Burbank, California. Marvel's temporary offices.
The building did not look like the headquarters of a company that owned Spider-Man, the Hulk and several hundred other characters. It looked like an insurance agency that had given up. There was a low beige box off a loading lane, a card table in the lobby with a sign-in sheet, a bowl of stale pretzels, and a hand-lettered arrow that read CASTING →, drawn in a hurry by someone who had clearly run out of tape halfway through the sentence.
At the end of the arrow was a waiting room, and the waiting room was full of boys.
Blond boys. Brown-haired boys. Tall boys with square jaws and clean teeth and the kind of relaxed shoulders that came from having never once wondered whether they belonged in a room. A few had mothers with them, perched on molded plastic chairs, holding water bottles and portfolios and the glazed expressions of women who had been up since five. Every boy held the same stapled pages. Every boy wore the same look under his hair, quiet and a little feverish: I was born for this.
Shiv found a spot against the wall beside a rubber plant and sat down. He had a number on a sticker on his shirt, 190, and a plain gray T-shirt under a navy collared jacket Aunt Sunita had pressed twice, because the first time she hadn't liked the sleeve. He had washed his hands three times with the lemon soap, because the smell of mustard oil took a long time to leave the skin.
It was a quarter to one. He had been there since nine, as Matt had insisted. Matt was out in the parking lot, pacing in a rectangle, smoking the one cigarette he allowed himself on days that were going to hurt.
"Is that him?"
"Who?"
"The Indian kid. In the corner."
"Seriously? He's up for Spider-Man?"
The whispering was low, and it wasn't even particularly cruel. It had the offhand quality of people discussing the weather. He had heard worse in both lives. In the first, a department head had once looked at a fresh-faced Jagdish Aggarwal at a faculty meeting and asked if he was there to fix the projector. In this one, a middle-school vice principal had called him "Srivastav Bone-shall" until he gave up correcting it. He knew the specific, casual weight of a stranger deciding who you were before you opened your mouth.
"My dad says it's a publicity stunt," said one of the blond boys, to nobody in particular.
"My mom says Marvel's out of its mind."
"My agent says nobody gets cast off an open call anyway."
"So why are we here?"
"For the sandwiches," said a thin, freckled boy at the end of the row, so dryly that three people laughed. He caught Shiv's eye across the room, shrugged, and held up the stapled sides like a toast. It was a small thing. Shiv nodded back, and was surprised by how much it helped.
He looked at the pages in his lap. He knew them by heart already, which Matt had told him not to do, and which he'd done anyway.
[Host, your heart rate is elevated. Analysis: anxiety.]
I'm fine, he thought.
[You are not. You have been bouncing your left knee for eleven minutes. Activating Veteran Acting Skills (Lv. 5)... complete.]
Something shifted in his chest. It was subtle, like a hand adjusting a dial on an old radio. The tremor in his knee ebbed. His breathing slowed. The room, which had felt a moment ago as loud as a train station, resolved into clean, quiet detail: the squeak of a sneaker on linoleum, the rustle of paper, the smell of the rubber plant and someone's cologne.
And for the first time, he saw the other boys differently.
They weren't rivals. They were performances. He could read the way each one held his script and mouthed his lines under his breath, and he could see, with the cool, unhurried clarity of a man who had spent two decades grading other people's work, what each of them was doing. They were all trying to look like Peter Parker. Cheekbones and posture and a sort of studied vulnerability, borrowed from television.
None of them was trying to be him.
That's the gap, he thought. That's the only gap there is.
The System could steady his hands and keep his voice level. It could not tell him what to feel. That part would have to come from somewhere underneath, from whatever was left in him that was still a boy at an airport with a plastic bag.
"Srivastav Bonshale?" an assistant called, from a door at the end of the hall. She had a clipboard and a headset and a look of controlled exhaustion. "Number one-ninety. You're up."
* * *
The audition room was larger than he had expected and barer than he'd imagined. There was a long folding table, three chairs, a video camera on a tripod, and a strip of masking tape on the floor to mark where you were supposed to stand. There were no spotlights. There was a coffee machine in the corner, gurgling and spitting like an old man.
Three people sat behind the table. In the middle was a tall, pale Englishman in his early forties, with tired eyes and an unbuttoned collar and a mug of tea steaming in front of him. A pair of thin wire-rimmed glasses sat pushed up on his forehead, and he was making notes in a margin with a pencil stub. That was David Yates: quiet, exact, and reputedly very hard to impress.
On his left sat a woman from Sony's casting department, in her forties, with sharp bangs and a notepad. A name card read DENISE MARLOW. On his right, a stocky, square-shouldered man in a Marvel baseball cap was chewing the end of a ballpoint pen as if it owed him money. That was Avi Arad. It was a little unreal, seeing a name he had met on the back of a hundred comics.
"Shiv," Yates said, glancing at the sheet. He pronounced it correctly. "Thank you for waiting. I'm told you've been here since nine."
"It's all right, sir. I read the pages a few times."
"Did you? Good. Whenever you're ready. Denise will read opposite you, and she's an appalling bully, so don't take it personally."
"I'm wonderful at it," said Denise Marlow, in a bored, flat monotone, and a few people in the room smiled.
The scene was simple. Peter Parker, a quiet student, stands in the school corridor. A bully shoves him. His books fall. A girl he likes watches. He gathers himself and says one line.
Shiv stepped onto the tape and stood there for a moment, hands loose.
He thought of the boy in a hostel at NIT who had read comics under a blanket because the electricity kept failing at night. He thought of the nine-year-old at Los Angeles International Airport, holding his uncle's hand and not understanding a single announcement. He thought of every time in two lifetimes that someone had looked at him and quietly decided that he was less.
He did not think about being brave. He thought about being tired of it, which was different, and quieter, and truer.
Then he opened his eyes and the room changed.
"Hey, Parker," said Denise, in the voice of a woman reading a grocery list. She shoved the air with one palm.
Shiv stumbled. It was not dramatic. It was a small, human stumble: shoulders curling inward, a scramble of hands for books that weren't there. He knelt without hurrying, as if the floor were something he'd learned to apologize to. Halfway through collecting them, his eyes flicked up for half a second toward an imaginary girl standing at the end of the hall. In that half-second you could see an entire life: embarrassment, longing, and a stubborn, exhausted refusal to give up the hope that she hadn't noticed.
"...Sorry," he said, softly, with a crack he hadn't planned. "I'm... I'm good. I just tripped."
Nobody spoke.
Avi Arad had stopped chewing his pen. Denise Marlow had lowered hers. David Yates had leaned forward in his chair with both hands flat on the table, and his tired eyes were suddenly very awake.
"That's lovely," he said quietly. "Don't change a thing about the stumble. Can I ask you something?"
"Yes, sir."
"What's in his backpack?"
It was not a question Shiv had prepared for. It was, he realized, exactly the sort of question the whole day had been designed to ask. He didn't reach for a clever answer. He thought of the boy, and the boy's aunt, and what she would have done that morning before school.
"A sandwich," he said. "Peanut butter. She cuts off the crusts, even though he's told her not to. A library book that's two weeks overdue. And a calculator with a cracked screen that he won't replace, because Uncle Ben gave it to him."
Yates held his gaze for a long moment.
"Right," he said. "One more. Same scene. But this time you've just been bitten by the spider. Your senses are overwhelmed. You can hear everything. You can't make it stop."
That's a good note, Shiv thought, with the clean pleasure of a student hearing a problem that had a real solution. He's not asking me to be louder. He's asking me to listen.
The second time, when Denise shoved the air, he didn't stumble.
He went still.
His pupils seemed to shrink. His head tilted a fraction to the left, as though he were listening to something far off that nobody else could hear: a pipe knocking in the wall, the hum of the coffee machine, the tick of a pen in Arad's fingers. A muscle moved in his jaw. His hands curled slowly into his palms, like a man holding back a storm with his fists. When he knelt, he did it in tiny, careful stages, the way you move when you're afraid your own body might break something. And through it all he did not say a word.
When he finally blinked, he came back like a swimmer from deep water, and the whole room let out a breath it hadn't known it was holding.
DING!
[Audition performance rated: A. Congratulations, Host. Try not to let it go to your head.]
[First Impression Bonus: +50 SP. Total: 50 SP.]
For a long moment, nobody said anything. The coffee machine gave one last, wet cough.
Then Avi Arad put his pen down, very slowly, on the table, and said hoarsely: "That's him."
"Avi," Denise Marlow began, with a worried little look at her notes. "We still have ten more boys waiting—"
"I've been reading these books since I was eight years old," Arad said. He didn't take his eyes off Shiv. "I've been in rooms like this for twenty-five years. And that's the first time I've seen him walk in the door. Tag him for the next stage."
"The studio is going to have questions, Avi."
"Let them." He turned his hand over on the table as if he were offering something. "I've got a few of my own."
Yates hadn't moved. He kept looking at Shiv with an odd, searching, almost hungry expression, like a man who had been looking for a wallet in the wrong pocket for three months and had just put his hand on it.
"How old are you?" he said.
"Sixteen, sir."
"And where did you train?"
"I didn't, really." Shiv smiled, a little sheepish, a little caught. "A middle-school talent show. A cereal commercial. A cough-syrup ad. And a lot of watching."
"Watching what?"
"Everything, sir. Mostly people."
Yates was silent for a moment. Then, for the first time that day, a smile broke across his face: slow and lopsided, and visibly unpracticed. It made him look about ten years younger.
"Mr. Bonshale," he said. "We'll be in touch. Thank you for your patience. Please send in the next one."
"Thank you, sir. Ma'am. Mr. Arad." He gave Denise Marlow a small bow, which surprised her, and walked out.
* * *
The door closed behind him.
In the room, Denise Marlow set down her pen.
"I don't want to be the person who says this," she said, "but Sony's going to hate it. He's sixteen. He's got no credits. He's—" she hesitated, and didn't say the word, and all three of them heard her not say it.
"He's what, Denise?" said Yates, mildly.
"He isn't what anybody's going to expect."
"No," Yates said. He picked up his tea, found it cold, and drank it anyway. "That's the first thing I like about him."
Out in the parking lot, Matt Hargrove pitched his cigarette into a storm drain and straightened as if somebody had called him to attention.
"Twelve minutes," he said, in a voice that was almost a whisper. "They give most of the kids three. I was timing it by the wall clock through the window. You were in there for twelve minutes."
"Is that good?"
"I don't know," said Matt, and for the first time since Shiv had met him, he looked every year of forty-three. "I honestly don't know what that is. But I've been in this business for twenty years, and I have never seen them let a kid stay in the chair that long."
Behind them, in the beige building, the assistant with the headset opened the door and said, in a voice that had lost its exhaustion:
"Number one-ninety-one?"
Nobody got up right away. For a whole second, in a waiting room full of boys with square jaws and clean teeth, nobody quite remembered what it was they had come to prove.