Chapter 13: The Door He Left Open

The Door He Left Open

The lot was half asleep when Halliday got there. The lights over the stage were at half, the coffee urn in the hall hadn’t been touched, and the only people in were the ones whose day started before everyone else’s.

He was early on purpose.

The makeup artist had her kit open before he finished sitting down. Nobody had told the crew anything except that the shoot had stopped, so she talked about it the whole time she was laying down his base.

“Such a waste,” she said. “I did your eyes yesterday and we got half a day out of it. Half a day. I’ve been mad about it since last night.”

“Then do it better today,” Halliday said. “I’ll keep it on longer.”

She went red to the ears. “Okay. Okay, yeah. I’ll do something better.”

One person was easier to sit in front of than a room.

Owen came in with an iced coffee and set it down by the mirror. The internet said iced coffee was what you drank when your face puffed up overnight; Halliday’s hadn’t, on account of being awake since five, but he drank it anyway, and Owen looked pleased.

Then Owen got bored. He took out his phone, typed Halliday’s name into the search bar, and scrolled. He scrolled back up and did it again, as if the first pass had to be wrong.

“Your mentions are so quiet,” he said.

“Quiet’s the word.”

“No, I mean good quiet. I went three pages before I found anything mean, and the mean one was a bot selling something.” He held the phone up like evidence. “You’ve got a clean tag. That doesn’t happen to people. Most of them haven’t seen you in anything. They just like the way you look.”

“Perk of being nobody.”

Owen laughed. The makeup artist laughed too. She had two fingers under his chin and the brush going, and was doing a professional job of not being charmed.

“You’re going to get one, though,” she said. “A name. It happens to everybody who works with Mr. Calloway. I’ve watched it happen. He’s got that thing where people just start paying attention.”

“He’s got a lot of things,” Owen said. He’d been singing one of the songs under his breath all morning, off and on. “Do you know how many of his songs I can do front to back? All of them. I’m not kidding. All of them.”

“I’m aware,” Halliday said.

“The only two people he’s got on this single are you and Sloane Adler,” the artist said. “She signed something big last week. Everybody was waiting to see who’d get it, and it was her. So.”

Halliday kept his eyes shut. “Him and Adler. Are they—“

“No. No, no, no.” She sounded delighted to be asked. “That’s message board stuff. They’ve done two songs together. That’s the whole thing.”

“People need something to do,” Owen said.

“People need something to do,” she agreed. She changed brushes. “But honestly? I don’t know who could actually date him. I’d fall apart. You’d spend the whole time wondering what he was even looking at.”

“Why would that be bad?” Owen said. “Think about it. Your boyfriend’s Rhys Calloway.” He went hunting for the end of that sentence and came up empty. “I’m just saying. It’d be great.”

“Owen,” Halliday said. “I had no idea you felt that way about him.”

Owen told him to shut up, and the two of them were laughing hard enough that she had to wait to finish the liner.

“You boys don’t get it,” she said, once she could. “He’s so far out in front of everybody. With a man like that you would never feel safe.”

She leaned back to check her work.

“Doesn’t stop me, though,” she said. “I’m saying it out loud so you know it’s not only me.”

Owen laughed again. Halliday was still smiling when the knock came.

Doyle came in and looked at the two of them, then at the kit, then at the mirror.

“Everybody out for a minute,” he said. “Halliday and I are going over today.”

The artist capped her brush and started packing. Owen didn’t move.

Halliday looked at himself in the mirror and got his face back in order.

“It’s fine,” he said. “Owen, go ahead.”

“But—“

“Go on. The director wants to talk to me.”

Owen went. In the doorway he hesitated, then pulled the door to without letting the latch catch — left it a couple of inches off the frame. He stood in the hall a second after that, listening, got nothing, and went off toward the stage.

Doyle didn’t take the stool by the mirror. He took the chair against the wall — the one with a back on it, the one that complained — and dragged it across the tile, unhurried, the whole length of the room. He set it down behind the stool, facing the glass, so that both of them were in the mirror. Then he sat.