My sofa is gone.
I spin away from her and out of the building until I’m in the bright sunshine of the lot with Charlotte behind me saying, “Emi, let’s just talk about this for a second. Let’s just take a moment to calm down.”
But all I can say is “Clyde fucking Jones,” because it’s his sofa in the place of my perfect one.
I storm through groups of smiling people and stern people and people talking on cell phones and carrying Starbucks cups and into Ginger’s building and past her secretary and into her office. She’s on the phone and holds up a finger for me to wait. So I stand there, in her perfectly decorated room, adorned with posters from all the famous movies she’s worked on, until she hangs up and says, “This must be about the music room.”
“What happened to my sofa? Did you see it? Wasn’t it perfect?”
She says, “It was a nice sofa. But we got so many amazing things that day, together, remember? You and me and Charlotte.”
“Of course I remember that day,” I say. “What does it have to do with my music room?”
She sighs as if she’s just so busy and I am so unreasonable.
“Emi, first, it isn’t your music room. You’ve done a really lovely job, but you are an intern and I am the production designer.”
“Yes,” I say. “I’m aware of our respective positions.”
“Okay,” Charlotte says, sweeping into the office, having apparently been hovering right outside the door. “I think it would be a good idea for Emi and me to take the afternoon off if that would be all right with you, Ginger. She’s been working really hard and didn’t get much sleep last night and, you know, things with Morgan are still a little rocky, so—”
“Fine,” Ginger says. “Go. Emi, tomorrow you’ll see that the couch complements your efforts beautifully.” But she says it coldly, with more edge than I’ve ever heard in her voice, and I start to worry about everything, because she’ll be my boss on The Agency, too, and I know that I’m just an intern. I’m easily replaceable. Maybe there are hundreds of geniuses of teenage decor. Maybe my niche isn’t even that special.
I follow Charlotte out of the office and the building and toward her car. She opens the passenger side for me and I tumble in.
“I just have to wrap up a couple things,” she says. “And then I’ll come back. Don’t go anywhere, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I can’t believe you talked to her that way.”
“I know. Me neither.”
She nods, satisfied, and shuts my door.
I get out my phone and try Toby.
A moment later, his voice rises above many other voices and music in the background.
“Hey, little sister.”
“Hey. Where are you?”
His face appears on my screen but the image is dark and grainy and I can barely see the curves of his face.
“Café,” he says. “London.”
“London. That’s far away.”
“Yeah,” he says. He leans closer to the camera; his face gets bigger and I can see him better. “They talk funny here.” He grins, leans back.
“Come back,” I say. “Come closer.”
He does.
“Hey, is something wrong?”
I nod and I feel my eyes well up and I wish so much that they wouldn’t. But it’s Toby and I know that if anyone will understand it will be him.
“My sofa,” I start, and shake my head because I need to pull myself together.
He waits. If I could see his face better I know that I would see concern, and I hate that he is so far away, and I hate that Morgan is going on a date tonight, and I hate that Los Angeles is full of so many miles and so many bars and so many people for her to be with instead of me.
“Oh, man,” he says before I’ve had to explain. “They went with something else?”
“It’s terrible,” I say. “It’s modern. And gray.”
“But, Em, you love modern.”
“Not for this. It isn’t right.”
“Gray,” he says. “Okay. Could be worse. What about throwing some pillows on it?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t want to throw pillows on it. I understand this scene. I understand why it’s important and what it should feel like, and I know what should be in the shot to make it feel the way it’s supposed to. And I found it. I looked so hard. I found it.”
“You still have the rest of the room, right? That Neutral Milk Hotel poster? You still have that, right? And the trophies. Those are classic.”
“I don’t want you to try to make me feel better,” I tell him. “I just want you to listen.”
I can see people getting up from a table behind him, people everywhere, moving around in the dark.
“Toby,” I say. “I don’t know if I want to do The Agency anymore.”
“What? No, wait a second. You’re really bummed right now. I totally get that. But just let yourself feel like that for a while and then let it go. Do you know how many times I’ve found locations I’ve known were perfect only to have the location manager say he wants something different? It sucks. I know it does. But it’s the way it works.”
“It’s Ginger,” I say. “She tells me she trusts me and that I can do whatever I want, and then when I’m not even there, without even talking to me about it, she just makes this change and ruins everything.”
“Not everything.”
“I don’t want to keep working with her. I want to work for myself.”
Toby clears his throat. He leans back in his chair.
Finally, he says, “This is how it works. You bust your ass. Not everything goes your way, and then, after a while, you get to that point. You get to make your own decisions and people look to you for approval on their work.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”
“You will move up in the studio,” he says. “I know you can do it. You just have to bite that tongue of yours and not let her see you so upset.”
“She already has.”
“Well, show her you’re over it.”
I nod.
“See this project through. See The Agency through. Then see where you are.”
“Okay,” I say, but my heart isn’t in it. There is this distance between us, and I can’t tell him everything I’m thinking, which is that I don’t know that I want to move up in the studio if working for the studio is going to be like this. If I can search for months and months in so many places, and then have all that work undone in a moment.