The Rom-Commers

Chapter Two

I DID NOTtell Sylvie at dinner.

It wasn’t just the first dinner we’d had together in the months since she’d gone back to college last January—it was her graduation party. A graduation that, of course, my dad and I had missed, since he couldn’t travel—and if he couldn’t travel, neither could I.

This wasn’t just dinner. This was a celebration. My glorious, brilliant baby sister had graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the highly picturesque Carleton College—which, if you didn’t know, is the Harvard of the Midwest—and she was now, among many other things, living proof that our family had overcome all of its tragedies and was thriving, at last. Officially.

We were celebrating, dammit.

I’d made a cake in the shape of a graduation cap and stuck sparkler candles in it. I’d festooned our kitchenette with gold streamers and sprinkled confetti on the table. I’d typed out little menus and rolled them up like diplomas.

I wasn’t ruining all that by moving to LA.

You had to maximize joy when it fluttered into your life. You had to honor it. And savor it. And not stomp it to death by reminding everyone of everything you’d lost.

Sylvie showed up in a cropped tee with her fairy-tale straight blond hair billowing, looking like the personification of youth and beauty and hope—and lugging five hundred duffel bags of dirty laundry. And I hugged her around the neck with genuine joy and jumped and squealed and kissed her cheeks. And my dad met us at the door with his walker and we sang “Happy Graduation to You” to the birthday song tune, my dad adding some one-handed percussion with a maraca. And then we ate stacks of pancakes and sausages and squirted canned whipped cream all over everything.

We sat at our little dinette and chattered away and teased each other and enjoyed every second of being back together so much that I almost felt resentful in some tiny compartment in my brain that Logan Scott had called out of nowhere with that crazy Charlie Yates news and complicated things.

Today of all days.

The longer the evening went on, and the more we sat around chatting afterward, catching up and drinking root beer floats for dessert, the more the memory of that phone call faded for me. I felt a growing and peaceful sensation that the crisis had passed—that I no longer had to make any hard decisions, and life would continue on as predictable and normal and vaguely unsatisfying as ever.

I just wanted to be happy—simply, uncomplicatedly happy—for like one evening. Was that too much to ask?

Apparently so.

Timing really was everything, I guess.

YOU MIGHT BEwondering why my fifty-five-year-old dad had to use a walker to come greet my sister at the door. Or why we couldn’t go to her graduation. Or why his percussion instrument of choice was one maraca.

I will give you the same vaguely cheery, deeply oversimplified answer that we always gave everyone: Just under ten years ago, my father had “a camping accident.”

Pressed for details, I’ll add this: He was hit in the head during a sudden rockfall while climbing in Yosemite and got a traumatic brain injury—which left him partially paralyzed on one side, a condition called hemiplegia, and also suffering from an inner-ear issue that profoundly messed up his balance called Ménière’s disease.

That’s the long story short.

I’m leaving out a lot here. I’m leaving out the worst part, in fact.

But that’s enough for now.

That’s why my dad couldn’t be left alone. That’s why he moved through the world like he was ninety. That’s why I worried about him 24–7. And that’s why writing a screenplay with Charlie Yates in Los Angeles was totally, utterly, entirely out of the question.

I wouldn’t shirk my responsibilities.

I wouldn’t abandon my dad.

And I would not, not, not eclipse my baby sister’s potential by sticking her on medical duty in this six-hundred-square-foot apartment.

I wouldn’t. And I couldn’t…

Until I read the screenplay.

THE EMAIL FROMLogan with the subject “Apologies in Advance” hit my inbox just as Sylvie was settling in on the top bunk with Netflix and her headphones. Our PJs were on, the lights were off, and I stared at that attachment for a good long minute before finally giving in and clicking it open.

An hour later, I made it official:

Terrible.

We really would need a more terrible word for terrible.

First of all, it was—at least in theory—an updated retelling of the beloved rom-com classic It Happened One Night. Written by a person who had clearly never seen the movie.

If you haven’t seen it yourself, please do yourself a favor: stop whatever you’re doing and go watch it. This movie is ninety years old, and it still sparkles with life and vitality and charm. A down-on-his-luck newspaper reporter tries to help a runaway socialite travel by bus to New York in hopes of getting her exclusive story—and falls madly in love with her instead. Clark Gable is fan-yourself sexy, Claudette Colbert is sassy and gorgeous, and the romantic tension? You could eat it with a spoon. This is the road trip rom-com that launched a thousand road trip rom-coms—and it swept the Oscars, winning all of the big five categories, including Best Screenplay. It’s a titan of the genre. It’s practically sacred.

And Charlie Yates, my beloved Charlie Yates, my gold standard, my writer by which all other writers are judged, my absolute all-time screenwriting hero…

He mutilated it.

He besmirched it.

He desecrated it.

This thing he did—I don’t even want to say “wrote”… It had no spark, no build, no banter, no joy—and no scenes that even resembled the original movie. The title was the same, and the character names were the same. But that was it. Was he asleep when he wrote this? Was he in the middle of dental surgery? How could someone so good and so masterful at writing—someone who could make you root for serial killers, and believe in ghosts, and genuinely like cannibal robots—take something that was already working, and had been working for ninety years, and chuck its charming soul into a wood chipper?

I mean, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert had to be weeping up in heaven.

He had their characters going to a line-dancing competition.

A line-dancing competition!

Something was going on here. Did Charlie Yates have a stroke? Had a chat bot secretly rewritten the real script as a gag? Was Charlie Yates being held hostage somewhere and forced at gunpoint to write a career-endingly bad story?

But career-endingly bad didn’t even capture it.

This thing was apocalyptic.

And there it was. Somehow that was the tipping point for me.

Real life was allowed to be disappointing. Heck, real life was guaranteed to be disappointing. Living alone in a tiny apartment with my sick father? Teaching community college freshman English so we could have health insurance? Denying my own dreams so my overindulged but lovable baby sister could live all of hers struggle-free? All fine. I didn’t get to make the rules for reality.

But stories had a better option.

I was not letting Charlie Yates ruin this movie, his career, the romantic comedy genre as a whole, and all our lives with this nuclear-waste-fueled dumpster fire of a screenplay.

Thatwas where I drew the line.

Nobody was dishonoring It Happened One Night. Not on my watch.

I didn’t even make a decision, really. Just finished reading, clamshelled my laptop, swung myself up to the top bunk, and stared at Sylvie until she took off her headphones and said, “What’s up?”

“I’ve just read a romantic comedy script,” I said, “that will destroy human civilization as we know it.”

Half an hour later, she had the whole story: Logan’s call, Charlie Yates’s situation, my life-changing opportunity. And before I even knew what she was doing, she was typing out an email to withdraw from her summer internship, citing “a family emergency.”

“You can’t not go to your internship!” I said when I realized what she was doing.

“Sure I can,” she said.

“It’s a week away! You made a commitment.”

“They’ll pull someone off the wait list.”

“But—” I shook my head. “But it’s very prestigious.”

Sylvie shrugged. “I’ll go another year.”

“What if they don’t take you another year?”

“I’ll go somewhere else.”

But I was shaking my head—fervently. I mean, I recognized that I’d gotten this started. I was the one who’d climbed the bunk ladder and told her everything. She was a good-hearted person, after all. I could’ve predicted she might try to solve this.

But now that it was happening, I couldn’t stand it.

What was she even thinking, giving up her internship?

Had I protected her too much? Had she had it too easy? Didn’t she know how awful the world was? “I’m not sure you understand what a big deal opportunities like this are,” I said. “You can’t take them for granted. The world is horrible. Chances to shine don’t just fall from the sky.”

“You hear yourself, right?” Sylvie said. “Ditto—right back at you. Do you know what a big deal Charlie Yates is? We studied him in my film theory class.”

“But you’re…” I couldn’t think of a justification. “You’re young.”

“You’re also young.”

“You’re full of promise.”

“You’re also full of promise.”

“But you’re—just…” I shrugged. “You’re Sylvie. You’re my Sylvie.”

“And you’re my Emma.”

I shook my head like that argument held no weight. “I can’t take your chance away from you.”

“And I can’t take your chance away from you.”

“But you’ve already said yes to your chance.”

“But your chance is bigger than mine.”

The more we argued, the more I had to pick a side. And of course, that side was always Sylvie’s. She really was my Sylvie. I’d practically raised her. Between me and Sylvie, I chose Sylvie—every time. That was a given. I didn’t know how to be her sister-slash-surrogate-mom any other way.

But Sylvie wasn’t giving up. “Guess we’ll have to flip a coin.”

“I’m not flipping a coin, Sylvie.”

Ugh. I’d created a monster. I used to win all our arguments—but now she was big enough to beat me.

“You know what?” I said. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

“Too late,” Sylvie said then, looking mischievous and defiant. “I just hit SEND.”

“You what?”

She shrugged like she’d won. “I sent it.”

“We weren’t done talking!”

“I was done,” Sylvie said. “You’re going to LA.”

“Write them back!” I said, grabbing at her laptop. “Say it was a mistake!”

But Sylvie clutched it to her chest. “Never!”

We were just starting to wrestle for it when our dad’s voice came through the wall. “Girls!” he called. “Quit arguing!”

Sylvie and I froze and looked at each other like, Now you woke up Dad.

Then his voice sounded again, deeper this time—resonant and decisive, like the voice of God. “We’ll discuss this in the morning like rational people,” he said, in a tone that made it final. “And then we’ll take a vote. And then”—he paused to be extra clear—“we’ll send Emma to LA.”