Page 75 of Out on a Limb

“Yes.” Cameron didn’t need to think on this. He thought it would take weeks or months of being in LA to become a development assistant at a hot network. The perfect job was thrown into his lap. “I’ll be moving out to LA in September when my lease is up.”

“September’s not gonna work for me, dude. I need you to start ASAP.”

“When you say ASAP, how soon is that? Tomorrow?”

“Ideally, yes. But I know that’s not gonna work for you. I was able to get you two weeks.”

“Two weeks? Arthur, please understand, I have a lease and classes and graduation and…” And a guy cooking him pot roast and mashed potatoes.

“I get it, Cameron. But you can work this all out. You don’t need to walk in order to get your degree. Talk with your professors. Mackey will be cool with it. Listen, I’m going out on a limb vouching for you with HR. This is an amazing opportunity, and jobs like these don’t open up that frequently.”

“I know.” Cameron tried to process this. It was like a rush of blood to the head.

“There is one thing. The studio has a policy in place that employees cannot work on side projects like films or screenplays. The president wants everyone to be completely focused on Mobius’s projects. Plus it’s a conflict of interest. If we are developinging a script that’s happens to be similar to yours, it could open us up to lawsuits.”

“I get it.” Cameron sort of did. He’d heard about lawsuits in Hollywood about stolen ideas. Mobius didn’t want the headache. The people working there, like Arthur, wanted to be there. They wanted to develop movies. I do, too, he told himself.

“There are assistants who’ve left Mobius and gotten agents on their own. They just couldn’t do it while employed. But you seemed interested in development when we spoke. You knew your shit.”

“Thanks.”

“So, are you in or out?”

Cameron stared at himself in the mirror, deep in conversation with the voices in his head. He pictured himself in an office reading scripts, working with Hollywood executives, watching scripts turn into actual movies that his friends and his mom and the people in high school he didn’t talk to anymore could see in actual theaters.

“I’m in.”

“Excellent!”

Arthur Brandt went on to say how excited he was to work with Cameron and how HR would be following up with him, but it was all white noise. Cameron looked into the mirror again and saw Walker standing by the door.

CHAPTER twenty-four

Walker

“Walker, are you ready?”

Patricia scrolled through the Powerpoint presentation for the hundredth time. She read over each word carefully, as if their jobs depended on it. Well, they did. Walker and Lucy sat across from her, watching her pick apart their work.

“On slide eight, can you put the period inside the quotation marks? Actually, you know what? I’ll just do it right now.” Patricia peered at her screen. Her nose almost touched the glass. “I think the two boxes on this slide aren’t the same size. The one on the left is a touch wider. Can you look into that?”

“Sure thing.” Walker scribbled her comment in his notebook. His hand seemed to give up halfway through, like what was the point in writing or doing anything anymore.

A clean break.

Walker bristled at the phrase. Bones had a clean break, but they were still broken. You still did something to get them damaged.

“And Walker, you’ve triple-checked these spend and TRP numbers?”

“Oh, I only double-checked,” he said as a joke. Patricia didn’t find it funny.

“Can you please check one more time? We need this to be perfect.”

Really? You don’t say.As if that weren’t the most obvious thing on the fucking planet.

“Okay. I will.”

It wouldn’t do any good. He could look at numbers all day today, but he wouldn’t be able to fix anything or find any problems. Everything in his eye line was out of focus, all because of the clean break.