Page 26 of How To Plot a Payback

He pauses. Waits.

Heads shake around the room.

“Do any of you know anybody getting tattoos on their bodies of Suzie saying, ‘Better luck next time,’ from Everybody’s Fine Here?”

He waits again.

Heads shake.

“Good doesn’t cut it. Decent doesn’t cut it. I want perfection.”

Paula downs her coffee as if it’s a whiskey shot and redoubles her staring game at the script.

Everyone in the room seems to have specific idiosyncrasies for their mind work. The man to my left spins a pencil. Another paces, muttering aloud. Paula drinks coffee like a Labrador drinks water. The woman across from me has fallen into a rhythm of scribbling words furiously and then, just as furiously, scratching them out.

Me? I take out a Rubik’s Cube.

Almost as soon as I touch the cold plastic, I feel my wheels begin turning.

My hands twist and turn through the weaving patterns, eyes barely flickering to the blur of red, blue, white, green, and yellow as I reread the scene.

It’s all fairly simple.

Unrelatably beautiful girl who always responds with the most unrelatably perfect replies has yet another perfect, unrelatable reaction to the fact that her long-term boyfriend has momentarily broken up with her and is now going—obviously, regretfully—on a date with the new woman across the hall. The breakup is because “he’s afraid of commitment” (after ten years of an on-off relationship, but who’s counting), which, of course, is another way of saying the writers ran out of ideas and needed to make up some shoddy excuse for why the perfect couple would break up, yet again, so they can keep the show going.

So they throw in a convenient backstory about his mother or father doing something wrong in the past, thereby causing his inability to move forward, and she reluctantly lets him go. She goes on some passing date that goes nowhere. But then he now, he moves on with someone half as interesting and beautiful as Ashley Krane—objectively speaking here, of course—all the while remaining just as close and having just as many bonded moments with the woman he really loves.

Emotionally married to Ashley Krane while dating everyone else under the sun. Technically not together, ergo, viewers keep watching. Happy writers. Happy viewers.

Throw in episodic mishaps and misadventures (getting stuck in air vents while eavesdropping, nearly accidentally marrying one’s first cousin, throwing themed parties at the drop of a hat) and there you are, folks. Neighbors in a nutshell.

The reality is, it’s all just dramatic and unnecessary action, and it’s not remotely plausible that a woman in this modern era would allow a man to break up with her after ten years to then go on a date with a woman across the hall two weeks later. Not at all.

But here we are.

And, of course, Lavender’s character is going to take this all on the chin with a smile.

It’s nauseating. I am having to swallow to stop from gagging.

This is one aspect where crime drama has the upper edge.

Somebody wrongs you? Kill them off.

Lull in the energy of the show? Someone drops dead.

Murder is almost always the answer.

Here though. This stuff.

Get a cup of coffee and talk about your feelings.

Get a cup of coffee and steal so many looks at each other the cameraman gets seasick from swinging back and forth.

Get a cup of coffee and get locked inside your mysterious neighbor’s cabinet while snooping.

And then, just as my hands slide the large green Rubik’s Cube square into place, I hear the mental click.

I look up.