“Oh my god.” Fiona shakes her head slightly, hoping she looks more annoyed than she actually is. “I’m leaving.”
“You’re not leaving. Karen,” Sam says, utterly unfazed, “may we please also get one hot dog with the works?”
Karen smiles, doe-like. “You sure can, peaches.”
“Can I ask you something?” Fiona asks once she’s gone, sitting back in the booth and crossing her arms at him. “Why do you assume that every woman finds you charming?”
He shrugs. “Experience, mostly. Can I askyousomething?”
“I would prefer that you didn’t.”
Sam ignores her. “You answered the phone, right?”
Fiona plucks a sour pickle from the dish on the table and takes a bite, then immediately realizes her mistake—it tastes like canned garlic and standing water, mushy and sad. “What?” she asks, once she’s swallowed.
“When your agent called you about the show, you answered the phone. So there must be a tiny part of you that wants to have a career again.”
“I have a career,” Fiona reminds him.
“At a copy shop?” Sam looks dubious.
Oh, that annoys her. “It’s my father’s business,” she snaps, temper sparking like flint against steel. “That he built with his two hands, and that paid for the house that I grew up in and my sister’s braces and my stupid fucking acting lessons. It’s not some random Kinko’s.”
Sam blinks. “No, I—sorry,” he says quietly. “I didn’t mean to—you know.”
Fiona feels her shoulders drop. “It’s fine,” she says, a little embarrassed—wishing, not for the first time, that she was the kind of person who didn’t get so worked up over every little thing. Pam, if she was here, would advise a deep breath. Instead Fiona finishes the rubbery, tepid pickle, then reaches for another one just for something to do.
“Are you really going to eat those?” Sam asks.
“Yes,” she says immediately, crunching as loud as she can.
“Because I’m just saying, they’ve probably been sitting out here all day.”
“Great,” she says, and picks up a third. “Plenty of time for them to cure.”
Sam takes a sip of his unsweetened iced tea, an expression on his face likeHave it your way, psycho. “What about Thandie?” he asks.
Fiona doesn’t choke, but it’s a near thing. “Thandie?” she manages to repeat, eyes watering a little. She clears her throat. “Thandie... would probably not eat the free pickles, no.”
Sam makes a face. “You guys were friends, weren’t you?”
“We are friends,” Fiona says automatically, though in truth she hasn’t seen Thandie in almost five years. The last time they hung out in person, Fiona convinced her to go to a party the second-cutest member of a popular boy band was throwing in a suite at the Chateau; the next day pictures of Fiona’s bleary face were everywhere, but Thandie had somehow managed to stay out of the camera’s panoptic eye. “I know acting isn’t a big deal for you, or whatever,” Thandie said quietly, picking at a fray in her sweater as they drank iced lattes on the couch in her apartment that morning, “but it’s serious for me. And not for nothing, Fiona, but the world tends to be a lot less forgiving of bullshit from people who look like me.” Six months later Fiona sat on a couch in the common room at the hospital and watched as Thandie accepted an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress; Fiona’s never said it to anybody, but it’s still the proudest moment of her life, and if getting the hell away from her is what Thandie needed to do to make it happen, then Fiona guesses she has nobody to blame but herself.
“Well,” Sam says now, gazing at her across the table, “what does she say?”
Fiona snorts. “Thandie isn’t going to do aBirds of Californiareboot in a million years,” she promises flatly.
“Why not?”
“Because she’s a serious actor!”
“I’m a serious actor,” he counters, and Fiona throws her head back and laughs.
Sam’s plush, pretty mouth drops open. “Fuck off!” He’s laughing, too, though Fiona can’t tell if she’s imagining that he also looks just a tiny bit hurt. “I am!”
“You’re something,” she admits without thinking, and right away she feels herself blush. “I mean—”
But Sam is shaking his head. “Don’t patronize me,” he tells her, then gestures down at his general person. “Come on, Fee, do you really want me to hide this light under a bushel? Or are you just too good for TV?”
