Tyler Chen was twenty years old and knew three things for sure: that aisle seven of the store—cables, adapters, nothing anyone ever bought with a smile—was going to take up the next six hours of his life; that he hadn't had a single callback in over a hundred days before this one; and that the envy toward someone you truly care about doesn't resemble anything like how they portray it in the movies.
The routine hadn't changed in a year and a half. He would wake up, check Actors Access before brushing his teeth, memorize script pages in the car between traffic lights, put on the same gray blazer that already had shiny elbows from so much use, and wait in rooms with folding chairs alongside twenty other guys who looked more like him than he would have liked to admit.
Sometimes I managed to read the entire scene. Sometimes not even that: "Thank you, this is enough for us" before finishing the first sentence.
They never called back.
A boy of about fourteen, there with his father to buy headphones, saw the script pages peeking out from the side pocket of his backpack, under the counter.
"Are you an actor?" he asked, with that unfiltered curiosity that only teenagers have.
"I'm on it," said Tyler.
—Were you involved in something I know about?
—Not yet.
The boy nodded, already losing interest, and walked over to the row of televisions. Tyler stood there for another second, his hand still resting on the pocket of his backpack, before someone else approached the counter asking for help with a printer.
Except that this time it was different.
The email arrived on a Tuesday, two days after Adrian left for New York, while Tyler was on his knees restocking chargers. Subject: CALLBACK — Recurring Role, Series Pilot (confidential project). He read it three times before believing it said what it said.
He locked himself in the storage room under the pretext of counting inventory and called his mother before anyone else.
—Mom. Mom, you're not going to believe this.
—What happened? Are you okay? —The sound of a frying pan falling into the sink was heard.
—I have a callback. A real callback.
There was a silence. Then, a scream so high-pitched that Tyler had to pull the phone away from his ear, followed by a laugh that sounded almost like crying.
—I knew it! I knew something like this was going to happen to you! —He had never said it, not once in three years, but Tyler wasn't going to argue about it that afternoon—. Tell me everything. When? What is it for?
—I still don't know much, Mom.
—I'm going to write to your Aunt Grace now.
—Don't tell anyone yet!
—I already wrote to him.
He wrote to Adrian that same nite, knowing that it was already late in New York and that he probably wouldn't see the message until the next day.
Tyler: I have a callback. really. it's not just another audition, it's a CALLBACK
Tyler: I can't sleep
Tyler: Have you ever felt this before a big shot? Like your stomach doesn't know whether to vomit or do a somersault.
Adrian replied the next morning, terse as always.
Adrian: You are going to be fine. You're going to be fine. Prepare as if you already have it. That's the only thing you can control.
It wasn't much. But Tyler read it five times before putting the phone away, and for the next three days, he repeated it like a mantra every time his hands started to tremble while rehearsing in front of the bathroom mirror.
The callback was in the afternoon, in an office building in Burbank that smelled of new carpet and old ambition. This time there weren't twenty competitors: there were four, all with the same manila envelope under their arm.
When they called him, Tyler walked in, said his name, said he still didn't have a representative —that part still cost him to say without his voice cracking a bit— and read the scene.
It went well. Better than good. He felt, for the first time in months, that rare moment when he stopped feeling like an actor reciting lines and began to feel just the scene, nothing more, without any Tyler observing himself from the outside.
The casting director smiled in the end. A genuine smile, not the polite one that she had learned to distinguish after three years of auditions.
"That was very good," he said. We will keep you in mind.
He floated out of the building. She called her mother from the parking lot, and once again she had to pull the phone away from her ear. He sent Adrian a thirty-second audio, something he almost never did, just so his voice could be heard.
He spent the following week checking the mail every twenty minutes.
A week went by. After two.
They didn't call. It wasn't an email saying no, which, Tyler was beginning to understand, was worse than a no. A no has an edge. It gets filed away, you cry for a while, and at some point, it becomes the past. This was not that. This was an unanswered thread, technically still open, technically still possible, until it stopped making sense to review it without it still hurting not to review it.
He kept going to other auditions in the meantime, because stopping felt like admitting something he wasn't ready to admit. One for a commercial for a regional insurance company. One for a university short film that paid in "exposure" and a copy of the final video. An open audition for a community musical in Pasadena that I didn't even need.
At nite, after closing, he would sit in his car in the empty parking lot before driving home—a habit he would never confess to anyone—and check the Instagram he had set up for Adrian a year and a half ago.
Three new photos from New York. A blurry silhouette on a nighttime set, the caption simply: "working." Comments piling up, people I didn't even know asking if it was really John Wick 3, if I could give spoilers, if I was single.
It had all been his idea. His insistence. And now he found himself scrolling down his own idea, with his thumb hovering over a photo that wasn't his, feeling something he didn't want to name.
It wasn't that I wanted things to go worse for Adrian. Not for a second did he want that. Adrian was his brother, the one who returned his calls, the one who remembered things Tyler said almost jokingly three months ago. Loving him well was never the problem.
The problem was simpler and uglier: he wanted, for himself, a fraction of what Adrian had. And he couldn't get it. And he didn't know if he would ever achieve it. And he hated, with an intensity that embarrassed him, being the kind of person capable of feeling both things at the same time.
Wednesday, May 30th was the worst day.
She saw the casting call announced that afternoon, posted by the producer on their account: the name of the role for which she had done the callback, and another name—not hers—next to it. Someone with a real resume. A real agent. There was no rejection email. Just that: the public confirmation of a silence that had already lasted three weeks.
That same afternoon, his manager called him to the back office to tell him that he had been "distracted" lately and needed to "improve his attitude."
Tyler said yes to everything. That he was right. That it was going to get better.
He didn't say: I was one email away from changing my entire life, and I lost by a margin I will never be able to measure.
He finished his shift folding cardboard boxes in the stockroom, alone, with the store's radio playing something he didn't recognize, and for the first time in a long time, he didn't feel like joking about anything.
He got home past ten. He threw himself on the bed without changing out of his store clothes.
At one twenty-five in the morning—Los Angeles time; in New York, where Adrian was still awake under artificial rain, filming something Tyler couldn't even ask what it was about—the phone vibrated on the nightstand.
Adrian: We're done. We're done. All good.
Tyler looked at it for a long time before opening it completely.
It was the same message, word for word, that he had probably sent to Sophie. To Rebecca. To anyone. Three economical, precise words, the way Adrian had always spoken, even before he learned to feel things. Tyler knew it. It wasn't personal. It never was, with Adrian, and that was precisely what made him feel loved in a strange way: that he didn't even try to sound warm and yet, somehow, he managed to do so.
But that nite, for the first time, Tyler wanted something more than the usual three words.
He opened the conversation and started writing.
I'm not well.
He deleted it.
Today was a horrible day, I lost the paper, my boss hates me, and I don't know how much longer I can keep doing this without feeling like I'm wasting my life.
He deleted it too, letter by letter, watching each word disappear as if that made them a little less true.
He kept watching the cursor blink.
Then he wrote what he always wrote.
Tyler: How's the fight against Keanu going? Haha, tell him I send my regards again, I know you won't do it.
He sent it before he could change his mind.
He lay there with the phone on his chest, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the three dots that probably wouldn't appear until morning.
They didn't show up.
The ceiling of his room had a damp stain in the left corner that had been there since he moved in, with a shape that sometimes looked like a dog and other times didn't look like anything. That nite it didn't look like anything.
He thot about calling his mother. He decided not to. He had already gotten her hopes up so much with the callback that he didn't feel capable of being the one to tell her that, in the end, nothing had happened. He preferred that she found out later, when it wouldn't hurt so much to say it out loud.
He thot about writing to someone from high school. He decided not to.
He stayed there, with the store clothes still on, the badge crooked over his chest, and let the silence of the room do what it used to do when no one else was watching.
He didn't cry, exactly. It was more like staying very still for a long time, breathing slowly, as if moving too quickly would break something that was barely holding together.
"You can do it, Tyler," he said softly to the empty room.
It sounded ridiculous as soon as he said it. He said it again anyway.
—Don't fall. Don't fall. This is just a difficult moment.
He didn't know if he believed it. He repeated it a third time, quieter, almost a whisper, until the words stopped meaning anything and became just a rhythm, something to hold onto as the rest of the nite passed.
He didn't fall asleep. But at some point after three, he stopped counting the minutes.
For that nite, it had to be enough.