Home > Necessary People(7)

Necessary People(7)
Author: Anna Pitoniak

A girl emerged from the kitchen. A brunette, who I didn’t recognize. “Are you the roommate?” she said. “Stella mentioned you might be here.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But who are you?”

“A friend of hers,” she said. She was wearing an oversize button-down and, apparently, no pants. There was a cigarette between her fingers, with a delicate column of ash. “She said I could crash for the night.”

“You can’t smoke in here,” I said automatically, thinking of paragraph 5, subparagraph B, in my agreement with the Bradleys.

She took another drag. “Seriously?” she said, stretching out the word. Bad vocal fry.

“It’s their apartment, not mine,” I said.

“I can see that.” She stared at me appraisingly, like she was sizing up an untagged item at the flea market. I followed her into the kitchen, where she flicked her cigarette into the sink and opened the refrigerator. “Don’t you have anything to drink?” she said, scanning the shelves. “Don’t you live here?”

“How do you even know Stella?” I said.

“Isn’t Stella the best?” she said. Her purse had spilled its contents across the kitchen counter. Lipstick, eyeliner, crumpled bills, matchbooks. She lit another cigarette. There were always girls like this, blasé and affectedly cool, who buzzed around Stella like flies around rotting fruit. They made me feel prickly, territorial. Stella was mine, not theirs.

The girl said she was only spending one night. But that turned into two nights, and three. I couldn’t help texting Stella to vent. Not that I had any grounds to complain; she’d invited this girl, after all. And this was her apartment. But that night my phone rang.

“Is she still there?” Stella said, the connection clear despite the ocean between us.

“Yup,” I said. From down the hall came the smell of cigarette smoke and the tinny sound of a TV show playing on her computer.

“What the fuck?” Stella said. “Go get her. Put me on speaker.”

“Oh,” the girl said, startling when I opened the door.

“Hey,” Stella said. “I said you could stay one night. One. Why are you still here?”

The girl glanced back and forth between me and the phone in my outstretched hand. Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened and closed, swallowing her panic.

“Hel-lo?” Stella said. “Can anyone hear me?”

“We’re here,” I said. “But it seems our friend is at a loss for words.”

“You told on me?” the girl hissed.

“Violet happens to be honest,” Stella said. “She happens to be a good person. The kind of friend who warns you about shady shit like this.”

“You should really pack your things,” I said, almost laughing at the look on this girl’s face. “I’ll ask the doorman to get you a cab.”

“See how nice she is?” Stella said. “I would’ve just thrown your crap out the window.”

Stella insisted on staying on the phone until the girl had gone. “Chop-chop,” she kept saying, her voice beaming through the black screen. When the front door finally closed behind the girl, both of us burst out laughing.

“God,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Are you kidding?” Stella said. “That was fun.”

“She was the worst.”

“The worst. I mean, I barely know her. She was in Cap d’Antibes a month ago, same time as me. I owed her one.”

“Owed her for what?”

“We were on this guy’s yacht. He was a creep. He wouldn’t leave me alone. She made an excuse so that we could leave.”

“Ah,” I said. “That trick. Instant case of food poisoning?”

Stella laughed. “It’s just not the same without you, Violet.”

We talked for a long time that night. Stella was a natural storyteller, and traveling had given her plenty of material. The jealousy that had accrued over the past few days, listening to this girl talk about Stella (they were so much alike, they were always on the same wavelength, you know?), washed away. This was just the long-distance phase of our relationship—that’s what Stella said. We knew couples from college who had moved to different cities on opposite coasts, determined that nothing would change. “They can do it, why can’t we?” she said. “It’s only temporary.” I didn’t want to point out how much work it took. How rare it was that both people put equal energy into maintaining the relationship.

“Wait, so where are you? In France?” I asked.

“Paris,” she said. “Currently lingering on the balcony, avoiding the world’s dullest dinner party. Guess what I’m looking at right now.”

“The Eiffel Tower?”

She laughed. “How did you know? What about you, what are you doing?”

I looked down at my pajamas, at the sponge in my hand, which I was using to wipe down the kitchen counters. It was immensely satisfying to have the apartment to myself again, to restore order to it. “Cleaning the kitchen,” I said.

“That’s my girl,” she said.

It could have been a split screen in a movie, two women in opposite settings. Both of us had been itching to graduate, bored with school for different reasons. But even as Stella told me more about Paris, the shopping and the beautiful people and the dinner parties that began at midnight, it struck me that I didn’t want to be there. I missed her, but I was happy with this life in New York, this sense of succeeding on my own terms.

She wasn’t sure when she was coming home. She wasn’t sure if she was coming home. The European lifestyle suited her. This she said jokingly, but also not. Climbing into bed that night, I thought of Anne Bradley handing me the paperwork. An unusual arrangement. Luck can vanish as suddenly as it appears. If Stella never came back, would they keep subsidizing this apartment just for me?

 

 

“She wants a hard copy of the script in front of her,” one of the producers said. “Run it down to the studio, will you?”

“Rebecca does?” I said.

“Who else!” the producer barked. “Pronto.”

In the weeks since her return, I’d only seen Rebecca from afar, through the glass walls of the conference room, or coming and going from her corner office. When I pushed open the swinging door to Studio B, where she was sitting at the anchor desk, she looked up from her phone right away. “Who is that? Is that my script?”

It was hot under the bright stage lights. “Here you are, Ms. Carter.”

She had intense green eyes, the color of spring. “It’s Rebecca. Never Ms. Carter, got that? Ms. Carter makes me sound like a middle school principal.”

“Sorry. Rebecca.”

“You’re new, aren’t you? What’s your name?”

“Violet Trapp.”

“Violet, could you be a hero and get me a tea? The throat-coat kind they have in the green room. I keep telling them to tone it down with the air-conditioning, but they won’t listen to me. Even though my name is on the damn set—isn’t that right, Hank?”

“That’s right.” Hank, the floor director, nodded. “Buncha assholes.”

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