Five
“Helen, would you like to say anything to start us off?”
She looks up, startled by the question from Suraya. Was I supposed to have something prepared? Helen has the sudden mental picture of herself giving a rousing inspirational speech to this room full of strangers (and Grant), and almost laughs. Who do you think you are?
“Um, no, I don’t think so,” she says out loud.
Suraya smiles at her in a don’t worry about it way and turns to the room at large. “Well, you’re all here for a reason, so don’t be afraid to speak up loudly and often. We have some truly great source material to live up to”—here, she nods toward Helen—“and I’m excited we get to be the ones to introduce whole new audiences to these fantastic books. Let’s do them, and the author, who is watching us very closely, proud.”
That gets a few chuckles from the room and Helen hopes for the thousandth time that she isn’t ridiculous for being here, that she shouldn’t be somewhere in Midtown Manhattan with Pallavi and Elyse instead, sipping a martini and saying nonchalantly, I think they’re starting the writers room for my show today, isn’t that cool?
Then Suraya turns to her right and Helen feels a tingling sense of things are about to get worse.
“Grant, you want to add anything?”
Grant sits directly across from her, playing with a retractable pen in a way she finds vaguely familiar. They’re separated by a long, oval table made from solid teak.
“Yeah.” Grant clears his throat. “Be vulnerable. If I don’t see each and every one of you cry before this room is over, you’re fired.”
That gets a laugh, which she finds surprising. Does he even have that kind of authority around here? He has the ear of the showrunner, which counts for something. But then, so does Helen.
She should have said something first, when she had the chance.
Grant glances at her for a fraction of a second and she feels a creeping warmth flushing up the side of her neck. It lasts even after he redirects his attention to the rest of the room.
“No, but honestly”—he grins in that friendly, winning way he has—“I feel lucky to be making art with all of you. Which sounds lofty, but that’s what we’re doing here, so I’ll tell you my darkest secret.”
Helen’s throat seems to constrict as she stares at the side of his head.
“Which is that when I was nineteen, I had a sex dream about my mother, and my therapist told me that’s very normal.”
Helen blinks. What?
Nicole cackles, Saskia bursts into embarrassed laughter, and Helen clocks Suraya giving Grant a subtle, smiling nod of approval.
“Well, that makes me feel better about myself,” the youngest male writer—Owen—drawls. “Is it my turn? My darkest secret is . . . hm, how deep are we getting here? Like ‘I hate my brother’s wife’ deep?”
Owen launches into a story about his older brother’s wedding weekend and Helen starts mentally counting down how many people have to go before they get to her. This spontaneous bonding exercise seems to be happening only at the whim of Grant Shepard. Surely if it was actually necessary, Suraya would have started it?
Helen isn’t even sure what qualifies as a dark secret. She’s reminded of all the times she’s been a silent participant in excruciating group conversations that never seem to go well for her. She always ends up waiting too long for a natural point to interject, and when she finally speaks, it’s usually something she can instantly tell was the wrong thing to say—she’s overshared, or undershared, or asked a follow-up question that’s too probing when she only meant to be polite.
The married-couple writing team—Tom and Eve—jointly tell a story about Tom having a one-night stand with a former child actress who Eve had grown up obsessed with, and how they ran into her while on their first date, years later.
Helen chances a look at Suraya. The showrunner is nodding and laughing. Helen tries to school her features into a fun, I’m actively listening expression.
“Can we address the fact that you definitely wanted to fuck me more after you found out?” Tom asks with a raised brow.
“Sometimes I picture you guys together and it’s hot to me, I’m sorry,” Eve says.
Suraya interjects with an anecdote next, because they’ve reminded her about a time her partner once pissed her off so much, she almost walked out on their then-three-year-old daughter.
Helen feels a prickling sensation at the side of her face and knows that Grant is watching her. She tries to affect a this doesn’t bother me posture, propping up her elbow, resting her chin in her hand, and resolutely not looking at him. She thinks she hears a short ha of air from his general direction.
By the time they get back around to Helen, the room seems to be buzzing with the energy of newly discovered inside jokes, and she tries not to feel like she’s at a disadvantage, going last.
“I don’t know if I have any dark secrets,” Helen starts.
“That’s okay, we’ve spent enough time procrastinating,” Suraya says, and turns to the giant, six-foot-wide glass dry-erase board on the wall. “Let’s talk about our show.”
Helen instantly feels both relieved and slighted.
Suraya stands and scribbles courtyard, unearthing secret box at the top left corner of the dry-erase board, then adds courtyard, burying secrets + a body at the bottom right corner.
Then she turns to the room and says, “Well, what happens in the middle?”
And they start talking about whose body (in the books, it’s a teacher) and how did they die and the young female writer with cool eyeliner—Nicole—raises her hand and tells a story about her least favorite grandmother’s death and somehow they’re back on the dark secrets train and Helen thinks longingly of the bar in Midtown where she could be sipping a martini instead.
Grant reminds himself he did try to warn her, over their lunch and in his general address to the room—that polite, serious conversation had very little use in a writers room. He watches as Helen’s face flushes with distinctly East Coast embarrassment at a story he’s certain Nicole has told at least a dozen times to complete strangers before.
This is the biggest difference between his interactions in LA and his interactions with old friends in Dunollie, New Jersey. He’s spent most of his adult life in a city where erring on the side of blistering vulnerability is professionally rewarded—every working screenwriter he knows has an arsenal of three or four stories that make them sound like terrible people, like they’re confessing dark secrets, when really, they cost next to nothing to reveal.
Grant finds the moments he enjoys the most in a writers room often come after everyone has run through their personal arsenal of stories. It happens after a few days, sometimes a few weeks if the room skews older, and there’s always a bubble of quiet after the laughter from the last well-exhausted story dies down.
Finally, the good part, he always finds himself thinking.
It’s the moment when a room full of relative strangers becomes a room full of people who have speed-run through the motions of friendship—they know things about each other that their own partners and parents and friends don’t know, or at least haven’t heard told like this.
And they’ve tricked themselves into thinking it doesn’t really matter, that these are just the stories they tell as writers, to get the job done—but they’ve finally run out of stories that don’t matter, and suddenly they’re sitting in a room full of people who know actually quite a lot about them.
That’s when they’ll usually turn collectively to face the whiteboard, where they’re puzzling over some story detail that just isn’t working, and someone will say something like, “I just don’t think that’s how a person would actually behave, in that situation.”
And they’d open it up to discussion, and someone would call bullshit on someone else’s answer—we all know you fucking love this shit, Shepard—and someone else would bring up something that happened last night at dinner, and they’d tell the story haltingly, without any jokes, frowning as they examined their feelings in every beat of the interaction, while everyone else listening would try to figure out, What would I have done, how would I have felt, in that situation?
It’s not true friendship—he knows he isn’t friends with everyone he’s ever worked with—but he likes knowing things about them. It makes him feel better, hearing the stories that stick in other people’s brains, the interactions that keep them up at night, the things they obsess over and care about against their will. The things that make them feel vulnerable and human too.
He chances another look at Helen from across the table—she’s smiling nervously in a way that doesn’t reach her eyes as she listens to Nicole explain some detail about her dead grandmother’s coroner.
Grant wonders sharply what it would be like to know something about Helen Zhang.
Helen thinks she might be allergic to this room.
By noon her skin is crawling from hours of listening, listening, listening. She thinks with a degree of nostalgic pining for her first job out of college, interning at a small publishing house in the city. How she would leave the building every day to eat lunch in the park across the street—sometimes listening to music, sometimes listening to nothing at all—and always blissfully alone.
Here, the writers’ assistant takes their lunch orders, and about forty minutes later they’re all sitting around the table eating and people are still talking.
“I wanna fire our pool contractor,” Eve says, as she tosses the dressing in her salad bowl lightly. “But it’s Tom’s mom’s friend.”
“That’s the worst,” Suraya agrees. “Have you considered divorce?”
“This conversation is making me feel poor,” Owen says as an aside toward the other end of the table, and Saskia and Nicole laugh.
Helen isn’t sure how they do this—how everyone always seems to know exactly what to say next, striking some perfect alchemy of bitchy and interesting. It’s an exhausting, constant volley of conversation. And she’s bad at it.
They’re so nice and so patient and so deferential, whenever she raises her hand with a self-conscious “Um, can I just—there’s a thing we were talking about, I know we moved on, but . . .”
She feels their eyes on her like floodlights, everyone waiting for her to say something brilliant or at least relevant, and the idea that she might say something obviously stupid to these very smart and much more experienced people becomes a premonition of mind-numbing clarity. Her thoughts stutter and trip over each other on their way from her brain to her mouth, and she’s angry at her words for betraying her in this hour of need.
She feels a stab of weird humiliation at the thought that Grant is witnessing all of this from a front-row seat. He has always been so much better at this than her, convincing a room full of people that his ideas are the best way forward. In high school, they were never group project partners or anything that pitted their ideas in direct competition, nothing so big or dramatic.
Her memories of Grant Shepard in classroom contexts mostly feature her sitting at a cluster of tables with skeptical classmates, then hearing sharp peals of laughter and clapping from across the room, and looking up toward the source to find him, always at the center of it.
She has the fleeting, stupid thought that she would like to show him a screenshot of her bank account balance, like, hey, people actually pay me a lot of money for my brain now!
Near the end of lunch, she catches this brief and potentially nothing of an exchange:
Grant types something in his phone and looks up in Suraya’s direction.
Suraya checks her phone, then gives him a curt nod.
What are they talking about in a private thread without her?
Is it about her?
Helen tries to remind herself that her least favorite thing about herself is how much she cares about what other people think. And that they probably aren’t thinking about her anyway.
Helen tries to believe this, but some warped and stunted little monster of ego in her brain insists, Yes, but you’re actually very good at guessing what other people think of you. You’re usually right, that’s probably why you’re a successful writer.
The day finally comes to an end sometime around five p.m. She hears Eve murmur to Tom, “Nice to have a room with shorter hours for once,” and Helen thinks short! as she packs up her own bag.
She lingers after everyone else has filtered out, and hovers awkwardly by the door as Suraya and the writers’ assistant review their board notes.
“Is there anything else you need from me?” Helen asks, trying to sound casual about it.
Suraya smiles in a slightly indulgent way.
“How do you feel about everything?”
“Oh, um.” Helen pauses, because she never knows what kind of answer people expect to that kind of question. “Fine. Good, I think. It was a good first day, right? You would know better than me.”
Suraya nods and starts packing up as well.
“It gets easier,” she says. “As you get to know the rhythms of the room.”
“Right, that makes sense,” Helen lies.
Suraya looks up and considers her for a moment.
“If you’re anything like me—and I suspect you are,” she says, with a wagging finger, “you’ve got enough instant replay tape going on in your brain right now to last through the weekend.”
“Ha,” Helen says weakly.
“Try not to spend too much time looking backward,” Suraya advises. “I promise no one’s thinking about anything you’ve said as much as they’re thinking about themselves and how they’ll impress everyone tomorrow.”
“Right,” Helen says.
Suraya hesitates for just a fraction of a second before she adds, “You did well today. See you tomorrow.”
Helen tries very hard not to replay that fraction of a second of hesitation over and over on her ride down the elevator.
She exits the building and collides immediately and gracelessly into the back of Grant Shepard, who’s standing near the door with his phone to his ear.
“—not the best use of my time,” he finishes into the phone, before he turns and catches sight of her. “Let me call you back.”
Helen squares her shoulders—I don’t care—and moves past him.
“Hey,” he says, and they’re walking side by side in a few short paces. “Helen, wait up.”
“I have a lot of work to do at home,” she says.
“Me too,” he says, and she thinks, crap, should I actually have homework to do? “I wasn’t talking about the room, on that phone call. My agent’s trying to get me to meet on this other show that’s not even for sure happening yet, and—”
“You should take the meeting,” Helen says, as if she knows anything about this industry. “You know I wouldn’t miss you.”
Grant falters a step, then he lets out a huff of air and redoubles his pace alongside her.
“Thanks for that,” he says dryly, an underlying note of fuck you too in his tone.
She knows she’s being an asshole, but some part of her feels grossly relieved to find she still has a voice that isn’t a stuttering string of nothings.
“You know, if you gave me half a chance, I could help you,” Grant says.
“I don’t need your help,” Helen snaps.
“Coulda fooled me,” Grant says as they walk toward the parking lot.
“I was just—being observant today,” Helen says. “I don’t feel the need to establish dominance in every room I walk into—you know what, I don’t need to explain myself to you. Fuck off.”
“Fuck you too,” he snaps, and she feels a thrill of vindication—I knew you were thinking it.
Grant freezes, as if just realizing what he’s said out loud. “Fuck, I don’t mean that—dammit, Helen, I hoped we could be friends.”
Did he really? Helen doubts that.
“We are friendly,” she says. “In the room. Don’t talk to me outside of it and we can keep it that way.”
“Helen,” he starts, in a painfully soft voice.
“Please stop,” she says in a gasping rush, and hopes her eyes aren’t as shiny as they feel. “Stop—stop trying to be nice to me, stop trying to explain things to me, stop calling us friends, stop trying to help. I don’t want your help, I’ve never wanted your help, and this would all go so much better if we could please . . . just have as little interaction as possible, outside the room.”
She stares at him miserably. Some unreadable expression flickers behind his eyes.
Grant swallows, then shakes his head.
“See you tomorrow, then,” he says in a low breath that sounds almost like a laugh, and walks off.
Helen watches him go and feels some frustrated mix of pride and misery and an overwhelming need to fix this. She thinks of her earlier discomfort in the room and tells herself all she has to do is get over it.
She remembers a dictionary of English aphorisms her parents kept in the house to learn the language of their American peers; her parents’ favorite phrase in it was mind over matter. “Mind over matter,” they recited to each other, the way Catholics recited the Lord’s Prayer. “Mind over matter,” when she was fighting back tears as Dad taped up her skinned seven-year-old knees. “Mind over matter,” when they were in that first cramped apartment that didn’t have any air-conditioning because they couldn’t afford it back then. Mind over matter, the entire funeral, when she was surrounded by so much parental grief, she couldn’t find any leftover place to put her own.
Mind over matter. She’ll finish her stint in LA, gain some fabulously interesting new stories to tell at dinner parties, and then she will have fixed the problem. She will return to New York and write and write and write, and then sell what she’s written and edit it and edit it and edit it until she publishes it, and she’ll be back in the swing of things. Helen is good at winning, or at least seeming like she is.
All I have to do is get over this, she reminds herself, and knows she will.
One week down, nineteen to go.
Grant stares at the clock above the door, ticking down the seconds until Suraya finally lets them go for the weekend. He ignores the impulse to look about two degrees to the right and slightly down, where Helen is currently drumming her fingers against the table.
“I just kind of . . . fundamentally disagree with everything you’re saying,” she says. She’s using that awful, friendly voice she has whenever she’s talking to him without looking at him. “It’s a slow-burn thing. We’d be giving it up too early, moving that piece up from the finale.”
“I hear you,” he says. “But then we still need an episode-out that tees up something with Celia and James, or we’re just killing time till the last episode.”
“I hate to play this card, but they’re my characters,” Helen says stubbornly. “This is a hill I’m willing to die on.”
“You can’t die on every hill,” Grant mutters.
“Okay, I think we’ve done a lot of good work,” Suraya murmurs, and shuts her laptop. “We’ll pick this up on Monday. I agree with Helen, though: the slow burn of it all works because it’s surprising.”
“Then we need something else, literally anything else, that’ll make us care about the middle four episodes,” Grant insists.
“Grant,” Suraya says, her brows slightly lifted. “Have a good weekend.”
Grant nods tightly. That’s embarrassing. He’s usually better at reading the room. Helen shoots him a triumphant look before she sweeps out the door. I don’t want to fight with you, he wants to shout at her retreating back. The rest of the room files out, and the dull ringing in his head clears just enough for him to feel something other than shitty about this.
“Can I say something, between us?” he says, as Suraya waits for her assistant to take photos of the ink-covered dry-erase board.
“Make it quick. I’m thinking about my dinner menu,” she says.
“Helen has a problem with me,” he says, his voice even, his tone measured.
Suraya shrugs. “It’s natural for you two to clash. Her loyalty is to her books and her readers; yours is purely to the show and the room. That tension is what keeps us in the pocket of where we should be. You’re both professionals—I’m not worried.”
Grant exhales shortly. “Okay, take me out of the equation. She’s still not gelling with the room, and it’s more than just nerves. Day one was nerves, we both saw that, but she’s had no problems speaking up since. And whenever she does, there’s an eighty percent chance it’s dragging the flow of the room to a grinding halt. It’s not an issue yet, but I can just tell, if she keeps going down this road, fighting us on every point . . .”
He shakes his head. “You told me when we first met, happy writers write better shows. I am fucking miserable, and maybe that’s on me, maybe that’s me and my own baggage here, but I can tell you for a fact that I’m not the only one in need of a pretty drastic morale boost after just one week.”
Suraya purses her lips. “What are you suggesting?”
“I—don’t know,” Grant sighs. “It’s like she can’t fathom the idea of fun being productive. She’s just like this, she’s always been like this, since we were in high school. Someone has to talk to her about it and it can’t come from me.”
“That is you and your own baggage,” Suraya says, clipped. “I don’t think it’s as bad as you’re making it out to be.”
“I’m reading the future,” Grant says flatly. He watches as Suraya takes an eraser to the board, wiping it clean. A lump forms in his throat, some hopeless feeling he can’t name. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
Suraya shakes her head. “I’m glad you brought it up; it’s good that you’re paying attention to things. I will monitor the situation, Grant. If it becomes a bigger issue, I promise I will handle it. Now go home and have a good weekend.”
The feeling of self-righteous indignation carries him to the parking lot.
Then the bubble bursts. What am I doing here?
Grant knows he could just do his job to the point of technically fulfilling his contract: show up on time, make pleasant conversation at lunch, throw out a few ideas when they come to him, and throw up his hands if they get shot down, because at the end of the day, this is just a job.
He could easy-mode his way through the next nineteen weeks, and it would probably be better for the dynamics of the room.
But it wouldn’t be better for the show.
He closes his eyes, and the image of Helen Zhang’s unsmiling face appears instantly, annoyingly. She’s as cool and uncaring as always in his memory, and just a little bit brittle.
Grant exhales and opens his eyes. He feels slightly ridiculous. He’s not going to tank his entire reputation and career over one job he didn’t even want that much in the first place.
He resolves that starting Monday, he will course correct.
He will be pleasant.
He will be perfect.
Helen Zhang won’t be able to say a goddamn thing about him.