The Rom-Commers(22)
Charlie tilted his head. “Do you want me to answer that question—or was it rhetorical?”
It was rhetorical, but I was so worked up, I said, “I want you to answer!”
Charlie gave a solemn nod as he conceded, “I have not.”
“Thank you! Exactly!”
Safe to say, this little tangent had not been in my notes. I had a million legitimate, academic points I could have led with, and yet here I was, just minutes in, asking—no, demanding—to know about Charlie Yates’s personal orgasms.
From Charlie’s expression, he hadn’t expected me to go there, either.
Though, if I’m honest, there was a brightness to his eyes like I’d surprised him.
The idea that I was seeing admiration from Charlie Yates gave me a fluttery feeling in my … everywhere.
I tamped it down. I had to stay focused. I wasn’t here to make friends.
But that’s when he picked up that pen of his and wrote, at the top of his notebook page, “Happy ending—essential.” And then drew a box around it. Like he’d heard me, and he agreed, and he was ready to move on to the next point.
I needed to move away from sex talk. That much was clear.
I consulted my notes.
“Other problems,” I said, in a tone like Where to begin? “I guess the next giant issue is that none of the things that happen in this script correspond to the original. At all. It’s almost like you’ve never even seen the movie.”
“No comment.”
“Have you seen the movie?”
“Of course.”
“Recently?”
“Not sure that’s relevant.”
“I think it’s pretty relevant. You’ve got the characters going to a line-dancing competition!”
“So?”
“So there is no line dancing in It Happened One Night!”
Charlie shrugged. “They said to update it.”
“With line dancing?”
He shrugged again. “It wasn’t taken.”
“It ‘wasn’t taken’?”
“All the other kinds of dancing have been done. Ballroom. Swing. Latin. Hip-hop. Dirty. Not to mention the whole Magic Mike stripping franchise.”
“There was line dancing in Footloose.”
“But that’s not a rom-com.”
“You don’t even know what a rom-com is!”
“I do now.”
I gave him a look, let him have the point, and then said, “Disqualifyingly bad problem number three: there is nothing romantic here. At all. The leads don’t even like each other, as far as I can tell.”
“They like each other. What about when she falls on top of him?”
“That’s an accident.”
“Yes, but it leads to a sexy moment.”
“Sexy how? She gets a concussion.”
“But they gaze into each other’s eyes before she passes out.”
“I didn’t read that as gazing. I read it as glaring.”
“That’s on you.”
“No, that’s on the script.”
“I’m telling you, that’s a turning point for them.”
“And I’m telling you, that’s not how that works.”
“Fine. Fall on me sometime, and I’ll show you.”
“Fine. I will.”
We faced off for a second until Charlie said, “The point is, people fight all the time in rom-coms.”
“At first they do. But then it has to give way to something better. They can’t just fight the whole time and then have hate-sex and call it a day.”
“Don’t knock hate-sex. It has its upsides.”
“I’m sure it does. But it’s not love.”
Charlie paused to write “hate-sex = not love” in his Moleskine and box it.
I built on my advantage. “This’ll take forever if you keep arguing with me. We’ll be here all night.”
Charlie frowned. I was right again.
“So,” I went on, “I’m going to need you to just sit quietly and listen while I rip your screenplay to shreds. ’Kay?”
And here’s the thing: he did it.
He really sat there quietly after that, while I earnestly went through every single sticky note on every single page of that script, enumerating every single way it was terrible—from structure to motivation and everything in between.
By the time we were done, it was after midnight, my voice was getting hoarse, and Charlie Yates had taken five pages of notes. And his handwriting wasn’t large.
It felt like a triumph. Like this whole trip hadn’t been for nothing. Like I’d maybe proved at least a few of his assumptions about me a little bit wrong.
Not that I cared, of course.
But as I repacked my backpack and Charlie read over his notes, I couldn’t help but gloat a little to myself. See that, Charlie Yates? I’m less worthless than you thought.
Was that something to gloat about?
I would have loved to leave it there. But that’s when I remembered I had to get myself to the airport in the morning. And thus I was forced to close out the evening by leaning over to Charlie and saying, “I’m so sorry. Could you explain to me how Uber works?”