I bring the river town dust back to LA on the soles of my boots.
By the time I unlock the front door of the glass house, the sun hangs low over the hills, turning the city below into a smear of gold and gray. The entryway smells like lemon cleaner and stale air; I left the place shut up for three days, and the silence has thickened in the corners. The floor-to-ceiling windows mirror my outline back at me, a ghost with messy hair and a carry-on still dangling from her hand.
I drop the suitcase by the couch, toe off my boots, and pad toward my office. The central air wakes with a low mechanical sigh, cool air sliding along my bare arms. For a second, the hum sounds like Stage 14 on a quiet day—AC and distant generators instead of cicadas and river water.
“Okay,” I tell the empty house. “You asked for the margins. Start here.”
The office door sticks for a heartbeat, then gives, letting me into the one room that never quite matches the magazine-ready rest. Shelves sag with binders and marked-up scripts; one corner hosts a leaning tower of branded gift baskets I never opened. The glass desk is cleared except for my laptop, a half-burned candle that smells like eucalyptus, and a thin layer of dust.
I grab a cardboard box from the hall closet and set it on the floor with a thump. Old contracts and PR one-sheets go in first; glossy photos of my face slide against each other with a faint whisper. The images stare up at me from the pile, smiling on cue, untroubled by smoke or courtrooms.
“You can go,” I tell them, dropping another stack into the box.
A lower file drawer sticks harder than the door did. I tug until something gives with a small tearing sound inside, followed by a muted thunk. When the drawer finally shoots open, the impact rattles my knees.
Inside, a manila envelope lies at an angle across neat rows of labeled folders. The flap gapes where the clasp has ripped the paper. A black title peeks out from the open side, familiar block letters hitting my eyes like a slapped hand.
THE ACTRESS WHO PUSHED.
My throat tightens. I don’t touch it at first. The house stays quiet except for the AC, the faint buzz of the fridge, the distant whoosh of a car climbing the canyon road outside.
“You knew that was in here,” I say.
I don’t mean it as an accusation. More like a reminder. I’m the one who stuffed it into this drawer months ago, hands shaking, right after shooting days that smelled like fake smoke and singed hair. I treated it like cursed evidence—too dangerous to keep on the desk, too loaded to throw away.
I rest my fingertips on the envelope’s edge.
“You went back to the mill,” I murmur. “You can read a script.”
The paper feels dry and slightly rough under my skin, different from the slick glossy pages of studio scripts. I slide it out.
The cover page is the same cheap cardstock, corners bent, coffee ring still ghosted along one edge from the day I first opened it in my trailer. The title shouts up at me in bold, theatrical font, like the author worried I might miss the metaphor. No byline. Just that story they thought they knew, pressed onto paper.
My first impulse is to march out to the kitchen, drop it into the trash, and bury it under coffee grounds and eggshells. Clean break. Clean house.
I don’t move.
Instead, I walk around the desk and sit, the chair’s mesh fabric cool against my back. The city glows through the windows, glass turning the view into a layered reflection of outside and in. I can see my hands on the script and the faint superimposed outline of the mill’s broken windows from my memory, overlapping like a double exposure.
I pull a pen from the ceramic cup by my monitor and flip the script open.
The first page starts with a slug line: INT. ABANDONED MILL – NIGHT. The words hit my stomach like a dull stone. Stage directions spill underneath, written in breathless, portentous present tense.
I read aloud. “A GIRL IN WHITE stands at the top of the staircase, angelic, trembling.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “Angelically trembling,” I repeat, tightening my grip on the pen. “Sure.”
I underline GIRL IN WHITE and scribble in the margin: Costume = innocence shortcut / cliché. Ask why?
The script calls the other character THE ACTRESS, all caps, no name. I remember that detail too; it bothered me even when I still clung to the neat horror of it. THE ACTRESS enters frame, the page says, “with a predator’s slow smile, eyes sharp with calculation.”
“Wow,” I tell the paper. “You’ve met exactly one woman in your life and she was probably your ex.”
The joke bubbles up faster than the dread. I scratch another note by PREDATOR: Whose POV? Production? Media? Self-hating inner monologue?
The lines between the girls—that word again, girls, not workers, not people—sound like they’ve been scraped from every sensational podcast narration written by someone who never had to hit their mark on a wet stair.
“You don’t understand,” GIRL IN WHITE whispers. “I’ll lose everything.”
I circle the line three times. “That’s your problem?” I mutter. “Not the broken bones, the blacklist, the undertow?”
I jot: Fear framed only as career loss. No mention of body, family, money. Convenient.
My heartbeat slows. The initial spike of adrenaline that came with the title has faded into an odd, steady focus. Each overcooked stage direction lands less like an indictment and more like a clue about whoever wrote this. They loved inevitability. They adored the idea that a person like me could only ever make one kind of choice.
I flip ahead, scanning pages. The script takes liberties with the fall: a gust of wind that never blew, a whispered curse that no one said, a glint of glass in THE ACTRESS’s eyes that suggests satisfaction.
“That’s the part you had to invent, huh,” I say softly.
I write: Replaces ambiguity with certainty to protect audience from unease. That unease belongs.
There’s a scene in a fixer’s office long after the accident, compressed into one neat confrontation. THE ACTRESS signs a stack of papers without reading them, ink looping across the page like “blood.” The dialogue paints her as a mastermind, fully informed, thrilled to bury the girl for a career.
I snort. “Yeah, I was a real mastermind at sixteen.”
I yank my pen cap off with my teeth and underline the words “she signs, eager.”
In the margin I print: Eager? Or cornered? Language choice erases power imbalance.
The funhouse-mirror version of me on the page keeps meeting with shadowy executives who speak in villain monologues, sipping whiskey in mahogany dens that look nothing like the cramped conference rooms where lawyers handed me NDAs. The mill morphs into storybook haunted house, complete with ravens on the windowsill and chains hanging artfully from the ceiling.
I tap the pen against the paper. “You needed it to be a morality play,” I tell the empty room. “Good girl versus bad actress. No unions. No underpaid crew. No scared parents. Just tidy archetypes.”
My hand moves automatically: Who disappears from this script? Crew. Families. Stunt coordinator. PA. Everyone who complicates simplicity.
The AC hum deepens, then settles. Outside, the last strip of sunlight slides off the far hills, leaving the house caught between warm interior lamps and the blue-black of coming night. I catch my reflection in the glass again: head bent, shoulders not tensed the way they were the first time I read this.
I flip to the final scene.
On paper, the climax takes place on a set that looks suspiciously like Stage 14. The writer dialed up the drama: sprinklers failing, flames painted in adjectives that belong in a romance novel, not on a call sheet. THE ACTRESS stands in a doorway between two victims: a beloved ingenue and a faceless crew member described only as “EXTRA.”
The stage directions lean hard on destiny.
I read them aloud. “In this moment, there is only one choice she can make.”
“Oh, go screw yourself,” I tell the page.
I slash a line straight through that sentence and scrawl above it: Bullshit. She has dozens of choices. Panic ≠ inevitability.
In the script, THE ACTRESS saves the ingenue, stepping delicately over the crew member’s outstretched hand. The camera lingers on her anguished face as the flames swallow the EXTRA, who never even gets a name. Cut to the present-day interview where she cries under soft lighting, begging the audience to understand.
My stomach rolls; not from guilt this time, but from the manipulative framing.
“I didn’t even do that,” I say. “I didn’t step over anybody. I refused the choice. That was the whole point.”
I press my pen down so hard the nib bites a tiny hole in the paper by EXTRA. Why is this person disposable? Who benefits from this framing? I write. Add their POV or admit you sacrificed them for narrative efficiency.
A laugh escapes my throat, small and surprised. The sound bounces off the glass walls, lighter than anything that’s lived in this room in a long time.
“You really thought you knew me,” I tell the script. “You wrote me into a trap and locked the door, and I walked through a different hallway.”
I lean back, the chair creaking faintly, and tap the pen against my teeth.
I could shred the pages. Burn them like a prop. Post a photo of the ashes and let the internet clap for my symbolism. That would still make this story about me choosing the camera.
A different idea arrives, quiet and persistent.
I flip back to the cover page. Under the bold title, I draw a line and write in capital letters: WRITING EXERCISE: UNRELIABLE NARRATOR / POWER & POV.
“Okay,” I murmur. “Let’s make you useful.”
On the inside of the cover, I start a list.
“Prompt one,” I say as I write. “Pretend every stage direction is written by the character with the most to lose. Who is that, and how does it distort the story?”
Under that, I add a second.
“Prompt two: Rewrite the final scene from the EXTRA’s point of view. Give them a name, a life, rent due, hopes that have nothing to do with the star.”
The pen flows now, ink catching the light.
“Prompt three,” I whisper, “tell the story from the fixer’s POV, but make them sympathetic and limited, not omniscient. What pressures do they face? What lies do they tell themselves to sleep?”
My handwriting gets a little messy with speed, letters leaning into each other. The exercise begins to look like something I would have rolled my eyes at in an acting workshop and secretly needed.
I pause, pen hovering.
“Prompt four,” I say. “Take THE ACTRESS and write three different endings for her. One where she chooses herself first, one where she sacrifices everything, one where she chooses structural change over personal redemption. Compare who gets hurt in each.”
I cap the pen and sit back again, exhaling through my nose.
“You’re giving them homework,” I tell the ceiling. “Look at you.”
A question pulses underneath the amusement: who do I trust with this?
I swivel to the bookshelf and pull down a slim folder labeled FAN / STUDENT MAIL. The edges are worn from the times I’ve opened it and then shoved it back. A few months ago, right after Quinn’s big episode dropped, an email from a state college theater department chairman slipped past my filters, politely asking if they could license scenes from my old series for a devised piece about accountability.
I never answered.
I flip through printed copies until I find it—a short note, earnest and careful, talking about students who want to interrogate celebrity narratives instead of just emulate them. My thumb rests on the letterhead logo.
“You,” I say to the page. “You can have it.”
I boot up my laptop, the fan whirring, screen blasting my eyes with white. I type the department’s address into a sticky note for reference, then shut the lid. No email. No explanation. Just paper to paper.
In the hall closet, I find a padded envelope big enough for the script. Back in the office, I slide the pages inside, the paper rasping softly against the cardboard. I hesitate with the flap open, then pull the pen out again and write on the front in neat block letters:
TO: DRAMA DEPARTMENT, [COLLEGE NAME] FROM: A FORMER UNRELIABLE NARRATOR
I leave off a return address.
“They’ll Google the title,” I say. “They’ll probably figure it out. That’s fine. Let them choose how much they believe.”
The house feels smaller as I walk down the glass corridor toward the front door, envelope tucked under my arm. Outside, the late light has shifted to deep orange, brushing the edges of the succulents by the steps. A warm breeze carries the faint smell of someone grilling two houses down, mixing with the dry scent of dust and jasmine.
I lock the door behind me and head up the hill to the nearest blue postal box. The concrete sidewalk radiates leftover heat through my socks, a sharp contrast to the cold river mud from yesterday still ghosting my muscle memory. A car passes, bass thumping; a jogger with earbuds nods hello without really looking.
At the box, I rest my hand on the cool metal for a second. The slit looks smaller than it did when I was a teenager mailing headshots and handwritten pleas to casting directors.
“New kind of submission,” I tell it. “Less begging. More bait.”
I feed the envelope into the opening. The cardboard catches for a fraction of a second, then slides down with a soft, final thunk. That sound rings louder in my chest than any applause I’ve heard lately.
“Go cause trouble,” I whisper.
On the walk back, the sky thins from orange to purple, city lights flickering on in the basin below like somebody just plugged Los Angeles into an outlet. Through my living room windows, I can see my office light glowing, a rectangle of brightness in the glass and dark.
I stand on the deck for a minute before going in, hands on the railing, the metal warm under my palms. The air tastes clean tonight—no fake smoke, no studio dust, just a hint of smog and whatever passes for fresh in this town.
“You turned the worst story about you into a pop quiz,” I tell the reflection watching me in the glass. “Now what?”
The question hangs between me and the city, unanswered.
Inside, the house waits, quiet and full of unrecorded air. In the office, my mic and headphones sit coiled on the desk where I left them weeks ago. I picture pressing record with no publicist listening, no host prompting me, no audience yet—only my own voice, unedited, speaking into a file that belongs to no one but me.
I leave the deck door unlocked, step back into the cool hum of the house, and walk toward the office, carrying the unsettled, low-grade thrill of knowing that for once, the next script I pick up might be one I write only for myself.