Opening night and, as soon as they could get Leontes’s detachable sleeves Velcroed on—the adhesive tape was moist and mucky in the record June heat, not sticking to the tunic—the show would begin. The sun had risen each day that week angry and blinking, baking the asphalt. Alice, sweltering, was tucked away backstage, hidden in the narrow wings.

Sadie had once observed that Alice’s favorite part of acting was disappearing. Alice couldn’t deny this was true. This may have been why she loved coming in with clean hair and knowing someone else would take care of the rest. She would be provided the exact words to speak, down to the punctuation, and directed where to stand. Told which shoes to wear to become queen of Sicily. Alice liked to place herself in others’ hands. She liked how easy it was to slip into another life.

And slip into another life she had. A year and a half ago, ditching the Bay Area—and her family, and her best friend—for Hollywood, to pursue stardust dreams she was scarcely sure she had.

It had all started in second grade, when Alice had auditioned for the school play, Under the Sea, and landed a role! She’d played a cold-water sea urchin who lived in the Shallows, the underworld of King Neptune’s marvelous kingdom. It was considered an undesirable bit part. Alice couldn’t sit down or pee. All the classmates, mermaids and starfish, shunned the monstrous urchin. Alice had one line she did not understand, about being turned into uni. Still, having been cast, in a role, to her, life could not be improved upon.

Now, in L.A., things were more complicated. Staring down the nothing, the zero, the black hole, the unmanifest, the 100-percent-pure potential, the no-thing. Submitting headshots online, not even landing auditions.