“I’m okay,” I announced as they walked by. “I’ll be fine in a minute.” I prayed Nicole would be home, that she would come. I felt terrible about our fight now. She’d been right; if I’d partied less, listened more in acting class, not faked my way through those boring sensory exercises—felt the cold, tasted the orange—I was a failure, a fraud. I should have never gone into acting. I burst into tears and tried to tell myself that I was not going to be fired and that I was not going insane. After what felt like days, I saw her familiar shape emerge from the darkness of the soundstage.

“Jackie, Jackie,” Nicole clucked. “What have you done?” She held up the vial of pills.

“Hurry,” I muttered and grabbed the Valium, took two, and choked them down. I was still feeling nauseous and prayed the pills wouldn’t come back up.

“My dear, you look like shit.” Nicole moved Lyle’s crossword out of the way and sat down in the seat next to me.

“What do you expect?” I snapped. “I’m sick and I’m having an anxiety attack.” I had meant to be sweet and apologetic, but her patronizing tone made me defensive.

“I meant your hair. Are you playing a country-western singer?” She leaned toward me with a chuckle. “And excuse me but are you wearing blue contacts?”

The groan of the heavy stage door sliding open kept me from answering. Sun poured through the entrance. A cluster of producers and writers were headed my way, stiff smiles on their faces, scripts in their hands.

I turned and waved at them. “It’s nothing. I’m fine, really. Listen, you’d better go.” I turned back to Nicole, but the seat was already empty.

The producing and writing staff engulfed me, making cooing, concerned noises. I tried to rise to greet them, but I was still belted in.

“Now, now, now, what have we here?” Ingrid, one of the writers and a former soap actress herself, bent to rub my shoulders while Josh, a sandy-haired preppie producer tweaked my chin, a move that at any other time I would have hated. Now, I wiggled my head toward him like a needy pup.

“Nerves, cutie,” Josh said.

I smiled up at them through my tears. “I swear this has never happened to me before.”

He nodded sympathetically. “Happens to everybody.”

Suddenly, a shadow descended. The mighty figure of Moira Parent stood, backlit by my eye light. Moira was the creator of Circle, an imposing house of a woman. Square faced, with a salt-and-pepper mane that flowed floors above the rest of her, she kept her massive structure cloaked under loose-woven, fiesta-colored caftans from Putamayo. Silver hoops hung from her ears—dozens more climbed both her arms. I had met her only once at my audition.