Television Romance

Viagra for Rabbits

INT. BACKSTAGE - NIGHT

Make it a good show. No questions asked.

It was the same sentiment that was driving Vian to the brink of losing it backstage on the fourteenth floor.

"Oh my- Holy fuck," Vian muttered. She wasn't the type for swearing, not by any choice but by chance, so her clumsy cursing only occurred in the face of the horrific, which happened to be exactly what she was facing now.

Her sketch, "Viagra for Rabbits," was an infomercial-type, to be performed live rather than pre-recorded, as sketches sometimes were. It involved, among other things, an easel. The easel was about five feet tall and held a thick whiteboard, the kind one might see at a business meeting. On the board was a chart of fake rabbit sex data, complete with axes labeled to show the clear positive correlation between "Rabbit Viagra" and "Bunny Business. The problem was that the board was cracked clean in half as if someone had karate chopped it into two pieces. The truth was much less exciting. Vian had been looking through the props room in anticipation of her first sketch had bumped rather forcefully into the easel on accident. It sent the board flying to its death.

She had tried to slide the pieces together on the easel to hide the rift, but the diagonal slice made each side either top or bottom-heavy and they refused to sit upright for more than a few seconds. She considered tape, but she was relatively confident that would make it worse. Plus, she didn't know where to find any tape. Maybe the Birthday Bad Luck theory had some credence. So she did the only thing she could think of; she raced the stair to the thirteenth floor and into Four.

Juliet was still standing at her desk, picking up pieces of paper one by one, delicately, as if her entire body was tender.

"Juliet, can you help me with something?" Juliet turned to her with a strange expression. She looked like she was seeing someone from her past and trying to force their name to the front of her mind. One hand fiddled with one of the threads hanging off a hole in her ripped blue jeans, which she wore with a leather jacket and boots that made her look like someone off the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. More than anything, though, she looked exhausted. Like she was melting into a worse version of herself.

"Juliet?"

"Ask Rennels."

"But-"

"Sorry. Rennels." And with that Vian sensed that anything further would be fruitless. Juliet went back to picking up her pages. Vian watched her for a moment, smoothed her hair nervously (for herself or Juliet she wasn't sure), and went to find Jerry. If he wasn't in Four, she reasoned, he was probably in Bill's room.

When she arrived there, however, neither Jerry nor Bill was there. Michael sat at his desk eating a sandwich and scrolling through a website. Oh, yeah. She hadn't forgotten Michael and Bill shared a room. Bill evacuated his writing room in favor of his dressing room as soon as the table read was over. She must have looked at least half as bad as Juliet because Michael frowned at her.

"You okay?" he asked, mouth still half-full with sandwhich.

"Do you know where Jerry is?"

"No. Why? You need something?" Vian debated telling him for enough for Michael to swallow and take another bite.

"Don't laugh,'' she instructed. He held his hands up defensively, the sandwich still in his grip.

"I broke a prop." She couldn't meet his eyes so she stared at her shoes. They were black sneakers, shoelaces tied neatly into fraternal bows.

"Okay." She waited for him to say more. He did not. He took another bite.

"Is that all you're going to say?" she hissed. Michael chewed deliberately and swallowed again. God, she could just strangle him and his nonchalant attitude. Couldn't he see that this was urgent?

"Did you talk to props?"

"No." None of the props people were in the room when she had accidentally self-sabotaged. And thank God for that. She would have died of embarrassment. Not that that possibility didn't remain open.

"Why not?"

"I..."

"Because you think they'll yell at you?" Vian almost denied it, but it was so transparently true that she ended up just nodding.

"What prop?"

"The board for my sketch. With the graph."

"Come with me." He stood and stretched his arms above his head before walking out. His muscles flexed obviously under his t-shirt. Vian bit the inside of her cheek and walked after him, feeling a lot like a kindergartener trailing their teacher. They walked into the elevator and stood for a moment. That moment was nerve-wracking for Vian, who on top of everything else, had dangerously low blood sugar and was physically shaking. Michael just ate his sandwich. He finished the last bite as the elevator door slid open with a merry ding. Right foot, left foot, right. Vian wished the backstage hallway would stretch like pulled Play-Doh between them and the props room. She knew this wouldn't happen, but she studied the photos on the walls to give the hall up ahead privacy in case it changed its mind. Michael was in a few, smirking next to other members of the cast.

"You like what you see?" he quipped, noticing her gaze upon the framed photographs.

"How old are these?"

"Not that old. I've only been here three years. That's my first year,"--he pointed to one photo--"second,"--another photo--"and the beginning of this season." He had been the only black cast member of his time, Vian noticed. Diversity reins. And would be still, if Mia hadn't joined this season. She was in the last photo, grinning like a kid at a carnival. Nick wasn't even in that one because he'd only joined last October, after the August season premiere.

"You came in with Jerry and Bill?"

"Yeah," he said lazily, but Vian wondered if it hurt a little that the other two of his class had paired off without him. They kept walking. "Props" read the shiny placard on the door, and props it was. Michael stepped in without knocking.

"Hey, guys," he said, cool as a sundae. Vian walked in after him, a duckling after its mother.

"Hey, Michael," one of the props guys said. He was screwing on the head of a mannequin in a manner that looked rather violent. Vian watched the pale, lifeless head spin around and around with mute horror.

"Hey, I knocked over the board for the rabbit sketch earlier and it broke," Michael said apologetic but perfectly calm. The man stopped twisting the mannequin's head and left it facing sharply over its own left shoulder. He cracked his knuckles and looked up at the two of them, his dirty-blonde hair brushing the tops of his shoulders.

"'Viagra for Rabbits?' Fourth sketch?" he asked.

"That's the one."

"Alright, I'll get to it."

"Thanks, Mark."

"No problem. Hey, next time you see Greg remind him that the stage can only take so much. He just tried to get a herd of elephants up there." Mark went back to making the mannequin recreate a scene from "The Exorcist."

"Sure." Michael herded Vian back into the hallway.

"No way in hell am I telling Greg anything," Michael confided when they were out the door. Everyone at the show, with the exception of maybe Sam, would rather jump from the fourteenth floor than tell Greg how to run his own show.

"Thank you," Vian said.

"No sweat. Try not to break anything else before the show. I'm going to take a nap."