Page 54 of The Rom-Commers

“It’s all just theater,” Charlie said.

“Are you telling me,” I said, “that you don’t care that you got all these awards?”

“I do care,” he said. “I just don’t care enough to display them in a trophy case like a douchebag.”

“So you’re just going to shove them out of sight and break off their wings?”

“You seem to be taking this kind of personally—” Charlie started.

“I do! I do take it personally! Do you have any idea what I would give for even one of these awards? And you’re just treating them all like they’re garbage? Look!” I picked up an Oscar and held it out toward him. It was surprisingly heavy. “Look how scratched this is!”

“It doesn’t matter!” Charlie said.

“It doesn’t matter? It doesn’t matter that you’ve scratched up the statuette of the highest honor in your industry? These things are made of solid brass and plated in twenty-four-carat gold! I watched a whole documentary about it! You don’t even have the tiniest inkling of how lucky you are. I will spend my whole life writing and striving and obsessing over movies and I’ll never even get close to one of these, and you…” I looked back down at the drawer, and words failed me.

“You want it?” Charlie said then. “Just take it! It’s yours, okay? Now we’re even!”

“But we’renoteven. Because I didn’t really win it!”

“Nobody really wins anything!”

“Tell that to your thousand-dollar coffee maker!”

Charlie frowned, like he’d never made that connection.

Which just made me madder.

How dare he take his life for granted? How dare he stand here in a mansion full of awards and act like nothing mattered! “You want me to take it?” I said. “I’ll take it! And I’ll spray-paint it bubblegum pink and write my name on it in red Sharpie with little hearts! And then I’ll tell everybody I won an Academy Award for a rom-com so rom-commy it was calledThe Rom-Commers!”

I wanted so badly to finish with “I quit!” right then—to charge out, Oscar and all, and never come back.

But I guess I wanted a chance to write with Charlie more. Because, instead, I just dropped that Oscar back in with the others. And then I walked myself out Charlie’s back door without saying another word.

CHARLIE GAVE MEa minute—several, actually—to cool off. And then he quietly came outside, too, and stood beside me as I stared at his pool.

Finally, I said, “You’ve got a pool with a high diving board?” My tone was calmer now but still had insult-to-injury undertones.

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “It came with the house.”

“Ahigh divecame with the house? Do they even make those anymore?”

“It’s vintage,” Charlie said. “This house used to belong to Esther Williams.”

I turned to face him. “America’s mermaid, Esther Williams?”

Charlie looked surprised that I knew who she was. “Yes. She lived here. In the fifties. And she put in that pool. You know who she is?”

“You could say that. I’ve seen every single one of her movies.”

“For your mermaid rom-com?”

Ugh. Now I remembered: He’d read it. He’d read itand called it aerosol cheese. He didn’t deserve to live in Esther Williams’s house.

But stepping outside was restorative. It was a warm day—and sunny.

Maybe we needed a change of activity.

“We should go for a swim,” I said next.

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