Scrappy Little Nobody by Anna Kendrick Page B

wonderful or (more often) entirely awful, when it was probably some combination of the two. My memory of my early time in LA suffers from this syndrome.
    The first year was tough. I was lonely. I was broke. But things went from soul-crushing to tolerable in one evening. A friend of mine who was passing through LA took pity on me. He invited me to an American Idol viewing party with some of his friends. Most of the people there didn’t know each other, and I bonded with two dudes named Peter and Alex over our shared outrage when Jennifer Hudson was kicked off. We started hanging out almost nonstop. After a few weeks, Peter and Alex mentioned that they both happened to be apartment hunting. I awkwardly said, “Can I come, too?” I think they were more than happy to have a girl around to make it clear that they were not dating. (They were gay—in case the indignation over J. Hud’s dismissal from Idol didn’t tip you off—they just weren’t dating each other.)
    I told Gwendolyn via email and with minimal notice that I would be moving out. You know, like a coward!At that point I’d already been unmasked as a nonresponsible, nontidy, noncourteous person, so what did I have to lose? I disassembled my desk and bed and reassembled them in a three-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood. That moving day was glorious. I was eighteen and living with two dudes in an apartment with new carpet. I took the smallest bedroom, so I could pay fifty dollars less a month. The fact that it had only one, very small window gave the room a minimum-security-prison vibe, but we made a group trip to Ikea and this time I bought the second -cheapest dresser they made to class the place up.
    The first week we lived there, Alex and I woke up to find tar tracked across the living room carpet. Peter had drunkenly stepped through a construction site, and wouldn’t you know it—tar does not come out of carpet. Ever. I was pissed at Peter, but he was so lovable he got away with everything. It made the whole place look dingy and I had to nervously explain it away when I had anyone over. But we decided we’d rather lose the security deposit than pay to recarpet, so I attempted to hide the stain with an area rug. That decision essentially doomed the apartment to remain in its squalid state. But we figured we’d probably move in a year or so.
    Alex and I were both under twenty-one, but Peter was of age and graciously bought alcohol for us. To save money on décor we exclusively drank Skyy vodka and artfully arranged theempty blue bottles in our living room. I hate day drinking now, possibly because it reminds me of this period. I think we drank just to feel like we were doing something.
    For the most part, we had fun. We went to drag night at Micky’s and someone dressed as my character from Camp , which made me feel more like a superstar than I ever have since. We got stoned and watched scary movies. I smoked too much the night we watched The Amityville Horror and climbed up the back of the couch begging the boys to stop reading my thoughts. It wasn’t a great look, but this was the stuff that distracted me from the overwhelming uncertainty of my professional life.
    A friend who worked at a catering company would occasionally need a temp last minute, pay me cash under the table, and let me have all the tuna Niçoise I could eat. But most of the time I was praying that Law & Order would need a mousy little teen killer so I could keep paying my car insurance.
    Because Peter had lived in LA the longest and was old enough to go out at night, Alex and I became close, at first out of convenience and then out of genuine shared love of making fun of everything and everyone, most of all each other. We watched pop concerts on DVD. We tried to take edgy photographs of each other on my three-megapixel camera. We discovered the “casual encounters” section of Craigslist and, naturally, posted an erotic plea to meet up in the bushes at the end of our street. We