by Amanda Heger
A stack of folders sat on the table in front of one of the women. A bright blue logo danced across the front and slashed purple letters wrapped around it. Marisol had seen that logo before. She leaned forward, straining to make out the writing.
“Um, hi?” Evan pulled back, forcing Marisol to realize how much of his personal space she’d invaded. She’d almost forgotten he was there. And she’d almost ended up in his lap.
“Sorry. Can you read that?” she asked. “On the table behind you—the one with the three women?”
He looked over his shoulder again, giving her an up close and personal view of his slightly overgrown sideburns and hard jawline. Somehow, she’d missed the fact that Wristband Guy was cute. Really cute. Definitely not her type—Tony and Tim the Ninjas were more her style—but Evan was not bad to look at. Not bad at all.
“I can’t tell. Hold on.” He extricated himself from the bar and headed toward the table of women, pausing a beat as he walked by. If Marisol hadn’t been watching so closely, she wouldn’t have noticed Evan’s gaze shift to the folder.
He snickered all the way back to the bar. “People United for Body Euphoria.”
The words dislodged the memory, and Marisol’s stomach swallowed itself whole. People United for Body Euphoria. One of the three finalists for the Della Simmons grant. One of the three finalists who’d sat through an interview with the Scorpion Pixie. And, of the three finalists, they were the only ones sitting with her over a bottle of red wine. Marisol’s chances of saving Ahora were being flushed further down the toilet every second.
Marisol flagged down the bartender. “Mojito, please.”
“Are you having a drink with me because you can’t stop thinking about how terrible their name is?” Evan asked. “Or because you’ve decided you want to go on a fake date with me?”
“Neither.” She put her face on the bar top, ignoring the sticky substance hitting her cheek. “What is wrong with their name?”
“People United for Body Euphoria? P-U-B-E.”
She shrugged. “So?”
“They’ve named themselves after pubic hair.”
“Oh!” Marisol almost felt like smiling. At least Ahora would never be compared to pubic hair. Maybe that was why they were meeting with Scorpion Woman, so she could give them some pointers on avoiding embarrassing acronyms.
“So you know those Pube ladies?” Evan asked. His smile left a deep crease on both sides of his face. An easy smile that wasn’t quite as dopey as the fake, pretending-to-be-in-love one he’d worn onscreen. This was his real smile, she could tell.
Marisol barely knew this guy, but at this point she’d spent more time with him than anyone in Los Angeles. And she had to tell someone. Anyone. As she sucked down her mojito, she spilled the whole story. Her job, the grant, the way she’d ended up taking her mother’s place at the conference. How she felt like a puppy dog paddling in a pool filled with sharks.
A solid twenty minutes passed before she stopped for air.
“Wow.”
“That is why I cannot do your show. I have to focus on the conference. I have to give a giant presentation next week, and I have not had time to prepare. I have to make them think I know what I am doing, but…”
Evan looked at his empty glass, then back at her. “You think you don’t know what you’re doing? You go out on these brigades all the time, right?”
“Every three months since I was eighteen—as a volunteer. And every three months since I graduated—as a nurse.”
“Then I guarantee you know more about what you’re doing than someone who would name their organization Pube.”
She nodded toward the table of women, who were laughing and pouring themselves more wine. It wasn’t just their shiny lip gloss and perfect manicures that made her feel inferior. “I do not know how to do that. How to never say stupid things. How to be so perfect all the time.”
Evan shook his head. “You’re being too hard on yourself. You need to have some fun, and you had fun on the show. I saw you think about knocking Betty’s walker out from under her during the audience game.”
“I did not!” She had.
He held up a hand. “Hear me out. Have some fun. Relax. When we’re done taping, James will make every person in the studio help you with your presentation. If there’s anyone who knows how to pretend like he knows what’s he’s doing, it’s James January. This is Hollywood. We can make your presentation shine.” He leaned in closer and lowered his voice. “And you’ll be way ahead of the Pubes over there.”
Marisol dragged in a deep breath. The weight of the interviews and the presentation, the financial troubles—all of it—threatened to crush her into a thousand, jagged Marisol-shaped pieces. Maybe Evan was right. If anyone could help her put a veneer of perfection on her presentation, it had to be Hollywood.
“James will help me with the presentation?”
“Yep. You want to practice in front of an audience? You got it. You want someone in our graphics department to make full color charts and graphs of your…”
“Pump It Up.”
“Of your Pump It Up presentation? Done.”
“What if people see me on the show? And then they think I am not a very serious nurse.”
“You aren’t a very serious nurse.”
Marisol pressed her lips together. Just because she was young didn’t mean she wasn’t serious about her job. “I am.”
“You’re a nurse. And probably a very good one. But you aren’t a very serious nurse. Very serious nurses have asses the size of China. They’re always scowling, and they enjoy jabbing needles into people.”
She laughed. She couldn’t help it. She did sometimes enjoy sticking needles into people. “But maybe everyone expects me to be a very serious nurse?”
“Maybe,” Evan said. “But maybe not. Maybe they want a cool nurse who knocks down old ladies for a chance to grease down ninjas. Besides, no one watches the show. It’s on the chopping block. It airs after midnight, and you said this hotel doesn’t even have the right channel. So the chances of anyone from your conference seeing it are slim to none.”
With a start, she realized hope had taken root in her chest. And the more she thought about it, the wider its branches spread. She pictured herself onstage, commanding the attention of everyone in the audience. With the help of the show, she could make the presentation look like a million dollars. Make Ahora look like a million dollars. And then she could call her mother to say those two little words they all needed to hear. We won.
“I have one more condition,” Marisol said.
“Done.”
“I did not tell you what it is.”
“Then tell me.”
She grabbed a piece of paper from the bar—some flyer the conference had set out on every available surface—and scribbled down her phone number. “I want to be a contestant on Who’s Got the Coconut.”
Day Four
When Evan started at So Late, Friday afternoons had consisted of a few menial chores, a couple of coffee runs, and kicking off early for happy hour with the other interns. But by week three, Friday had become pure, unadulterated chaos.
Now, Friday was the day the skeleton crew scrambled to pick up all the balls they’d dropped during the week. Friday was the day he spent running from one task to the next, completing the dozens of tedious jobs left undone by the long gone interns. Friday was the day James January locked himself in his office and manically dissected the show’s numbers while creating a frame-by-frame, joke-by-joke analysis of each episode.
Without fail, at one o’clock James would emerge with a piece of paper in hand, his fingertips smudged with ink. “We had a major drop off after the monologue,” he’d say. “Somebody write me some decent hooks, damn it.” Or “We got a big boost online this week, but our live numbers tanked after Thursday. Why the hell can’t we do Thursdays?” Somehow the man knew exactly what each of his thirteen viewers were doing during every second of the show—when they peed, left for snacks
, or passed out in a drunken stupor.
Last week, Evan managed to escape James’s clockwork complaints by organizing the props. This week he planned to do the same, and he stood in front of the prop closet, surveying the damage. It was somehow worse, even though he’d spent hours last Friday tagging and sorting the contents. Musty junk brimmed from every corner, barely leaving him a place to walk. But if he was lucky, no one would find him for days.
Or at least hours.
Julia would turn the studio upside down, or maybe worse, if he didn’t show at exactly four o’clock—the call time for his “date” with Marisol. The producer had almost flipped the entire place over last night when he’d told her about the promises he had to make.
“You promised what?”
“She has this presentation. It’s—”
“Not that, Peoria. Tickets to Who’s Got the Coconut?”
“Not tickets, exactly. She wants to be a contestant.” Evan had assumed it wouldn’t be a big deal. The show ran under the same network umbrella. And everyone knew Coconut didn’t choose its contestants randomly. There were interviews and some top secret formula that seemed to weigh the decibel of the contestant’s scream, the ridiculousness of their costume, and the likelihood they’d drop the f-bomb on television. Even on her own, Marisol was a shoo-in.
“James and Sammy Samuelson do not get along.” Julia rubbed her temples—not like she was soothing a headache. More like she was gathering her fury.
“They don’t?” he asked.
“Why don’t you know this stuff? Don’t you want to work in television?”
“You said to do whatever it takes. I did whatever it took.”
“I meant to offer her oral or whatever. Not this. God, James is going to lose it if he has to grovel to Samuelson.”
Which was why, this morning, Evan shunned his other duties in favor of organizing the prop closet. Again. He curled a four-foot rubber snake along the edge of the table, then built an entire pyramid of fake dog turds.
“This is why the show is failing.” The voice startled him. Plastic shit clattered to the floor. “We spend all our money on poop and not enough on decent writers.”
Evan cleared his throat. “Hi, Mr. January. I didn’t realize you were in here.”
The host sat on a footstool in the back corner of the room. His blue T-shirt blended in with the light blue walls, and when he ducked the right way he disappeared behind a tower of boxes. Boxes—Evan knew—that held the remains of a plastic skeleton, an urn Evan was too scared to open, and fifteen pairs of red high heels.
“This is my think tank. Being around this mess settles my mind. Unsettles my stomach, but, you know, everything’s a trade-off.”
“Sure.” Evan fumbled with the snake. He was alone with the host of a late-night talk show. Had a captive audience with a man who could potentially launch his fledging writing career into orbit. He needed to say something. Pitch something. Make the man laugh. “You want me to go? I don’t want to disturb you.”
“Hand me that femur, would you?”
Evan racked his brain, trying to remember which bone was the femur. He grabbed the biggest piece of skeletal plastic he could find and handed it over. “This one?”
“That’ll do.” James waved the bone around like the conductor of an undead orchestra. “I heard you found the girl.”
“Yeah. Kind of. Julia found her, but—”
James shook his head. “Look, Cletus. If you want to get ahead in this business, you’ve got to start taking credit for anything you can. You went to the conference and dragged her back to the studio, right?”
“Not exact—” Evan stuttered at James’s raised eyebrow. “Yeah. I convinced her.”
“Good. I know you’re not as dumb as you look.” He punctuated each syllable with a swing of the femur. “For whatever reason, people loved your dumb-as-a-box-of-press-on-nails shtick, so we’re running with it. But we’ve got to make it big. We’re going to launch a full-out social media war with this thing, so go big or go back home.”
Evan laughed. His mind couldn’t handle the sheer weight of the words. Like he couldn’t comprehend what James was telling him. Social media war? “I think people liked the girl—Marisol. Don’t know how much it had to do with me.”
“What did I just tell you?”
“I look as dumb as a box of press on nails?”
“Well, yes. But come on, man. Take credit for something here. You’re a bloody intern. You make this bit work and we get another week. Maybe two. The show gets picked up for twenty-six weeks. And then guess what?”
“What?”
“You’ll have a job here. Probably a half dozen other job offers too. Maybe even a show that doesn’t have thirty piles of dog shit on the ground. Now go find the rest of the writers and make sure they don’t screw up your shot.”
Interns weren’t offered jobs out of the blue like that. It didn’t happen, at least not before the end of their internships. But the words crept under his skin, buzzing until he couldn’t ignore them anymore.
Five minutes later, Evan shoved open the door of the writers’ room. He didn’t knock, and he didn’t ask for permission to join them. He’d always kindled a hope that this internship would lead to an offer. For a few weeks, that flicker had almost gone out. But now the host’s words had sent it into wildfire territory. “James said to help.”
The guy closest to the door nodded and pointed at an empty folding chair. “What time is she coming?”
“Around four. Depends on the bus schedule, I guess.”
“You didn’t send a car?”
“I can do that?” Evan blinked. Marisol said she’d taken the bus to the studio the first time, and they both assumed that was how she’d make it back tonight.
“Not now. It’s too late,” the guy said. “Go pick her up when we’re done here. The buses are always late. Julia isn’t going to want to be here all night.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“I’m Andrew.” He jabbed a pen at his chest, then introduced the rest of the writers in the room. “We were brainstorming desk pieces for next week. Let’s run what we’ve got for the date instead, so lover boy here can go get the girl. Then we can pick this back up.”
James’s words buzzed louder. Take credit for something here. “Evan.”
“Huh?”
“My name is Evan.”
“Until we get a six-month pick up order, you’re whatever we say you are. Let’s go.”
Evan listened as they spitballed, lobbing ideas back and forth across the table like a television show version of the world’s slowest ping-pong tournament. A few ideas rang out as mildly funny, but none had that thing. The thing that made the studio audience erupt into laughter. The thing that pulled the home audience from the edge of sleep and made them turn up their televisions.
“What do you think?” Andrew asked. “Want to run through one of these? Let’s do the first one: Accidental Dim Sum.”
He didn’t want to run through any of these. They were—as James would say—shite. Complete shite. Go big or go back to Peoria. “We need to use Marisol more.”
“I’d use her six ways to Sunday,” one of the writers chimed in.
Evan ignored him and focused his attention on Andrew. “There’s too much of me in these. I mean, sure, I can look like a mooning idiot and people will laugh, but it’ll get old fast. People liked the first one because she was so unpredictable.”
“So what do you propose?” Andrew looked bored. And impatient.
“Keep it unpredictable. Go semi-scripted instead. Give her a few lines and ideas, then turn her loose.”
“She’s not a professional, man. I think that’s a bad idea.”
Maybe it was. Evan barely knew Marisol. She had no comedy training. She was being consumed by this grant stuff, and she wasn’t exactly excited about being on the show. Giving her open stage to make or break his writing career—all of their careers—might be the worst idea he’d ever had.
&
nbsp; Evan took a deep breath. “Do it semi-scripted.”
• • •
Every time her mother called, Marisol let the phone go to voice mail. She replied with a variation of the same text again and again.
Sorry. Very busy. Will call soon. Everything is fine.
It wasn’t fine.
She’d gone down to the hotel lobby for breakfast to find the Pube ladies sipping coffee with Mr. Morgan, the man who’d interviewed her the very first day. Emboldened by caffeine—or perhaps pure desperation—Marisol pulled up a chair.
“So nice to meet you. Are you looking forward to the conference?” she’d asked.
The women cocked their heads, like confused puppies. “Right. You’re the girl from Nicaragua.”
Marisol noticed the way she’d spit out the word “girl.” Like Marisol was getting ready for her first day of kindergarten.
“Excuse me,” Mr. Morgan said. “I’m going to get some more of those eggs.”
The second he was out of earshot, Pube One morphed from pleasant business woman to sneering she-devil. “Feel free to leave now.”
“Excuse me?”
“You can’t just leech onto our networking efforts,” Pube Two said. “It looks desperate.”
Marisol stabbed her eggs and pretended she wasn’t sitting at a table with demons in suits.
“The Hilltop always does the best breakfast. Top notch.” Mr. Morgan slid into his seat.
“It was a very good choice for the conference,” Marisol said. “Are you from Los Angeles, Mr. Morgan?”
“Please, call me Chadwick. And yes, born and bred Californian here.”
It was working. She could tell by the depths of the hate pooling in the Pubes’ eyes. Marisol went with it. She inserted herself into every piece of conversation, making small talk and feigning interest in Mr. Morgan’s job, which seemed to involve shuffling paperwork all day long. By the time Marisol got up from the table to get ready for her last interview, the cranky old man was wishing her luck.
Take that.
But the feeling didn’t last. First, the iron in her room went on the fritz—leaving her with a burn along the collar of her shirt and the world’s deepest wrinkles in her skirt. Then the elevator clogged, leaving a bottleneck of people for her to wade through. When she finally made it to the interview room—on time for once—she found a note jammed into the crease of the door.