“Howdidyou end up a screenwriter?” I ask. “I always thought you’d be a lobbyist or a professor or something.”
She was soseriousin high school.
“I’m full of mystery,” she says, piling scrambled eggs onto her plate.
Apparently, she doesn’t intend to say more.
“Seriously,” I prod.
“Well, I majored in communications, because I wanted to be White House press secretary. You know, a normal thing eighteen-year-old girls want.” She laughs at herself a little. “But I had to take a couple of creative writing classes for my major to graduate, and I was really good at it. So I decided to do a screenwriting MFA.”
“Why screenwriting?”
She dumps a huge blob of ketchup onto her eggs.
“Because screenwriting is more lucrative than toiling away at a literary masterpiece, and I like money.”
“Strategic,” I say. “But why rom-coms?”
In high school she could not abide the slightest whiff of anything romantic. She wouldn’t even watch masterpieces likeTitanic.She liked to cuddle up on the couch with popcorn and watchFrontline.
“They were way more popular, when I started, and easier for women to break into,” she says. “And I wanted to write stuff I could sell. Plus, you can bang them out quickly because they all have the same arc and use similar tropes. It was just practical.”
“You sound somewhat dismissive of your own genre.”
And dissonant with the girl she used to be. Molly’s interests were never “practical.” She liked listening to Rufus Wainwright and debating the existence of trickle-down economics and reading slim volumes of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
“I’m not dismissive. I think rom-coms are an undervalued reflection of our culture. The conventions are a narrative vehicle reflecting the fantasies and anxieties underlying, you know, the primal biological will toward finding a mate.”
“Oh, like, asoul mate?”
She groans. “Not this shit again. I mean the impulse to reproduce one’s genetic material.”
“It’s not shit, it’s true love. And it’s what you’re selling, isn’t it? Soul mates? You must on some level find the idea attractive if you’ve devoted your entire career to it.”
“What I find attractive is exploiting the inherent human desire for connection for profit. It’s a job. I’m good at it. End of story.”
I don’t buy it.
“You’re so full of shit, Molls. God, I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”
“Excuse me?”
She looks mad.
I guess we’re not at so restored a level of closeness that I’m allowed to call her out.
Apparently, this is the part of her high school schtick she’s still hanging on to: finding love corny.
I happen to know she actually doesn’t.
I’d bet my life on it.
But for now, I’ll bet something else.
CHAPTER 9Molly
Seth looks very hot when he’s provoking me. I’m torn between wanting to kick him out of my room and wanting to grab his hand and put it under my robe.
