Actors.
“Be careful around this one,” Drew says to Brody as they appear in front of me. “She once spilled an entire cup of coffee on me.”
Brody raises his eyebrows, and I can feel my cheeks redden. I mean, yes, technically this is a statement of fact, but I know he’s making fun of me. “Sorry about that,” I mumble.
“Looking for someone to throw that one at?” Drew asks, pointing to the cup in my hand. “Because I’ll move out of the way. I don’t really want to take another coat to the dry cleaners.”
Brody takes a bite of the candy bar he’s holding and keeps silent. Even though his character is Drew’s fast-talking, goofy best friend, in real life he’s apparently more taciturn.
“I can pay for your dry cleaning,” I say, because really, it’s the least I can do, but Drew just chuckles.
“I’m not going to make you pay for my dry cleaning.” And then he leans in—surprisingly close—and says, “See you around, Coffee Girl.”
Brody lifts his candy bar to me like a toast. “Coffee Girl.”
And then they walk away, and I’m left thinking about what I should have said back. Coffee Girl? Okay, so Tommy’s troubling caffeine dependence does mean that I spend a large part of my job getting him coffee, but seriously? That’s not my job title, and it’s a little—or a lot—condescending to reduce me to Coffee Girl. I’m an assistant. I’m a writer. I have a name.
“Thanks, Annie,” Tommy says from behind me, and I turn to hand him his coffee.
“Yes,” I say forcefully. “Annie. That’s my name.”
“Sure is!” Tommy says cheerfully, looking at the clipboard he’s holding.
I let out a frustrated sigh and look across the street. Drew’s standing there, talking to Tarah and Brody, his annoying profile directly in my line of vision. Try as I might to look away, my eyes snag on him. I mean, I get it—I get why he’s famous. He’s cute, yes, but there’s more to it than that—there’s something about him, some sort of charm that he radiates, some ineffable quality that the rest of us mere mortals don’t have. Although if Chloe were here, I’m sure she’d remind me that he’s very effable.
But even Chloe’s imagined double entendre isn’t enough to make me not mad at him right now. White-hot indignation floods my system as I think about what he just said. Coffee Girl. Ugh. There’s no way this guy can give the romantic comedy genre the respect it deserves.
Chapter Seven
I manage to more or less avoid Drew on set the next day, since he’s actually focused on his job instead of putting me in my place. Whenever I’m not on set, though, I have to write articles, because internet content doesn’t make itself. Tommy has some phone call with an executive scheduled for Thursday evening, so we wrap up in the afternoon, and I’m free to spend the rest of the day in bed, writing.
Well, writing and researching Drew.
It’s not that I feel good about typing his name into the search bar on my laptop. In fact, I feel pretty creepy about it, like Meg Ryan does at the beginning of You’ve Got Mail when she’s trying to secretly e-mail Tom Hanks without arousing Greg Kinnear’s suspicions.
But I don’t have a bland, clearly-not-right-for-me boyfriend to observe my actions. I only have my own secret shame as I ignore the article I’m supposed to be writing on at-home hemorrhoid relief.
It’s just that the last time Chloe was trying to convince me that I should be actively pursuing Drew because he’s my Tom Hanks, she was trying to describe his specific brand of hotness. She claimed that he was sexy in a John Krasinski way, then I said that John Krasinski is more cute than sexy, and then she was like, “Oh, so you admit you find Drew sexy, which, FYI, means you totally want to have sex with him,” and then stared at me like she was a detective on Law & Order and she’d cornered me into a confession, which was very annoying.
So here I am googling Drew, trying to convince myself . . . what, exactly? This is like when I look up the Facebook profile of some girl I hated in college—like I’m hoping to find something that confirms my feelings and makes me say, “Yep, still hate her, I was right all along.” I already know plenty of annoying things about Drew, and from the safety of my blanket cocoon, I intend to find out about any scandals or embarrassments.
At first, I don’t come across anything juicy; just his IMDb page and a Wikipedia article that tells me where he went to high school and that he was the football team’s mascot.
On the second page of results, I see a post on a blog called Hollywood Gossip. In glaring capital letters, the headline screams, “HOLLYWOOD HUNK DREW DANFORTH VISITS DYING GRANDFATHER,” right above a picture of Drew next to an ailing elderly man. A fake smile is pasted on Drew’s face, but it can’t hide the exhaustion and anguish he’s obviously feeling. It’s so raw that I’m uncomfortable looking at it, and I wonder how the hell this picture even ended up on this terrible website.
I click away and onto an article about Drew’s most famous relationship: the years-long one between him and Gillian Roberts, his costar on Mike’s Restaurant. They slowly fell in love on the show, but apparently in real life they got together a lot more quickly. Gillian played this supposedly mousy waitress on the show, someone who didn’t wear a lot of makeup and had messy hair and never really dressed up (so . . . someone a lot of us, myself included, related to). But in real life? I scroll through pictures of her on the red carpet, her hair sculpted into waves and some designer dress hugging her perfectly toned body. She’s beautiful. I remind myself that she has trainers and nutritionists and professional hair and makeup artists, but I can’t help comparing myself and my hair (abysmal) and wardrobe (leggings-based) to the glamour on my screen.
I click away from that article, too, and keep reading results. Aside from the time he was photographed making out with a Victoria’s Secret model at a party, most of the articles have headlines that refer to Drew as a “Hollywood prankster” or “funnyman” and are about all the weird things I already know he did.
Does this guy take anything seriously? Or does he think his entire life is a joke, when most people would literally chop off a body part to have the career and lifestyle he has? Coffee Girl, I think.
Annoyed, I slam my laptop shut. I need to be reading about hemorrhoids, not movie stars, so I decide to go to Nick’s, where at least I’ll be too embarrassed to openly research Drew Danforth.
I step into the coffee shop and wave to Chloe and Nick behind the counter, then grab the one open table by the window—Thursday is board game–night, and Monopoly aficionados have every other table pushed together. Nick loves it because they have to order seriously massive amounts of coffee to stay awake for such a boring game. I settle down and open up my Word doc, ready to write the guide to at-home hemorrhoid relief that will take the internet by storm. I type a few words and take in the comforting sounds of the coffee shop: Chloe berating Nick for putting on his Elliott Smith playlist (“It’s like a real bummer of a Wes Anderson movie scene in here, and that doesn’t make anyone buy lattes!”), the comforting hiss of the espresso machine, the chuckles of the Monopoly players. As much as I sometimes wish my life would change, or that something would happen, I have to admit that I do love these comforting sounds. I inhale the warm, rich coffee scent and think that if I could wrap up in this evening like a blanket, I would.