Siren Queen(4)

Maya made a face, which did not make it less beautiful. She pointed a red nail at me.

“Well, she’ll do fine, won’t she?”

Jacko looked dubious, and she turned to me. Her eyes weren’t cold at all, they were melting chocolate, and she smiled with the weight of a blessing falling over my shoulders.

“Won’t you, baby?”

“I will,” I said instantly. “What should I do?”

“A real trouper, huh?” said Jacko with a laugh. “All right, we’ll give it a try. What you’re wearing will be good enough, but stash your shoes and socks somewhere.”

The moment she got her way, Maya lost interest in me. An assistant came forward to straighten out the ruffle at the hem of her red dress, kneeling down like a supplicant, and I was left sitting on the curb and carefully untying my shoes and removing my stocks, trying not to stub my feet on the scattered pebbles when I stood up. A nicely dressed woman took pity on me.

“Here, honey,” she said. “We’ll wrap them with paper and put them right here so that you can get them later, all right?”

I’m glad she thought of it. My parents would have skinned me if I came home without my shoes, but I never gave it a second thought.

My dress, which Jacko had declared good enough, was a carefully mended calico that hung limp in the heat. It had been made for an adult woman, and though my mother had sewn in the curves, it still hung on me with an irregular kind of frump.

Orders must have been shouted from somewhere, because an assistant director came up to me, thin as a whip, harried and distracted.

“All right, you start here. When Mrs. Vos Santé says, ‘In all my born days, I never saw the likes of you, Richard,’ you run around the corner. Go up to her and beg for change, all right?”

A shiver of shame went through me at his words. I knew what beggars were, people with desperate eyes and clutching hands, trying to grab for whatever extra bit of life they could squeeze out of the day. I looked down at my dress in confusion, because I couldn’t understand what made it a beggar’s dress, and I could see my bare and dusty feet underneath, stepping on each other shyly now.

The assistant director didn’t wait to see if I understood. Instead he left me on my mark and ran to attend to other matters. Time slowed for a moment, solid like it can get when prep pulls out like taffy.

Then I heard the sharp, dry clack of the clapboard, rendering all else silent, and Jacko called out the magic word.

“Action!”

From my spot on the corner, everything seemed dim even as I strained my ears to hear Maya Vos Santé’s words. She was talking with a man about cruelty and how a woman could expect to find nothing but in a world ruled by men.

The man said something utterly forgettable even in my memory, and Maya Vos Santé laughed. The sound was like drops of cold water running down my spine.

“In all my born days, I never saw the likes of you, Richard.”

My cue, though I didn’t even know to call it that yet.

I ran around the corner, stubbing my heel badly on a rock, but I didn’t even stumble.

The moment I stepped into the camera’s eye, I had entered some kind of magical circle. The air was thicker and somehow clearer, the colors more vibrant than they had been before. I had to stop myself from looking down at my hands, certain that they would be glowing against the umber light.

I stuttered to a stop in front of Maya and the actor. To me, they were both dressed like royalty. My mouth went utterly dry, and there were no words for them. Beg, the assistant director had said, but I didn’t know how to do that.

I swallowed hard. The click in my throat was so loud that it should have been audible on the reel. The actor just frowned, but Maya was looking at me with concern and warmth, her face tilted to one side like a gentle cat’s, so perfect I could have died.

“Please,” I managed, my cupped hand coming up slowly.

“Oh, sweetheart,” said Maya sadly. I thought I had ruined it all, that she was disappointed, and I would be sent away from this magical world. My eyes filled with tears, but then Maya was digging in her enormous black handbag.

“Here, baby,” she said, crouching down to see me almost eye to eye. She pretended to tuck something into my palm, and then she cupped the back of my head with her hand, pulling me forward and pressing a cool kiss to my brow.

“I think you’re the special one, Marie,” said the actor, and Jacko bawled cut.

The air snapped back to normal, so hard that I could barely breathe. For a brief moment, I could truly see, and now someone had come along and slid transparent snake scales over my eyes. Everything looked so shoddy and so dirty that I could have cried.

I heard some muttering from Jacko and the man with the camera, and he looked up, nodding.

“We got it! Set up for scene fifteen.”

Scene fifteen certainly didn’t need me. Maya forgot about me the moment the scene was over, and I was bumped and jostled away from the center of cameras and lights, washing up finally next to the nicely dressed woman who had helped me with my shoes before. I noticed that she wore a silver cuff around her thin wrist, lovely, but so narrow that it could not be removed easily. The word WOLFE was emblazoned on it, and she caught me looking at her curiously.

“I’m under contract at Wolfe,” she said with pride. “Seven years. It means that I can’t take jobs with any of the other big three, and that they’ll have work for me the whole time. I’m not in scene fifteen, but I’m in scenes seventeen and eighteen, which are being shot right after.”