Acting Out [Student/Teacher, GxG]

The Sweetest Poison

I knew it was a bad idea when I did it — I knew, and still, I couldn't resist the temptation. It was something I'd overheard on set a few days before we got off for break. Hushed words whispered between crew members as they risked furtive glances in my direction — 'Do you think it's true? A girl like Rowan... you'd think she'd be smarter than that.' At first I'd assumed they'd somehow figured out about the drugs, which terrified me, but when the second man spoke, it wasn't what I'd expected at all. 'I still think about Eliza Daniels,' He'd sighed, shaking his head, 'Naïve as all Hell, but I guess you'd have to be to get in so deep with someone like her. It's a damn shame what she did to that girl.'

The conversation had continued, and I'd sipped on my coffee, pretending to be engrossed in my book. The words I could pick out drifted over me like a strange dream; Never confirmed, of course, but we all knew,' 'A woman like that is dangerous. You'll never see it coming until it's too late.' 'Poison. Poison with a pretty face. The worst of them are always beautiful, aren't they?' 'That poor Eliza...'

Eliza Daniels. Eliza Daniels. Who was Eliza Daniels?

I stared at the screen of my laptop, willing my mind to process what I was reading. I'd typed in the name that had haunted my thoughts over the past week, and part of me had been afraid. Maybe I didn't want to know. I trusted Claire, but the looks they'd been giving me were those of pity — as if I were some feeble child lost deep in the woods, ripe and ready to be snatched up by the Big Bad Wolf.

Not much had come up when I'd searched her name — just an IMDb page and a few gossip articles from late 2010. I clicked on the IMDb page first, greeted by a photo of a young girl with striking blue eyes, long strawberry blonde hair, and a shy smile. Her freckled face was youthful and betrayed a delicate innocence. According to the page, she was born June 2nd, 1990, which would've made her twenty-seven, but she couldn't have been more than twenty in the headshot I was looking at. 

Scrolling down, I discovered that she only had one film under her belt  — 'The Sweetest Poison' — and It was listed as unfinished. The link brought me to a page that was nearly empty, save for a cast list, and my brow furrowed in confusion. There was Eliza's name at the top, and below her was Claire Lane, followed by a few more names I recognized. The entire cast, besides Eliza herself, were A and B-List actors. It didn't make sense that a movie with that much star power hadn't made it past principal photography. The tagline caught my attention — "A Vegas runaway gets more than she bargained for when she's taken in by a mysterious Entrepreneur and his abstruse young wife."

I quickly opened a new tab and searched 'The Sweetest Poison 2010', clicking on the first result. The page was titled 'The Disappearance of Eliza Daniels and 'The Sweetest Poison'' and seemed to be a forum of some sort, with ten pages of theories regarding the movie's downfall. From what I could gather, it was supposed to be Eliza's breakout role — plucking her from obscurity into stardom, but filming had commenced two weeks before Wrap, and unnamed 'insiders' claimed that the reason that filming had come to such an abrupt halt so close to completion was that Eliza had been hospitalized. There were no conclusive answers as to the cause of her hospitalization — some speculated that she'd slit her wrists, others that she'd drank bleach at a party. When I finally got to the first post on the page, dated back to December 2010, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. 

The details were vague, as if written by someone who really didn't want to be tied to this particular story, but the five paragraph long post explained that Eliza had 'issues' long before she got involved with the film, but that it had all come to a head at a party thrown by Claire and her boyfriend. According to the source, Eliza and Claire had left the party, and Eliza had come running down the stairs alone in tears, straight to the kitchen, where she grabbed a bottle of Clorox and guzzled it. Someone had been in the kitchen, pouring a drink at the time, and was able to grab it from her and call Poison Control and an ambulance, and, though 'a close friend' had told them that she'd survived with minimal damage, she was in a Psychiatric Hospital for close to a year and never returned to acting. Unlike other posts, this one was adamant that Claire had nothing to do with it — Eliza was a ticking time bomb with scars on her wrists and a troubled look in her eyes that no amount of money or success could ever rectify. It was only a matter of time, they'd alleged, everyone knew it was bound to happen. The 'close friend' had also told them that she hoped Claire didn't blame herself, because, in the end, it wasn't her fault.