Landline(13)

“How can you have a white eggplant? That’s like . . . purple green beans.”

“There are purple green beans. And yellow oranges.”

“Stop. You’re blowing my mind.”

“Oh, I’ll blow your mind. Girlie.”

“Are you flirting with me?”

He’d turned to her then, pen cap in mouth, and cocked his head. “Yeah. I think so.”

Georgie looked down at her old sweatshirt. At her threadbare yoga pants. “This is what does it for you?”

Neal smiled most of a smile, and the cap fell out of his mouth. “So far.”

Neal . . .

She’d call him tomorrow morning. She’d get through to him this time. This was just—this had just been a weird couple of days. Georgie was busy. And Neal was busy. And time zones weren’t on their side.

And he was pissed with her.

She’d make it better; she didn’t blame him. Everything would be better in the morning.

Morning glories, Georgie thought to herself just before she fell asleep.





FRIDAY





DECEMBER 20, 2013





CHAPTER 6


One missed call.

Fuck, f*ck, f*ck.

Georgie’d woken up on the couch this morning a half hour after her alarm would have gone off if she’d remembered to set it. She ran upstairs to take a shower, then threw on a new pair of jeans and the Metallica T-shirt. (It still smelled more like Neal than like Georgie.) When she went to grab her phone on the way out, she saw the text alert: One missed call

An Emergency Contact

That’s what Neal was filed under in Georgie’s contacts. (Just in case.) (Of something.) There was a voice mail, too—she hit PLAY but Neal hadn’t left anything, just a half second of silence. He must have called while she was in the shower.

Georgie called right back, got Neal’s voice mail and started talking as soon she heard the beep. “Hi,” she said. “It’s me. I just missed your call, but I won’t miss it again—call me. Call me whenever. You won’t be interrupting anything.”

As soon as she hung up, she felt like an idiot. Because of course he’d be interrupting something. That’s why Georgie had stayed in L.A., because she couldn’t be interrupted.

Fuck.



Georgie wasn’t any good that morning.

Seth was pretending not to notice. He was also pretending not to notice her Metallica T-shirt.

“It feels weird to be writing a different show in here,” Scotty said, looking around the writers’ room. “It’s like we’re doing it in our parents’ bed.” He was sitting in his usual spot at the far end of the conference table, even though there were eight empty chairs closer to Seth and Georgie. “I wish the front-desk girl was here to make us coffee. Georgie, do you know how to make coffee?”

“Are you kidding me?”

Scotty rolled his eyes. “I didn’t mean that in a sexist way. I just genuinely don’t know how to turn on the coffee machine. You’d think they’d make that part obvious.”

“Well, I don’t know either,” she said.

Seth looked up at Scotty over his laptop. “Why don’t you go get us coffee?” he said. “We won’t need any fart jokes for at least a half hour.”

“Fuck you,” Scotty said. He frowned at the framed Jeff’d Up poster on the wall. “It’s kind of like we’re doing it in Jeff German’s bed.”

“Nobody’s doing it,” Georgie said. “Go get us coffee.”

Scotty stood up. “I hate leaving you guys alone. You forget that I exist.”

“I haven’t forgotten you,” Seth said, picking up his cell phone. “I’m texting you our orders.”

As soon as Scotty was gone, Seth wheeled his chair into Georgie’s and leaned against her armrest. “I’ve seen you work the coffeemaker.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” she said.

“Does that mean you won’t man the whiteboard either?”

“I’m not your secretary.”

“Yeah, but you don’t trust Scotty to take notes, and you can’t read my handwriting.”

Georgie stood up, reluctantly, found a dry-erase marker, and started updating their progress on the whiteboard. She actually really liked being the one who wrote things down. It was like being the decision-maker.

Back in college, Georgie would type while Seth swanned around The Spoon offices, thinking out loud. Then he’d be all righteous indignation when the magazine came back from the presses: “Georgie. Where’s my Unabomber joke?”

“Who can be sure? Probably holed up in Montana.”

“That was a great joke that you cut.”

“It was a joke? See, it’d be a lot easier for me if you made your jokes funny. Then I wouldn’t get so confused.”

By junior year, Georgie and Seth were writing a weekly column together on page two of The Spoon. Georgie was finally starting to feel like she belonged on staff. Like she was good enough.

She shared a desk with Seth then, too; that’s when they first got used to it. Seth liked to have Georgie close enough that he could pull her hair, and Georgie liked having Seth close enough to kick.