighteen unruly children will fling bubblegum and juice boxes at me while I try to lead a Critter Chat.
I’m fucked.
“Lucy, stop,” Kai says, forming a timeout gesture with his hands. “You’re doing fine.”
I hold up the gravely injured doll as evidence to the contrary. “Have you seen Annabelle’s head?”
Kai frowns, and I wait for him to acknowledge that he was wrong. That my glaring incompetence can’t be helped after all, but could I please get Karina’s autograph for him?
But he doesn’t. Instead, he shuts the camera off and points it toward the opposite wall. “Forget about the camera for now, then. Just show me the nursery. Tell me what Keeva will experience here. Like it’s just you and me having a conversation.”
“But the camera’s the whole point,” I argue, praying that Kai will just let me retreat to my office and bury my shame in two sleeves of Chips Ahoy!
“No, Keeva’s the whole point,” he says. “You’re the whole point. It’s your connection with the animals that matters. That’s the story. The camera is just a tool that helps me share it with the world.”
Kai’s being, dare I say it . . . nice? And it might just be a trick, but the encouraging nod he gives me tells me it isn’t, and the pounding of my heart slows a little. I might not know the first thing about being successful on TV, but I know the ins and outs of Ape House. I set the cursed baby doll on the ground and give Kai a tour of the nursery: the scale where I’ll weigh Keeva twice a day, the sink where I’ll wash and prepare her bottles, and the blankets, balls, and cardboard boxes that will serve as enrichment items and encourage play.
Eventually, I glance away from the nursery to find him bent behind the camera, his face pressed to the lens.
“Hey!” I cry when I see the red power light. “You told me to forget about the camera!”
Kai pops out from behind the tripod, a cocky grin playing at his lips. “And you did. See? You can do it, Lucy. I’ve been recording for the last ten minutes, and you were too absorbed in your excitement to notice.”
“You have? Really? But I . . . I didn’t even trip on anything,” I say in disbelief. “I didn’t even lose my train of thought or ramble about hyenas.”
Sure, I had no idea Kai was shooting, and I displayed zero percent of Kitty Conway’s sultry intrigue, but I stayed upright. I stayed conscious. I didn’t sob into my polo or lose my lunch. I did it, even if I didn’t realize that I was.
“What I’m trying to teach you is that once Keeva’s here, you’ll forget the cameras exist,” Kai says. “You’ll be too caught up in your passion to worry about anything but your work.”
I’m not totally convinced, but before I can explain that to Kai, his phone buzzes. Kai’s jaw tenses when he glances at the screen.
“I better take this,” he says, a hard edge to his tone. “Good work today, Lucy. And it was great to meet you, Mia. Stay wild, okay?”
“Okay!” Mia chirps back, but he’s already out of earshot, his phone pressed to his ear as he strides down the hallway for privacy.
“He’s awesome,” Mia says, watching him walk away. “Don’t ya think?”
I glance down the hallway, where Kai’s got his hand pressed against the wall again, his head hung low as he engages in what looks like another unpleasant phone call.
“Um, maybe,” I say, too confused by the events of the past hour to pull away when Mia wraps her hand around mine.
Because Kai might be an obnoxious braggart who’s too handsome for his own good and can’t shut up about his Emmys, but he also humored Mia when she asked for his autograph and took time out of his day to help improve my cataclysmic screen appeal. And yes, he might annoy the hell out of me and suffer from a cringeworthy addiction to applause, but he clearly cares about his job.
And for a reason I can’t figure out, he seems to care about mine.
I call a mental truce with Kai, but it only lasts about two minutes. Because when Mia and I get back to my office, she sets my new Wild Side hat in a place of honor on my desk, right beside my cherished Dr. Kimber bobblehead. Only then do I read the rage-inducing inscription that makes me want to march straight back to the nursery and kick down Kai’s camera.
To Lucy, from Kai: Don’t get your pseudopenis all bent out of shape.