Page 1 of Sizzle Reel

chapter one

As I make my hour-long commute to work, I convince myself that the reason it was mildly difficult to come out to my therapist is because she looks like Rachel Brosnahan. Which, yeah, doesn’t make much sense without context, and who’s to say my brain’s working at seven in the fucking morning as I inch along the slog of Vermont Avenue, longing for the respite of the equally-as-red stretch on Wilshire Boulevard? In fact, I can confirm it is not. I’m not even really listening to the Bechdel Cast podcast I clicked on an hour ago.

Facts: Beverly Hills is seven miles from my apartment. My therapist looks exactly like Rachel Brosnahan. I’ve been officially identifying as bisexual for four days.

Four days, and I’m already a bisexual disaster. Or, rather, I became a bisexual disaster the moment I came out to Julia. Imagine for a moment the bright lighting of a therapist’s office a block from the beach, with sun spilling in from the east because some clown didn’t put the windows in the office facing the beach. We’re doing a P.O.V. shot; Julia’s perfectly centered horizontally but shifted up a little vertically to suggest her slight authority over me, a slight authority we don’t talk about.

I’m bisexual, I say. Camera tight on me, Julia off camera.

That’s great! she replies. When did you figure it out?

I reply with: While watching The Marvelous Mrs.Maisel.

We quick cut to Julia’s face and—

Even running the story through my head, my cheeks still go hot with the memory. I knock my air-conditioning up a notch. Everything’s fine. Coming out has been fine. The Julia–Rachel Brosnahan story is the kind of shit my best friends, Romy and Wyatt, will lap up like, well, like stressed-out Hollywood assistants lap up hard liquor after work. And yes, I can tell them this specific story because they’re the next people I’m going to come out to.

Just as I reach perfect homeostasis from the air-conditioning against the sizzling heat of Los Angeles in June, I’m tapping my employee card against the reader in the parking garage and locking away my freedom and sanity, along with an emergency change of clothing. I take my daily last longing look at my parked car, wishing I could crawl back to bed. But alas, I’m twenty-four, nearly two years out of college, and a Working Professional. A true old Gen Z with a let death take me aesthetic.

Slater Management is what Hollywood calls “boutique,” which really just means we don’t have enough clients to take up a whole building. We take up three levels: lobby/café/copy room, literary managers, talent managers. We’re successful enough to have perks like a café but small enough that I know the name of everyone I pass as I walk through the floors.

I drop into my chair at eight fifty a.m., ten minutes before my boss, Alice, will be in. Or expects to be in. She’s never on time. So, at the very least, I’m given a few minutes to reassess the scene. Slater has provided us with quickly declining Macs, headsets, and ancient office phones that don’t even have caller I.D.—the Let’s Push My Blood Pressure Up to 181/121 Trio. I start my deep breathing and do my standard morning routine: open up the digital Rolodex, click open Alice’s call log, open email, headset on. Alice has a client coming in today. His name’s John, and he’s a director of midbudget films that people know of without knowing his actual name.

“Jesus, Luna, you gotta stop doing coke every Sunday,” Wyatt Rosenthal, one of the two people I’m going to come out to next, says as he plops into his seat beside me.

While the six talent managers have their own offices separated from us by wall-to-wall glass, the assistants are all crunched on to one communal pod desk. Great for socializing, bad if you want to cry without five other people (and a straggling manager or two) having to force themselves to look away from you.

“Are you implying I look like shit?” I reply, softening the jab with my best attempt at a smile.

“Just tired.”

I resist the urge to look at myself in my phone camera. I keep makeup minimal for work because like hell can I properly put on liquid eyeliner at six a.m. But apparently it’s not covering up the bags under my eyes.

I give Wyatt a once-over. He’s got a Sigma Alpha Mu, Jewish pretty-boy look. Wavy honey-brown hair, full eyebrows, ears that stick out just enough to be called cute, orthodontics-corrected teeth. The type of boy my Jewish parents are in loooove with. “I like to think I’d look worse if I were doing all that cocaine.”

Wyatt chuckles. “I mean, around here, I’m sure there’s someone who does.”

Our brief conversation jolts to an end with the shrill ring of Wyatt’s phone. He picks it up in a perfect swooping motion, like how basketball players are taught to make free throws. “Steven Wells’s office.”

Everyone in the pod has answered each other’s phones at least once because of everything from sudden family emergencies to secret job interviews to having to pee. So it was inevitable that I’d have covered Wyatt’s desk at least once. And Wyatt’s boss…is fine, I guess. He makes Wyatt get him exactly eight chicken sausages from the café every morning and once called Wyatt at three a.m. saying he was lost in the Charles de Gaulle Airport and needed Wyatt to navigate him to his gate.

“Can we return?” Wyatt asks. Once the phone’s hung up, he turns right back to me.

“How was your weekend?” I ask. My eyelids are already growing heavy, and Alice isn’t even here yet. I’m gonna need coffee stat. To think I didn’t even drink tea before this job.

Wyatt shrugs, readjusting a rolled-up sleeve on his pink button-down, the loudest piece of clothing he owns. “Eh, pretty boring. Went on another Hinge date.”

It shouldn’t—god, it shouldn’t—but “Hinge” sends a snap of panic through my stomach. As it has in the six months since Wyatt and I broke up after dating for a whopping three weeks. My little brother, Noam, has joked that my parents mourned my and Wyatt’s relationship more than I ever did, but the feeling in my gut isn’t encouraging.

“How’d it go?” I ask, not a single negative emotion in my voice.

I’m the one who broke up with him. We agreed to be friends in order to keep our trio together. No drama has ensued since.

Wyatt shrugs. “I don’t think I’ll see her again. There’s just never anything interesting about these random girls.”

I’ve been mildly annoyed by Wyatt’s casualness in regard to his dating life before, and yes, in my four days as a woman [who] loves women (w.l.w.) I’ve become more offended by it. But, again, he’s my friend. He’s just ignorant.

“Maybe if you went on more than two dates with these girls, you’d give them time to open up.”

---