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

assortment of leather jackets rivaled only by his collection of ex-girlfriends. By the end of my first week as an assistant, I’d learned that women who came to read for Diner Waitress One or Busty Woman on Subway were also unwittingly auditioning for the part of Girl Who Will Sleep with Rob This Weekend. I also learned thatRob was not very good at closure. He’d love them and leave them, usually so abruptly that the woman didn’t realize she’d been left. At least once a month, one of Rob’s ladies would call the show’s offices demanding, in tones that ranged from screechy to weepy, to speak with him. “Who?” Rob would ask when I’d relay the message. He’d stroke his chin thoughtfully, making a show of trying to remember Jane or Joelle or Jessica. “Can you tell her I’m in a meeting?” he’d ask in a winsome tone that stopped working on me after the first dozen times he’d used it. I decided that cleaning up a staff writer’s romantic messes was not part of my job. “I’m transferring you right now,” I’d say, and give Rob a hard look. He’d drag his feet as he made his way to his office, eyes on the carpet, and shut the door before picking up his extension. Sweetheart! How are you doing? Yeah, I meant to call, it’s just been crazy-busy over here . . . Hey, can you send me your new head shots? Because I really think you’ve got something special.
    Sitting at my desk, where the hole-puncher stood at right angles to my computer screen, where there were extra umbrellas and Advil and cell phone chargers and a binder full of takeout menus stowed in my deep bottom drawer, I would think, smugly, that I’d never fall for someone like Rob, with his smooth talk and his good looks and his obvious Sure we’ll cast you lies. I wasn’t that shallow, I told myself, and I wasn’t that dumb. But Rob snuck up on me, not with his looks or his charm but with the seductive notion that we were both Hollywood outsiders, that the two of us had our faces pressed up against the glass as we stood in the rain and looked in at a party to which we hadn’t been invited, interlopers in a world that didn’t really want us there.
    Rob had grown up in Los Angeles, but his parents weren’t industry people. His father owned a car wash, his mother did hair in Beverly Hills. Rob went to not-great public schools and then got an athletic scholarship to USC. Like me, like almostevery writer I knew, he’d started his career as an assistant . . . but because of his talent, combined with his visible indifference to the opinions of others (which, of course, made everyone work harder to earn his approval), he moved up fast. By the time he was twenty-eight, he was a co-executive producer of The Girls’ Room. He had a house on Topanga Canyon with three bedrooms and a pool. He drove a black Audi with a series of numbers and letters after its name that meant something to people who knew about cars, and he sent his parents money every month, which I knew because I’d heard him mention it on the phone. By all visible signs, Rob had made it . . . but when we were together, he’d let me know he wasn’t one of them, a child of privilege. He’d roll his eyes at one writer’s mention of his prep school or another’s stories about her parents, both psychiatrists on New York’s Upper West Side. He made me believe that it was us against the world, that we were two outsiders plotting our takeover of an industry determined to keep us down.
    “So what do you think?” he would ask the room as we worked on a scene where the girls of The Girls’ Room were dealing with a romantic crisis, the way they did most weeks. Technically, he was asking the whole room, but his eyes would go to me first, as if he knew that I was the one who could be counted on to come up with something that would work. He’d rock back in his chair, long legs extended, taking up space while we pitched ideas. Maybe Cara could plan a surprise party for Lily? Maybe there could