“Tomorrow,” she called out as Scarlett departed. “Great things, O’Hara!”

Scarlett was understandably nerve-rattled when she got upstairs. Spencer’s door was open. He had his headphones on and was “cleaning,” which meant he was dumping the contents of boxes onto his bed. The one he was currently working on contained tubes and pots of well-used makeup, fake body hair and skin, and lots of crumpled script pages.

“Trying to find a blood pack,” he explained, when he noticed Scarlett had appeared in his doorway. “Eric and I have been thinking about doing a thing where one of us stabs the other by accident during one of the scenes. We want to run it by Trevor, but it won’t look good unless I bleed. I have about seven of them in here somewhere…Marlene said you brought Eric along to some party she was at tonight.”

He tacked that on to the end very casually while plucking three noses out of the mess and piling them on his pillow. Scarlett spoke fluent Spencer, though, and knew that this was not just a random remark.

“Just for backup,” she said. “It was free food. At the Hard Rock. I would have taken you, but you had gone to work.”

“The Hard Rock?” he repeated. “Why do they always pick janky places?”

The matter had clearly made his radar, but he said no more about it. He continued picking through the debris until he produced a small plastic bag of dark red liquid.

“Here we go,” he said. “I’m thinking stomach. It’s really easy to puncture the bag there and get the blood all over the place.”

He pulled up his T-shirt and started poking around his abdomen for possible locations for his wound.

“Mrs. Amberson needs you,” she said.

He straightened up, a little too quickly.

“Service?” he asked. “I love to give service.”

She narrowed her eyes.

“What?” he asked, all innocence. He jumped up, fished a deodorant from under a stack of clothes, shoved it under his shirt, and applied it liberally. “I am a Martin. Hotel management is in my blood, and customer satisfaction is my life.”

“Every time you flirt with her,” Scarlett said, “a puppy dies.”

PERFORMANCE

The Heart of the Angel (now Empire) was about as generic a cop show as you could possibly want. There was a cop with a dark past, fighting crime in the big city. The scene they had was about a teenager who’d been sexually attacked on a date and was refusing to press charges against her former boyfriend. The Donna character, formerly called “Mike Charlane” (renamed Alice by Mrs. Amberson) was screaming at this poor girl like a maniac, trying to get her to step up and “get some justice,” “fight for justice,” “speak for justice,” and (Scarlett’s personal favorite) “be the covergirl of justice.”

Though Mrs. Amberson hadn’t asked her to, Scarlett took the liberty of improving the scene a little, going beyond the basic guy-to-girl, LA-to-New York changes that Mrs. Amberson had penciled in. Scarlett rewrote the bad speeches, tweaked the dialogue, added a bit to the end of the scene. She was surprised to see the sun coming up outside the Jazz Suite window by the time she finished. As she walked back to her room, she startled Spencer, who was on his way to take a shower.