by J. S. Cooper
I was left staring at the phone in frustration, anger, and jealousy. Why couldn’t Blake and Bridget just leave me alone and let me move on with my new life as a Hollywood starlet, living life vicariously through my movie roles and sleeping with my hot directors and costars?
I arrived at Stephen’s at 9:10 p.m. Well, if I am more accurate, I arrived at 8:30 but stayed in my car until 9:10 p.m. I didn’t want to look overly eager. I looked over my cheat sheet really quickly and tried to remember as many facts as I could about the school board and some of the more recent local school district stories from the LA Times. It seemed to me that the parts I found the most interesting and engaging were the more personal stories. That was also what I loved most about working at We Love to Read. The actual students whose reading and writing skills improved week after week, the joy in their faces, the pride, the achievement. That was something concrete that made me happy. Something that made me want to write. The numbers and data that I had read in most of the articles were boring to me and didn’t give me any personal connection to the stories. I wanted to tell Stephen some ideas I had on how to reach out to the community as a whole in our show, well, his show, but wasn’t sure how he would react.
I rang the doorbell with butterflies in my stomach. I had shaved my legs especially for tonight and put on sexy underwear and my favorite perfume, ‘Princess’ by Vera Wang. It would serve Blake right if he didn’t get a phone call from me because I was spending the night at Stephen’s. That would show him. Let him go and give Bridget some advice on how to be a grown up.
“Hey, Maggie, come on in.” Stephen answered the door with his cell phone in his hand. “I’m just on the phone. Feel free to have a seat.” He waved his arm towards the doorway on his left and wandered off.
I looked around his house. It was stark white and pristine. A little off-putting and too modern for me. There were lots of huge abstract sculptures, and I felt like I was in a museum, and one that I wouldn’t frequent often at that. As I walked through the doorway to what I presumed was the living room, I gasped. There was a gigantic painting directly facing the entryway of what was clearly a woman’s vagina. I didn’t know whether to laugh or not, but I had a feeling that was not the feeling the painting was supposed to elicit.
I groaned when I realized how minimalistic the living room was. The chairs were very close to the floor and looked very hard, with no comfortable cushions to cuddle against. The room looked like it was going for a Japanese Zen-like feel but had failed in all areas except for the not being comfortable part. I definitely could not see myself snuggling up next to Stephen and making out anywhere in this room. I also noticed that there didn’t appear to be a television. I guessed there would be no TV breaks or laughing over old episodes of ‘King of Queens’. Inwardly, I groaned. This was not going to be the warm cozy evening I had been picturing in my head.
“Hey, Maggie, sorry about that. Have a seat. The food should be here soon.” Stephen came over and gave me a quick hug and led me over to the break my back chair. Lowering myself down to the chair was only marginally more embarrassing than deciding how to sit on the chair. I couldn’t really lean back, but sitting forward wasn’t very comfortable either. I decided to just go ahead and sit on the floor and lean against the chair. Unfortunately for me, cold marble doesn’t make for a very comfortable sitting piece either.
“So, Maggie. I am really excited to get your insight into these papers,” Stephen got down to business immediately as he sat down on the chair.
“Oh, me too.” I groaned inside again. “Me too.”
“I figure we can talk about the show for a bit and then eat and then go over the paperwork after we eat. Don’t want to spill anything on the papers now, do we?” He laughed.
I just smiled and nodded my head. Why did I waste my perfume on this night? It didn’t seem to me that there was going to be any chance of us being close enough for him to appreciate the flowery scent between my bosoms.
“So Blake told you the concept, right? We want to expose what is really going on in Los Angeles schools and basically you are going to break down the facts for concerned citizens. You speak Spanish, right?”
“Spanish? Huh?” I looked at him puzzled.
“Many of the parents speak Spanish as a first language, so I was thinking it would be cool if you were to do a bilingual show, really show we are reaching out to the community.”
“Oh, well, I’m not really fluent in Spanish.” (Unless knowing hola and coma estas was considered being fluent).
“Oh, I thought Blake told me that you were,” Stephen looked disappointed. I could see my Hollywood career going down the drain before my eyes.
“Sorry, I mean, I guess I could learn...get a Rosetta Stone CD set if need be...” I wanted to add if you will pay for the set, but didn’t want him to think I was using him for free stuff.
“No, that’s fine. We can just have Spanish subtitles. That may even be cooler.”
“Oh okay.” How would that be cooler?
“So, what I want you to do tomorrow is to create some PowerPoint presentations and simplify them for our viewers and...”
HUH? “Sorry, what? PowerPoint?” I smiled at Stephen while trying to hide the dismay in my voice.
“Yes, I will give you the documents that I got and you can extract the most pertinent information and...”
“Extract?” I said under my breath.
“And then create some cool interactive bar charts and graphs...”
“Graphs?”
“Yeah, you know. Something that makes parents sit forward and say ‘wow’.”
“Wow,” I repeated after him as if in a trance. I had a feeling that any parents watching the TV show would be feeling like I did making the charts. And that feeling wasn’t going to elicit any ‘wow’s.
“Exactly, we want the wow factor.” He grinned at me. “I’m so glad that Blake suggested you for this hosting position. I think you are going to be great.”
I smiled weakly at him. This was not sounding like the position I had been envisioning. I thought I was going to be interviewing some cute kids at different schools and asking them about reading and spending time reading to them, even possibly from my own book, nothing like a bit of free publicity. But this job was starting to sound like I was to be some sort of administrative assistant.
And the even more messed up part of the equation was that it wasn’t even a job. I wasn’t getting paid. Or at least not monetarily. Stephen had told me that the exposure I would receive on TV would be so beneficial to my career that it would more than make up for any pittance he could pay me. I’d had doubts that I would receive any real exposure on public access TV but figured that it wouldn’t seem like work if I was hanging out with kids and helping my own writing process.
Also, Stephen himself had definitely sweetened the pot with his good looks. But this was starting to sound like it was going to be a lot of grunt work. And to be honest, not the sort of grunt work that I was particularly interested in either.
“Yeah, sounds exciting for sure. Um, how often will I be interviewing the kids?”
“Well, I’m not really sure if you will be interviewing any kids...”
“What?”
“There’s a lot of red tape in public schools, and you know principals aren’t going to really want us coming into the schools when they realize we are doing an exposé on them.”
My mouth dropped open. “Exposé?” This was not sounding like something I could even legally be involved in, or at least not if I wanted to keep my day job, the one that was actually paying my bills. I still had to go to these schools every week for my ‘We Love to Read’ school visits.
“Yeah, this is going to blow the public school system apart,” Stephen said excitedly.
“What exactly is the information that you have?” I swallowed, scared to hear but wanting to know. What if the information compromised my job and I had to become an informant? I’d never work in the educational nonprofit sector in Lo
s Angeles again.
“Well, I don’t really know yet,” Stephen looked at me sheepishly, “that’s what you are here to find out.”
“Me?” I looked at him puzzled.
“Yeah, when we go through the files that were sent to me, from my contact at the L.A. Times.”
“Oh okay,” I seriously doubted that I was going to be able to decipher any codes in the paperwork that would lead to an exposé that would take down the whole public school system but figured that if I could, then the system deserved to be brought down.
“This is going to be awesome. People are going to look at me as the more intellectual Michael Moore.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” It struck me that if anyone was going to be looked at as the more intellectual Michael Moore it should be me, seeing as I was the one who was going to be responsible for finding the earth-shattering news that would scandalize the LA school system, but I decided to keep that thought to myself.
The doorbell rang at that point, and Stephen went to go and get the food. My stomach growled in anticipation. I was excited to eat some sweet and sour pork and fried rice. It might make me a little sleepy, but would definitely put me in a better mood. Greasy food always did.
As Stephen walked back with the big brown bag containing the delicious food, I could feel my mood improving. He put the bag on the glass table in front of me and went to get some plates.
“You can start opening the boxes if you want. I’ll go get us some utensils.”
I eagerly started opening up the boxes to see what goodies he had gotten for the night. My excitement quickly turned to disappointment. What was this crap? Stephen had ordered brown rice, some sort of vegetable stir-fry, and a tofu dish. I wanted to cry. This was not going as planned at all.
Stephen walked back into the room with the plates and took a deep breath.
“Ooh, doesn’t this smell delicious?”
“Sooo delicious,” I lied. I decided that I would make Blake bring me some real food when he came over; it was the least he could do. I helped myself to the smallest serving of each dish and pretended to ooh and ahh over every bite.
“It’s sooo good, isn’t it?” Stephen grinned at me as he helped himself to more brown rice. “Want some more?” He was handing me the box.
“Oh, no thanks. Gotta watch what I eat,” I said sarcastically.
“Oh, I know. This stuff is so good but I only get it once every few months. It’s so bad for you!”
I looked up at him, ready to join the laughter I was sure was going to come after that comment. But he looked so earnest that I realized he was serious.
“Ha, yeah. I definitely don’t treat myself like this everyday.” Thank God.
“Maggie, you really are something special.” I looked up to see Stephen smiling down at me, his lips glistening with oil from the stir fry. He really was such a good-looking man.
“Thanks, Stephen, you’re pretty special yourself.”
The meal was over pretty quickly, and Stephen immediately cleared up the mess and took the food to the kitchen to package and put away in the fridge. I was impressed by his due diligence and realized that I would have to do a thorough cleaning of my place before I ever had him over. I also noted that I would likely be spending a lot of time in this austere museum house of his if we ever dated because there was no way that I would have time to clean my place every day in preparation for his coming over. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be impressed by all the half-eaten takeout boxes in my fridge.
“So, let me hand you the file that my contact at the LA Times gave me and you can start going through it and jotting everything down you think looks out of the ordinary.”
“Sure.” I really wanted to ask him who his contact was. He kept mentioning it and I was curious to know whether or not it was the EIC himself. I mean, that would be kind of incredible. I could be in on some sort of Watergate project here. There might be movies made of this night, and I would get to choose which actress would play me. My name would be in history books for people to read about for years to come. Maybe Vera Wang would pay me some sort of royalties if I made sure to include the fact that I wore her perfume on this night.
I eagerly reached for the file that he handed me and was surprised at how small it was, only about 20 pages thick. The contact must have made sure to send only the pertinent information. Boy was I in luck, this wasn’t going to take long at all. I eagerly pulled out the papers and got a pen and pad ready to note down anything I thought looked unusual. It took me about 10 minutes to go through the papers thoroughly.
“Hey, Stephen,” I called out to him, “I think you may have given me the wrong file.”
“What?” he walked back into the room with a glass of wine. I noted that he had not offered me any. What was I, the secretary who wasn’t allowed to drink on the job?
“I think that perhaps you gave me the wrong file.”
He looked at me confused. “No, no, that’s the file.”
“Oh.”
“So, you find anything as yet?”
“Um, well, no, not really,” I paused. “Who exactly is your contact at the LA Times?”
“Well, I promised him I wouldn’t tell anyone, you know. He could lose his job.”
“Yeah, I understand that. I was just curious. I won’t tell anyone.”
“Okay. I guess it won’t hurt to tell you. His name is Jose Vargas.”
“Jose Vargas?” I had never heard of him before, and I had just looked through the entire list of editors and reporters listed on their site hours before.
“Yeah, Jose Vargas.”
“So, uh, what role does Jose have at the paper? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“He’s a janitor.”
“A ... a ... janitor?” Was this a joke?
“Yeah. He was cleaning out some trash cans from some of the offices a few weeks back and thought that these papers might be helpful.”
“Helpful?” I said weakly looking down at the papers.
“Yeah. He said all the numbers had to mean something. And he knows that some of the reporters are working on a big story about the education system.”
“Really? He knows this how exactly?”
“He overheard a conversation, but anyways, that doesn’t matter now. We have our own story to work on. This could make us famous.” Stephen flashed a brilliant white smile at me, only I didn’t react the way I would have a week before. My stomach didn’t jump with excitement; I didn’t see myself in magazines; I just felt a sinking feeling in my stomach.
“Uh, yeah. Famous, for sure.” Famous for being dumb, I thought to myself.
“So, see any patterns yet? Who’s going down?” Stephen asked eagerly.
“ Um, not sure yet. I need to study it a bit longer.”
“Oh okay.” Stephen smiled down at me admiringly. He was looking at me like I was some sort of Einstein about to solve the greatest problems in Physics. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that there was nothing to be found in the papers he had given me, unless he wanted to know who ordered what at McDonald’s during the last lunch order.
“Can you still concentrate if I put some music on?” Stephen looked at me inquiringly.
“Sure,” I said, “that would be fine.” I was a little surprised to hear Marvin Gaye crooning at me from the corners of the room, but it did help to relax me and relieve my boredom from pretending to study the numbers on the pages. I looked down at my phone and realized that Blake had texted me to remind me to call him when I was done. I groaned. What was his problem? Didn’t he have a girlfriend he should be more concerned with? It annoyed me that he was treating me like an irresponsible little sister. I sighed.
“Everything okay, Maggie?” The eager look on Stephen’s face was almost too much to take. He really thought that I was going to find something here. Or did he? I nearly fainted when I felt his hands on my shoulders, massaging me.
“I’ve often found that it helps people concentrate and relax more when they are get
ting a massage,” he whispered in my ear as he continued to knead my shoulders. Whoa! Was he trying to get me into bed? Had this been a ploy the whole time?
I laughed. Thank God! I knew no one could be that stupid. This had been Stephen’s way of getting me over to his house so he could seduce me. I was a little annoyed, but flattered at the same time.
“Oh yes, it is very relaxing.” I leaned back and closed my eyes, tilting my face up a bit for the inevitable kiss.
“What are you doing?” Stephen looked at me weirdly. “Don’t let me stop you from concentrating.” He stopped massaging me and looked anxious.
I looked back at him in confusion. Shit! He wasn’t trying to seduce me. He really thought I would find something here.
“Stephen, you do realize that these are photocopies of lunch receipts from McDonald’s, right?”
“Of course. I was hoping you could figure out the code.” He looked at me like I was the dumb one.
“The code...” I spoke weakly.
“Yes, obviously there is a code here hiding what the money was really being spent on.”
“The money?” Why would anyone care about coding where 100 dollars was going each week?”
“Yes, I mean, let’s be realistic. No one is eating McDonald’s every day.”
“Yeah, I guess not.” I didn’t bother telling him that I had gone for weeks eating McDonald’s every day. That that was likely the reason why I had to go to the gym and had a wardrobe full of ugly clothes.
“But, uh, why do you think I can work out the code?” I know that I had thought the CIA was interested in me, but that was because I knew how easily I solved murder mystery novels and thriller movies. I always figured out who the murderer was before the main characters did and was right about 50 percent of the time. However, I hadn’t really shown any of those skills to Stephen, so I wasn’t really sure why he thought I could help.
“Because Blake told me how bright you are. That you have a brain that works like no other. Frankly, that’s why you got the TV host job; I figured I could use you as a researcher and investigator as well.”