I knew if I’d asked her to take me with her for a home-cooked meal, she wouldn’t have argued. But I didn’t want to impose, didn’t want to bring my own agitation into her house. So I headed back to my own home. For the rest of the afternoon and into the night, I stayed in my room, studying what I’d written the night before. If this was going to happen, I had to be an expert on my own material. Even Amelia’s and Keith’s and Donald’s pep-talk phone calls didn’t make me less nervous; if anything, they increased the pressure, since I wanted to keep Amelia and Keith and Donald happy along with me.
If there was one thing I was sure of, it was that tomorrow morning’s meeting would be important.
If there was one thing I wasn’t sure of, it was that tomorrow morning’s meeting would go well.
Not only was the network’s daytime president a notorious hard-ass.
He was also my mother’s third ex-husband.
“Mallory!” Trip Carver exclaimed, standing up behind his desk to shake my hand. “It’s so wonderful to see you!”
And all I could think was: Liar!
Trip Carver was the kind of guy who only smiled when he was tearing someone apart. I guess my mother was attracted to that … for a time. She and Trip had dated for only about seven months before getting hitched—”a marriage made in daytime heaven,” according to Soap Opera Digest. Well, as far as I could tell, the only thing the marriage had in common with heaven was that a lot of things died to get there. In public, Mom and Trip were tuxedo-and-gown compatible. But in private, they were scissors and rock. They “fixed” this by eliminating private contact altogether. Trip worked late, Mom worked early, and any overlap was barely bearable. I was thirteen and had already seen two husbands come and go—I had no desire to attach to Trip and he had no desire to attach to me. If we saw each other, I’d say hello and he’d nod; that’s how it was.
Then Trip cheated on Mom. Not with his secretary or his best friend’s wife, but with his best friend’s wife’s secretary, who spelled her name S-I-N-D-Y. When Mom found out, she threw things. In between ducking and picking up pieces of shattered statuary, Trip looked bored. The divorce papers soon appeared, and Mom and I were moving to a new house again. Mom blabbed about Trip’s tryst to the fan sites, and Trip’s lawyers had to work extra hard to convince him not to fire her on the spot. Breaking up with the boss had actually given her more job security—only someone like Mom could pull that off. Now when they saw each other, Trip was always coldly polite and Mom always asked him how Sindy was, even though Sindy had flown the well-decorated coop months ago.
Trip looked a little grayer than he’d been when we’d shared a house. But other than that, he was the same, acting like his soul wore a suit.
“I love Likely Story, “he told us, his eyes alternating between Donald and me. “Absolutely love it. One of the freshest pitches we’ve seen in years.”
The daytime VP, a spare woman named Celene Thimble, nodded behind him. I made my face devoid of all hope and/or excitement. I knew if I seemed too eager, Trip would take advantage of it.
“So what’re you thinking?” Donald asked.
“Well, as you know, we’re announcing a new lineup soon, and I’d like this to be a part of it. We’re willing to budget the first steps and then go from there. Casting will be crucial, of course. And we need a good show runner.”
He reached out his hand, and an assistant sprang from the side of the room with a folder in his hand. Like me, the assistant was keeping all expression off his face. He was wearing an expensive suit, but he looked like he was playing dress-up. He couldn’t have been more than five years older than me.
Trip took a photo out of the folder and put it on the desk for the rest of us to see.
It was a total glamour head shot—every hair in place, head tilted slightly to let the light add some attractive shadows. The guy in it was sexy, no doubt about it—his eyes gleamed with bold intensity. Confidence—that’s what he had. The kind you wanted to make out with.
There was one problem, though. He was easily in his late twenties, maybe even thirty. There was no way anybody would buy him as Ryan, the male lead on my show.
“Isn’t he a little old for Ryan?” I asked.
Trip chuckled condescendingly.
“That’s not an actor,” he said. “That’s going to be your executive producer, Richard Showalter. We’ve had our eye on him for months now. He’s a little bit HBO, a little bit MTV. Like you, he knows what kids like. I think between the two of you, we’ll get a truly groundbreaking show.”
This was daytime TV—I knew Trip didn’t really want “groundbreaking.” He wanted “commercial”—but since I was “creative” (which, to the soul-suits, also meant “touchy,” “unreasonable,” and “freaky”), he thought I needed to hear “groundbreaking.”
“As long as people watch it,” I said. “That’s what I want.”
Trip seemed pleased by this.
“We’ll set up a meeting with you and Richard,” he said. Then he pulled another photo out of his folder.
This one wasn’t a head shot. It was this completely creative black-and-white photograph of the most beautiful guy in the history of creation. He was walking through Central Park, unaware that his photo was being taken.
“Sweet Jesus,” I said. I couldn’t help myself.
Trip nodded. “He looks even better in color,” he told me.
“He’s Ryan,” I said. “Exactly.”
“Exactly,” Trip echoed.
“But who is he? Really, I mean?”
“His name is Dallas Grant, and he’s a senior at Juilliard in New York. We’ve literally seen him stop traffic—some poor girl was driving down Broadway and got into a fender bender because she couldn’t help watching him cross the street. One of our execs saw this, then called a photographer to get some shots. Our Juilliard scouts say he’s a very promising actor … and he’s about a hundred thou in debt for school. We can’t believe that nobody else has gotten to him yet. But we’re already on it.”
I couldn’t stop thinking how perfect this boy was for Ryan, my brooding, darkly mysterious hero-slash-antihero. It would make perfect sense for all of Deception Pass’s female residents to fall desperately in love with him, especially Sarah and Jacqueline, the other points in the romantic triangle.
But I also couldn’t help thinking: He’s so beautiful that I’m already intimidated by him. His beauty wasn’t the simple blank-slateness of a male model in an underwear ad. No. It had complexity. Beguiling complexity.
The room was silent, and it took me a second to realize that Trip must have asked me a question while I was staring at Dallas’s photo.
“So you approve?” Donald prompted.
“Absolutely,” I said.
Trip then showed a few actresses for the female leads, Jacqueline and Sarah. I narrowed down a few candidates for Jacqueline. As for Sarah … well, that was Amelia’s part. Since I wasn’t about to tell them that yet, I said, “I have someone else in mind for Sarah,” and left it at that. Trip nodded and said we would make casting decisions at a later date.
He still hadn’t said what my position was going to be, exactly. I wasn’t shocked that he wanted to bring in an executive producer—as much as the show was going to be my creation, I didn’t know the first thing about budgets, finance, production costs, and anything else involving dollar signs and stress. If I was going to raise this baby, I needed someone else to figure out how to pay for it.
At the very least, I wanted head-writer and creator credit. Trip was no fool—he knew my soap-opera lineage was as much of a hook as anything I’d written.
I figured I’d let Donald iron everything out. All I needed was Trip to get us going.
Trip started to speak in his second language—it’s called Demographics—and I only half listened as he talked about how advertisers were trying to capture the 18 to 35 range now more than ever, and how the network’s strength had always been 55 plus, especially in Daytime. (When Trip said �
�Daytime,” it was always with a capital D.) The prime-time programming was already trying to skew younger; Likely Story would be a “natural extension” of that.
As long as I could cast Dallas Grant and Amelia, I was happy.
Finally, the meeting was over. The assistant made the motion to lead us all away, but Trip asked if I could stay back for a second. Everybody else filed out.
“You realize,” Trip said to me, his blue-charcoal eyes unwavering, “that we’re going to have to sell the hell out of you to make this work. You’ve always been your mother’s daughter, but now you’re really going to be your mother’s daughter. I don’t want you suddenly thinking you’re going to be able to distance yourself from that.”
This didn’t bother me in the least. “I’ve put up with my mother all these years,” I told Trip. “I might as well get something out of that.”
This time his smile was a kind I hadn’t seen him use before—a smile of respect.
“Good,” he said. “I’ll tell you this—you are getting in on your merits, since your bible is better than ninety-nine percent of the dreck that makes its way into this office. But it’s your name that’s going to make this an easy sell.”
Now it was my turn to smile.
“That’s fine,” I said.
Sensing our meeting was now over, I stood up to leave. Trip stood, too, and saved his last words until I was almost out the door.
“Mallory,” he said, and I turned back around to face him. “You know that I hate your mother.”
I didn’t say anything.
“And you know,” he continued, “that your mother is going to hate this.”
I nodded, showing him I understood completely.
Two wrongs might not make a right … but two hates could definitely get a soap opera into production. I was set.
I trusted Donald to work out all the details. A few days later, there was a big headline in Daily Variety:
SOAP OPERA PRINCESS GETS HER KINGDOM
I didn’t particularly like being called a princess. But I loved the idea of having a kingdom.
The article said that Likely Story was on a fast track.
It also said that Richard Showalter was in negotiations to be executive producer.
I figured I had to meet him soon.
First, though, Amelia and I had to celebrate.
Other girls probably would have thrown a party. Word would have spread through school, and soon dozens—if not hundreds—of people would have been crowded into my house, spilling drinks on the carpet and making out in the available enclosed spaces (and probably some of the open ones).
I didn’t like to celebrate that way.
I had a sense that Amelia might have been into a party, but she was nice enough to indulge my antisocial behavior. After the news was released into the world, a few kids at school kissed up to try to get roles or, at the very least, passes onto the set. But most acted like I’d proven undeniably what they’d always thought to be true: I was a mutant from the planet Soap Opera and had spawned from my mother to spread salacious contrivance throughout the televised universe. To give an example: One football player in my Logic and Equations class yelled out, “Hey, Mallory, is there going to be a lot of hot evil-twin action on your show?” and the other people in the room laughed. At me, not with me.
I figured I would have my revenge soon enough. In my soap-opera world, all of the football players were going to be impotent.
In fairness, there were a few kids—mostly soapfan girls and gayboys—who were happy for me. But Amelia was the only one who traveled over the moon with me. So I figured our celebration should be a private one. On a whim, I booked us a room at the W—not a suite, just a room—so we could hang out and watch bad cable and eat ice cream without worrying that anyone (particularly any soap stars of a certain age) would interrupt. One of the only perks of being with Mom when she was on publicity tours was getting to spend the days in fancy hotel rooms; I loved having temporary possession of the bed, of the fancy shampoos, of the bathrobes. Staying in a hotel room was like being in a place where you held only the bare minimum of responsibility. I could relax there in a way that I could never relax at home. Plus, the W had special meaning to me. It was the same hotel that Trip had gone to when he’d cheated on Mom, so I figured it was a fitting place to celebrate. I planned to be within eyeshot when Mom saw it listed on her credit card.
After I arrived at the front desk, the desk manager told me my guest had already arrived and gone up. She winked at me then, and I wondered if she thought Amelia and I were a couple.
I myself started to wonder when I opened the door to the room and found it lit entirely in candlelight. Before I could think fire hazard, Keith appeared in front of the bed, dressed only in a white T and his boxers.
“Surprise!” he said. And I’ll admit it—I was surprised.
In between kisses, he explained that Amelia had granted him an hour in the room with me, and he planned to make the most of it.
For us, “the most of it” didn’t mean all of it—the rose petals on the bed were the only things that were going to be deflowered tonight. There were lots of reasons for this, but the primary one was named Erika.
We rolled around on the bed for a while and made out, kissing and grasping and keeping all our clothes on. A lot of the time, I was really into it—I could lose myself from any other thoughts besides the heat of him and the heat of me and the heat of us as we kissed and rolled and felt. But every now and then, flashes of Erika would intrude. I would think of him kissing her. Sleeping with her. Doing everything he was doing with me, only with her. Liking it more. Going further. Not thinking of me.
I didn’t stop, but part of me stopped. And then it wasn’t just Erika I was seeing. No, lying there in the hotel bed, Keith kissing my neck, pulling my shirt aside to kiss his way to my shoulder … suddenly it was Dallas Grant’s picture I was seeing. It was Dallas Grant I was imagining. Desiring.
This is trouble, I thought. This is madness.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Once it was there, I couldn’t get rid of it.
Before I’d even met him, I was hooked.
My first meeting with Richard Showalter was a nightmare. Although with nightmares, you at least have the consolation of waking up.
We were having lunch at the Ivy, which was so cliché that it was almost exciting—it was my turn to be the one caught chatting over calamari. I could live with being A-list among the A-holes for an hour or so.
Richard was already waiting at the table when I arrived—promptness, I figured, was a good sign. He didn’t stand when I got there, but he did hang up his cell and flash me a semi-genuine smile. He was as handsome as his photo had promised, and his body showed that he had a personal trainer who took his job very seriously. He was wearing a black T-shirt that probably cost more than a whole Old Navy store and Prada sunglasses that would keep the sun out but the shine on.
“Mallory,” he said, looking at me as if I were his new girlfriend’s more skeptical little sister. “I can’t tell you how excited I am to be working with you.”
We were sitting outside, and there was some sunlight coming through the LA haze. Still, I wanted him to take his sunglasses off. I’d already learned to be suspicious of people who never showed their eyes; it was that hint of vampire blood.
“I’ve always been a big fan of your mother’s,” he continued, no fangs in evidence. “But I have a feeling I’m going to be an even bigger fan of yours.”
Well, that was nice. At the very least, he’d done his homework.
I’d done mine, too—I knew that Richard Showalter had propelled himself up the production ladder by masterminding Catfight, a quasi-reality soap about four women in New York City who worked at the same fashion magazine by day, undermining each other every step of the way, only to hang out as best friends at night, frequenting the same upscale bar so they could talk about the guys they’d slept with. Catfight had been a huge hit one summer—spawni
ng an otherwise inexplicable trend for drinking pink wine and calling men “disposable bedposts.” But when Richard was snatched away to make a pilot for Fox called Three Alarm Fire (basically, Catfight with New York firefighters), the series became just one more Entertainment Weekly in-joke and was canceled for an advice show called Is He Stupid or Just Plain Dumb?
Three Alarm Fire was never made, and his future was never secured … until the Likely Story deal came along.
“I was a huge fan of Catfight,” I said.
Richard laughed. “No you weren’t.”
“Well, in the beginning.”
“You hated it.”
“I never even saw it,” I admitted.
“But you hated the very concept of it.”
Well, this put me in a spot. Did I get more points for politeness or the truth?
I figured I’d opt for the truth.
“Yeah, it was pretty lame,” I told him. “No offense.”
“Shows how much you know!” he replied.
And this was before I’d even had a chance to order an iced tea. We were arguing.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
He smiled again. “This is only going to work, Mallory, if you admit that you’re completely out of your depth and that you need my expertise. You don’t know anything about running a TV show, and—I’ll be honest—I find that refreshing. Usually I have to deal with creators who think they know everything, and that creates more messes than you’d ever believe. One of the great things about this setup is that you know your place and I know mine. If we get that down, the rest will be easy.”
A few words popped into my mind, and they all rhymed with ick.
“There,” he continued, signaling the waiter. “What will you have?”
I ordered without looking at the menu, to make him think I ate here all the time and was much more caught up in the scene than he ever would be. (He didn’t have to know I’d researched it online the night before.)
Likely Story! Page 3