The Rom-CommersPaperback

One

LOGAN SCOTT CALLED just as I was making dinner, and I almost didn’t answer because my dad and I were singing along to ABBA’s greatest hits. There were not too many people I’d interrupt ABBA for—but yes, fine, Logan Scott was one of them.

Logan was my former high school boyfriend, who still felt guilty about the way we broke up, and he dealt with that guilt by sending me job opportunities.

Not the worst way to handle it.

It was the penance he paid for his unscathed life.

Though nobody’s life is truly unscathed, I guess.

His less-scathed life, maybe.

He was a manager. In Hollywood. For screenwriters. A very glamorous job.

Technically, he was my manager—although I’d never made him any money. I was kind of like his pro bono case.

It was fine, he always insisted. I’d pay off eventually.

I’d placed in two different screenwriting contests because Logan insisted I submit. He got me in the door freelancing for Variety. And all those movie reviews I got paid minimum wage to do? Courtesy of him.

He just kept sending me work.

I told him to stop feeling guilty. I was fine. But I didn’t exactly mean it. Not if that guilt of his was going to keep paying my bills.

Some of them, anyway.

All to say, on this particular night, Logan had a doozy of an offer for me.

“Emma,” he said. “I’m going to need you to sit down.”

“I’m flipping pancakes-for-dinner right now,” I said. My sister, Sylvie, was coming home from college, so I was making her favorite meal.

“You will definitely drop them all when you hear this,” Logan said, like he’d pictured me juggling pancakes instead.

I covered the in-progress stack with foil, turned off the music, and gave my dad a “one minute” finger from across the room.

My dad nodded and gave a hearty thumbs-up, like Do whatever you need to do.

“I’m ready,” I said to Logan.

“Are you literally sitting down?”

“No.”

“I’m not kidding. You need to do that.”

I walked to our dining-slash-breakfast table and sat down at my already-set place. “Okay,” I said. “I’m literally sitting.”

“I have a job for you…” Logan said then, pausing for effect.

“I’ll take it,” I said.

“Writing a feature film script…” he went on, stretching out the moment.

“Sold,” I said, like Moving on.

And then he got to his grand finale: “With Charlie Yates.”

Logan had told me to sit—but at the sound of that name, I stood up.

Then I froze. Then frowned. Then waited. Was this a trick?

“Hello?” Logan finally said. “Are you still—”

“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I thought I heard you say Charlie Yates.”

“I did say Charlie Yates.”

I sat back down. “Charlie Yates?” I said, like there was room for confusion.

I could sense Logan nodding. “Yes.”

But I needed more confirmation. “Charlie Yates who wrote The Destroyers? Charlie Yates who wrote The Last Gunslinger, and Smokescreen, and Forty Miles to Hell? The screenwriters’ screenwriter, living legend, reason half the country says the catchphrase ‘Merry Christmas, cowboy’—that Charlie Yates?”

“Uh-huh,” Logan said, enjoying the moment. “That one.”

I took a sip of the ice water in my glass—

“He’s written a rom-com,” Logan said.

—and I coughed it back out.

Logan waited while I recovered.

“Charlie Yates wrote a rom-com?” Now I was suspicious. A Western? Sure. A horror flick? Absolutely. A dystopic space adventure where the robots eat all the humans? In a heartbeat. But a rom-com?

No way.

“He didn’t,” I said, answering my own query.

“He did.”

“Is it … good?” I asked, and then immediately shook my head to cancel the question.

Of course it was good.

I’d seen every movie Charlie Yates had ever written, and I’d read every one of his screenplays—produced or unproduced—that I could get my hands on, printing them off the internet and lovingly binding them with brass brads before alphabetizing them on their own dedicated shelf on my bookcase. And I didn’t just read them. I highlighted them. Annotated them. Covered them with Post-its and exclamation points. No question it was good. Charlie Yates couldn’t write a bad screenplay if you threatened to take all his awards away.

“It’s terrible,” Logan said then.

“What?” It couldn’t be.

“It’s so terrible, even calling it terrible is an insult to the word terrible.”

I took that in. “You’ve read it?” I asked.

“My eyes will never be the same, but yes—I read an entire draft.”

“You read a draft?” I asked. “How?”

How was my ex-boyfriend from high school just casually reading the private first drafts of the world’s most beloved superstar screenwriter?

Logan paused for a second and then he said, “So, I’ve been waiting for the right moment to share this with you, but … I am actually his manager.”

“What!” I stood up. Again.

“I’ve been waiting to tell you because I knew you’d freak out.”

“I’m not freaking out,” I said, but in truth I was now clucking around the dining table in a meaningless circle, headless-chicken style. I knew Logan represented some high-profile people. But not that high.

“Just from the way you’re breathing,” Logan said, “I can tell that you are.”

“How am I breathing?” I demanded.

“Like a Charlie Yates superfan who is losing her shit right now.”

Fine. He wasn’t wrong.

I took a soothing breath, and then walked to our apartment door, stepped outside, and strolled deliberately down our fourth floor’s exterior walkway. Calmly. Like a non-freaked-out person.

I tried again. “You’re telling me in seriousness that you’re Charlie Yates’s manager?”

“Yes.”

“Charlie Yates?” I asked, like he might mean another Charlie. Then, “Charlie Yates?” like he might mean another Yates.

“Yes to both.”

I was baffled. “How long has this been going on?”

“About three years.”

“Three years?!” I shrieked. Then, lower, “Did you just say ‘three years’? You’ve been working with my favorite screenwriter for three years and you never thought to mention it?”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t think to,” Logan said, trying to steer us to a calmer place with his voice. “I decided to wait until the right moment.”

I thought about all the joy of being one degree of separation from Charlie Frigging Yates—joy I’d been missing out on for three years. Then I said accusingly, “You ‘decided to wait’?”

“Yes. Because, as you already know, timing is everything.”

Well. He wasn’t wrong there.

I’d made it to the end of our walkway. I leaned over the railing and looked down at the evening lights over the parking lot, and the car lights on the freeway beyond that, and the downtown lights sparkling off in the distance. I knew somebody who knew Charlie Yates. Everything had a bright new shimmer.

“Fair enough,” I finally said.

“I’m telling you now,” Logan said, “because, like I said before, I have a job for you.”

It all came rushing back. “That’s right. You have a job for me—”

“To write a screenplay—” Logan said.

“With Charlie Yates,” I finished, my voice glowing with awe.

“But rewrite,” Logan said. “Ghostwrite. I need you to fix this thing—hard.”

“It’s a page-one rewrite?”

“Page zero,” Logan said. “He’s got a handshake deal with an exec from United Pictures that if he writes this rom-com, they’ll produce that gangster thing he wrote that’s been kicking around.”

Was it weird that a screenwriter of Charlie Yates’s renown had an unproduced screenplay lying around? Not at all. Most scripts by most screenwriters never saw the light of day, in fact. You can make a great living in Hollywood getting paid good money to write scripts that never become movies. But that’s what made Charlie Yates such a legend. Getting anything produced was a feat. But Charlie sold script after script—that became movies, that won awards, that became classics, and that then had people quoting them verbatim year after year.

“I love that gangster thing,” I said. I’d found a bootleg copy on the internet and used up a whole pad of Post-its admiring it.

And I didn’t even like gangster movies.

I didn’t like drug kingpin movies, either. Or prison massacre movies. Or killer clown movies. Or sea rescue movies where everyone gets eaten by sharks.

Unless Charlie Yates wrote them.

He was that good. I loved everything he did, even though the only genre that I myself truly personally liked was … romantic comedies.

Which was the only genre he didn’t write.

Until now, apparently.

That’s how good he was. He forced me to love him—against my entire personality.

“He loves the Mafia thing, too,” Logan said. “He spent months and months in Chicago for research and he wore a pocket watch the whole time. And he’s hell-bent on getting it made, especially now that he’s back from his”—Logan hesitated before finishing with—“hiatus. But that can’t happen until he does this rom-com. And as I mentioned—”

“It’s terrible.”

“We’re going to need a better word for terrible.”

I gave it all a second to sink in.

“That’s where you come in,” Logan said, ready to move on to details. “It’s going to need the mother of all rewrites. Uncredited, of course—”

“Of course.”

“But for good money.”

“How much money?”

“More than you’re technically entitled to, Writers Guild–wise.”

There it was. There were levels to how much you could earn, depending on how much success you’d had. And since I’d had—and I say this with great compassion for myself—almost no success, my level wasn’t high.

Didn’t matter. Who cared?

This was Charlie Holy Shit Yates.

“Send it to me,” I said. There was nothing more to discuss. Would I uncreditedly rewrite Charlie Yates’s incomprehensibly terrible screenplay? Of course I would. I’d do it for no money. Hell, I’d pay him. I’d already mentally opened a new file in Final Draft and saved it as CHARLIE F@$%ING YATES.

“There’s a catch, though,” Logan said next.

“What’s that?”

“You have to come to LA.”

Now I started pacing the walkway again. “Come to LA?” I echoed, like that was something no one ever did.

“Not forever,” Logan said. “Just for the working period of the rewrite.”

How long did a rewrite even take? I’d never done a rewrite for someone else.

Logan read my mind. “Six weeks,” he declared next. “Possibly longer. This has to be an in-person thing.”

“But—” I started, so many objections in my mind, it was hard to choose. “What about Zoom? What about FaceTime? What about Slack? Google Meet? Hell—even Skype! There are a million virtual ways to do it.”

“He’s old-school,” Logan said.

“That’s no excuse.”

“And he’s got a massive ego.”

“He deserves that ego,” I said, shifting sides. “He’s earned it.”

“The point is, he’s Charlie Yates. He gets it the way he wants it. And he’s never going to just accept virtual corrections from some unproduced writer on the internet.”

“When you put it that way, I don’t sound very impressive.”

“I know.”

“So I have to come out there and—what?”

“Woo him.”

“Woo him?”

“Obviously not in the traditional sense of woo.”

“I can’t go to LA, Logan,” I said. “I can’t go anywhere. Remember my dad?”

But Logan wasn’t deterred. “What about Sylvie?” he asked.

Dammit. He had me. “What about her?”

“Didn’t she just graduate?”

“She did, but—”

“Wasn’t that the plan all along? To get Sylvie through college and then let her take a turn?”

“That was the plan,” I said, bracing myself against how right Logan was. “But she got a very prestigious summer internship with International Medical Aid—”

“Bullshit!” Logan shouted.

“Did you just shout ‘bullshit’ at me?”

“It’s her turn,” Logan said, mad at me now. “You’ve done everything for ten years—”

“Just under ten years,” I corrected.

“—and the plan, all along, was for her to come back to Texas after college and take over.”

“Yes, but that was before—”

“Call her,” Logan demanded. “Call her right now and tell her she’s coming home. You will never get another chance like this. This is the opportunity of your lifetime.”

“I don’t have to call her. She’s on her way in from the airport right now. Remember the pancakes?”

“Perfect timing,” Logan said then. “Tell her at dinner.”

But I just leaned down and rested my forehead against the metal handrail as a garbage truck rumbled by down below. “I don’t want to.”

“Be fair to yourself, Emma,” Logan cajoled.

Why were we even talking about this? I had things to do and no time for nonsense. “I’m not crushing Sylvie’s dreams, Logan. That’s not on my to-do list today.”

“But what about you?” Logan asked. “What about your dreams?”

At that, I stood up. “My dreams,” I said, like We’re done here, “got crushed a long time ago.”