Free June by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore Page A

Apatha, remembering what her father had told her before he’d redeployed, when she’d come in to his carpentry workshop and begged him not to leave, not again. “When something seems impossible, find a part deep down inside yourself that’s strong,” he’d said, wrapping his large hand around June’s, then tightening his grip. “Clench it, like a fist.” It had hurt, to feel him squeezing her fist so tightly inside his own. But she had understood.

The movie people were strangers, but Lindie didn’t need to know their names. They fit together like gears; it was plain to see that if any of the pieces of the mechanism malfunctioned, it could be replaced with a die-cut replica. The camera operator operated the camera, and the costume department sewed the ladies into their long, bustled dresses, and the cinematographer was the man with the small telescopey thing in front of his right eye. The studio had even brought along a fellow whose sole job was to wrangle the ogling crowd; most St. Judians between the ages of one and a hundred had come to watch the show. Lindie had never taken crowd control to be a skill until she watched this man handing out flyers that called for more extras in the days ahead; then, just as a wave of excited whispers threatened to crest over the relative quiet, he hushed the onlookers with one Svengali-like look, and she understood he was a master of his profession.
    There were plenty of job-related nicknames—Scripty or the “script girl” was not a girl at all but a bookish-looking woman who noted every alteration to the script with the pencil that was otherwise tucked behind her petite ear, Crafty was where the crew got their meals, and P.A. stood for production assistant, which was a glorified name for the person who could, and would, be asked, at a moment’s notice, to count two thousand silk buttons out for a seamstress, or move ten crates of apples a half dozen times until the director and the production designer agreed on their placement in the background, or make sure the flowers for the leading lady’s dressing room were delivered at 10:00 a.m. on the dot. In short, a P.A.’s work was exhausting, thankless, and underpaid, and Lindie loved every second.
    Casey was in charge of the P.A.’s. That first day there were four of them, and Lindie was the only child, only local, and only girl. She certainly hadn’t appreciated how influential that letter from Alan Shields had been; once she handed Mr. Shields’s letter over to Casey, he’d reluctantly told her to go tell the horse and wagon that it needed to move to the other side of the square in order to be in the shot. Casey was youngish—couldn’t have been but a few years beyond June—but just as mirthless. He wore brassy wire-rim glasses and a grave expression, and, if he didn’t see you running, he was glad to remind you how replaceable you were.
    Lindie was happy to ask how high when Casey said jump. In her first hour on set, she ran two messages to the lighting crew, took a note from craft services up to Illy’s restaurant indicating they’d be in need of a case of Coca-Cola come noon, discovered she didn’t have authority to deliver that letter, went back to Illy’s to tell them to forget it, returned to set to discover that Crafty did, in fact, need a case of Coca-Cola after all, and could she also ask Illy’s for some 7UP, and went back to Illy’s to reconfirm that she’d be back at 11:30 to somehow shoulder two cases of glass-bottled soda back to set on her ninety-pound frame. Then she jogged down to the Memorial High gymnasium before anyone asked for Dr Pepper.
    The vast room with the shiny wood floors was just as hot and loud as it was in the winter months, when it was jammed with the sweaty basketball team and the hollering cheerleaders. Dresses, shoes, racks of hats, and a dozen members of the costume department, pincushions tied to their wrists, filled the floor. Someone had dragged the lunch tables into the