The Rom-Commers

Chapter Six

THAT WAS Apretty strong exit. Right?

I spoke my piece, and ended on a zinger strong enough that they both mutely watched me walk off. I felt their eyes on me all the way down the street, as my broken carry-on wheel bewailed every step I took—and I held my head high until I was out of sight.

Though as soon as they couldn’t see me, I felt the air that was holding up my lungs—and my posture, and my remaining shreds of dignity— release itself… and I deflated like a balloon.

That’s how I walked after that: slumped, lopsided, lost.

I’ll just call an Uber and go to a hotel, I told myself, in an attempt at a pep talk.

But I’d never called an Uber. I didn’t even have the app on my phone. And I’d never been to LA. I hadn’t traveled outside the five-mile radius of my apartment in almost a decade. How would I even find a hotel? I was alone, I had no idea where I was, and I was too humiliated to turn around.

I’d walked for about fifteen minutes—and was just starting to panic—when Logan drove up alongside me and matched his pace to mine. His window came down.

“Get in,” Logan called.

I ignored him and kept walking. There was a pebble in my shoe, but I ignored that, too.

“He caved, okay?” Logan called. “He gave in. He says you can stay.”

I kept walking.

“You got the job!” Logan shouted. “You don’t believe me? I have the text right here.”

He held up his phone, but I didn’t look.

“You’re not listening. I’m telling you it worked. He’s in. It’s happening.”

My broken carry-on wheel caught on a rock, but I yanked it so hard I didn’t even break pace.

“You should be thanking me!” Logan called next, a little louder. “It worked, didn’t it?” He shook his phone at me. “He says, and I quote: ‘Fine. Fuck it. She can have the guest room.’”

I didn’t really know what to do in this moment. I didn’t have a plan. All I knew was, I would not get in Logan’s car. Nothing else was clear—at all—except that.

“Are you refusing to spend the night in Charlie Yates’s mansion? Is that what’s happening now? Because I’m telling you: He’s got a wine cellar. And a pool. And a thousand-dollar coffee maker.”

But the pebble in my shoe—or was it maybe a piece of glass?—and I just kept walking.

And walking.

Until finally, faced with my wall of stoicism, Logan gave up and drove off—leaving me behind, now more triumphant and more panicked at the same time.

Really?Was that all the penance he was going to do?

Fine.

How hard could it be to download the Uber app?

I stopped to pull out my phone, and that’s when I saw the low battery alert.

Okay. No freaking out. If worse came to worst, I could find my way back to Charlie’s house and borrow his phone. I turned back to study the terrain I’d just covered.

At least, I thought I could find my way back.

Probably.

If it didn’t get dark first.

I turned back to face the way I’d been going again, scanning the horizon for, maybe, a luxury hotel that was having a 90-percent-off special.

What time did it get dark here, anyway?

On the heels of that thought, I heard Logan pull up alongside me again and idle. Without even looking to the side, or considering if this was the stupidest thing I’d ever do, I tilted my head to the sky and shouted, “Please! Just! Fuck! Off!”

“Really?” a guy’s voice said.

A guy who wasn’t Logan.

I turned, and instead of Logan Scott in a Beemer, it was Charlie Yates in a Chevy Blazer.

A cool, seventies vintage Chevy Blazer, by the way. Baby blue. Windows down. And Charlie Yates in aviators, regarding me and looking—fine, whatever—impossibly cool.

As impossibly cool as a guy in a rumpled Oxford could be.

Way cooler than any writer deserved to be.

I turned to face him. “Sorry,” I said, vastly more polite now. “I thought you were Logan.”

It wasn’t Charlie’s fault that Logan brought me here. Charlie wasn’t doing anything wrong by not wanting to work with me. Yes, he’d said a few mean-ish things earlier. But I wasn’t going to hold that against him. I wouldn’t have wanted to work with me, either, if I were him. He could still be my favorite writer.

This was on me, really, for believing Logan’s cockamamie story in the first place.

“Get in,” Charlie said. “I’m here to rescue you.”

“Oh,” I said, still just wanting to stay as far away from both of these guys, and this whole experience, as possible. “It’s fine.”

Charlie leaned his head out the window then and checked the bright sky like an old sea captain reading the wind. Then he put the Blazer in park—just right there in the road—got out, and came around to face me. “It’s not fine,” he said then. “It’ll get dark in a few hours. And that’s when the coyotes come out.”

“The coyotes?”

Charlie nodded, like Yep. “And the mountain lions.”

“You have mountain lions?” I asked. “In the second-largest city in America?”

Charlie nodded. “Almost four million.” Then he added, “People. Not lions.”

He hadn’t answered my question. “Should I believe you?” I asked, mostly to myself.

“I can’t tell you what to do,” Charlie said. “But I have yet to mention the bears.”

“Seriously?” I said.

“It’s cool,” Charlie said then, calling my bluff. “I can tell you prefer to be”—he looked around—“alone.”

“Wait—” I said, as Charlie started to walk back around toward the driver’s side.

“You’ll be fine,” Charlie said. “Just a quick tip: If you do see a mountain lion, don’t run.”

“Don’t run?” I echoed. Can you lose a conversation? Because that’s what I was doing.

He shrugged. “You can’t outrun a mountain lion.”

“You know what?” I said. “I’ll come with you.”

“Naw,” Charlie said, enjoying this now, “you don’t have to.”

“I want to,” I said.

Charlie, like convincing me had been much easier than he’d expected, came back around to where I was, and, holding my gaze the entire time, stepped close and leaned in until there was less than a foot between us—close enough to spark a What the heck? question in my head—before I realized he was sliding my backpack off my shoulders and then picking up my bags.

He tossed both in the back of the Blazer, and then, when I still hadn’t moved, he opened the passenger door for me. “I’ve got you,” he said. “Hop in.”

AND THAT’S HOWI wound up spending the night with Charlie Yates.

Although not like that sentence implies.

On the short drive back to his house, I tried to adjust: I was with Charlie Yates. We were in his very cool, vintage—reconditioned and now hybrid, he told me—truck. The Allman Brothers played on the radio. The windows were hand-cranked down. The famous zero-humidity LA air fluttered all around us. Charlie drove one-handed, his free arm resting out the open window.

Almost like I wasn’t there.

I snuck looks at his profile. Had he really just agreed to work with me? Logan said so, but now we all knew exactly how trustworthy Logan was. Still, the dialogue “Fine. Fuck it. She can have the guest room” rang true. Logan could never write dialogue like that.

“Thanks so much,” I ventured then, “for saving me from the mountain lions.”

“Not a problem.”

“I really am so sorry about all of this.”

“It’s not your fault. It’s Logan’s fault.”

“It must have been so weird for you to see me standing at your front door with my suitcases.”

“You have no idea.”

“Logan just called me out of the blue and said he had a job for me.”

“Right?” Charlie said, like What a douche.

“He’s found me lots of jobs in the past, so it didn’t seem all that weird. But it did seem… too good to be true.”

Charlie nodded in solidarity.

“But I trusted him,” I went on. “I took the summer off from my job. I left my family. I put everything else that mattered on hold, and I packed up my life and flew out here. With no idea that you had no idea.”

Charlie shook his head at the situation, like he really got it.

“You are my favorite writer, though,” I said next. “Logan wasn’t lying about that. I love you more than Richard Curtis, and Elaine May, and Billy Wilder. I love you more”—and this felt so sacrilegious, like I might be smote by lightning at the words, but I had to make my point—“than Nora Ephron.”

Charlie held kind of still.

Too much?

Then he gave a small, mechanical nod that read like Got it.

No doubt my cue to stop talking.

But I just had to know. I had to confirm. I decided to proceed as if and see where that got me. “So I just want to thank you. For this opportunity. It’s not easy to change your mind. Especially not in the heat of a crazy moment. But I need to say that this is the hugest of huge deals to me.” And then, realizing it might sound cheesy but unable to find any better words to capture my sincerity, I concluded with “I will do this work with my whole heart and soul.”

I snuck a look at him.

He was frowning.

“What work?” Charlie asked.

“The rewrite?” I said.

At those words, Charlie positively detonated with laughter—the kind of pah you make when you are very surprised by something unspeakably ridiculous. Then he followed the pah with hooting, and chuckling, and slapping his hand on the door of the truck.

This went on for a while.

It was bitter laughter, I decided as he went on—but laughter all the same.

Anyway. I guess I had my answer.

“The rewrite?” Charlie kept saying. “The rewrite?”

I wasn’t laughing myself, needless to say. “Logan told me you’d agreed to everything,” I said. “He said you’d said, ‘Fine. Fuck it. She can have the guest room.’ He showed me the text!”

Like I might prove him wrong.

Charlie took a few deep breaths as he worked to settle. “I did say you could have the guest room. For one night. Before you fly home tomorrow.”

“Ah,” I said.

“It’s so funny that you believed him,” Charlie said. “Didn’t he just lie to you?”

My shoulders hunched in my defense. “Yeah, but… he doesn’t always lie. Most of the time he tells the truth.” Then I had to add, “I think.”

“Well, he wasn’t telling the truth about that.”

“Fine,” I said. “Got it.”

“I mean,” Charlie went on, still marveling at Logan’s gall and my gullibility, “I don’t write with anyone. Ever. Logan knows that. And if I’m really your favorite writer”—he glanced at me like he’d caught me—“you’d know that, too.”

“Yes,” I said, mechanically, repeating the very famous story. “You once tried collaborating with Topher James Heywood, and it ended in a bar fight where you almost got shanked with a broken beer bottle, and then you never worked with anyone else again. I’ve seen you tell that story like ten times. Though sometimes it’s a Heineken bottle, and sometimes it’s Sam Adams.”

Charlie nodded like I’d proved myself, and then he said, “I never should have named the beer. I keep saying the wrong beer and getting angry DMs about it.”

“There’s a whole discussion board on Reddit.”

“That’s disturbing.”

“I’m on Team Heineken, by the way. But only because I like the label.”

Charlie considered that. “Heineken it is, then.”

That felt weirdly good.

But then something hit me. Heywood.

Topher James Heywood.

“Wait,” I said. “Does Topher James Heywood also go by T.J. Heywood?”

Charlie flared his nostrils like he was not a fan. “Yes. ‘T.J.’ and ‘Teej’ and ‘Trey’ because he’s a ‘the third.’ And also…”

“Also what?”

“He has another nickname, but nobody uses it but him.”

“He has a nickname for himself?”

Charlie flared those nostrils of his again. “Yeah.”

“What is it?”

Charlie hesitated. “Jablowmie.”

“What?” I didn’t get it.

“Because of the last name?” Charlie prompted. “Heywood.”

“Jablowmie Heywood?”

“Flip it,” Charlie said, and when I still hadn’t cringed in recognition, he flipped it for me: “Heywood Jablowmie.”

I dropped my shoulders, like Seriously? “That’s the nickname he chose for himself? It’s not even in the right order!”

“I’ll be sure to mention that to him.”

“Why were you even trying to write with this guy?”

“Well,” Charlie said, like Where to begin? “He’s richer than God, he knows everybody in this town, and he wields a crazy amount of power for somebody who wears a backward baseball cap.”

“All because his dad is Chris Heywood and his grandfather was Christopher Heywood?”

“He’s a classic example of failing to the top.”

“But he started at the top.”

“Yeah. That’s how that works.”

Of course it was.

“Anyway,” Charlie went on, steering us back to the more pressing matter of why he couldn’t work with me, “the point is, this you-and-me thing was never going to happen. And Logan should have known better.”

“Agreed.”

“I was never going to agree to anybody rewriting my script. Least of all some unproduced, underachieving, failed nobody writer off the internet.”

Whoa. Could we go back to talking about Heywood Jablowmie?

I sat quietly and waited for Charlie to remember who he was talking to.

But he didn’t.

“It’s insulting,” he went on. “It’s ridiculous. It’s utterly, comically out of the question. It’s like hiring a crayon-toting kindergartner to repaint the Sistine Chapel! It’s like hiring a toddler with Play-Doh to rebuild the Eiffel Tower! It’s like hiring a teenager with a ukulele to rewrite Mozart!”

“Are you Mozart in this scenario?”

“Of course!”

“So your self-esteem is”—I tilted my head to emphasize the sarcasm—“healthy.”

“I don’t need self-esteem! I’ve got a whole drawer of Oscars!”

Ah. Sarcasm ignored. Oh, well. “I’d actually love to hear Mozart on the ukulele.”

“You’re missing the point.”

“No,” I said, with a little wry nod, “I think I got it.”

“Because the point is, someone like you isn’t even remotely qualified to work with someone like me.”

“You’ve made that very clear.”

“Someone who doesn’t live in LA, who’s never done any real work in the industry, and who placed in two film festivals, but didn’t even go? No offense, but that’s someone who clearly doesn’t take her work seriously.”

No offense?Everything he’d said up to now had been harsh, but not untrue. But “doesn’t take her work seriously”? That crossed the line.

“I take my work very seriously,” I said, feeling a sting of—you guessed it—offense.

“Incorrect,” Charlie said.

“‘Incorrect’?”

“Because if you were serious, you’d be taking every opportunity that came to you—and not just taking, grabbing. With both hands. Like nothing else mattered.”

“But other things do matter.”

“The fact that you think that is exactly why you’re a failed screenwriter.”

“I’m not a failed screenwriter!”

“Which part of your failed career gave you that idea?”

Whoa.

How to even respond? Finally I mustered a gritted “I take my career seriously.”

“Do you?” Charlie challenged. “Because the Warner Bros. internship isn’t something that writers just ignore.”

“Logan told you about that?”

“Do you have any idea how prestigious that internship is? How much it could have changed your life? It’s unfathomable that you had that chance and didn’t take it.”

“I know exactly how prestigious it is, and I—”

But Charlie kept going. “Logan thought I’d be impressed that you won. But the fact that you turned it down tells me everything I need to know.”

“Look, there were circumstances—”

“Fuck circumstances! That’s what I’m saying. If you want to do this life, you have to eat it and drink it and sleep it, and it has to come before everything else. Family—friends—sex! Anything else is second best. Anything else is not taking it seriously.”

Turning down that internship had been the most agonizing sacrifice out of all my agonizing sacrifices. But if this guy really thought that my own personal writing goals should truly come before everything else, including my family—including my dad—then there was no use in trying to explain.

We’d reached Charlie’s house. He swung us into the driveway, cut the engine, and stomped the parking brake.

“Is that what you’ve done?” I asked then, quietly. “Sacrificed everything?”

“How do you think I wound up all alone in this giant mansion?”

Was he saying that like it was a good thing? There was bitterness in his voice, and probably a whole story to excavate. But I had my own bitterness to cope with.

I’d already lost this fight, anyway.

I let out a long breath. “You must be right, then,” I said. “By your definition, I guess I don’t take it seriously.”

“Thank you,” he said, like he’d won.

“Pro tip, though,” I said now, at the end of this endless day, not even able to disguise the exhaustion in my voice. “In general, if you have to add the words ‘no offense’ to something you’re saying… it’s probably offensive.”

Charlie frowned at that. Like it registered. Like once the frenzy of trying to make his point had abated, he could suddenly see the wreckage he’d left behind.

“I’ll find a plane ticket home,” I said then, in defeat, hearing a threat of tears in my voice, “for first thing in the morning.”

Then I pulled the door handle to get out.

But the door didn’t budge.

“Oh—” Charlie said, remembering. “It’s broken.” At that, he leapt out and came around to my side. “I have to get it from here.”

He opened the door, and I swung my legs out, fully intending to grab my bags, march inside, fire up the internet, buy a plane ticket, and then defiantly ignore Charlie Yates for the rest of my life.

But instead?

Instead, I fainted.