Up & Out - Ariella Papa [48]
I buy pizza for the three of us. Jordan insists on getting half pepperoni. I hate pepperoni and some of it crept over on the plain slices. This meant I could only have two, which really pissed me off, especially when Jordan is shocked that I could actually eat two. Lauryn must have been a saint!
“You’ve got quite an appetite,” Jordan says. Is this what Tommy meant by trying? I can’t wait for him to leave. He tries another approach. “Nice glasses, Rebecca.”
“Thanks,” I say.
“She looks like a nerd,” Tommy says.
“Thanks,” I say again, and mouthed Asshole at Tommy.
“You want to play some Tony Hawk?” Tommy asks Jordan. Was the purpose of getting me to move in with him so that Tommy could annoy me? What have I got myself into?
“Sure, my call time isn’t until ten,” Jordan says.
Ten! Now we are going to have an all-night tournament. Soon, Jordan is calling his guy for a pot delivery and Tommy is bringing out the bong.
“Um, I have to get up tomorrow,” I whisper to Tommy while Jordan is on the phone placing his order.
“That’s why you have your own room.”
“Welcome home,” I say to myself—and my cell phone rings. It’s Seamus. I smirk at Tommy and take it in my room.
Of all the executive producers, only Don has e-mailed Delores back. He has replied from the Hamptons—it is Memorial Day weekend, after all!—and even his e-mail implies that he really doesn’t want to be bothered. It seems that Delores has slowly lost her mind, and by mid-Monday, when normal people are enjoying a barbecue and a day off, she is “inviting” us to a mandatory meeting for the entire staff at 10:00 a.m. Tuesday morning.
My body still aches from moving and it is a miracle that I got in at nine o’clock, but I knew that losing the whole weekend of work was going to be a problem. Even though I could barely lift my arms to put a shirt on, the subway arrived just as I went through the turnstile, so I was feeling pretty good.
Of course that all changes when I go into the meeting. The first twenty minutes consist of Delores dressing us all down for not being accessible all weekend. She wonders aloud if we are at all aware of deadlines. All four-seven of her is filled with rage as she demands we submit our revised production bibles by the end of the day.
Revised? The meeting room is a buzz of activity. She is one step ahead of us. She slams a box on the table and pulls items from large stacks of collated pages.
“I spent my Memorial Day putting these packets together.” She says Memorial as if it was the most insidious word in the English language, and begins to distribute the stuff.
“I expect everyone to make this their priority.”
I begin to look through the packet. It was a new format for the production and a lot of rhetoric. Production bibles are giant documents about the show, the characters and storylines. It’s basically the who, what, when, why and how of a series. They take forever to put together. Hackett and I had gone back and forth for about two weeks the first time we did it. If we are on production deadlines, how could we possibly stop what we are doing and rewrite a document that already existed?
I look around; everyone is riffling through the sheets of paper. There are a lot of eye rolls and head shakes, but no one looks like they are actually going to say anything. Were we just going to take this lying down? I can’t afford to lose more time producing the show. I need to keep creating the episodes—not stop and describe them.
I started to raise my hand—but wait! I don’t need permission to talk. I am an executive producer—I had a right to be heard.
“Um.” The whole room turns their eyes to me. “Don’t you think this is a little…” Shit, shit, what is the word? Redundant? Excessive? Which would get me in less trouble? I have opened my mouth and now I am getting fucked. “Much?”
I felt pure evil come through Delores’s eyes. I have dared to question her. The word of the day is retribution and it will be hers. Up until this point she has toed the line between giddy pretend-a-friend and