I had a number in mind, a reasonable one, but what I really wanted was a salary on par with Ben’s, which was a good 25 percent higher than mine. Call me old-fashioned but the moment I became financially independent from my parents, I knew I’d never go back. The freedom tasted too good. And that way I’d never lose everything in a horrible divorce, like my mother had.
Ben pulled me back to him and nestled his face in my neck.
“Maybe I should come with you. Who’s going to be there again?”
“I thought you had to work?”
He kissed me in response. He had a full-time job as a marketing copywriter for a tech startup, but if you met him at a party and asked what he did, he would give you a completely different answer.
I led us, still intertwined, out into the room. His laptop was open on the desk right next to mine. Ben was writing a new screenplay, a time-traveling comedy with a sci-fi element. He was feeling great about this one. He thought he might finally get an agent or even make his first sale as a screenwriter. He’d said that about every screenplay, but I’d never hold that against him. I was a supportive girlfriend; I believed in him. This time and every other time before it. Ben was a screenwriter. No “aspiring” needed in front of it. The fact that it didn’t pay a single bill was irrelevant to him.
To me, work meant money. Work meant life. I couldn’t dissociate the two.
My phone rang, ending our conversation. It wasthatringtone, the one we both knew announced calls I always had to pick up. Ben grabbed his laptop, slipped back into the bathroom, and closed the door behind him, the only way to give me privacy in our tiny hotel room.
“FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK,” Carmen said. Not an unusual greeting, coming from her. “Have you seen the latestDis-Moi Toutpost?”
Hearing this, it would have been easy to think of Carmen Perez as a Prada-wearing devil of a boss, but four years of working for her had taught me the woman contained multitudes. She listened to heavy metal and loved obscure Korean movies that didn’t even have a U.S. distributor. She lunched on kale juices and chocolate donuts. She peppered all-team meetings with vivid retellings of her most recent sexual encounters. The girls had no names, but the positions certainly did. And the womanlovedto swear.
“Of course,” I lied, putting in my AirPods so I could flick through Instagram and learn the content of said post while listening to her tirade.
“Those fucking fuckers.”
I scanned the caption—something about Fiona Pills being spotted leaving her film set in Edinburgh a couple of hours ago. The gossipists, as I called them in my head, had checked: There was a flight to Nice she could catch, but if Fiona Pills had any intention of making it to her movie’s launch party tonight, she sure was cutting it fine. She had already missed the festival’s opening ceremony, which had started a couple of hours ago.
“She could be flying private,” I said. “And this party was kind of last minute anyway. The real event is the premiere tomorrow. She’ll be there.”
Carmen always liked when I was being the voice of reason. That and the fact that I got shit done without ever needing to be asked twice.
“Her people aren’t getting back to me. Odetta is about ready to slice her open.” Carmen gasped. “Forget I said that.”
“Forgotten,” I said.
Ever since Carmen had signed on to do the publicity for the film, Odetta Olson’s rumored feud with Fiona Pills had been a constant source of anguish and f-bombs. Odetta, the established actor-turned-directorhad,allegedly, been so difficult with Fiona, the lead actor inDon’t Be Sad!, that Fiona had ghosted her ever since. But Fiona Pills was still contractually obligated to attend press events and festivals to promote the movie. If she didn’t, she’d lose a nice chunk of her multimillion-dollar payout. You’d have to be crazy to walk away from all that money just because you didn’t like being near someone. Lots of people can’t stand their colleagues, and they manage to go to work every day. Though young actors don’t always make the most logical decisions. Regardless, we needed Fiona Pills to get the best media coverage for the movie.
And to undo some of the negative press it had already gotten. In recent months, there had been a few blind items alluding to on set bickering between unnamed participants and vague jabs about insecure older women who struggled to watch their star fade away. The usual, nasty stuff. Pitting the older woman against the younger one, how original. But when the movie was announced as a contender in the Cannes Film Festival, the gossip mill ramped up. Now that the world premiere was upon us, things were starting to smell well and truly off.
This was bad for all involved, including me. Carmen was hoping to sign a long-term deal with the movie studio, and my promotion depended on that.
“I’m thinking shitreallywent down between these two,” Carmen said.
“Do we want to find out what?”
“We should. We really fucking should. But I’m pretty sure we’re not going to like it.”
She paused, and I could almost see her rubbing her temples. Working in publicity hadn’t exactly been my childhood dream. But after graduating with a degree in communications—which felt like something I could use in the real world—I floundered a bit. Hung on to the waitressing gigs I’d had in college while I applied to every job and internship in the entirestate of California and beyond. Not much happened until, one night, I talked to one of the moms I was occasionally babysitting for, who was friends with Carmen. That’s how I got an interview for an assistant position at her firm, Violet PR. Two years in, I’d been promoted to my current role as junior publicist, and I stopped wondering if I would have gotten the job on my own merit.
“You think the rumors are true?” I asked.
Carmen’s spidey sense turned out to be spot-on more often than not. She’d been doing this work for almost twenty years, running her own company for fifteen of those.
She sighed. “I don’t think Cannes is going to be fun for either of us.”
The wheels were already spinning in my head. “If something went down on set, other people know about it.”
“Let’s just focus on tonight, okay? You have the final guest list?”
“Of course.”
