Chapter 45
Pushing into the glass offices of ICA, Maggie takes in the view from the thirty-seventh floor.
Her heart gallops in her chest. She takes a minute to appreciate just how immense a gift this is from Ingrid.
She looks out at the Fox studio lot, at all the extras lined up around the block, hoping to get their shot at stardom.
That could have been her as an artist, waiting in line forever.
But instead, she’s up here, plucked from the masses.
As much as she’s still mad at Ingrid for stealing from her, the woman delivered. Maggie is finally agented!
“Right this way, Maggie. Your team is waiting for you,” the gorgeous blond receptionist says.
Team?
The receptionist leads Maggie into a conference room, where five people are seated around a table. All this time she spent praying for just one person to believe in her, and now she has five!
“Maggie! Welcome! I’m Jack Stone.” Jack walks over.
He’s a short white guy in his forties, with stylish glasses and expensive sneakers.
Maggie gives him her firmest handshake and sits.
He introduces her to the others. There’s John from Television Literary.
Tom from Podcasts. Janine from Brand Management.
Isaac from their Speakers Bureau, if that’s something she’s interested in pursuing later. They’ll talk.
“Thank you so much! I’m so grateful to be here.”
“Anything for Ingrid! She’s my best client!” Jack holds up a finger. “In fact, she’s pushing hard to get a meeting on the books for you and Charlie Cooper. He’s the executive vice president of the studio.”
“I know Charlie!” she says.
“You do?” Jack asks. He looks relieved. “That’s great! So you’ve worked with him before?”
Maggie blushes, realizing she actually doesn’t know Charlie. She’s only sat next to Ingrid while she talked to him on Zoom during a transfusion…which she definitely can’t tell them about. “No…I just…I’ve heard of him from Ingrid.”
“So you haven’t pitched him anything before?” Jack asks, slightly disappointed. Maggie shakes her head no. “Have you worked on any other projects that he might know of? Written a few samples? Any pilots?”
Maggie shakes her head again. “I’m writing a novel, if that counts!” She sits up straighter. Hopefully, if she’s the screenwriter on Summer Rain, she can pull back some of her life story from the movie and put it into her book again. “Which Ingrid has optioned—”
Jack smiles and cuts her off. “That’s wonderful. But what Charlie’s going to care about most is screenwriting experience.”
Maggie nods, trying her best to portray total confidence, even as she can tell what everyone’s thinking—Give us something to work with here. You can’t have no experience. How’d you even end up in this room?
“You’re going to have to really sell him, kid,” Jack says.
“I’ll sell him.”
“Of course you will. Ingrid is never wrong about people.”
As the rest of her team tells Maggie about all the other exciting opportunities and possibilities they have for her if she lands this first job, Maggie quietly takes out two stacks of printed pages: her novel-in-progress manuscript and the thinner, stapled pages of her novella.
She slips both across the table. “By the way, this is the novel I’m working on.
It was a novella first—that’s what Ingrid optioned.
But I’m expanding it. I’d love to have someone in your Books department take a look at it! ”
Jack glances at one of the other agents, then reaches slowly for the manuscripts. “Absolutely. We’ll get to this, I promise. But for now, I want the focus to be on your screenwriting for Ingrid. We really want to see you knock it out of the park!”
“Of course!”
She leaves the meeting pumped. She has an agent! A whole five-person team! They have other opportunities and plans for her! All she has to do is land Summer Rain—which she will. She snaps a selfie of herself in front of the ICA lobby and sends it to her mom.
MOM!!! I’m now repped for screenwriting by Jack Stone, ICA!
She waits and waits for Mom’s reply. When nothing comes, she sends the same news to Willa.
It sits as Delivered. Maggie stuffs her phone into her pocket and hustles back to her car.
As much as it hurts to have no one, she reminds herself she’s not doing this for anyone else. She’s doing it for herself.
This is what she wanted. She clawed her way to this moment. She’ll fling herself off the building before she feels bad for it.