Dear Delali,
Your final problem set is now three months late.
Is everything okay with you?
Please do let me know if you need my help with absolutely anything.
Sincerely,
Professor Portillo
“Who’s that?” Adrien asked, looking over Delali’s shoulder.
“Adrien.” Delali nudged him away and put the phone in her bag. “Mind your own business. And open the windows when you’re pretending to smoke.”
He lifted his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay.” Adrien opened the large, street-facing window, apparently unbothered by Delali’s dig. “Wanna run through it one more time? You seem nervous.”
With Lionel back on the West Coast and no other actor friends to speak of, Delali had no choice but to run lines with Adrien. And, because she was only human, they’d started sleeping together again. Delali had found it was incredibly easy not to catch feelings—all she had to do was, within minutes of finishing, imagine Adrien singing “We Shall Overcome (the Defense),” and she sobered right up.
“No, I’m good,” Delali answered, turning to assess her audition outfit in the mirror—a white boat neck shirt tucked into high-waisted jeans and a pair of penny loafers. She couldn’t wait to change. “And I’m not nervous,” she added.
Adrien shrugged. “Okay. But you’re doing that thing with your lip. That you do sometimes when you’re nervous.” He ashed the cigarette and rolled out a thin black yoga mat.
Delali folded her lips into her mouth.
“Well, if you’re nervous, you shouldn’t be. I’ve always thought it was funny how little you care about acting, considering you’re pretty good at it. And I’m saying that not as your pining ex but as someone who just starred in a highly successful, soon-to-be-Tony-nominated play. In a challenging role, I might add—”
Delali sighed, holding up a hand to stop Adrien from carrying on. She considered making a jab about the dictionary definition of the word “challenging,” but relented when she realized that she had, in fact, been challenged through the viewing experience. “I should probably head out soon,” she said.
“Cool, before you head out could you grab me one of the wheatgrass shots in the fridge? You should grab one, too. They’re boosted with beta-carotene, if you want some extra protection from cataracts and harmful air pollutants.”
“No, Adrien.” Delali turned to leave.
“Hey, Dela?”
She stopped. “What?”
“You’re gonna crush it.”
* * *
On the drive over to the studio, Delali felt comfortable and calm, partially from the amount of practicing she’d done and partially from the tiny bit of Soothing Solution she’d sucked off her pinky to mollify her jittery nerves. The decision she’d been juggling for so long had finally been made, and it had been easier than she’d expected. Last night, while practicing for the audition, she’d been overcome with an excitement that she never felt while doing math. She didn’t know if she was moved by the story, or by the idea of walking across the stage to collect her Oscar, or just happy to be back in a comfortable routine, doing the low-risk, high-reward hobby that had filled her childhood. Maybe there was something comforting about an industry where a man’s hubris only resulted in a three-act cringefest. Instead of, like, a suite of disastrous foreign policy decisions or a casually racist economic theory. Plus she’d been playing with the idea that with her powers, she could maybe have a hand in what got made, maybe even stop some big network from producing Johnathan Manning’s next project. A girl could dream.
“Thanks, Isaac,” Delali said as they pulled up to the studio.
He winked at her in the mirror. “Good luck!”
When Delali walked in, a slight man in swamp-colored chinos and a cornflower-blue checked shirt was waiting for her.
“Miss Tamakloe,” the man said. “Right this way.” He gestured for her to follow him down the long hallway that led to the audition room. On the walls, there were posters from films Undertow had cast, and Delali found herself unsettled by all the blockbusters she recognized. Two Time, a time-travel rom-com where Henry Golding, a plucky, London-based architect, finds himself accidentally dating a woman and her great-grandmother at the same time. Lean Out, a social thriller where Lupita Nyong’o, an ambitious corporate lawyer, attempts to escape a zombified San Francisco in a dystopian near future where her office pantry runs out of hibiscus Tazo tea. And, finally, closest to the door, A Number’s Game: The Stephanie St. Clair Story, starring Nicole Armor, whose performance as a diner waitress turned industry-leading surgeon in Just What the Doctor Ordered had first inspired little Delali to start acting.
“It’s just through there,” the man said, nodding to the double doors in front of them. “Good luck—I loved you in Georgia, by the way.”
Delali gave him a strained smile, her nerves still threatening to get the best of her, before thanking him and opening the door to the audition room. It was a broad, sparse, carpeted room, resembling the kind of soulless corporate office space Delali hoped she would never have to work in. Four people were seated at a long folding table: a woman and man she assumed were the casting directors; Ruth Bailey, the bookish screenwriter she recognized from the pictures accompanying the initial Deadline press release; and, most frighteningly, Mazy Kutekwa, the offbeat writer-director heading the project. Sit Awhile was her debut feature, but she’d been gathering buzz on the festival circuit for a few years now.
Mazy was a true eccentric—the kind Adrien was playing at but could never really be—from her arugula leaf-print highwater pants and lime green bob to her acid wash jean jacket and red-framed Coke-bottle glasses. Weird artist types like Mazy had always scared Delali and made her feel vaguely inauthentic. Acting wasn’t like, the air she breathed or anything. She mostly thought the work was fun, and the lifestyle it afforded her was even better.
“Delali, hello,” said the casting director sitting furthest to the left. He reached up to smooth his hair, and Delali could hear the crunching of his gelled hair from where she stood. After a quick round of hellos, Mazy merely raising her brows in greeting, there was an awkward stretch of silence. Then Mazy nodded toward a man seated off to the side, who Delali had completely missed upon entering. He must be reading opposite her.
“Please read from page forty-two. We’re ready when you are.”
Delali’s now well-worn copy of the script fell open easily. It was said that Undertow liked to “surprise” actors with auditions scenes, but Lionel had helped her as much as he could, choosing five pivotal scenes to focus on. The one on page forty-two was an interview Hansberry had done with Studs Terkel on A Raisin in the Sun, which Delali had returned to more than any other. She quietly congratulated herself for picking the right one—doing math in a dark room for the rest of her life would be such a waste of her intuition.
“Right, yes,” Delali said. She took a deep breath and adjusted her stance as the actor read Studs’ lines. When he finished, Delali glanced quickly at her script and then began to recite the words she had already memorized. “It’s an excellent question,” she said, modulating her voice to imitate Hansberry’s 1950s Midwestern drawl. She delivered the lines until she got lost in the rhythm of the scene, the pressure she’d been feeling at the base of her neck starting to unwind. She shifted her gaze to steal a glance at the casting directors. They exchanged a quick, pleased look; Ruth nodded every so often, scribbling on the yellow pad on the table in front of her. Only Mazy’s expression was completely unchanged, as stoic as it had been when Delali first walked into the room.
Delali wondered if she could . . . She focused in on Mazy, careful not to trip on her lines, speaking seamlessly as she urged her named power into action. Soon, she felt a tension at the back of her head, like someone was pulling her scalp. Then, a second later, Mazy’s thoughts filtered into her head. Mazy thought the way most people took notes, fragmented and a bit disjointed.
Good voice quality. Actions too small. Expressions veer toward sleepy.
Sleepy?! Delali raised her eyebrows and opened her shoulders. “It seems to me there’s a preoccupation and a sense of guilt for something—that some elements are so afraid of what they feel that they’re already anticipating something that hasn’t been true,” Delali continued. She added a punch to Hansberry’s already haughty delivery, sprinkling in slight gestures as she spoke. “What they’re sensitive about is the material that’s used in it”—here, Delali added a pause that wasn’t in the original recording, luxuriating in the silence before finally continuing—“obviously.”
Delali poked into Mazy’s head again as she recited the final lines of the scene—the second time entering someone’s mind was always so much easier than the first. Better, was all she heard, and Delali gifted herself with a teeny half-second smile before continuing. When the scene was finished, her heart still thrumming with nerves, the casting directors and Ruth thanked her for her audition. Mazy sat silently typing on her phone. Delali was tempted to read her mind again, just to get one final sense of what Mazy had thought of her audition, or to see whether she was amending a ranking in her head. But no need: she could already tell, just from the swooping rush of adrenaline she felt as she left the room and headed toward the exit: she’d killed it.
* * *
Delali was a block away from her apartment when she felt a sudden weight in her bag. She was confused at first, then giddy, unzipping the bag as quickly as her hands would allow her. When she lifted the metric out, it had darkened to a purple that bordered on black, and instead of the static color she was used to seeing, it shimmered and moved, speckles of light dotting around inside. It was no longer the feather-light ball that she’d tossed in her backpack every morning. The orb now sat swollen and heavy, and felt like paperweight in her hand. She pulled out her phone to text the other girls—she was there.