Free Can I See Your I. D.? by Chris Barton

Sexton became your manager. You also married the guy. He wasn’t a big name, but then, neither were you—maybe you’d get to the top together. And by last year, you each had some ideas about how to make that happen.
    It was one thing to still be getting teenage roles in your thirties. It was another to be getting crappy teenage roles, these insulting, one-dimensional parts. You were a serious actor, and you needed better scripts, and if nobody out there was going to offer them to you, you would just have to write them yourself. You’d never done that before, but you knew you could figure out how. So you added another hyphen and became an actor-singer-writer.
    Nobody cares, really, how old a screenwriter is. Being thirty-one as a writer would be no big deal. But you couldn’t be a thirty-one-year-old writer and be an actor young enough to land the teenage parts you’d be writing for yourself. You needed one identity for both of those facets of your career.
    Since someone might notice that “Kimberlee Kramer” had been playing teenagers for a decade already, Brad persuaded you that this single identity should be a new one. Actors change their names all the time—again, no big deal. Except for one thing: Your new legal name, Riley Weston, would come with a fake I.D. showing that you were a teenager. Having a phony I.D. was not so normal. That was a little unusual, actually.
    But you tried it, and you wrote and wrote and wrote some more. For a long time, you didn’t do much else, and you came up with a really good spec script for the pilot episode of a TV drama. You called it Holliman’s Way , and it’s about these three teenage sisters, and Brad sent it to this producer who really liked it and wanted to meet with you. He didn’t even know how old you were supposed to be—he just liked your writing.
    At this meeting, the producer didn’t want to talk just about Holliman’s Way —he wanted to talk about you , and your background, and how this tiny eighteen-year-old actress with no credits to her name came to be sitting in a Hollywood producer’s office discussing her script. Kimberlee Kramer’s story wouldn’t do, of course—Riley Weston needed one of her own. So you told him you’d been homeschooled, and that your mom had brought you out here, that you’d arrived a couple of years ago, when you were sixteen.
    Things started happening fast. That producer sent your script to a director, and he liked it too—he didn’t know your age either—but that turned out to be a dead end. Brad kept shopping Holliman’s Way around, though, and this huge talent agency signed you up. And this past spring, they got you a six-month, $60,000 contract as a writer for a new TV series that would debut in the fall.
    Felicity .
    You were perfect for it—the main character is this girl Felicity who’s just going off to college, so having an eighteen-year-old writer on the staff made total sense. The other writers were all older than that. Even the star was already in her twenties. The two guys who created the show were about the same age as you—the same age you really are. Everybody working on the scripts had a lot more writing experience than you, but while sometimes you felt like you were just along for the ride, they turned to you for help in getting the characters’ late-adolescent voices right.
    You had to keep in mind that as far as they knew, you actually were an eighteen-year-old—and a fairly naive one at that. You needed to act the part—bringing in stuffed animals for your office, hanging up a Titanic poster, talking about boys. Everyone on the show threw a big party for you right there on the set for your nineteenth birthday.
    Playing that role all day long month after month was exhausting. They all knew that what you most wanted to do was act, but they had no idea how much acting you were already doing.
    The show