Fuck, he should try to stop thinking about Fiona.
He runs through his lines, irons his button-down. Messes with his hair for a while. There’s a tiny part of him that worries it’s thinning, even though he’s only thirty-one. “Hi,” he says once he’s finally satisfied, smiling his most charismatic smile into the mirror and hoping the casting director is more taken with him than some other people he could name. “I’m Sam Fox.”
The audition goes decently, he thinks, though even after all this time he can still never really tell what they’re thinking back there behind the folding table. He’s hopeful, at least. He texts Erin from the car when he’s finished to see if she wants to meet at their usual place and get drinks.
Can’t, she texts back. Dinner with hipster glasses girl.
Sam sends her a series of crass emojis meant to communicate Hope you get laid, trying to ignore his own weird, sudden pang of loneliness. After all, if he really wanted company, there are at least a dozen other people he could text. But the thing about a lot of his friends here is that Sam knows they’re going to want to talk about work—who booked what or what he’s going to do now that the show is canceled—and he doesn’t want to do that tonight.
He thinks about Fiona again, but that feels like a dangerous road to wander down, so instead he drinks two beers and watches some porn and passes out on the couch in his living room. When he wakes up, his phone is buzzing on the cushion beside his face, a picture of his brother Adam wearing a cheese hat displayed on the screen. The home page of the porn site is still up on his computer, a pop-up ad for some disconcerting animated game playing over and over.
“Did I wake you up?” Adam asks, when he answers. “It sounds like I woke you up.”
“What?” Sam blinks, watching the cartoon boobs bounce for a moment without entirely meaning to. He shuts the screen of his laptop, then slides the whole operation under the couch. “No.”
Adam doesn’t buy it. “Isn’t it like, seven p.m. there?”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“Okay,” Adam says. “Sorry again about your show, man.”
“It’s no big deal,” Sam says automatically. Part of being the one who got out of their hometown means it’s his job not to complain about his life here, to pretend that it’s all industry parties and movie premieres and sticking his hands in the prints outside the Chinese Theatre. He doesn’t tell his mom and brother about the directors who never follow up, or the Thanksgiving he spent eating Indian takeout by himself because Erin flew home to Corpus Christi and he was too proud to go to Russ’s house. He definitely doesn’t tell them about his credit card bills.
“You okay for money?” Adam asks now.
“I—what?” It takes Sam a second to realize he’s asking because of the show getting canceled and not because he somehow read Sam’s mind or saw his bank statement. “Yeah, of course.” He clears his throat, rubbing a hand over his nap-dazed face. “How did it go today?”
“Fine,” Adam reports. “Although Benson just left to go work in computer crimes because things were getting too complicated between her and Stabler.”
“Well, shit,” Sam says. His mom and brother are working their way through all seventy-nine seasons of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit while nurses drip poison into her veins with the intention of shrinking her tumor enough for her to have surgery. It makes Sam feel like he can’t breathe when he thinks about it, so he tries not to, although more often than he’d like to admit he wakes up sweating through his sheets in the middle of the night, promising himself he’s going to be a better son in the morning. “You think she’ll come back?”
“You know,” Adam says, “somehow I do.”
Sam hauls himself up off the couch, filling a glass of water at the tap to wash the beer and sleep taste out of his mouth. “Speaking of comebacks,” he says, “did I tell you they’re going to reboot Birds?”
“Yeah, I got your text,” Adam says. “It’s a sure thing?”
“Well, no, not exactly,” Sam admits. “I guess they’re still waiting for Fiona to sign on the dotted line, or whatever.”
“Oh, man,” Adam says, and Sam can hear the grin in his voice. “Fiona St. James. I haven’t thought about her since she did that photo shoot with the crocodile.”
Sam drains his water in one long gulp. “I think it was a Gila monster.”
“You’d know better than me, dude.” Adam laughs.
Sam frowns. “What does that mean?”
“I mean, you’re the one who knew her. And you guys had a little thing, didn’t you?”
“Uh, nope,” Sam says immediately. He has no idea why Adam thinks that. Shit, do other people think that? Does he have that reputation in this town, as one of the million quasi-famous dudes Fiona St. James boned on her Oregon Trail through the tabloids? “We definitely didn’t.”
Adam, for his part, seems utterly unconcerned. “That was a great poster,” he muses. “My friend Kyle had it on his wall in high school, and all of us used to take turns—”
“Okay.” Sam winces. “I get the idea.” He bought the magazine in print back when it came out—everybody bought the magazine, even though the pictures are still, to the best of his knowledge, the first thing that comes up if you google Fiona’s name—but it makes him feel vaguely ashamed now in a way he doesn’t want to examine too closely. After all, it’s not Sam’s fault she completely lost her marbles and posed more or less naked with a bunch of reptiles.
“Anyway, it’s probably not even going to happen,” he says now, rubbing at the back of his head. He feels hungover, even though he didn’t actually drink that much before he fell asleep. “The reboot, I mean.” He doesn’t know why he’s telling this to Adam—they’re not that close—except that for some reason he kind of wants to talk about Fiona a little more. “I went to see her, talked to her about it. She didn’t want anything to do with me.”
“Huh,” Adam says. “Well, you probably dodged a bullet, right?”
“Yeah,” Sam agrees, only it doesn’t feel like he did, exactly. In fact, it kind of feels like he went in for a part he wanted and whiffed. “Probably.”
He hangs up with his brother and gets another beer out of the refrigerator. He pulls up YouTube on his phone. He types Fiona’s name into the search bar and is immediately presented with a list of public embarrassments so long and eclectic it makes the menu at the Cheesecake Factory look like an exercise in restraint:
Fiona St. James berates photographers outside hotel in Santa Monica
Fiona St. James shoplifting security footage
Fiona St. James drunk on Ellen （full interview）
Sam hesitates for a moment, his thumb hovering over the screen:
UNCENSORED Fiona St. James flashes paps from moving car!!!
Then he tosses the phone on the couch, which is where it stays until it buzzes a little while later with a text from Russ. Looks like the newlywed folx are going in a different direction, he reports. We’ll get ’em next time!