“A fourth stunt trainer guy. He’s coming in later.”
Trudy, Leah, and Jamie all came to a stop midstride and looked at Michele. “How do you know? And why isn’t he already here?” Trudy demanded. “We deserve to have all of them present and accounted for so we can make a fair comparison of who is the hottest.”
“I don’t know why he isn’t here,” Michele said, and glanced over her shoulder, as if anyone could possibly hear her in the din two dozen female voices created in the gym. “But apparently, he’s a real player. I heard it from one of the Serious Actresses—seems like a bunch of them know him. Some of them have dated him, too. And get a load of this—they call him the Extreme Bachelor. Isn’t that hilarious?”
“Why?” Trudy asked.
“Because he’s a serial dater. A luuuv-ah,” she added dramatically, making full use of her lips.
“When’s he coming?” Trudy asked. “I want to see this luuuv-ah.”
“Later is all I heard,” Michele shrugged. “But I’ll get some intel this afternoon,” she added with a wink. “I promised Katherine Hepburn over there that I would run lines with her.”
The four of them glanced at the Serious Actress who they had dubbed Katherine Hepburn, based on her intensity (extreme) and the fact that she studied her script all the time.
“Ladies, please split up into your armies,” Eli was begging. “East on the left, West on the right.”
“Dodgeball, yes!” Leah said with a fist pump. “I love dodgeball.”
“How can you love dodgeball? The last time I played it was the fifth grade,” Trudy said, staring at Leah through her humongous black sunglasses.
“Will you please take those off?” Leah demanded, pointing at Trudy’s shades.
Trudy pushed them up on the top of her head and smiled. “Let’s decide who we are going to take out first. A Serious Actress or a Starlet?”
“Tamara,” Leah said instantly. “If she’s even playing. She’s probably got an allergy to rubber.”
“Oooh, you’re so snarky. I love that about you,” Trudy said, and linking arms with Leah, Yin and Yang, and Michele and Jamie went off to the left to play dodgeball.
They lined up to wait for some instruction, and when the guys finally got them to all stop chattering like a group of mutant magpies, the song “Like a Virgin” began ringing on someone’s cell phone.
“Now come on, you guys,” Cooper cried. He looked close to losing it completely. “We just had a chat about this. No cell phones.”
“Sorry,” a brunette called out, but she took the call anyway.
“Okay, attention, everyone,” Cooper went on, with a glare for the brunette who held both hands up around her mouth and the cell phone, “I think we all know the game of dodgeball.” Eli walked over to a cage and began to toss red rubber balls to Cooper, which he placed on either side of the center line. “Why are we playing dodgeball?” he asked as he laid out the red balls. “Because we’re filming it, and we’re going to use your movements to craft some of the animation we’ll add to the battle scenes.”
Everyone instantly looked around for cameras, and spotted one above them, the other at the far end of the gym.
“We play six on a side,” Cooper continued. “When I blow the whistle, each team retrieves three balls. If you’re hit, you cycle out, and the next person on your team cycles in. You can eliminate a player in two ways—either hit her with the ball, or catch her ball before it hits the ground. Aim for the body, not the head. Anyone aiming for the head will be eliminated from the game and may even lose a job, okay? Everyone get that? Safety first, ladies. Remember that—safety first.”
He paused, put his hands on his hips, and looked at each team. “If you are taken out of the game, walk over there,” he said, pointing to the bleachers. “And sit down. Don’t talk. Don’t get out your cell phone. Don’t get out your nail polish. No stopping to redo your hair like the incident we had yesterday,” he said, looking pointedly at a Starlet who batted eyes at him. “These games go pretty fast, and we’re going to play a bunch of them until we have each side working together as a team and get enough film to give the animators. But the whole point of this exercise is to work as a unit.”
His speech was getting a little long, Leah noticed. Several whispered conversations had begun.
Cooper seemed to know it, too, because he clenched his jaw, then pointed at a Starlet on Leah’s team who rarely spoke. “You,” he said sternly. “You are the leader for this team.” He turned to the other team and pointed to Beth, a Serious Actress who’d been mad at Leah since they ran lines and Leah had snickered at Beth’s overwrought, over-the-top performance of a mom out of valium. Well hell, she’d thought Beth had been kidding.
“You’re the leader for this team, all right?” Cooper said.