The craft services table was a small, cluttered oasis of beige in the vast, gray desert of the soundstage. It was a chaotic landscape of half-empty coffee urns, wilting fruit platters, and boxes of brand-name snacks designed to provide the illusion of care. Alex had escaped the oppressive, pastel-colored perfection of the set during a long, tedious break for a lighting change. He sat alone at a small, wobbly folding table in the corner, nursing a bottle of water, the plastic cool and solid in his hand. He had his phone out, scrolling through an endless chain of emails from his father about the Q2 tax filings for Echo Chamber. It wasn't a distraction; it was a retreat. The cold, logical certainty of business was a welcome refuge from the soul-crushing, performative creativity of the commercial shoot.
He was so engrossed in a thread about international withholding taxes that he didn't notice her approaching until her shadow fell across his table. He looked up, his professional, do-not-disturb mask already half-formed.
It was Olivia. She was holding a half-eaten bag of pretzels, her posture a strange, endearing mixture of hesitation and determination. She looked less like the polished TV star from the set and more like a normal kid working up the courage to talk to someone at a school dance.
She stopped at his table, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. "Hi," she said, her voice softer, less projected than it had been on set. "Sorry to bother you. I'm Olivia."
"I know," Alex said, his tone polite but distant, a clear, practiced signal that he was busy. He was already preparing to look back down at his phone, to retreat back into the safety of his work.
But before he could, she rushed on, a torrent of words tumbling out as if a dam had broken, a desperate, sincere confession that completely ignored his subtle social cues.
"Okay, I'm just gonna say it because I'll literally explode if I don't," she said, her eyes wide, her words quick and genuine. "I'm a massive, massive fan. Like, a huge fan. My friends and I have listened to 'Before You Go' probably a thousand times. It... it really helped me through something kind of heavy last year. It was one of those songs that just… it felt like it knew, you know?" She took a quick, nervous breath. "So, I just wanted to say thank you. For that. Okay, I'm done now, I'll go away. Sorry."
She gave him a quick, awkward smile and was already turning to leave, having delivered her payload of pure, unadulterated sincerity.
Her words were a complete and utter shock to his system. He was used to the calculated praise of industry executives, the abstract adoration of a faceless online audience, the performative respect of other artists at awards shows. But this was different. This was raw, unrehearsed, and deeply, achingly human. It was so genuine, so un-Hollywood, that it completely disarmed him. It was the first real thing he had experienced all day, and it pierced through the ghost's cynical armor and the boy's weary defenses with an effortless, surprising precision.
The ghost persona, with its cool, analytical detachment, simply receded, having no protocol for this kind of interaction. The sixteen-year-old boy, the one who had written that song on the floor of his dark bedroom, surfaced. A small, real smile, the first of the day, touched his lips.
"You don't have to go away," he said, his voice quiet, stripped of its usual professional veneer. He looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time. "Thanks. That... that means a lot."
He gestured to the empty metal folding chair opposite him. An invitation.
She hesitated for a split second, surprised by his response, then sat down, placing her bag of pretzels on the table between them as a kind of peace offering.
For a moment, they just sat there in the strange, cluttered oasis of the craft services table. The conversation, when it started, flowed with an ease that was almost startling. They didn't talk about music, not at first. They talked about the sheer, mind-bending absurdity of their current situation, finding an instant, powerful common ground in the shared weirdness of their lives.
"It's so strange," Olivia said, gesturing vaguely with a pretzel stick toward the set. "I spend ten hours a day on a set that looks exactly like a high school, pretending to go to class and deal with fake drama, and then I go home and have to do three hours of actual chemistry homework for my real high school. My brain doesn't know which one is the real life anymore."
Alex let out a soft, genuine laugh of recognition. "Tell me about it," he said, the story tumbling out of him before he could stop it. "Last semester, I had to take a business call with my German distributor about a delay on a vinyl pressing. I took it in the third-stall of the boys' bathroom during English class so my teacher wouldn't see me on the phone."
Olivia's eyes went wide, and then she burst into a bright, uninhibited laugh, a sound that was a hundred times more real than the scripted awe she had performed on set. "No way. Did you get away with it?"
"For about five minutes," he admitted with a wry smile. "Then I came back to class and she asked me who I was talking to that was more important than The Great Gatsby. I told her the truth. I don't think she's looked at me the same way since."
They bonded instantly over this shared, surreal reality, this secret club of two. They were teenagers living adult lives, kids carrying the weight of adult-sized responsibilities and pressures. They talked about the exhaustion, about the loneliness of having experiences their friends couldn't possibly understand, about the strange, constant feeling of being a visitor in their own lives. In their mutual exhaustion, in the sheer, bizarre uniqueness of their circumstances, they found a powerful, unexpected connection.
As she talked, Alex saw past the energetic, polished Disney actress persona for the first time. He saw the person underneath: an intelligent, funny, and slightly overwhelmed girl who was just trying to navigate an insane world without losing herself. She wasn't just a "brand" or a "demographic." She was a real kid, just like him.
"Okay, kids! Back to one!" the director's voice boomed from across the soundstage, shattering their small bubble of normalcy.
They both let out a small, synchronized sigh. The break was over. It was time to go back to being props. But as they stood up from the table, their dynamic had been completely rewired. The awkward, professional distance was gone, replaced by the easy, comfortable chemistry of two people who had just recognized a kindred spirit in the wild.
When they were back on the offensively perfect bedroom set, sitting on the edge of the bed with the sleek, cold tablet between them, everything felt different.
"And… action!"
Olivia leaned in, delivering her scripted line. "Hey. Whatcha working on?"
But just before she spoke, she caught his eye and gave him a tiny, almost imperceptible eye-roll, a secret joke just for him. A small, conspiratorial acknowledgment of the absurdity of it all.
Alex had to physically suppress a laugh. He looked up from the tablet, and his smile, his look of creative surprise, was a little more genuine this time. He tapped the screen, and the bland, soulless, corporate synth loop began to play.
He watched her as she summoned her look of joyful, on-camera awe. But this time, he wasn't just watching a good actress at work. He was watching his new friend. And it made the whole ridiculous, inauthentic process feel, for a moment, almost real. The fake, on-screen friendship, born from a marketing brief and a focus group, was suddenly grounded in a small, true, and completely unexpected connection. The ghost was still there, observing, analyzing, but for the first time all day, the boy was smiling.