How to Land a Movie Star novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Rooftop

I didn't tell him that night.

I walked into the glass kitchen at six with a bag of tacos I couldn't eat.

He was at the counter reading a script, with a pencil behind his ear.

"Errands," he said.

"Errands."

"Long ones."

"Yes."

He nodded and went back to the page, and the pencil behind his ear made him look briefly like a boy.

At eleven I was still on my bed in the guest room.

I had the voice memo playing, and I kept hearing the editor's cheerful voice.

Someone knocked twice on the door.

"There's a roof," Corin said through the wood. "It has a ladder. I don't know what else to offer."

I opened the door.

He was in a grey henley with the sleeves shoved up his forearms, holding two blankets.

"Is this a ploy?" I asked.

"I don't have ploys. I have a roof."

It was a flat roof with a low wall, reached by an iron ladder at the end of the upstairs hall.

Two folding chairs sat up there facing the canyon.

The whole city lay below us in a spill of orange and white, and the air smelled like eucalyptus and hot stone.

I sat.

He handed me a blanket and sat in the other chair, which creaked under him.

"Why's your head shaved?" I said, because it was the first thing I thought of.

"I did it for a movie six years ago."

"And?"

"I kept it. Fewer people recognize you without hair."

He looked at me sideways.

"Why do you put a pencil in yours?"

"It's a system."

"How many pencils?"

"Two, in an emergency."

"What's the emergency?"

"Auditions. Somebody always needs a pencil."

"You're keeping a pencil in your hair for strangers."

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