Up & Out - Ariella Papa [1]
I loved my character, Esme. She may have been a bespectacled smart-aleck twelve-year-old, a glorified imaginary friend, but she was my baby. She was comfortable with herself and her smarts.
So, while I adored her, I couldn’t believe other people liked Esme so much. And then I began to like her for more than what she represented. I liked her for fast-forwarding my career. Overnight I got a staff, a promotion, a fat raise and a haircut. I busted my ass to get the first twenty-two-minute episode of Esme’s Enlightenments ready for the Upfront, where all the advertisers gathered for a presentation in the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria. It was pomp and circumstance thinly disguising sales pitches. This is where the ad execs would lay their money down for the following season.
And boy did they lay their money down! Esme was a huge success. The network ordered a full season. The licensing department worked up all these plush Esme dolls and created an Esme board game and the advertisers spent their money as if there was no tomorrow. Hackett gave an inspiring speech about how Esme was going to help shape the future of the network. Even though she was a girl, she had tested well with boys, who thought she was a techhead. I felt tears coming to my contacts when he talked about how Esme had tons of possibilities, and it was all thanks to one young woman who believed. Me.
I stood up at my front table when Hackett pointed to me. The spotlight shone on me and the camera plastered my smiling face on all the screens for even the back tables to see. I prayed I didn’t have spinach in my teeth from the so-so chicken Florentine they had served at the luncheon. I got a huge round of applause. If my life were the movie I often wish it were, the credits could have rolled right then. Well, maybe after Tommy, my recently exed boyfriend (whom I still find time to have stress-relieving fantastic sex with), would have run down the aisle through the balloons and lifted me up into a freeze-frame, just like in Dirty Dancing. Then my movie audience could have left with the feel-good smiles that commercial blockbusters aim for. (Like many people who work in TV, I’m obsessed with movies.)
But Tommy didn’t come and the credits didn’t roll…even though it was a really great feeling. I still had to produce thirteen episodes of Esme’s Enlightenments in a matter of months and I barely had time to breathe, much less properly blow out my new haircut.
The first few episodes of the series got exceptional ratings and press, but my work wasn’t done. Another season was ordered. Now we are constantly rolling out new episodes, and that means late nights and ignoring some of the people I care about the most. And believe me, all the delivery food I can order in to my office doesn’t exactly satisfy this food addict’s jones.
But I am an adult and these are adult responsibilities and I have to deal, right?
So, I’m out for an every-other-week dinner at Nobu with my roommate, Lauryn. I barely see Lauryn with the hours I keep. When I arrive, she has already ordered a mango martini for me. We kiss hello and I take a bite of the dried piece of mango that comes with the drink.
“You seem very happy,” I say. Since Lauryn realized her marriage to Jordan was really only a starter marriage and his ideas about commitment involved spending her money and sleeping with other women, she had become very bitter. It was nice to see her smile and not mention that I was twenty-five minutes late.
“Well, Rebecca, it’s finally over.”
“What?”
“My D-I-V-O-R-C-E became final today,” she sings.
“Wow! That’s great,” I say. I’m not sure I really think so. I mean, we’re barely twenty-seven and she is divorced, but I guess it’s cool because she is happy and Jordan is a dick. I hold up my martini glass and clink it into hers and a little bit of our drinks spills.
We order our meals—we each get shiitake mushroom salads, and I order my usual rock shrimp tempura and she gets yellowtail sashimi