Up & Out - Ariella Papa [3]
I get into bed and try to imagine tomorrow. With all this production going on, I am starting to lose touch with Esme. I created her, but now my staff has had to take over. Janice and John are animating her and Jen has asked if she could write a couple of scripts. Tomorrow, I want to spend the day coming up with the concepts for the last five episodes of the season.
I think teen girls rule the world. When you think about it, they create all the trends. When you’re a teenage girl, you’re just forming, mentally and physically, and everything makes you who you are. I really want Esme to be the kind of girl you’d want to have for a best friend. The kind who’s tough enough not to give a shit about the dumb things guys say and the kind you can trust with anything.
I wish I were more like Esme and not desperate to bust on Lauryn with my pals. I just need to get their take on it. I won’t psychoanalyze too much.
Tomorrow I will spend some time with you, Esme. I will strive to be like you, I promise.
Two hours later I wish I had called the girls. Insomnia is something that started right around the time Esme’s Enlightenments was made into a show. Now I spend my nights wondering about Esme’s ratings and how to keep her plots interesting. I also rehash what the critics have to say when they pick apart my program. I don’t get a lot of beauty sleep.
This whole year (since I found out last April that I had to produce episodes for the show) has flown by. I barely got a chance to lift my head up from my computer terminal.
When I finally pulled my nose up from the grindstone, there was the slightest change in my relationship with my friends. Sometimes everything was normal and I couldn’t feel it, but other times it seemed we were all moving in different directions. When we moved to New York after college, we spent all this time together. We didn’t really have any family around. The fact that we wound up in our group was one of those things that was either fate or an amazing and fortunate coincidence. I think friendship works like that—people just get pulled in.
Beth was my roommate in college. Thanks to Beth, I met Tommy, her brother and my ex-boyfriend. I introduced Beth to Lauryn. Kathy was Beth’s cousin’s roommate who looked up Lauryn when she moved to the city. We all just clicked and felt like we discovered this city together after college.
We each brought something to the group. Lauryn brought her funny physicality, Beth motivated the group to try new things—to go forth into the city as if we owned it—and Kathy was the practical one, the stylish one and the one who seemed to believe all of us were going somewhere.
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment things changed and I can’t say it was all because of how much time I spent at work. Maybe it was Lauryn, who had held us together all along. When she started spending days in her pajamas, crying over Jordan, we started hanging out less. Or maybe it was Kathy, going completely crazy over her fiancé, Ron. She kind of settled in with him, moved to the suburbs and decided her reason for being was to be the most beautiful bride in the tri-state area. None of us could have predicted that the girl who got all the best clothes at sample sales would be asking us to try on pewter bridesmaid dresses. But maybe we stopped hanging out as much when we stopped being able to keep up with Beth.
Beth didn’t have to worry about insomnia. Most nights she passed out drunk, unless she had taken something to keep her up and partying all night. She had plenty of people to go with her to the hottest clubs now that she worked at the music studio. I found her new friends wild and intimidating. Although I think the changes in my relationship with Beth had a lot to do with Tommy and me breaking up.
We should have broken up a lot sooner. Part of the reason we stayed together so long was that