by Jane Galaxy
“Production shots and on a break between. It was cute, he gave—”
“Christ, Reyes.”
It was unclear whether Trevor was angry with her. Frequently, it took a few minutes of conversation before Vanessa could read enough of the signs—whether he pushed back hard quickly or let the staff give him enough rope so he could hang them. Today she was willing to assume that something this outrageous could impress him.
“Christ,” he said again, staring intently. He looked up at her. “You haven’t got some secret pact together, have you? You freelancing with those Rio bastards now too?”
She assumed he was talking about the Portuguese paps and decided against reminding him that she was Puerto Rican—second-generation, even, and as far from being Portuguese as he was.
“Again: Jax Butler asked me. Personally.”
Trevor sat back in his (ergonomic, Herman Miller, definitely overpriced) chair.
“You know the studio has contracts with their own choice of photogs,” he said. “And if you didn’t before, you could’ve guessed they’d want a tight rein on their own image.”
Vanessa swallowed as subtly as she could and crossed her arms over her chest. Being bold, she thought. Being bold pays off.
“Fans have to feel like they’ve got special access,” she said, and shrugged. “It’s nothing new. Methods gotta update.”
“You’re opening us up to the risk of lawsuit,” he said. Vanessa could feel the blood moving through her hands.
“Well, you want to get one up on the Portuguese, here you go,” she replied firmly. Not that that cured any possibility of litigation, but it meant something. She had a shot, no reason to waste it.
Trevor gave a long sigh and shook his head, leaned forward to look at the shots again.
“I’ll look into it,” he said finally.
The next day when Vanessa came into the office, Sam stopped her in the hallway and held his hand up with a weird look on his face.
“What are you doing?” she asked. If this was some new Instagram-worthy Native American appropriated bullshit, she was done with white guys for the rest of her damn life.
“Uh, I’m high-fiving you,” Sam replied. “Or I was gonna.”
She looked at his hand. He was holding it at a good height for him, way above her head. Vanessa left him hanging.
“Why do I need a high-five?”
“Your pictures.”
“Okay.”
“Trevor sold your pictures.”
She instantly forgave Sam’s awkwardness.
“Who? For how much? He said he was going to look into it. He sounded mad at me and said we’d get sued—is he not worried about that?”
“Slow down, jeez,” said Sam, grinning. “Dave said he overheard Trevor trying to shop it around to the grocery papers. He was here, actually making calls himself. Apparently the Instigator Weekly is going for more of an investigative journalism bent after they broke some political story, I don’t know.” Sam rolled his eyes. “And all of a sudden, bam. Movies Now stepped in.”
Holy fucking shit. That was a big deal. The magazine was meant to make the average person feel like they were privileged enough to be reading a trade paper. Glossy photos, select cover shots. This was six, seven-figure territory.
Her face must have said exactly that, because Sam went on.
“Offered them the original card and the camera. Trevor can be such a fucking tool.” He chuckled a bit like he thought that was a good thing. “Not like they were top-secret wedding shots. Or a newborn heir to a reality TV dynasty.”
“How much?” said Vanessa.
“Oh. Dave didn’t say.”
She looked around the open floor at the few guys sitting at editing desks.
“And Dave’s out on assignment this morning. Try texting Trev. They’re your photos.” Sam went off toward the kitchen.
Vanessa stood in the hallway staring down at her phone. Her most recent text to Trevor had been ages ago, about some reality contestant’s regular yoga studio.
Okay, thanks Trevor!! had been her message, chipper and eager to please. No reply to that from him. His only message had been a misspelled street name.
Sam said to text you, she typed, and before she could decide whether that was a good opener, her thumb pressed Send out of muscle memory. Trevor kept his message receipts turned off on purpose, and it was a long few minutes before she got an answer.
100k came up in the message bubble.
One hundred thousand dollars.
That was—that was a lot of money. That was pay off the bills and set Claudia up for treatments for a long time money, even if she took a percentage cut for a commission.
!!!, she typed, then erased it and sent Okay. Nice.
well cut you a check in couple weeks std comm, Trevor replied.
Vanessa stared at his text, trying to decipher it.
Standard commission? she wrote back. No way. This was all me, it’s worth more than 3%.
agency rules, he wrote. + ur freelance
Something about Trevor’s constant misspelled texts drained her of any motivation to keep typing responses. She flagged down Sam, who was wandering by with a cup of coffee about to spill over the edge.
“Hey, have you ever gotten shots that Trevor’s screwed you over?”
“What do you mean?” He set the coffee on a desk gingerly and rubbed his hands on his jeans, wincing.
“He pulled down a hundred kay on my photos and is trying to give me my usual commission rate.”
“Aw man, that sucks,” said Sam. He kept his eyes on the cup.
“Do you think I can talk him up?”
“I mean, you don’t have a contract to hold him to, and you can’t argue for staff rates when you’re freelance.”
“I got personally requested for something, I did all the work—Trev didn’t have to negotiate access, or come up with a tip, or try to beat some other group of guys or anything.”
“Yeah,” said Sam, carefully pouring creamer into the coffee, “but he did haggle the price, so there’s that.”
“That only benefits him!”
Sam swore under his breath as the coffee finally went over the edge and began flowing across the desk toward the mass of wires around a monitor.
Vanessa found one of the video editing rooms and flopped into the chair to stare at the ceiling.
She was—
This was—
This was perfectly normal, and she had no good reason to be surprised. It stung to even think those words, and she closed her eyes for a moment. The more she got used to being disappointed, the easier it would be down the road to not take it so personally. Or maybe the more she hardened herself against bullshit like this, the easier it would be to rise above these assholes and the rules they only enforced when it was convenient for them.
Slowly, Vanessa leaned the chair forward and pulled the editing computer out of power save mode. She went to Movies Now’s website, but the pictures weren’t anywhere to be found, probably still on some graphic manager’s editing bay. Her photographs. She switched over to Venal-Rama to see if they had anything that could distract her.
Sure enough, there were some of Dave’s shots. He was one of the oldest photographers for FB2 and had been nice to Vanessa the few times she’d gone around the city with him. He had a solid working relationship with a star named Chastity Jones. His photos of her had kicked her career out of Sorority Girl #2 -land and into a role as an ADA on a crime procedural. Chastity still sometimes gave him a special tip-off if she was going to be out and about. It was one step away from sending him a card and fruit basket on his birthday as far as this profession was concerned.
Vanessa wondered if any of her celebrities would ever think of her that way. A personal level, she mused. How intimate could paparazzi and celebrities ever really be?
She thought about Jax. The day after she’d climbed out his apartment window, it had seemed like being fucked by a movie star in his loft apartment would w
ork against her—like, in a logical world, all her opportunities would have dried up just from being another sexual conquest in a long line for him. At least it had been better than getting fucked over by an idiot from Perth with aspirations of being the next Harvey Levin.
Vanessa sighed and tried to focus on something else again. Claudia had told her that reliving arguments or bad conversations only made you resentful toward the person you were imagining. Jax was easier territory.
It was nothing short of bizarre that he’d given her his personal phone number. A-listers had services to connect people to them, operators to screen connections so that commoners couldn’t bother them at all hours.
Vanessa flicked at her phone and pulled up the text messages between her and Jax. He kept late hours and liked nitpicking bad movies. She knew that about him now. Did he trust her not to say anything, or did he (probably rightly) assume that nobody would really give a shit? That there were some things that people actually didn’t want to know about movie stars? Jax on the couch in his boxer shorts—or maybe naked, he probably walks around that apartment naked when he’s alone, some subsection of her brain said—watching Svengoolie at two in the morning didn’t exactly jive with the Dirk Masterson brand.
She’d just been sitting in the hall gathering her prints back up from the portfolio case she’d dropped and trying not to wake Claudia when her notifications went off. And then he’d called her, like they were friends catching up at the end of the day. Vanessa opened her phone log just to make sure she hadn’t imagined that part. Nope, there he was, a string of numbers with a bright yellow star emoji next to them just in case her phone was stolen or hacked—not that it was much of a deterrent, but at least it wasn’t JAX BUTLER AKA DIRK MASTERSON, YOU KNOW, THE MOVIE STAR screaming at whoever looked at it.
It was the only phone call she’d gotten in the last six months that wasn’t from a collection agency.
She went back to the summary list of all text messages. Pretty much the same story. No text messages from friends.
There were robo-updates on library branch closures for construction. A wrong message from Sam last New Year’s. Warnings from her phone carrier that her data usage was getting too high. Claudia was nothing but an endless list of We’re done. I’m home every time she finished group at the hospital. And the messages from Trevor.
That was it.
Jax Butler was becoming more of a constant presence in her life than everyone else she knew. God, was she really this alone in the world?
“Do you want to go get seaweed smoothie bowls?”
Sam’s head was positioned diagonally in the doorframe. Vanessa could see the rest of his body through the glass wall, his equipment bag still dangling from one hand. She resisted the urge to tell him that sounded like something a billionaire tech investor would mainline in the hopes of eking out one more month of life while dying in hospice.
Sam took her thoughtful silence as actual consideration of the question and an invitation to straighten out and fill the doorway.
“That sounds extremely healthy,” she said in her best diplomatic voice. “What time is it?”
“Almost lunch,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Vanessa with a sigh. “I’m not getting much done here, I think I’ll just call it a day.”
“You coming down with something?” asked Sam as they went down the hallway.
She couldn’t take too much of the obliviousness from him, or of his extended discussion of how awesome this new band was, called Drunken Master or something, and left the smoothie place before she wound up committing her meager earnings to an $18 bowl of limp ocean byproduct and flagrant misuse of jicama.
By the time Vanessa got home, she was ready for a pity nap, but instead found Claudia in the midst of housecleaning. Clear sign of a bad day coming. She’d need to be extra careful, but for some reason Claudia had stopped and left the mop in the middle of the floor.
“What are we doing?” asked Vanessa, trying to drum up some patience.
“You need to explain this!” said Claudia from the other room. “You definitely owe me a full explanation of what the hell is going on here!”
“What,” she said, trailing her bag behind her on the still-damp floor. Claudia turned from the computer to reveal the shot of Jax standing with Adriana Peace below headline text in flashy, space-tastic blue and yellow.
Photos by Vanessa Reyes / FB2 said the caption in tiny letters beneath each shot.
“How did you even get these? I mean, how did you get inside the studio lot?”
Vanessa shrugged.
“He asked me to.”
“Asked you to?” Claudia stared at Vanessa, and Vanessa stared at Jax.
Claudia pressed again. “What, you’re best friends now? I thought you hated that guy.”
“Mmm,” Vanessa said, exactly the way she’d practiced it in her head on the ride back to Queens the day before. “He’s like any of them I follow. But he asked, and turning it down would have been bad for business.”
“How bad?”
Vanessa paused for a moment.
“Hundred thousand dollars.”
Her sister said nothing, but spent a long time looking at each image carefully. Movies Now had chosen fifteen photos for their spread, she realized. The shots of the production crew were endlessly cropped to only show Jax smiling in an apron, totally void of context. But she’d been right—that shot of him grinning naturally into the camera, the one that he’d thought was so cheesy, was the featured photo on the Movies Now website preview.
“So is the commission gonna be bigger?”
Vanessa sighed. “No, not really. I mean, not at all. It’s. . . . My boss is a jackass.”
There was a long pause as Claudia absorbed this.
“Still. I mean, it’s huge. Helping that much.”
Vanessa jerked up from where she’d wound up on the couch. Her sister had an awful expression on her face, and it was obvious where her thoughts had gone. There was nothing Claudia needed to do. It wasn’t her responsibility. Claudia needed to rest, and stay where she was, and not push herself.
“Claudia, you do plenty.”
“I know.”
“You don’t need to feel guilty.”
“I know.”
“I am doing this for both of us, and you don’t owe me anything.”
“I know. Ness—”
Someone outside knocked on the door, and they both froze. Vanessa waited a moment, then chose her steps carefully to look through the peephole. A pale young woman she didn’t recognize was standing outside. She waited on tiptoes to try to see if the stranger was holding flyers or a clipboard. The woman knocked again, and Vanessa wished to hell she’d clipped the chain shut when she’d come in.
She wedged her toes under the door and opened it a few inches.
“Are you Vanessa?”
The woman had dark hair piled into a messy bun on top of her head, rectangular glasses over a bored expression, and a vivid, practically glowing purple dress. The fact that the hallway’s wallpaper was peeling and the floor was piled up with garbage bags from the neighboring apartment didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest. Either that or she had an excellent poker face.
“I’m Natalie, Jax’s assistant.”
Ah. Poker face. The door veered back to a politer angle.
“Oh, I’m—How did you find me?”
“It’s not hard. Can we talk a second?”
Vanessa stepped out and closed the apartment door behind her without looking at Claudia or the hundreds of prints she’d tacked up all over the shabby walls instead of actual decorations. The portfolio had been too full, and it had seemed pointless to put them all away.
“Natalie,” she said. She’d always pictured personal assistants as pretty, stylish people in outrageous shoes who endured a lot of being screamed at while trying to make it look like their high-profile clients could get through the day without prescriptions or cocaine. Natalie didn’t look like the type wh
o’d bother to reach out to catch a ball if someone threw it to her, or like she took much shit from anybody, let alone Jax. “The condom girl?”
“And I was so sure my art would go unappreciated in this lifetime,” Natalie intoned with an ironic half-smile. “Do you have a passport?”
“Uh. . . .”
“That could use some context. Jax liked the photos you took on set. He’s happy with the outcome and is inviting you to join him for another shoot. If you bring your camera equipment, we can get you anything else you’d need over there.”
“Over where?”
“He wants it to be a surprise.”
“How long a trip are we talking?”
Vanessa watched Natalie tilt her head to the side slowly, with a thoughtful expression now.
“A week. Ish.”
“And when do we leave?”
Natalie smoothed a lock of hair out of her face. “Five minutes ago.”
Vanessa went back inside to hunt for her things and passed the living room.
“You’re leaving?” Claudia called to her, having eavesdropped.
“Apparently,” said Vanessa, and started digging through the drawers in the bureau with all the old medical bills. “It’s another photo shoot, somewhere foreign.” She found her passport and tossed it onto her camera bag. There was an extra battery pack and charger in her bedroom, and she didn’t need her fritzed-out old toothbrush, they had those in other places. She grabbed her birth control pills from the bathroom sink—
Vanessa stared at the blue packet in her hand. She thought about late night bad movies, and the few text messages in her phone, and the sound he’d made in the back of his throat when she came—
There was no decision to make. There was no point in thinking about it. She could just go have fun with someone whose abs had their own Wikipedia page, come home, and deal with Trevor and her cheated-out commission later. Or maybe never. Hell, maybe she’d return with photos good enough to get on staff at an agency that wouldn’t treat her like shit.
Vanessa was shoving bags into bags when she stood suddenly and turned to find Claudia standing there, leaning on her cane.
Claudia and her housekeeping and the looming threat of a bad day. Shit. She was a bad sister to do this to Claudia.
