The Price Of Innocence by Lia Marsh

Laura s miled as she weaved her way in between the tables, her small and delicate feet unconsciously moving to the steps of the music as she danced her way back to the bar with the customers’ empty plates.
    “You just never stop dancing, do you Laura?” grinned Norman, a fellow waiter, as he shuffled past with a pot of coffee.
    “I don’t know how you can, working in a depressing place like this...”
    Laura grinned back, depositing her tray lightly on the bar and skipping around it to give her orders to the chef.
    “Come on, Norman, it’s not that bad,” she pointed out.
    “Anyway, I can’t help it. I was brought up dancing to music like this!”
    She laughed, indicating the c orny Latino beat which was pumping out of the stereo. Norman shook his head, clearly baffled at her light heartedness. 
    “ It’s not normal, you know, Laura,” complained her friend Stacy, another fellow waitress.
    “No one else who works here is so happy.”
    It was true. As Laura weaved her way out to the customers again, she could see all of the other workers going about their jobs with dull, heavy steps; the grins which they forced onto their faces for the customers seeming to cost them a huge effort.
    But Laura honestly didn’t mind waitressing. It was true, it was certainly not something which she wanted to stay in all her life. No, she had much bigger plans than that; for Laura was going to become a successful Hollywood actress.
    When she had first taken this job she had treated it quite dismissively, feeling that her ambitions were bound to realize themselves soon. She even excitedly shared her dreams with the rest of the workers, expecting them to react with impressed interest, or at least mild admiration that she had already had modest roles in a few made for TV movies. To her surprise, however, they waved this away dismissively.
    “We’re all movie stars here, darling,” Norman had informed her.
    “It’s true,” Stacy had agreed.
    “We’ve all had minor roles of some kind.”
    “What do you expect?” added Jim, the chef.
    “This is LA, after all.”
    Laura was nonplussed.
    “So, are you still trying to get into the movies, then? I mean, the big ones?”
    But the other staff had waved this question away again; and Laura could see that whatever their ambitions had been before, they had given up on them now.
    “You will too, soon enough,” they had assured Laura, to her horror.
     
    Many months and a lot of rejections for parts later, she was beginning to see what they meant. She had not been offered a single role in the time she had been working here; though she went to at least one audition a week. And she was beginning to notice something about the auditions.
    Each time she found out who had gotten the part she had been trying out for it was always the girl who had been wearing the least clothes, and who flirted the most ostentatiously with the casting director. It just wasn’t fair; it was nothing to do with acting ability.
    For a while, Laura h ad allowed this to depress her (to the deep satisfaction of her co-workers). But then, just a couple of weeks ago, she had heard a rumor through the Hollywood grapevine; a rumor about a new movie which would start filming very soon. The movie was about a young, Latin American girl who falls in love with a man with strange powers.  And just last week, Laura had managed to get hold of a copy of the first half of the proposed script.
    As she sat in her tiny apartment poring over it, she realized that she had to have this part. It was too perfect for her not to have it! The main female protagonist was a nineteen year old girl of Latino descent who had grown up in California: just like Laura. The description of her on the front page even sounded like Laura:
    “Slender, with dark caramel skin, long black wavy hair, and green eyes.”
    As Laura read through the script, she became more and more excited. But how would she get into the movie? It was extremely high-profile: