Everything Leads to You

She cracks the first egg into a glass bowl in one quick motion.

“So anyway, I researched all of these bakeries and I thought of a way I could prove myself considering that I was a teenager with no formal experience. I chose seven bakeries and made seven full-size German chocolate cakes from scratch. I drove out here and delivered them all, and one by one, the people who worked there looked at me like I was crazy.”

“Why?” I ask. “That sounds like a great thing to do to impress people.”

She shrugs. “I thought so, but it didn’t help that most of the places I went didn’t have traditional cakes. They were all very gourmet. Like with bourbon and sea salt, or classic cakes with a spin, like vegan Red Velvet made from beets. Lots of olive oil cakes, which I had never even heard of, but that now I love. Anyway, only one baker at one bakery ate a slice of my cake in front of me. It was the La Cienega Bakery and it was the owner who was there working, and when she tasted it she told me it was delicious but that they weren’t hiring. I still held out hope that someone would quit and she’d have an opening. That’s who I thought you guys might be when Jonah said a woman had called me. I thought it would be a perfect birthday present to be offered a job.”

“Instead you got us.”

She smiles. “When I pictured having friends here, I saw us crammed into a tiny apartment. I imagined waitresses taking community college classes or aspiring chefs working as line cooks. I thought we’d probably live in a sketchy neighborhood and pool our money to make stir-fry for dinner.”

“Are you disappointed?”

“No. I mean, don’t get me wrong; that kind of life sounded incredible. But,” she says, looking up at me, “what could be better than this?”

~

Forty minutes later, the cake is in the oven. I’m laying the portraits we bought out on the floor to determine how they should hang, and Ava is reading her own copy of the script, pen in hand.

Charlotte lets herself in.

“Thank you, Ava. Whatever that is, it smells amazing and I am starving,” she says, dropping her computer bag onto the couch.

“Why not ‘Thank you, Emi’?” I ask.

“Because all you know how to cook is pasta and scrambled eggs.”

“And toast.”

“Yeah, but you usually burn it.”

“Not true,” I say. “It’s a matter of preference. I happen to like my toast crisp.”

“Still,” she says. “There’s no way that amazing smell is thanks to you.”

“She did find me a cake pan,” Ava says, laughing.

She’s clearly amused but I’m not because I don’t want her to think I’m some loser who can’t toast bread. I want her to think that I’m that fun kind of girl who will bake cookies on a Tuesday night, or make french onion soup on Bastille Day.

“Don’t be mad,” Charlotte says. “You have to leave some talents for the rest of us.”

She smiles at me and I can’t help but smile back because it’s a pretty nice thing to say.

“Fine.” I shrug. I turn to Ava. “Secret’s out: I can’t cook.”

“I can’t decorate,” she says.

“That doesn’t bother me,” I say, and it comes out flirtatious, and I want to keep going, so I say, “I’m terrible at math.”

“I’m a bad speller.”

“I don’t even know my multiplication tables.”

“I can’t do a real push-up.”

“I wanted to learn Spanish but I can’t roll my r’s.”

“Wow,” Charlotte says. “This is interesting,” which is a cue to stop but I could keep going forever, listing all my flaws in order from the most innocuous to the least. I am afraid of spiders . . . I fall in love too easily . . . I have fierce spells of self-doubt. Because in the conversation beneath this one, what we’re really saying is I am an imperfect person. Here are my failures. Do you want me anyway?

“I want to hear all about everything,” Charlotte says to Ava.

“She’s SAG eligible,” I say.

“I know. I was there when they signed the paperwork. Rebecca and I are redoing the budget for the third time. What did you think of Benjamin?”

“Oh, he was there?” I ask, surprised that Ava didn’t mention him right away.

She nods.

“He was . . . nice,” she says.

Charlotte and I laugh.

“You don’t have to like him just because he’s famous,” I say. “Or because he’s your costar.”

“It’s not that I don’t like him. Like I said, he seems nice. It’s just that in movies he’s so sexy. I don’t find many guys that attractive, but even I understand the appeal. Like his role in Call Me Yesterday? When he’s all brooding and misunderstood? But today he was just kind of . . .”

“Oh, we totally understand,” Charlotte says.

“It’s the collapse of the fantasy,” I add.

Ava cocks her head.

“It applies to almost anything. You know that scene in Call Me Yesterday that takes place in the back room of the school?”

“Yeah?”

“You know how it’s super-dark and claustrophobic?”