“I can’t believe they invited Scott Braddock to their wedding.”

“Why wouldn’t they? They invited you.”

“Yeah, but I’m awesome. Laurie and I are actually friends.”

“Well, he’s probably friends with his agent too. He seems like a friendly guy.”

I snort. Very lady-like.

My roommate and I are doing our make-up in the back of a Lyft car, on the way to my agent’s wedding. She’s marrying another agent. That agent represents Scott Braddock. Since moving to L.A., my whole life has been about becoming a wildly successful screenwriter and successfully avoiding my nemesis Scott Braddock. I have predominantly failed at both of these ambitions.

In the past four years, I have completed six screenplays, sold one of them, accidentally run into Scott Braddock a total of twenty-two times, and hid from him once (behind a tree when I was hiking in Griffith Park and saw him and his best friend coming down the hill towards me). Knowing that I will be seeing him this afternoon, at an event where I will be surrounded by people that I want to impress, is making my brain spin out of control and my stomach do somersaults.

Before Laurie had told me that Braddock would be at her wedding, I had been anticipating the event with equal parts dread and optimism. I was dreading it because I had been in Writing Mode for a month (a glorious mode wherein I stay home most of the time, in pajamas, to write on my laptop in front of the TV with my favorite rom coms on repeat and the kind of delirious coffee buzz that has me convinced that every page I’m writing is the best page of writing that anyone has ever written), and when I’m in Writing Mode the thought of transitioning to Social Mode is akin to the shock of being yanked from a womb, into a brightly-lit world of unpolished dialogue and interactions with humans who can’t be controlled in the way that my characters can.

I had been optimistic about it because I knew it would be a good opportunity for me to get my face out in front of a lot of people who could potentially hire me or buy my scripts or pass my scripts along to their actor or director clients. But now I’m just dreading it, because if there’s one person whose dialogue irks me beyond all comprehension and whose interactions seem the most out of my control—it’s Scott Braddock’s. My anger and frustration towards him has become this separate living thing that I’ve fed and kept alive, like the world’s shittiest virtual pet.

“He always seems so happy to see you, every time we run into him.”

“He does not—he always says something to piss me off.”

“Just because you get pissed off that doesn’t mean he was trying to piss you off. I’ve never understood why you don’t like him. He’s so cute. He looks like an actor playing a screenwriter on a CW show.”

“Ugh. Please. He looks like a screenwriter who’s trying to look like an actor who’s playing a screenwriter on a CW show. See the difference? Also I would not watch that show.”

“You would hate-watch that show and secretly write a script for it where his character’s found dead floating in a pool.”

She’s right.

Maya Owens is my plus-one and my best friend and I honestly don’t know what I’d do without her. I’ve known her since I moved to L.A. four years ago, when we both worked at the same restaurant on Beverly Boulevard. She still works as a hostess there, when she isn’t busy going to classes at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (where she’s studying to be a costume designer), or being a model (to pay for her classes at FIDM). She is half Bermudian, a quarter Chinese, a quarter Dutch and a thousand percent hot. She has green almond-shaped eyes, toffee-colored skin and super curly caramel-colored hair. Men basically jizz in their pants when they see her and I have literally witnessed a guy wipe drool off his chin while staring at her. So yeah, she keeps this cute little blonde blue-eyed girl’s ego in check.

“He has good taste in clothes and he looks good in jeans and I have never seen him be anything but nice to you. So why do you hate him so much?”

“Multiple reasons.” I hold up my mascara wand for emphasis. “One—I’ve been competitive with him since Emerson, because we were both the star screenwriting students in our year—he wrote horror and thrillers and I wrote romantic comedies and young adult scripts. And then in our last year he started writing romantic comedies and young adult scripts!”

Maya shrugs and twists her lips to one side. “How dare he?”

“That was my thing! And then he and I were the only two from our class moving out to L.A. after we graduated, so whenever I have a meeting with producers and executives and I’d say I went to Emerson they’d be like: ‘Oh do you know Scott Braddock? I love that guy! I should email him’ so basically I just remind people who should be hiring me to get in touch with him instead, and we’ve both been competing for the same studio assignments for years, meanwhile he also has writing samples for horror and thriller scripts, so why does he have to do my thing? Pick a lane and stay in it!”

“Is that it? That’s why you have all this pent up anger and frustration about him? Literally none of that qualifies as hate-worthy asshole-ishness and you know it.”

“AAAAAND” I take a deep breath and pause for dramatic effect before proceeding. “He had sex with my dormmate in our room one night after a party and then never talked to her again, and she went nuts.”

“Who—Brianna?”

“Yep.”

“Yeah but wasn’t she nuts already?”

“That’s not the point! Whose side are you on anyway?”

“I am on the side of whatever will get you laid, my love.”

“This has nothing to do with me getting laid!” I say, a lot louder than I meant to. The Lyft driver glances at me in the rearview mirror, fearful of making eye contact, lest I report him for inappropriate sexual advances.

I lower my voice. “That is definitely not the point!”

“When you have that kind of a reaction to an attractive guy—sister that is always the point.”

I don’t tell Maya that the point is Brie told me it was the best sex she’d ever had in her life. She went into great detail, describing the exceptional length and girth of his penis, how he went down on her, all the different positions he employed, and how he was the first guy who ever gave her orgasms. All the Guinness and tequila in the world could not erase my memory of those descriptions or the insidious images they conjured in my mind—and believe me—I tried. There was a brief period where I attempted to consume all of the Guinness and tequila.

I feel a chill throughout my entire body and shake my head. “It was so gross that he did all that with her in my room, like two hours after hitting on me at a party.”

“Ah hah. The plot thickens.”

“No—I rejected him, end of story for me, but he and I had three classes together—”

“So you weren’t mad at him for how he made Brianna feel, you were mad at him for how he made you feel.”

“No, I—it’s both! I’m mad at him because of how he made her feel and in turn how she kept bugging me about him for months, showing up after my classes with him, and he wouldn’t even look at her, he was such a dick, and then I’d have to deal with her massive freak-outs. God!”

“Well.” Maya applies clear lip-gloss and drops the applicator into her tiny purse. “He definitely should have talked to her. For a lot of reasons.”

“Yeah.”

“I just think it’s interesting that you still have such strong feelings about it all these years later.” She smacks her lips.

“They aren’t strong feelings and it’s been less than five years. I’m still mad at my sixth grade teacher for giving me a ‘Needs Improvement’ in Creative Writing.”

“Well, you showed him.”

“Yeah I did.”

I cross my arms and sit back, trying to think of something else to talk about, besides Scott Braddock, but I can’t. Now that I’ve begun venting about him I can’t stop. It’s like a tic, or an itchy spot that you barely notice until you start scratching it and then you feel like you can’t go on with your life until that spot has been rendered red and raw and numb.

“He’s such an ass. In class he always did this thing where the professor would express some pretentious opinion about something—Alfred Hitchcock, for example—and he’d nod his head slowly and pull his glasses off his stupid face and then clean them with the bottom of his shirt and say ‘I think that’s exactly right,’ and our professors would think he’s a genius because he tells them they’re right and he wears glasses and I bet you anything he does the same thing with producers and executives and it’s like—excuse me for having perfect vision and not wanting to lie to idiots about them being right when I know for a fact that they’re wrong—especially about Nora Ephron!”

I finally take a breath and feel my armpits. They are moist. I’m getting myself all worked up about him and getting sweat stains on my dress. He’s ruining my day and I haven’t even seen his stupid face yet.

“You know, you can get glasses that aren’t prescription, right? Like prop glasses. You’d look really good with glasses.”

“That’s not the point, Maya, the point is —”

“The point is you haven’t stopped talking about this guy that you supposedly can’t stand for like twenty minutes.”

“Yeah because there are so many things I can’t stand about him, it takes me a long time to go through the list.”

“I think you’re obsessed with him and you need to have sex with him to get over it.”

“Okay first of all, I’m the opposite of obsessed with him, and secondly, that is the worst advice ever.”

Maya always gives me the worst advice ever, but she’s the most loyal friend I’ve ever had, and also she’s always right. Her advice inevitably sounds terrible to me, and usually involves her forcing me to drink kale juice or apple cider vinegar when I think I’m coming down with something and just want chocolate chip cookies and milk, or pushing me to go out dancing with her the night before I have a big pitch meeting that I’m nervous about—and I always end up feeling better. So if she really thinks I should have sex with Scott Braddock, then I’m in trouble. Or she could be wrong about something for the first time in her entire life.

She was certainly right about not trusting my last boyfriend. My last boyfriend was a camera operator named Jake. We dated for about a year, until almost a year ago. It was perfect—he worked long hours on movie sets while I was at home writing so we’d text each other throughout the day and then he’d show up to fuck me, we’d go out for something to eat and then he’d go home because he had to get up early. It was exactly what I needed/wanted and I was so happy that I didn’t even dwell on his somewhat disappointing cunnilingus skills and terrible taste in music.

Then he stopped texting and coming over and returning my texts and calls and I found out from Maya that he was dating an actress who was recently the star of her own Disney Channel show. They had gone to Maya’s restaurant for dinner and he had pretended not to recognize her. When he went to the men’s room, Maya cornered him and gave her a piece of her mind. He said it wasn’t like I’d ever acted serious about him anyway. She may or may not have instructed the bartender to spit in his drink and the bartender may or may not have done it. Who am I kidding—if she asked him to, then he definitely did it because he’s a male human and she’s Maya. Regardless, I have been a workaholic nun ever since.

“I just think that if you’re this passionate about anything, even despising him, it’ll translate into —”

“Okay let’s stop talking about him, he’s not that important.”

“Okay baby cakes.” She pats my knee. “Let’s talk about you and how amazing you look today.”

“If you think I made myself look amazing for him, you’re wrong.”

“I’m never wrong.”

“Not usually, but you’re wrong about this.”

She is mostly wrong about this. I need to look good because there will be a lot of agents and producers and executives at this wedding. Not that I’m going to schmooze—I don’t schmooze—but I want to feel confident, and at this juncture, the best way for me to feel confident is to look good. Yeah, I said it. It may have been two years since my script was on The Black List of Hollywood insiders’ favorite scripts, but I’m wearing a six-year-old A-list dress that I can barely fit into and I will charm the socks off of anyone who wants to talk to me (except Scott Braddock).

It wasn’t in my budget to buy a new dress for this occasion, not even a “gently-used” one. I will probably be the poorest guest at this event. The script of mine that sold to a studio sold for a modest price in Hollywood terms, but to a girl from Idaho it was a fucking fortune. For a gal from Idaho who was living in Los Angeles, the net profits have lasted me two and a half years, and that’s only because I budget very carefully and I’m good at sticking to my budget—despite Maya’s insistence that I should splurge every now and then to “show the universe that you trust in its abundance and that it will always provide for you.” In about five months, barring any unforeseen financial disasters, I’ll have to go back to waiting tables. That wouldn’t be the end of the world, but if Scott Braddock ever walked into my restaurant and sat in my section and tipped me with his trust fund money, I would be forced to stick a fork in his hand and then move back in with my parents in Boise.

Maya is staring at me. “You’re still thinking about him, aren’t you?”

I realize I’m scrunching up my face and holding my breath and making fists. “There's just something about his smirky face.  I can't tell if I want to punch it or kiss it until he cries.”

“Wow.  You are going to have such hot sex with him.”

“Shut up I would never.  Like literally if I got drunk and super horny and he were the only single guy there I’d sooner hump a cactus.”

“There's a pretty picture.”

I laugh to myself and pull out my phone.

“You're typing that to yourself to use as dialogue in a script, aren't you?”

“You don't know me!  Yeah, I am.”

“It's not that funny.”

“Yeah you're right.”  I delete it.  “Don’t let me get drunk.”

“Just super horny?”

“Seriously. Maybe there will be a nice sexy handsome single young producer or director…”

“Yeah and maybe there will be unicorns and sexy vampires who can go out in broad daylight. Trust me, lady. A hot screenwriter in hand is worth more than a mythical sexy young single producer or director in your bush.”

“He’s not in my hand and he’s definitely not getting into my bush.”

We turn onto Loma Vista in Beverly Hills and I can see the entrance to stately Greystone Mansion and all of the BMWs and Teslas and Priuses headed towards it. I take a deep breath. Laurie Metzger and Jeff Bloomgarten have rented out the same grand location that was used in There Will Be Blood, which is appropriate because—Scott Braddock. I’m already exhausted from thinking about him.

“I just hope they didn’t seat us at the same table.”

“Of course they did.”

“You can let us off here,” I say to the driver. It’s a mild, sunny April day, and I’d like to air out my armpits on the walk up to the grounds. I believe the ceremony is going to be outside. The drive to Beverly Hills from our place in the Northeastern hipster region of Los Angeles took a little longer than expected—it always takes longer than expected to get anywhere from anywhere in Los Angeles—I can’t believe I haven’t learned that yet. The ceremony should start in about fifteen minutes, so it’ll give us enough time to scan the crowd and choose seats as far away from you-know-who as possible.

Men are already doing double takes when they see Maya walking up the hill. She’s wearing a simple dusty rose A-line dress, but with her legs and those nude ankle-strap stacked heels, she looks stunning.

“Will you do me a favor and lighten up and have a little fun today? You’ve been working your ass off all year and it’s gotten you nowhere.”

“Thanks.”

“That’s not a judgment on your writing ability, Erin, it’s just that this business that you’re in sucks balls and you take it so seriously and you’re so hard on yourself, it’s like—what if you do end up being the most successful screenwriter of all time—is that all you want for your life?”

“Kind of.”

“That’s sad.”

“That’s not fair. You work your ass off too, but when you do it, it looks like more fun because you’re making beautiful clothes and modeling beautiful clothes and seating beautiful people to dinner, meanwhile I just sit at a computer and listen to podcasts.”

“Well, maybe we both need to lighten up and have a little fun today.” She takes my hand and squeezes it. “I have a really good feeling about things. There’s something in the air…”