The Next Best Thing (13 page)

“Do you have a title?” asked the guy I’d met the day before—he was the editor in chief of the school paper, and of this new, secret underground venture. His name was Joel Kingsbury, and he was handsome, in a thoughtful, pale, bespectacled way.

“How about ‘Our Lips Are Sealed’?”

“I like it,” Joel said, and smiled at me. Warmth rushed through my body, from my toes to the top of my head . . . and that was my
A Star Is Born
moment. Joel slid to one side, Brittany moved to the other, and just like that, like magic, there was room on the bench for me. It was like my dream of television: the glass softening and parting, so that I would have a place in the world.

The underground paper was called
Hellmouth,
because Brittany was a
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
fan, and it came out every two weeks, unless Joel or Anita, who wrote columns about politics, or Sean, who drew the cartoons, got busy or sick. We’d type it up on a laptop and print it at Brittany’s, since her mother had a copier, and leave it in stacks in different places each time—under the bleachers in the gym, in the girls’ and boys’ first-floor bathrooms, in a corner next to the microwaves in the home-ec kitchens. We’d get to school at six in the morning on Drop Days, with piles of the papers in our backpacks, and creep around the building, delivering them, before piling into Joel’s car and going to HoJo’s for breakfast. In my four years of writing “Our Lips Are Sealed,” only one person ever figured out that the anonymous author who signed each column “Kisses!” was me.

It was right before Christmas when I left my meeting at the official school paper, the
Framingham High Observer,
and found Sarah on the low wall where I’d been sitting when I’d first seen
her and Derek. She must have been waiting for me. “You need to stop writing all that mean shit about Derek’s face,” she began.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said coolly. After my first Mount Vesuvius reference, I’d instituted a regular feature in the column called “ZitWatch.” When Derek’s forehead zit had finally exploded, I’d taped a Hostess cupcake to the locker of the person who’d gotten the date right, and then turned my attention to the pimple on his chin.

“I know it’s you,” said Sarah. “You’re the only one in ninth grade who’d use a word like
protrusion.
You’re such a show-off.”

I stared at her blandly. Maybe I was a show-off, but at least I didn’t stuff my bra. Which Sarah did. Maybe I’d use that in next week’s column.

The bus pulled up to the curb, and I started to walk past her. My throat felt swollen, and my eyes were burning. I wondered what she’d done with that Tiffany locket I’d bought her. I’d saved for weeks to buy it, and when my grandmother had offered to chip in, I’d told her no.

“You should cut it out!” Sarah’s voice was loud and shrill, and she sounded like she might have been crying. “He can’t help how he looks!”

Oh,
I thought.
Like I can?
I turned around.

“You were supposed to be my friend,” I said. Sarah stepped back. Clearly, she wasn’t expecting me to say anything except that I was sorry, which I wasn’t.

“You’re just jealous,” she retorted. “Because I’ve got a boyfriend, and nobody’s ever going to want you.”

I felt my eyes flood, and blinked fast, so the tears wouldn’t spill down my cheeks. “I’d rather have no boyfriend than Derek Nooney,” I said. “How can you let him kiss you? Aren’t you afraid that one of his—what’s that big word? Oh, right.
Protrusions
—one of his protrusions is going to explode all over you?”

“Bitch,” said Sarah.

“Human Stridex,” I responded.

Her face crumpled, and I could tell what she was thinking: that the next time she picked up a copy of
Hellmouth,
she might find herself on the receiving end of my attention, being called Human Stridex for all the world to see. Without another word, she turned, her shoulders slumped. Triumph surged through me, hot and heady. I’d won. It was undeniable. But it didn’t feel good. All I wanted to do was to run after her and ask her why: why she’d dumped me for Derek Nooney, why she acted like she couldn’t even see me anymore.

My grandmother was, of course, thrilled that I’d joined the school paper, that I had an activity, that I’d made friends. She clipped each story I wrote and had them all laminated and then bound in a scrapbook. I never told her about
Hellmouth,
but I was pretty sure she knew—at least once a month, I’d host a staff meeting in my bedroom, with the door locked and four or five senior staffers gathered around Charlie McKenna’s laptop (his father worked in computer science, and Charlie was one of the first kids to have one). She would provide us with snacks—piles of sandwiches, bowls of popcorn, platters of cookies—and I’d hear her humming, moving past our room as we whispered and laughed. By the time I was a senior, editor in chief of both papers, I’d made up my mind: somehow I would find a way to write for a living when I grew up. I’d find a way to use my voice, funny-mean and observant, to earn my keep, to make my name, to carve out a place in the world.

T
he Monday morning after my conversation with Shelly, I pulled on my old navy-blue interview jacket—only by now I knew enough to pair it with jeans and a fedora, instead of heels and a skirt. I straightened my hair, painted my face, and proceeded, dry-mouthed and sweaty-palmed, to the Burbank offices of Two Daves Productions. I’d pulled into the lot a neurotic forty-five minutes early, parked my Prius, and established myself in the eighth-floor waiting room that, save for the
Bunk Eight
posters on the walls (tanned, white-teethed specimens of both sexes conducting a pillow fight in a picturesque cabin in the woods) and the copies of
Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter
on the coffee table, could have fronted an insurance office, or a dentist’s, or a bank.

I silenced my cell phone, crossed my legs, and opened up the folder containing everything I could find about the men I’d be meeting with, and began to reread.

The Two Daves were David Lieberman and David Carter. Friends since college (Harvard, of course), they’d been staff writers all through their twenties before landing a development deal, during which they’d created the sitcom
Bunk Eight.
Shelly had told me that their previous assistant had just left under mysterious
circumstances, and that the Daves were eager to replace her immediately, if not sooner.

I was halfway through reading an interview the Daves had done with
The
Onion
(they’d insisted on conducting the session in Big Dave’s hot tub—
as you do,
I thought) when the door swung open and a little black-and-white dog came bombing out of the office, zipped past the receptionist, and hopped smartly up into my lap.

“Oh, hi there!” I said, startled. The dog looked at me with bright black eyes and then gave my nose a single lick and curled up in my lap as if it had known me all its life. One of its ears stuck straight up, the other flopped as it ran, and I remembered something I’d read somewhere—that when God sees a dog he likes, he folds one of its ears down to remember it.

“Pocket, off!” boomed a voice from inside the office. The dog lifted its head, sighed, and then hopped off my lap. I got to my feet as an extremely tall, handsome man stepped out of his office.

“Sorry about that, Ruth. You’re Ruth, right?” I nodded, brushing dog fur off my legs.

“I’m Dave Lieberman. You can call me Big Dave. It’s self-explanatory.” He raised his voice, shouting in the direction of a closed door. “Hey, asshole! Your therapy dog tried to hump our job candidate’s leg!”

“Oh no it didn’t!” I cried as a calm voice issuing from behind a wall called, “Pocket, go to place.”

The dog obediently trotted to a fluffy rectangle of padding in the corner and curled up. Big Dave winked at me. “It’s a she,” he stage-whispered. “You’re not allergic or anything, are you?” I shook my head. I hadn’t grown up with pets—my grandmother was not, as she put it, a dog person, and I’d never lobbied for a bird or a fish or a cat—but this dog, now regarding me calmly with its chin on its paws, seemed like an excellent example of its kind. Besides, plenty of showrunners brought dogs to work—it
was one of the job’s common perks or affectations, depending on your attitude and on the dog’s behavior.

While Big Dave fished a treat out of a ceramic jar labeled
TREATS
, I took a moment to consider my possible new boss. True to his nickname, Big Dave was over six and a half feet tall, and everything about him was large. He had enormous hands, and feet the size of loaves of bread. His nose was a generous hook, his teeth looked slightly larger what most men I knew had in their mouths, and his chin jutted heroically, like a little kid’s drawing of a superhero. Then there was his hair, a shoulder-grazing mop of glossy brown that he was constantly fussing with, combing with his fingers, pulling into an impromptu ponytail, and then releasing to hang in waves and ringlets against his cheeks.

Big Dave’s hair might have said “rock star,” but his clothes were strictly prep school. That morning he was arrayed in flat-front khakis, lace-up oxfords, a button-down shirt striped cream and lime with his monogram—
DAL
—on the cuffs, and a Lilly Pulitzer tie in an eye-watering pattern of hot pink and tangerine. He had a booming laugh and a winning smile, both of which, I would come to learn, he deployed regularly. The world delighted Big Dave, and why shouldn’t it? I knew, from my reading, that Big Dave, at thirty-six, was rich enough to own five sports cars, one for each workday, and a sprawling glass box of a house that was perched in the Hollywood Hills, with a swimming pool and a hot tub and a sauna, a home gym and a screening room that sat twelve.

“Pleasure to meet you,” Big Dave said, taking my hand. “Where are you from, Boston? I’m hearing Boston. You ever go to camp in the Berkshires? You look like a girl I knew once. Stacey Saunders? Played volleyball? Not you, obviously, but any relation?”

I shook my head, looking around as Dave helped himself to a Fresca and the little dog—Pocket—crunched up her treat,
licked her lips, then began chewing on a cylinder of red rubber. The office, up on the eighth floor overlooking Alameda Avenue, was large and sunny, with big windows that let in plenty of light. It was equipped with couches and chairs and beigey-gray carpet that had most likely come from some office supply warehouse. The desks and bookshelves and telephones had probably been there before the Daves arrived and would remain after they left. But the furniture was the only thing signaling that we were in a place where work was expected to happen. Except for the couches and carpets, their office was a romper room, a ten-year-old boy’s dream, if the ten-year-old boy had expensive taste and an unlimited budget. A soapbox racer painted red and white was parked against one wall. On a table beside it was a half-assembled four-foot-high Death Star made of LEGOs, alongside a variety of diagrams and Internet-procured cheat sheets. A Nerf basketball hoop was affixed to the back of the door, a felt golf green was rolled out along one wall, a giant tank filled with bright fish had been set between the two desks, and there was an old-school pinball machine underneath the window.

“Do you play?” Dave asked.

I shook my head. “Ms. Pac-Man was my game.”

“Ooh, good one.” He settled on a white leather sofa, underneath a row of movie posters—one for
King Kong,
another for
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman,
and a third with Tura Satana, of Russ Meyer fame, bursting out of her halter top as she confronted some unseen foe. The pièce de résistance, displayed in a Lucite box in the corner, was a gold wheelchair that it took me a moment to recognize as the one Woody Harrelson had used when he’d played the titular character in
The People vs. Larry Flynt.

“Affectation,” said Big Dave, following my gaze. The back door swung open, the little dog raised her head and gave a cheerful yip, and a man entered the room, his hands working
the wheels of a far less glamorous chair than the one in the see-through box.

“Screw you,” said the man in the wheelchair. He was boyishly handsome, with thick brown hair and mild hazel eyes, and he spoke to his partner with familiar affection. “I’m not the one who bought the Batmobile.”

“You see?” asked Big Dave, arranging his features in a hangdog expression. “You see how he treats me? Besides,” he went on, turning back toward the man I assumed was his partner, “I didn’t buy the Batmobile. I leased it for my birthday. How many times am I going to turn thirty-five?”

“Bought. Leased. You’re splitting hairs,” said the man in the wheelchair—the other Dave, I presumed. Little Dave. “All I know is that when you look up
entitlement
on Wikipedia, there’s a picture of you. In the Batmobile.”

“I didn’t actually drive it,” Big Dave grumbled.

“Oh, well, in that case, I take it all back.”

“Are you getting this?” Big Dave asked again, raking his fingers through his hair as he turned to me. “You see what I put up with?”

“Big white guy can’t catch a break,” I said . . . which turned out to be precisely the right thing to say. Both Daves laughed, Big Dave loudly, Little Dave with a dry, quiet
heh-heh-heh
. The dog looked from one Dave to the other, her bright black-olive eyes following each beat of the conversation, one ear erect, the other folded and floppy.