Chapter 1: The Best Day of My Life

# The Best Day of My Life

The Halcyon was the third of the season, and by then Vera Calloway had the walk down cold.

She had done the carpet at 6:40, which was late enough to be noticed and not late enough to be rude, and given them four minutes and eleven poses. Four minutes and eleven poses was the number her publicist had worked out two seasons ago, and it had never once needed adjusting. Silver dress. Hair up off the neck. The earrings were borrowed, insured in Zurich, and she had been told three separate times not to touch them.

Inside, the room was set for six hundred with the front row at eye level, so the cameras could get faces coming and going. She had counted the four shallow steps from the back of the hall during the seat fill, while the ushers were still arguing about the sixth row. The steps had been widened after a nominee went down on them two years ago and did not get up again that night.

The presenter came out with the envelope, which was the color of an old penny.

Then she was at the microphone with the trophy in both hands, and the room was up, and she waited it out.

"This is the best day of my life," she said.

They laughed the way a room laughs at an award show, and she let them.

"I'll remember it."

In the second row, Marcus Ashford had the aisle seat. Six seats down from him sat his brother Julian, and neither of them turned his head while she was up there.

The music came up. She walked off into the wing, handed the trophy to a woman with a clipboard, and asked where the food was.

Backstage, the press line ran along a wall of black drape, and the kid from one of the trades got the question everybody had agreed on before she arrived. How does it feel.

"Like the best day of my life," she said. "I already said that part."

They laughed again. They were going to laugh at whatever she handed them. She stood still for the rest of it with one hand on the rail and her chin at the angle that photographed well from underneath, and let the flashes come, and did not blink, because a blink ruined the frame.

The quote was in somebody's notes before the publicist's hand closed on her elbow. Eleven words.

"Two things," the publicist said, walking her out through the service corridor. "The Vantage party. You're going. Brandt wants five minutes with no cameras in the room."

"Fine."

"And say something about the dress. They always ask about the dress."

In the green room, on the table next to the coffee, somebody had set out a tray of small square cakes at the top of the night. Three hundred people had walked past that tray. Not one of them had been taken. She stood over it doing the arithmetic — the tray, the hour, the number of people who had looked and kept walking — and then she took one and ate it standing up, and took a second one on the way out.

She took her seat again for the next two categories and did what she always did in a room full of people, which was look at it the way she looked at a set before the first take. Who was where. Who was standing with whom. Which doors had been propped open and which ones hadn't.

Out of frame of every camera, behind the podium, the prompter had been left running with all four names in the category, hers included. Whoever won, the prompter was ready.

The Vantage party was four blocks away, in a room where they had painted over the ceiling and rolled up the good carpet. There was a photo wall at the front and, at the back, a card table and a stack of rental chairs.

Hal Brandt talked at her for six minutes about a thing in March. She kept her eyes on a woman crossing the floor behind his shoulder, dragging her left foot, working a broken heel like it didn't hurt yet.

"Absolutely," she said, when he stopped talking.

The room was loud and warm, and everybody in it had been at the awards an hour ago, so it was the same room in a different building. She said the right thing to twenty people in ninety minutes, and none of the right things were the same twice, and by the end of it her face ached in the two places her face always ached.

She left at 11:04, through a service door the party had opened so that nobody would have to leave through the front and be photographed doing it.

In the car she took off the earrings and put them in the inside pocket of her coat, where somebody in Zurich would want to count them.

She was found at home the next morning.

Her assistant let herself in through the kitchen door at 7:20. The alarm had not been set. The coffee machine had not been started. She made the calls from the driveway, standing up.

Vera Calloway was pronounced dead at 8:05 a.m. She was twenty-three.

The agency's statement went out at nine and ran to one sentence. By the afternoon the trades had three paragraphs and no more than the agency did.

VANTAGE TALENT GROUP: "We are devastated by the loss of Vera Calloway. She was a member of this family and the finest actor any of us will ever work with. We ask that her family be allowed to grieve in private."

THE HALCYON FOUNDATION: "The Foundation is heartbroken. Our thoughts are with her loved ones."

By noon:

#VeraCalloway

#BestDayOfMyLife

#TheHalcyon

FOUR NETWORKS. THE SAME ELEVEN SECONDS. THE SAME PIANO TRACK.

THE CLIP: 40 MILLION VIEWS BEFORE MIDNIGHT.

TWENTY-THREE: A CAREER IN PICTURES

SHE LEFT AT THE TOP

"THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE": VERA CALLOWAY'S LAST WORDS

Somebody dug up a post she had made four years earlier, at two in the morning, which read, in full: why are the fish in the pond fighting. Nineteen thousand reposts in a day. It ended up on a T-shirt.

@grainyfootage: she was supposed to be at the premiere on the 14th. she was supposed to be in my city in april. i had a ticket.

The trophy came back to the agency on Friday, in a padded box, with her name on the label. It went onto a shelf in the mailroom and stayed there while four different people tried to work out whose it was.

Author’s Note

Of everything Vera does tonight, the moment I keep coming back to is the tray of cakes in the green room. Three hundred people walk past it without taking one. She does the arithmetic, eats one standing up, and takes a second on the way out. That small theft lands harder for me than the trophy in her hands. She gives her best self to the room and keeps the real one for the empty hallway. What did you make of that moment — appetite, or something else?

If you'd like to read ahead, early chapters are available on the author's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/TranKhang