Today's Reading

"I know not to make any sudden moves," he says, eyes straight ahead.

"Good one," I say.

"You're here early," he says. He's wearing khaki pants and a white shirt, untucked. Untucked and unbrushed are worse than unhinged, if you ask me.

"Yes, big day," I say and gesture to my dress. I don't know why I've done this. This small gesture with my hand has opened up the door for me to tell him that I have a new script. I don't want Dan anywhere near it, but I also want to rub it in his face. "I have a new project."

"Another think piece?" I refuse to look his way, but I can feel a little smile off of him.

Now I'm rolling my eyes. "It's going to be the film of the year."

"I'm sure." The elevator stops on the twelfth floor, and he steps forward and holds the door open for me. His navy blue eyes are disarming every time. All of his features are, as if a sixteenth-century sculptor with a too-sharp chisel arranged them on his face. But it's the eyes, wide under his black brows, that have the intensity to match his arrogance. "No one wants to watch two people who they don't care about fall in love for absolutely no reason."

He's just so superior with his omniscience about what everyone wants and doesn't want. He was so casual about crushing my first real project like it was a gas station receipt. So I step out of the elevator, turn back to him, and spill it. "It's funny and offbeat, with oddball characters. But more than that." I don't know why I'm selling this to him.

The elevator door starts to close and he stops it with his sneaker. "Wait. True Story?"

"No," I say. If you could throw a word at a person, I would have shot- putted this one at his chest.

"No, it's not True Story?"

"No. I mean yes. But not you." My hands ball up, all on their own accord, as Dan steps off the elevator and lets the doors close behind him.

"Yes, me," he says. "Jane, I'm meeting with Nathan about this at nine. He wants me as cinematographer, and I need it."

"You need it," I say. My voice has gone jagged. "This is about you now? Just trying to get all the facts straight."

"We both probably need it. But I don't hate this script. In fact, I can see it, in my mind, exactly how it should be." The movie I've been imagining as I fall asleep is the same one he's been imagining, but probably with weird lighting and subtitles and whatever arty stuff wins awards and sells absolutely no tickets. He presses the button and the doors open. "If you can just act like a normal person, we can make this movie."

I am a normal person. In fact, I'm so normal that I don't scream those words at him. There's nothing that makes a person act more insane than trying to prove how sane they actually are. I have a little sweat beading up on my chest now and I really need to calm down. "This cannot be happening," I say as the elevator doors close between us.


CHAPTER TWO

I sit under my desk where it's safe. There's no place left to fall when I'm down here. It's where you'd sit in an earthquake. My office door is closed, and I just need a minute in this small space to regroup. The hard plastic mat that my chair rolls around on feels cool under me. My knees are pulled up to my chest, and I look up at the underside of my desk drawer where I've written the word "please" six times since my promotion. I can't say exactly why making it in this business means so much to me. Show business was a lifeline for my mom and me when I was a kid, and I mean that literally in the way a lifeline can be food and shelter. But it was also such a weird way to grow up, on television, always being a joke. I just want to be taken seriously for once, and preferably in the world I was raised in. I can't bear the thought of being part of the next round of layoffs, sent home with a cardboard box and a pity smile. I want Hollywood to give me a hug or a gold star, or at least a better table at the Ivy.

My current office has a view of the very top of Pantheon Television and the soundstage where Pop Rocks was filmed. The show followed four middle schoolers, unlikely friends, who started an after-school band and became pop stars. If I get a film made, there's a chance I will move to an office on the other side of the building, where I won't have to look at it. Inside that studio was our fake high school classroom, fake recording studio, and fake auditorium where we were discovered and given our own fake record contract.

My character, Janey Jakes, is immortalized as a meme, the one you send your friends after they accidentally reply all or pull out of a parking lot with a bag of groceries on their car. Oof! I'm thirty-three now, and people seldom recognize me, but it happens. They see me at Starbucks making my famous 'oof' face while trying to force open the cream container, and they sing the familiar show ender: "Poor Janey, do do do do do do." I smile politely at their joke and pose for their selfie, but honestly, it's a nightmare.
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