The Next Best Thing by Jennifer Weiner Read Free Book Online Page A

and concealer on my scars. I would wear my Filene’s clothes, my skirt and jacket and heels and, on my head, a fedora the color of coffee with cream, accented with an ivory ribbon around the band, that Grandma had found at a boutique on Melrose and bought me asa good-luck gift. She’d shown me how to wear it, tilted to cast a shadow over my disfigured cheek, angled just so. “There,” she’d say, giving the brim a final tug before sending me out the door.
    I applied to every show, network, and production company that might have use for a hardworking English major who loved to tell funny stories and did not mind fetching coffee or taking her boss’s car to be detailed, or even doing the detailing itself, if it came to that. I’d provide my own toothbrush and Q-tips and Armor All for the wheels. I wasn’t proud. Day after day, I’d present myself to receptionists and watch their eyes widen when they took in my face. I would find a seat in a room invariably filled with young men and women dressed in their best, although I quickly realized that in Hollywood what constituted one’s “best” was jeans with no visible rips or stains and T-shirts without anything too obscene written on the front. I retired my lined navy-blue jacket and skirt and invested in a bright fuchsia cardigan, cropped khakis, and metallic-gold ballet flats. “Polished and pretty,” Grandma decreed, nodding her approval.
    I started my job search in January, acutely aware that I was looking for employment in a land where beauty was the norm and that, here more than anywhere else, my face might work against me. Sitting in the waiting rooms, listening to the rustle of résumés, the weight of someone else’s body shifting in a seat, I’d sneak looks at my competition’s faces and wonder, with a sinking heart, whether everyone out here was beautiful, whether they’d all started out wanting to be actors and decided to be writers only after that hadn’t worked out. Who’d want to have to look at someone like me every day when they could hire an assistant who was bright and diligent and qualified and also easy on the eyes?
    It took me four months to get hired as the assistant to the writer’s assistant on a show called The Girls’ Room. In spite of its name, the show, an hourlong soapy drama-with-jokes about fourgirls who attended a posh New England boarding school, was created, run, and written almost entirely by men, which nobody seemed to find problematic. “I’ll do anything,” I’d told Steve Deylin, the showrunner, when he interviewed me. Steve, I knew from the Internet, had started as a writer-producer and moved up steadily until, when the man who created The Girls’ Room moved on, he was ready to be in charge of the whole thing—the other writers, the directors, the cast, and the crew. “Whatever you need, and I won’t complain. I just want to learn.”
    I showed up early, stayed until the last writer had gone home, paid attention, and never remarked about how, as a graduate from a well-regarded East Coast college, I was surely qualified to do more than fetch sandwiches, schedule haircuts, book Steve’s NetJets, and cover for him on the one afternoon when he mistook his NyQuil for DayQuil. The only favor I asked for was to be allowed to sit in the writers’ room whenever I could, listening and taking notes and figuring out how a television show came together.
    I worked on The Girls’ Room for three years. I got raises and promotions, and eventually I got to write my own episode. By union rules, sitcoms had to farm out a certain number of episodes each season to freelancers, and after I bombarded my bosses with my spec scripts and pitched jokes whenever they’d let me, they agreed to give me a shot, as long as one of the staff writers signed on to supervise.
    The writer who took the assignment was Rob Curtis. Rob was a few years older than I was. He had dark hair laced with gray, ironic oversize horn-rimmed glasses, and an