"It had never occurred to me that my sister would’ve felt jealous that I had been cast instead of her," writes 'A Real Animal' author Emeline Atwood

My older sister Olivia wrote her college essay on the age-old question: would you rather fly or be invisible? Her answer was fly, because she said she already knew what it felt like to be invisible. High school and middle school were a torture for my sister. Her class contained a very mean clique of girls. On Valentine’s Day, in the sixth grade, one of them left baggies of candy on top of everyone’s locker, except my sister’s.

I think my sister’s deep longing to be seen only inflamed her longtime dream of being an actress. I can’t remember a time when she didn’t want to be on stage. We’re only a year apart and shared a bedroom growing up. At home, my sister was hilarious and wildly loquacious — not at all the timid kid she was at school. I used to watch her practice her red-carpet interviews in front of the mirror and her Oscar acceptance speech into her Miley Cyrus toothbrush. She desperately wanted to be on TV, and as a very little kid, she believed that the PBS Kids show, ZOOM, was going to be her big break. The speed at which she could speak Ubbi Dubbi, by the age of six, was stunning. She couldn’t wait until she came of age to audition.

But in 2005, ZOOM was discontinued, and a new show called Fetch! with Ruff Ruffman replaced it. When my sister was in eighth grade, our middle school drama teacher approached her in the hall: Fetch! was holding auditions that January at the WGBH headquarters in Brookline, Mass. and Ms. Kort encouraged my sister to try out. This incited full-fledged obsession: Livvie spent months researching the Fetch! audition process, looking up anything she could find online from former contestants (questions they got, tips on how to stand out). She started watching the show every afternoon. 

Thousands of kids flew in from all over the country to audition. I was  dragged to my sister’s first Fetch! audition after school because Mom didn’t have time to drop me off at home. I remember being grumpy about this, because I had a lot of homework. Inside the big shiny WGBH building was a long winding line of kids and parents, standing behind blue rope, numbers pinned to the kids’ shirts. My sister and mom beelined to the sign-in desk, straight into the pack of people, while I found a bench near an exit door where I could sit and get started on my homework, since it seemed like my sister’s audition could take hours.

My sister says that day remains one of the most exciting of her life. To stand out, she’d worn fake, red-rimmed glasses and a beret. She remembers the exact question she got because it happened to be a question she had practiced ahead of time: the producer with curly hair began “So, your cousin is a werewolf—” and my sister cut in ‘How do you know that?’ and the lady cracked up.

I can’t remember how I also ended up in the audition line. I’m guessing Mom found me and told me I might as well get a number, too, since we were there. 

My sister was confident she was going to get a callback, and she did. I did too. The callbacks went on for many rounds, over months. My sister and I both made it to the top 10 — that’s when she got cut and I got on the show. I became one of six Fetchers on Fetch! Season Five.

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I’ve never had any dreams of being on TV. And I’ve never wanted to be an actress. One of my greatest fears as a kid was getting picked out of a crowd by a street performer and having to stand in front of people. When I grew up, I wanted to be a cheese farmer and I liked to spend time in the woods with my little brother playing a make-believe game we called “Lewis and Clark,” which involved looking for bear scat, deer droppings and animal tracks, and collecting wild berries to eat on the roof of our woodshed.

My favorite book Tracking and the Art of Seeing taught you how to read animal signs, how to find claw marks on trees and dens in hollow logs. I believe these interests of mine — plus the fact that I wore the same baseball cap every day from the second to eighth grade — are what made me stand out and made them want to cast me on Fetch. The science theme of our season was “animals,” and they already had a shoot planned in Yellowstone National Park about tracking wolves on horseback.

People still ask me what it was like being on Fetch. I remember the feeling more than the experience itself; I’ve never liked being on camera — I’m too self-conscious. Every time we had to redo our reactions, say a line fed to us by a producer, pretend, do it again, I was continuously reminded that all the experiences we were having — building hover crafts, decorating wedding cakes, riding horses — were for TV, not for me. At the end of the day, Fetch was a job, the days were long, and although we were playing ourselves, we were still acting. Playing “myself” was hard. It felt like I wasn’t actually being myself at all. 

On our first day of filming, I remember standing in front of a random house I was pretending was mine, waiting to be picked up by a duck boat Ruff had sent containing the other Fetchers whom I’d pretend to be meeting for the first time. Before filming started, we’d had a month of workshops together, to help us bond. Another girl in the cast, Rubye, was a girl I already knew — it was the first time PBS had cast kids who knew each other, and they framed it as casting “best friends.” On that duck boat day, I remember Rubye pulling me aside to let me know that I “come off really fake on camera.” I was so embarrassed. I apologized to her, then felt a little scared after that to speak.  

I used to have a lot of anxiety as a kid around what it meant to “be present,” ever since my mom told me, when I was in fifth grade, that to her, the meaning of life was “to be in the moment.” At the time, my class had been reading Jeremey Fink and the Meaning of Life. After that, anything that separated me from “the moment” felt existentially dire, which included cameras, phones, even binoculars.

During the Yellowstone shoot, on my one morning off, my dad and I managed to squeeze in a hike, and in the middle of a blossoming valley I eyed an outcropping, just off the path, and I remember promising myself that later in life I’d return to it, when I was less busy, when I had more time to sit down with my notebook and soak in the landscape — when there weren’t any cameras around. I had this sense that sitting atop a sunny rock in a flowery field was close to the type of moment my mother was talking about, the type of moment I was supposed to be in.

To this day, I have never seen a full episode of Fetch. My family threw a launch party the day my season aired, and I couldn’t even make it through a few minutes of watching myself. It was also the summer before high school, when I was trying to reinvent myself. I didn’t want to wear my hat anymore, and cheese farming was no longer my dream. I wanted to be a writer. Fetch was broadcasting across the country a version of me that I didn’t want anyone seeing, one where I talked too much about animal scat and in one episode literally uttered the words, “Cheese is my destiny.” I hoped that no one in my high school would ever even know about the show. 

It had never occurred to me that my sister would’ve felt jealous that I had been cast instead of her. Growing up, she was the person I felt closest to. Our bedroom was a place where I could be completely myself. The summer before she went away to college, I was in agony. A few weeks before she left, we were laying on our carpet, stalking her newly assigned freshmen roommates on Facebook, when I told her I was planning to apply to the same college she was going to, so that one day we could live together again. “Absolutely not,” she had replied. I was in shock. I had never considered that my sister wouldn’t always want me around since I always wanted to be around her. But Livvie told me that she didn’t want to be at school again in my shadow. 

Before this, I had been mildly aware that my sister wasn’t “popular,” but I hadn’t truly seen how excruciating high school had been for her. And I certainly hadn’t seen all the ways I had inflicted insecurity upon her — how terrible she felt the night I told her in detail about my first kiss when she had yet to be kissed, how she cried in the shower the day I got asked to her senior prom before her, how ecstatic she was to get her period before me because at least she had that.

She told me about a softball game we played a few weeks after I had been cast on Fetch, when the shock was finally starting to wear off. We were on the same team in middle school — I was the pitcher, my sister in the outfield — and she said, “I remember throwing the ball back to you on the pitcher’s mound and thinking, yep, this is what it’s going to be like for me for the rest of my life, just throwing the ball back to my sister, I could lay down out here in centerfield and no one would even care. Once, I think I did.” 

Today, my sister is 30 years old, lives in LA, and is an actress. She performs her one-woman show at fringe festivals all over the world, and also at theatres in New York and London. She tells stories with so much gesticulation that the other day, when we were in a taxi headed to karaoke, somehow her feet ended up on the inside roof of the cab. She loves being seen and doesn’t care when or where or how or by whom. She says Fetch was a life-changing experience for her because  it’s when she first started developing her thick skin.

I will never be as brave as my sister. I still have trouble attending fringe shows with her, since performers love picking people out of the audience. If I could hide under my chair, I would. People still ask me about Fetch, and when they do, all I think about is her, how desperate she was to be seen, how I was better at being seen back then than she was and yet, she was better at seeing me than I was at seeing her. 

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A Real Animal by Emeline Atwood comes out July 7 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

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