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I swivel up to sitting, then press the soles of my feet into the edge of the coffee table so I can scoot back. When my shoulders touch the firm pillows, I drape my head back and rake my fingers through my hair. “Okay, I broke up with Sylvester.”
“No! You didn’t.”
“Yes, I did. Roxie, you told me to fill you in, and I can’t do that if?—”
“But youworshipedSylvester Sven! He’s famous, Maddie. You wouldn’t break up with him, unless… Oh, shoot. Did he cheat?”
“Worse.”
“Worse than cheating? There’s something worse than cheating?”
“You know that movie I’ve been working on?”
“Sort of… the one about the kidnapped guy?”
“Right.”
My first ever completed screenplay is a comedy about a guy who, through a series of wacky events, gets kidnapped. I’ve kept pretty quiet about it for the past two years, ever since the idea first started to take form in my mind.
Except for my boyfriend, Sylvester, a renowned screenwriter, I haven’t even shown anyone the completed script.
“He said he’d help me sell it,” I explain, “and then he?—”
Oh no.
Here come the waterworks again.
My eyes blur and I reach for a tissue. When I blow my nose a loud honk fills the room. Embarrassing, but I’m beyond caring. I push up my glasses and wipe tears from my eyes before settling them back in place. “He went behind my back and is selling it as his own! He took credit for it, and he said a big production company is interested, and now I hate him!”
“No way! That’s awful.”
“I know. He’s a sniveling weasel.”
“But you were with him for years…”
“It was a mistake. I was blinded by his fame, under some weird spell, and now I’m finally coming out of it and—and it gets even worse.”
She yanks a tissue from the box and hands it to me. “Worse than him being a sniveling weasel?”
“Oh, yeah.”Honk. “We were going to get married.”
“Married?” she shrieks.
“Roxie!” I hiss, flicking my eye to the stairs.
With my luck lately, my mom will appear in a second, a hand to her ear, and call down the stairs: “What’s that I hear about marriage?”
Thankfully, the staircase remains an empty, dimly lit tunnel. My parents are nowhere to be seen, so they’re hopefully still blissfully unaware that their eldest daughter was taking her rebellion to a new level. First, she turned her back on the familypancake-slinging business to jet off to LA, and then she almost eloped with a famous screenwriter. My mother would have a conniption.
My father would do one of those I’m-not-angry-I’m-disappointed frowns, where lines etch down from his mouth to his square chin. Those frowns usually make me feel even worse than my mother’s fits.
“I know… I know. It was really bad of me, but Sylvester popped the question a couple weeks ago after that movie of his,Silver Balloons, came out, and said we should go to the courthouse together… and I thought it was all so exciting and I said yes before I really thought it through. And then I realized Mom and Dad would be mad?—”
“About you getting married without telling them?” Her volume has ratcheted up again, way too loud. “Uh,yeah, Maddison. They’d have been more than furious, and rightfully so. That is a huge deal.”
“Would you please keep it down?”
“Mom and Dad would freak.”
