by Amanda Heger
“Your presentation?”
“You know, for the conference? You are supposed to help me today? Help me with the Hollywood polish?”
James clearly did not know. He cleared his throat and took a step toward the door. “Maybe talk to Julia? She’s usually in charge of things like that. Besides, you don’t need any help in the polish department. Just be yourself.”
No. No. No. Evan wouldn’t have lied to her about this, right? Maybe James got into weird preshow hazes where he forgot everything except the show.
“What about my tickets?” she asked.
“Tickets?”
“To Who’s Got the Coconut?”
“Why would you want tickets to that horrible housewife shite?” He waved to the woman behind the counter before he disappeared into the late afternoon sun.
The wet cement sloshing in Marisol’s stomach solidified. They’d all lied to her. Used her. Julia. James.
Evan.
“Damn.” Clint had his own phone out now. “I can’t believe you didn’t mention this.”
“Sorry.” She put her hand on his phone screen. “Please do not tell anyone.”
“Why? It’s awesome.”
“No. It was an accident. Being on the show, I mean. And no one from the conference will take me seriously if they find out. Especially with all the things people are saying now.”
“Like what?”
She couldn’t find the energy to repeat them. “Stupid things.”
“Can I ask a question? If you were so worried about people finding out, why’d you do it in the first place?”
Because they’d promised to help with her presentation. Because of the Who’s Got the Coconut ticket. Because she didn’t understand what she’d gotten into. Because it made her feel alive. More alive than sitting in a stuffy hotel trying to convince people she—and by proxy her work and her family and her patients—were worthy of their grant money.
A million reasons.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Well, I think I do.” Clint pulled a few dollars from his wallet and tossed them on the table. “You’re human? It sounds fun. Plus, the show is funny. And hello? Look at James. Gorgeous.”
“He is not really my type.”
“Well, he’s definitely mine. Come on. On the way over I’ll tell you a few stories about Evan as a kid.”
She didn’t want to hear anything about Evan right now. Or maybe ever. It would be smarter to go back to the hotel and pretend he’d never stumbled into her life with his wristbands and his ideas and his weird grandpa. His kisses.
“How do you know him exactly?” she asked as they exited the Wonton Queen.
“Friends with my kid brother since they were tiny. In fifth grade, they called this sex line number from my parents’ basement and ran up a three hundred dollar phone bill.”
Her mouth fell open.
“Yeah, 1-800-Spank-Me or something like that,” Clint said, tugging her back toward the studio. “Evan had to mow my parents’ lawn for a year to pay back his half. And you should absolutely feel free to tell him I told you this story.”
They stood near the gates of the giant warehouse-like studio now, and Marisol looked between Clint and the bus stop a few meters away. Nope, she decided. She would never mention it. Never tease Evan about it, because she wasn’t going to speak with him again. She was going to get on the bus and hide in her hotel room until daybreak.
“You ready to go in?” Clint asked.
She looked at the building, willing her mouth to open. Willing her brain to force the words “I am leaving” out.
“Clint?”
“Yeah.”
What if she’d misunderstood James? What if he had so much on his mind that he couldn’t keep track of his schedule? What if she really never saw Evan again? “Do you think Evan is a good person?”
“One of the best.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. Now come on, we can’t miss the monologue.”
She let him pull her inside, and they made their way to the set with just enough time to grab the wristbands Evan had left with one of the security guys. Unlike the first night she’d stumbled into the taping, the audience seats were full. Only two remained in the back corner, with a tiny sign marked “Reserved.”
Evan appeared behind them. “Those are for you,” he whispered.
“Thanks, man.” Clint slapped him on the back and sat down.
Marisol couldn’t find any of the right words. Everything kept swirling inside her—frustration, confusion, attraction. Why hadn’t he told her how big this had become? Did he know about those rumors? What about the things he’d promised her? Were any of them real?
Those feelings between them? Real? Or was he only doing what he needed to do to keep her coming back to the show?
“You okay?” he asked.
Please be real. “When should I meet James for my presentation?”
“Yeah. About that.”
“What about that?” she asked. Her heart sank further with each beat.
The lights flickered on and off. On the sidelines, Julia spoke into a headset. A plump man in a flannel shirt sauntered onto the set. The same warm-up comedian as last time.
“James is busy tonight. So we’re going to tape it. And then, uh, he’s going to watch it and give you some pointers.” Evan looked at his shoes as the lights flickered one last time.
“Hello everyone, and welcome to So Late It’s Early. Glad to have a full house tonight.” The warm-up comedian clapped his hands together.
Finally, Evan looked her in the eye. “I have to go. I’m sorry.”
She sank into her chair, feeling every bit a stupid, stupid girl. He’d lied. About all of it. Lied about how many people would see the show. Lied about James helping her with her presentation. Lied about them.
Ten long minutes later, the audience roared to life as James stepped onstage. Beside her, Clint became a freaking ray of celebrity-crush sunshine, beaming at the Englishman onstage. And Marisol slipped out of the studio, determined not be the show’s pawn for one second longer.
Day Nine
It had to be some kind of sorcery.
That was the only plausible explanation for how room 214 had become more disgusting in the week since Evan had last been there. It still smelled like moldy feet and had more stains than a hooker’s bedspread. But the amount of garbage on the floor had increased threefold. Fast-food wrappers. Empty soda cans. A wine bottle. Pages and pages of scripts. The only clear surface in the room—besides the giant brown stain on the couch—was the rickety table where the playback equipment sat. And even that was covered in some sort of sticky film.
“What happens in here the rest of the week?” he whispered to Andrew.
The head writer shrugged. “Hell if I know. We used to think it was the interns. But now there’s only, what, two or three of you?”
Evan nodded and cleared a spot for himself on the non-stained end of the couch. Soon the others filtered in, including Penny, each with their shoulders hiked closer to their ears than the last. This was it. In less than half an hour, they’d know if they’d get another week.
Whatever the verdict was, whatever twists or turns the executives decided to make, it would be on him. The stupid intern with the stupid ideas who stupidly convinced everyone to go along with them. The more he thought about it, the angrier he became. So much for a learning experience. The cancellation email hadn’t even come yet and already he was picturing the headlines. The rude comments. The flight home.
Not to mention the bullshit with Julia not giving Marisol what they’d promised. He’d pay the price for that too.
“Hello? What do you think?” Julia stared at him like she’d been talking for ten minutes without a response.
“About what?”
“For crying out loud. I don’t know why we bother with interns anymore.” She rolled her eyes.
“Lay off him,” Andrew said. “Bonerhead Bob’s done
a lot the last few days.”
More than most of you. Evan bit back the retort. “I didn’t hear the question. That’s all.”
“What do you think we should do about the Lady Killer segment? Every time we try to shoot the last one something goes wrong.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we should end it as is. Maybe Penny can be the new Lady Killer.” He’d happily do all the intern duties alone if it meant he’d never have to appear on television again.
“Might not be a bad idea.” Julia scribbled something on a notepad. “Penny will need to give you all of the passwords to the social media, her contact list, all that jazz. What do you think?” she looked at Penny.
“Uh, sure.” Penny looked anything but sure. “But what about Marisol?”
“The public hates Marisol, especially after yesterday. I think we need fresh blood.” Julia kept scribbling.
Evan wanted to protest, to stand up for Marisol. But it was true.
Last night, after the show wrapped, he’d headed straight to the back row. Everyone knew James disappeared into the bowels of the studio for an hour or so after the tapings—giving himself a mental critique of his performance—but not everyone knew he did it in the prop closet surrounded by fake dog turds and plastic skeletons. Evan would grab Marisol and march her straight to the prop room. Get her an audience with James.
But she was gone.
Clint said she’d slipped out before the show started. That she’d gotten freaked out by all the photos and the comments online. So when Evan got back to his apartment that night, he pulled up his old, inactive Instagram account.
The last time he’d looked, he had ten followers. All of them friends from college. Now? Fourteen hundred. On an account with a single picture—Evan at age six, sitting on Santa’s lap while his parents smiled in the background.
He dug a little further, found the So Late account. And from there, he found the hashtag with the hundreds of photos. Photos of Marisol walking down the street with a cup of coffee. Photos of Marisol and Evan at the diner. Photos of him getting in and out of his car in the studio parking lot. A single photo of them kissing from atop Sammy Samuelson’s game show podium.
He’d been tempted to stop there. Then he read the comments.
The stupid fucking comments.
Yeah, there were people who posted seventeen times in a row about things like true love and “Marivan” and how they wanted to smoosh Evan’s cheeks. There were people who posted comments praising the show and the sketches. But no matter how many positive comments glowed on his screen, all Evan could see were the negatives.
When it came to him, the trolls fell into two camps: the why-are-his-arms-so-long camp and the let’s-keep-the-erectile-dysfunction-memes-going camp.
But the comments about Marisol knew no bounds.
Her clothes. Her hair. Her smile. Her accent. Her skin color. It seemed the Internet brought out all kinds of crazy, but especially the chickenshit, racist, sexist kind. And once someone posted a photo of Marisol walking away from the show with Clint beside her, the comments only fell further down the rabbit hole of disgustingness.
That someone who posted the photo of Marisol and Clint: the show.
A fact he intended to interrogate Penny about as soon as they left this hellhole.
“You’ve got mail! You’ve got mail!”
Everyone jolted upright, gazes darting between Julia’s laptop and the clock on the wall. Too early. The clock said they still had fifteen minutes of hell to wade through before they had to lay their necks on the chopping block.
“You’ve got mail! You’ve got mail!”
“Julia?” Andrew asked.
“You’ve got mail! You’ve got mail!”
“I’m trying.” The producer’s hands moved over the keys as the robotic voice kept announcing mail. “The computer’s freaking out or something.”
“You’ve got mail!”
She turned it around. Email after email popped up on the screen. From this distance Evan couldn’t make out anything but the constant scroll of names and subject lines rolling by.
The door swung open and James sauntered in. He held a giant coffee in one hand and the plastic femur in the other. “Well, we meet again. Ten minutes before our fate is announced, and I have a few things I want to say.”
“You’ve got mail! You’ve got mail!”
“Already?” James asked.
“I think something’s wrong.” Julia banged at the keys. “It’s only supposed to do the ‘You’ve got mail’ thing when it comes from the network.”
“You’ve got mail!”
“Shut the thing up already.” Jerry crossed the room and unplugged the laptop’s external speakers, but the email notification kept playing—just minus the surround sound.
“Back away from my laptop, Jerry,” Julia said. “Right now.”
But Jerry ignored her and pulled the screen closer to his face. “Holy shit.”
One by one, everyone left their seats to huddle around the laptop, their murmurs cutting through the constant drone of “You’ve got mail!”
Evan couldn’t take it. “What?”
He shoved his way to the front of the crowd, close enough to see the screen over Jerry’s shoulders. The emails kept coming, but it didn’t take long to see they were all from the same network address. All with the same subject line: MARIVAN FOREVER. And the little preview box showed they all had the same attachment: the photo of Marisol and Evan kissing on the set.
At last the emails stopped. But there were still more than a hundred of them clogging Julia’s inbox.
“What is this?” James squinted at the screen. “Why are the execs emailing you with this fanboy bullshit?”
“You’ve got mail! You’ve got mail!”
“Here we go again,” Julia said.
Evan squinted at the computer screen. Who at the network had lost their mind and forwarded Julia the same email again and again? Someone was getting fired—and not just James January and the rest of the crew.
Except, Evan realized as the screen finally stopped moving, it wasn’t the same email. Same subject line, same photo, but each had a slight variation on the length of the text.
“Is it a virus?” James asked.
Evan almost snickered. Marivan did sound a lot like a virus.
“Shut up and listen.” Julia pulled the computer and onto her lap. Like a group of overgrown preschoolers settling in for story time, the rest of the room fell in around her. “Dear James and Julia,” she read. “As you can see, you have a vocal group of fans—a group that clearly includes some hackers, as they were able to obtain my personal email address to use in their electronic letter writing campaign.”
“What kind of asshole says ‘electronic letter’?” James made a hoity-toity face as he said the words, but the bounce in his knee said he was desperate to hear more.
Julia cleared her throat. “One of my interns has set up a filter that will bounce the incoming emails to you. I don’t know how this works, nor do I care. However, if I have to deal with this misery every day, so do you. It is quite obvious someone from your show began circulating the rumors about cancellation—”
“Don’t think it counts as a rumor if it’s true,” Evan said.
“Do you want to hear the rest of this or do you want to keep interrupting?” Julia asked. She didn’t wait for a response. “While we do not endorse such tactics, we do appreciate the fervor of your fan base. Therefore, while you have not met the requirements to extend the show, we have decided to reassess on Friday”—she took a deep breath, and the smile that had started to creep up her face disappeared—“when the executive in charge of finalizing these decisions returns from vacation.”
The drumbeat of silence filled the room.
Evan reached for the computer. “Can I?” He ignored the return of the raging “You’ve got mail!” notices as he read the executive’s email again. At the bottom, in a mess of numbers and information Julia hadn’t r
ead aloud, their ratings glared from the screen. They needed a 0.22, and they hadn’t made it. But the 0.20 they had accomplished was higher than any week the show had aired. Ever.
“We almost made it,” he said.
James grabbed the computer from his hands. “Let me see.”
“You’ve got mail! You’ve got mail!”
“Find a way to shut that damn thing off,” James said, but he didn’t move. His eyes roamed over the screen, and Evan knew the exact moment the host caught that number along the bottom. “We really did. A 0.22. I didn’t think our little bastard engine that could would ever see more than a 0.15.”
A congratulatory murmur went through the crowd, a low-key sort of happiness tempered by the task ahead. And by the constant yammering of the computer announcing more mail. James slammed the laptop shut mid-notification.
“Okay, first things first. Who set up the ‘electronic letter writing campaign?’ I’m probably supposed to punish you for giving out that asshole’s email address, but first I want to congratulate you on being a genius.”
Everyone stared, letting the tension pull tighter and tighter.
Until one person raised their hand.
Penny.
“Okay, fine,” James said. “Congratulations. If anyone asks, you got into a lot of hot water. Now on to business.”
James’s smug grin was back. The one that had earned him a cult fan base as a stand-up comedian but seemed to fade further with every week they awaited the network’s email of doom. “What’s the plan for tonight’s sketch? The stuff with the weirdos outside? Did they edit it yet?” His questions kept coming, and it was a full thirty seconds before he paused long enough for anyone to answer.
And when he did, everyone turned to Evan.
“We, uh, well…” Suddenly the room was ten degrees warmer. “Things didn’t go so well yesterday. I think you probably heard?” How could James not have heard? In less than 24 hours Evan had heard at least five different rumors about why Marisol had run away—and none of them came close to being weird enough to be the truth.
“That’s why she was so keyed up at Wonton Queen?” James pulled his chin back, like Evan had dropped the truth about the tooth fairy in his lap.
