Page 1 of The Wedding Season
Chapter 1
*Erin*
“Ican’t believethey invited Scott Braddock to theirwedding.”
“Why wouldn’t they? They invitedyou.”
“Yeah, but I’m awesome. Laurie and I are actuallyfriends.”
“Well, he’s probably friends with his agent too. He seems like a friendlyguy.”
I snort. Very lady-like.
My roommate and I are doing our make-up in the back of a Lyft car, on the way to my agent’s wedding. She’s marrying another agent. That agent represents Scott Braddock. Since moving to L.A., my whole life has been about becoming a wildly successful screenwriter and successfully avoiding my nemesis Scott Braddock. I have predominantly failed at both of theseambitions.
In the past four years, I have completed six screenplays, sold one of them, accidentally run into Scott Braddock a total of twenty-two times, and hid from him once (behind a tree when I was hiking in Griffith Park and saw him and his best friend coming down the hill towards me). Knowing that I will be seeing him this afternoon, at an event where I will be surrounded by people that I want to impress, is making my brain spin out of control and my stomach dosomersaults.
Before Laurie had told me that Braddock would be at her wedding, I had been anticipating the event with equal parts dread and optimism. I was dreading it because I had been in Writing Mode for a month (a glorious mode wherein I stay home most of the time, in pajamas, to write on my laptop in front of the TV with my favorite rom coms on repeat and the kind of delirious coffee buzz that has me convinced that every page I’m writing is the best page of writing that anyone has ever written), and when I’m in Writing Mode the thought of transitioning to Social Mode is akin to the shock of being yanked from a womb, into a brightly-lit world of unpolished dialogue and interactions with humans who can’t be controlled in the way that my characterscan.
I had been optimistic about it because I knew it would be a good opportunity for me to get my face out in front of a lot of people who could potentially hire me or buy my scripts or pass my scripts along to their actor or director clients. But now I’m just dreading it, because if there’s one person whose dialogue irks me beyond all comprehension and whose interactions seem the most out of my control—it’s Scott Braddock’s. My anger and frustration towards him has become this separate living thing that I’ve fed and kept alive, like the world’s shittiest virtualpet.
“He always seems so happy to see you, every time we run intohim.”
“He does not—he always says something to piss meoff.”
“Just because you get pissed off that doesn’t mean he wastryingto piss you off. I’ve never understood why you don’t like him. He’s so cute. He looks like an actor playing a screenwriter on a CWshow.”
“Ugh. Please. He looks like a screenwriter who’s trying to look like an actor who’s playing a screenwriter on a CW show. See the difference? Also I would not watch thatshow.”
“You would hate-watch that show and secretly write a script for it where his character’s found dead floating in apool.”
She’sright.
Maya Owens is my plus-one and my best friend and I honestly don’t know what I’d do without her. I’ve known her since I moved to L.A. four years ago, when we both worked at the same restaurant on Beverly Boulevard. She still works as a hostess there, when she isn’t busy going to classes at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (where she’s studying to be a costume designer), or being a model (to pay for her classes at FIDM). She is half Bermudian, a quarter Chinese, a quarter Dutch and a thousand percent hot. She has green almond-shaped eyes, toffee-colored skin and super curly caramel-colored hair. Men basically jizz in their pants when they see her and I have literally witnessed a guy wipe drool off his chin while staring at her. So yeah, she keeps this cute little blonde blue-eyed girl’s ego incheck.
“He has good taste in clothes and he looks good in jeans and I have never seen him be anything but nice to you. So why do you hate him somuch?”
“Multiple reasons.” I hold up my mascara wand for emphasis. “One—I’ve been competitive with him since Emerson, because we were both the star screenwriting students in our year—he wrote horror and thrillers and I wrote romantic comedies and young adult scripts. And then in our last year he started writing romantic comedies and young adultscripts!”
Maya shrugs and twists her lips to one side. “How darehe?”
“That wasmything! And then he and I were the only two from our class moving out to L.A. after we graduated, so whenever I have a meeting with producers and executives and I’d say I went to Emerson they’d be like: ‘Oh do you know Scott Braddock? I love that guy! I should email him’ so basically I just remind people who should be hiring me to get in touch with him instead, and we’ve both been competing for the same studio assignments for years, meanwhile he also has writing samples for horror and thriller scripts, so why does he have to do my thing? Pick a lane and stay init!”
“Is that it? That’s why you have all this pent up anger and frustration about him? Literally none of that qualifies as hate-worthy asshole-ishness and you knowit.”
“AAAAAND” I take a deep breath and pause for dramatic effect before proceeding. “He had sex with my dormmate in our room one night after a party and then never talked to her again, and she wentnuts.”
“Who—Brianna?”
“Yep.”
“Yeah but wasn’t she nutsalready?”
“That’s not the point! Whose side are you onanyway?”
“I am on the side of whatever will get you laid, mylove.”
“This has nothing to do with me getting laid!” I say, a lot louder than I meant to. The Lyft driver glances at me in the rearview mirror, fearful of making eye contact, lest I report him for inappropriate sexualadvances.
