Page 24 of A Very Snowed In New Year
“Obviously.” I shrug.
“Hold on, hold on,” Lainey says, holding her hands up. “I am negotiating on behalf of my client, and we have not agreed on the terms.”
Shay stifles a laugh, because Lainey is mostly studying digital media and her negotiating experience primarily involves deciding where to eat and getting out of doing chores. “Okay. I will attach myself to Piper’s script as the lead and as a producer?—”
“Piper shall also have a producer credit.”
“Sure. I mean. You do realize my agent and lawyer are the ones who are actually going to work all of this out for the script, right? We’d have to do a proper option agreement. I can pay Piper twenty-five dollars an hour as an assistant.”
Lainey stifles a laugh. “Uh, no. You will pay the Piper a weekly salary of one thousand five hundred dollars.”
“A thousand five hundred a week?!” I blurt out. Inconceivable.
“You’ll be using your writing skills,” Lainey says to me, but it’s her sister she’s really explaining this to. “And you have mad flexting skills. She’s lucky to get you for fifteen hundred a week. And by the way,” she says to Shay, “any demands you make on my client for PA work must be light and reasonable. No making her drive to Ralphs to buy toilet paper at three a.m.”
“Please. My house cleaner stocks the toilet paper. I can pay you a thousand a week, Piper. All-inclusive, no benefits, no per diem—take it or leave it.”
I have to clear my throat. “One thousand dollars a week?!”
“Take it or leave it.”
“She’ll take it for now, but if she chooses to work for you full-time once she graduates, then we will renegotiate,” Lainey says, holding a warning finger up to her sister. “And you better be nice to her.”
“Don’t listen to her, Piper,” Shay says. “I’mthe nice one.”
Wow, she really seems to believe that. “Oh.”
“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.” Shay hands me her cell phone. “First of all, give me your number.”
I enter my contact information into her phone and give it back to her.
Holden Holden Holden.
I’m doing this for Holden.
I am going to deceive Holden so he doesn’t have to text with someone who is totally unworthy of him.
“Oh, right,” she says, looking at my phone number. “You’re from New York. Are you going home for the holidays?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, well, I won’t need you to do anything for me here until the new year anyway probably. But we will touch base throughout the day. And I’m going to tell Holden I’m sending him an invitation to chat on Backroom. Do you have this app?” She holds up her phone and points to a yellow app with a text bubble logo. “It’s a private texting app. Download it on your phone, your iPad, your laptop, wherever. You’ll sign in with a new account I just created.” She pulls a cheap-looking cell phone out from her handbag to show me. “I got a burner phone. The Backroom account is linked to this phone number, but as long as you sign into the Backroom app with my account, you can text him as me from anywhere. Obviously don’t talk about yourself. Obviously please don’t text anyone else as me. And don’t send him any pictures of yourself telling him it’s me. Got it?”
“Yeah. Of course. Wow. Have you done this before? Had someone else text people for you?”
She rolls her eyes. “No. But I do have a few different Backroom accounts linked to different phone numbers. It’s good to compartmentalize. Anyway, I’m gonna text Holden right now and tell him we’re taking this to another app for privacy reasons. He’ll get it. Famous people do this all the time.” Her thumbs jab at her phone screen. “It’s been, like, five hours since he last texted me and I didn’t reply, so he’ll probably respond as soon as he gets this… Yup. Okay, it’s on. Sending him an invite. Did you download the Backroom app yet?”
“Me? No.”
“Okay, well, I have to get to Pilates.”
Is this really how quickly things move for some people? When do they make time to have conversations with themselves in their heads? When do they reimagine real-life people and events in the context of fictional worlds and muse to themselves about how remarkable people’s butts are?
Lainey takes my phone from me and downloads the app within a matter of seconds. She gives the phone to her sister. “Here. Sign in.”
She taps a few things into my phone, hands it back to me, and that’s it. “Okay, my handle is ShayAnything dot eighty-three.”
That’s clever, dammit.
