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sides. They search my rib cage. I focus on the feeling. Pain. Death. Darkness.
    “Cut!” Wyatt yells.
    I breathe out. Rainer sits back.
    “I’m not buying it,” Wyatt says.
    Rainer squints up at him. “We could hit it a little faster,” he says.
    Wyatt shakes his head. “I want to
feel
it,” he says. “I want to feel like you are losing her and you”—he points down at me; it makes my blood run cold—“you are barely conscious.” He crouches down. “It needs to come from here,” he says, and drops a hand roughly to my stomach. “Core.”
    He stalks off. I hear him mutter something, but I’m not sure what it is.
    Rainer touches my shoulder. “Don’t listen to him,” he says softly. “You’re doing great.”
    But I know he’s wrong. I’m not. I want to be, but I’m not.
    It’s getting hot now, the sun climbing higher and higher. Jake knows how to tell time by the sun. He once tried to teach me, but I didn’t quite get how you were supposed to go about it, since you’re not supposed to look directly at the sun at all.
    By the time we finish for the day, it’s dark and I am exhausted. We must have done about a hundred takes of that healing scene. And then another hundred involvingthe crash. We were in and out of the water, and even though it was hot, my teeth have been chattering since the afternoon. Rainer kept putting his arms around me to warm me up between takes, and whispering encouraging things. He’s been pretty protective since we got here, and I’m grateful for that. If he weren’t on my side, I don’t know what I would do.
    We have to end at eight, and this makes Wyatt crazy. Usually our shoots get later and later throughout the week. Technically we can’t shoot for more than twelve hours without a seven-hour break in between, and my hours are even stricter. Since Rainer isn’t a minor, he can film late into the night and stay on set as long as he needs to. I, on the other hand, have all these stipulations and requirements—I can film for only five and a half hours and need to spend three hours a day in school. Sometimes, at the end of a shoot, I’ll have twenty minutes of school left and I’ll have to go up to the conference room in the hotel lobby with my tutor, Rubina. Wyatt will film my reaction shots, or dialogue, and then I leave and my double comes in to film the rest. It’s weird to think that for a lot of the movie, I’m not even there.
    Even so, once you factor in hair and makeup (which can take close to three hours), sleep is hard to come by.
    I hop into a waiting van.
    I turn to see if Rainer is coming, but I see he’s cornered Wyatt, and the last thing I want is to interrupt that. We leave, and then I trudge back up to the hotel, discouraged. I had thought that getting the role was the hard part. That I’d proven myself and that was why they’d hired me. What I didn’t realize was that getting hired was only the beginning.
    I’m heading into my room when I hear footsteps behind me.
    “Hey, PG, wait up.” Rainer jogs to my door. He wiped his makeup off in the van and now has on a gray T-shirt and jeans.
    “So,” he says, “today was a little tough.” He cocks his head to the side, like he’s trying to get a read on me.
    “It’s okay,” I say. “It’s fine. It was my fault.”
    Rainer gives me a small smile. “Want to talk it out?” he asks. He moves around me to take the keys out of my hand and unlock my condo door. He’s so confident, so comfortable. I know he’s older, but it’s something else, too—experience.
    I shrug, caught off guard by our contact. “There isn’t really much to talk about. I just sort of suck.” I slip past him, and Rainer follows me inside.
    “That’s absurd.”
    “Oh really? Tell it to my core.” I tap my abdomen twice like Wyatt did.
    Rainer shakes his head. “He’s being an asshole. I just told him—”
    “Please,” I say, cutting him off. “Please tell me you did not just tell him to go easy on