Nepo Baby
Nepo Baby can’t find her sunglasses.
She’s driving to an audition, swerving down the 101 in her brand new Bentley, which her father bought her last week. It’s golden hour, selfie hour. This is her favorite hour. It turns her moss-green eyes into an evergreen world. It means more likes, which means more engagement, which means more sponsors.
Except it’s not her favorite hour right now because the setting sun is in those green eyes and she’s swerving a little on the road, her car rocking side to side like a tilt-a-whirl, and she just wants to get to her audition. She digs into her Burkin bag, the scent of her Chanel perfume filling her nostrils for a sickly sweet moment. She hopes that, to others, she smells of ambition and promise fulfilled. She wants to smell of sex, the kind of Clean Girl sexy that doesn’t even know it’s sexy. Dewy skin and blow-up doll mouth and fuck-me eyes. That’s all the execs see when you walk in, anyway. Wide-open fuck-me eyes. Doll smile. Whitened teeth. The promise of a freshly-waxed pussy.
Nepo Baby is digging in her bag with both hands now, her knee propping up the steering wheel, one eye on the traffic, the occasional blur of early evening headlights. She can’t find her Gucci sunglasses. If she lost them, she’s gonna be fucking livid. Her father bought those for her last week, too. But she doesn’t want to even think about anything related to her father, or the way he propped one pale leg up on the lush red velvet stool of the Gucci store in Calabasas, his basketball shorts riding up to reveal his dangling balls, complete with grey pubes. His world-famous boisterous laughter, fake but in a way that doesn’t anger because it still makes one feel seen, as he talked to the cashier. No one else would have been allowed to keep their dirty-ass Prada sneakers on that velvet. No one but Henry Hughes. King of Calabasas and alliteration.
Nepo Baby swerves on the road, and the Bentley makes a metallic noise as it scrapes against the edge. She rights it with her left hand as her right hand produces the sunglasses, which she dutifully places over her ski-slope nose. That nose cost about $30,000 and two hospital visits. It’s a perfect, prim little IG nose, like the ones everyone in Calabasas has spent undisclosed sums of money and time trying to achieve with varying success. But she has succeeded, and that nose is her ticket out from under her father’s thumb. That nose is gonna make her this generation’s Jane Fonda, only a little less mouthy.
Nepo Baby takes her exit, eyeing the time on her car radio. 3:30pm. Shit, she curses under her breath, a soft stab of syllables. She’s running late. She’ll probably just barely make it. She mentally runs through the lines she’s spent the past week rehearsing.
Oh, come on, Samantha. It’s SO obvious that he’s into you.
Ugh, gag me with a spoon. You’re so oblivious. It’s adorable.
That’s the character’s recurring line. Gag me with a spoon. She says this when she’s elated, or depressed, or angry. By the time she’d finished reading the script for the CW teen show, she wished someone would gag her with that spoon. But still, this show is money, baby. A lead in her own hit teen drama? It would make her the envy of millions of girls across America, all clasping hands in prayer to diet pills and plastic surgeons to make them as gorgeous as Nepo Baby. She’d be that elusive Hollywood creature. The It Girl. Blake Lively in Gossip Girl. Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls. Sydney Sweeney in…well, anything.
Nepo Baby would join that highest honor bestowed upon fuckable blondes ranging from Marilyn Monroe to Paris Hilton. The part is basically already hers. She isn’t even sure why she’s bothering to go over the lines again, other than out of sheer boredom that can’t be drowned out even by the Charli XCX bumping from her Bluetooth. Her father’s best friend, their neighbor for the last twenty-two years, had written the pilot that had been greenlit by the network. He'd also been not-so-subtly eyeing her ass at family pool parties since she was fourteen.
Nepo Baby is getting a little old for her big break. She’s going to be twenty-three this fall, a fact that her father loves to remind her of, especially when he is feeling nostalgic for his own glory days as the star of his hit 90’s teen drama. I booked Lakeshore when I was twenty-one, he’d reminded her for the millionth time on her way out of the house that afternoon. His green eyes were blinking lazily at her over his ceramic coffee mug, like a cat. His blonde hair and botoxed forehead were shining in the fluorescent kitchen lights. And that was with no connections, no friends in the industry, nothing. I moved out here from Oklahoma, and I just made it happen for myself. I’m not sure how I did it, but I know it wasn’t by sleeping in until eleven am. He winked at her then, like they were in on some little secret, the slimy fuck. Remember, honey, you’re dried up in this town by the time you’re twenty-four. And that’s pushing it.
Nepo Baby pushes her brakes hard, going from 80 mph to a cool 35 as she glides through the streets of West Hollywood. There are homeless people hunched over shopping carts brimming with useless shit. Multiple people talking to themselves, a cacophony of voices she can’t hear, shrouded safely in her black Bentley-shaped tomb. For a moment, she imagines she’s driving a hearse instead. She imagines her own body inside, lithe and young, all perky tits and blonde hair swept back from her face to reveal the Grecian cheekbones, sharp jawline jutting in outrage at her own demise. Green eyes forever closed, her final breath sighed apathetically as her life was taken in a Monroe-esque tragedy.
She plans for the candle of her wind to be snuffed out by age thirty-three. Actresses are best loved in their graves at a fuckable age, not out on the streets of Sunset over-plumped with filler, on their third facelift. Marilyn Monroe wouldn’t be Marilyn Monroe if she grew old. She’d just be another Hollywood bitch.
She smiles, thinking of her ultimate end. Everything leading up to it is just a play, really. A fun teen movie before the credits roll and the lights turn on. When she puts this audition in the context of her eventual demise, it almost seems funny. It almost makes the asinine quips and contrived drama of this show seem entertaining.
She pulls into the studio lot. Checks the time again. 3:55. She’s going to be late. This time she doesn’t curse. She just smiles to herself. Any other actress would be sent home for this small crime–a few extra minutes spent in traffic. But Nepo Baby will just pout her soft, pink lips, dripping with gloss, and spread them open to make suggestive comments.
She lifts her pilates-sculpted ass off her seat to see her face in the rearview mirror. She practices her pout. Smiles her artificially-whitened smile. Tosses blonde tendrils over one tan shoulder. She blinks, lazily and yet practiced. She becomes her most It Girl self. When she steps out of the car into the dying light, her head is empty of all thoughts.
Editor’s Note
Damieka Thomas only needed 1200 words to paint a vivid character portrait in “Nepo Baby.” Can’t you picture this woman driving her Bentley to an audition on the 101? Sure, we get some details about Nepo Baby’s physical appearance, but more importantly, we get a deep dive into her psyche. The way she thinks, the way she acts, the way she relates to her past and plans for her future. Thomas has given a masterful example of how to develop a character implicitly–not with overt description, but instead by dropping the character into a scene and letting her react to it.
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It took me a few days to come up with a song pairing for Nepo Baby. It was tricky because Nepo Baby is by no means a sympathetic character, but somehow I still kind of like her. I wanted a song with a character who was…let’s say, loveably obnoxious. Hat tip to Gwenda Bond for helping me settle on what I believe is the perfect match in Cardi B’s “Pretty & Petty.” Also, I realize it’s not what Cardi B means when she says “you’re built like your dad,” but the parallel still makes me smile.
-Josh Boldt, Editor