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memories. The ride might’ve been fast, but it had been beautiful.
    So why did she feel so unsettled? Here, on a beautiful windy spring day alone on the beach? It wasn’t thoughts of Cody, because he was her past. Really and truly. Whether she missed his camaraderie was irrelevant. Seasons change — if anyone knew that, she did.
    The feeling could be the idea of living in LA and committing to the movie and Mel Kamp and … and whatever they’d done with the script. Or the uneasiness could be the idea that maybe she’d given up her dream of dancing on Broadway a little too fast.
    The sun was overhead but still just behind the lifeguard tower, leaving her place on the platform completely shaded. Like a secret hideaway from the towering glass office buildings of Century City and the relentless traffic of LA and the insidious paparazzi.
    A place where she could breathe.
    She opened the cover of the script and thumbed through it. The whole thing was a hundred and five pages. She could easily get through it in the next couple hours. She stretched her legs out in front of her, crossed them at the ankles, and began to read.
    With the sea breeze swirling around her and the bright blue sky hanging over the ocean, Bailey expected the next hour to be one of the day’s best. The first few pages into the script, she felt that way for sure. But there at the top of page six came the first sign that Bailey’s uneasiness from earlier was warranted.
    At the beginning of that page, her two costars’ characters were at a party full of gang members when three girls approached them and offered to sleep with them. The descriptive and graphic scene that followed was both gratuitous and offensive. Bailey stopped halfway down the next page, sick to her stomach. What was this garbage? No one had told her there’d be scenes like this in the movie. Clearly Mel Kamp had been alluding to this in the recent studio meetings. Bailey was angry with herself. She should’ve asked more questions, pushed more for an explanation about therewrite. But how could she have guessed this? Not with NTM, the studio known for its clean films.
    Panic and disgust filled her mind with every page of the script. For the next five minutes Bailey flipped through the revised story and found half a dozen scenes she couldn’t live with. Even the scene she’d originally read for had a number of cuss words thrown in. And in the director’s note on the scene it said:
The teacher is young, but she must dress in a way that turns the heads of the guys in the class. This is how she first gains their attention
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    Bailey closed the script and pulled her knees up to her chest. What was happening? How in the world had the producer thought she’d be okay with this? Surely Brandon’s agent had told Kamp how Bailey felt, her absolute determination to only do family-friendly projects, movies with a message or some redeeming value. She brought her hand to her face. What about her costars? How would they feel about the changes?
    The sick feeling in her stomach grew. She dropped the script on the wooden floor of the lifeguard tower, stood, and walked to the nearby railing. Leaning on her elbows, she hung her head and closed her eyes. With everything inside her she wanted to be in Bloomington. Spring would be knocking on the door back home, the snow pretty much behind them. On a day like this, Ricky would have a baseball game, or Shawn and Justin would be tearing up the soccer field. She and her mom could’ve gone for coffee and talked about life. Not a single person would be lurking in the bushes ready to snap her picture, and she wouldn’t be holding a script that made her sick.
    Just she and her mom talking like they’d always been able to do.
    Her mom would’ve known what to say, and together they could’ve discussed what in the world Bailey was doing in LA and where she would wind up if she stayed. Her breathing came faster,and she could hear her heartbeat pounding, almost as if