The Second Assistant Read Online Free PDF
Author: Clare Naylor
II and I was the star.
“Morning.” I walked into the office on Monday.
“Hey,” Lara managed as she typed an e-mail. She was le dernier cri in her third new Marc Jacobs dress in a week. From whence? I wondered. As did everyone else in the office, judging by the looks on theirfaces. But who cared? Thanks to Winona, shoplifting your clothes had become almost as cool as knitting them yourself. “How was the apartment?” she asked.
“Oh, great. I took it.”
“Cool. It’s a great deal.” She barely looked up.
“Yeah, though it’s not like I spent much time there this weekend.”
“Oh, well.” Lara was back in work headspace, but I was desperate to tell somebody about my amazing day.
“I was up in Malibu at some guy’s house,” I persisted. And that got them. Not Lara, but the other assistants in my office, Talitha and Courtney.
Until this moment my fellow assistants had been almost entirely uninterested in me. They’d looked me up and down on my first day and pretty much ignored me since. Talitha had brown, sloe eyes and long, blond mermaid hair. Her midriff was permanently exposed in an array of jewel-colored, mind-blowingly expensive hippie clothes. She was the exception that proved the black-clad Hollywood rule. She was also staggeringly ignorant of anything that happened outside the Los Angeles city limits. Except for dating, and then she was interested, conversant, and very, very prepared to travel. Apparently her parents were both prestigious Hollywood writers, but you’d never have known it, and her only ambition seemed to be to have a romantic life as colorful as her Schiaparelli-pink skirt. Her boss was a permanently absent woman called Gigi whose back I’d only ever glimpsed being trailed by a small wheelie suitcase out of the door. She was always on location with some actress or other in London or Zagreb or Sydney. I did see her face once, though, when I went into her office to find a copy of a script that Victoria asked me to read. There, on her wall, above a long-dead plant was a six-by-four framed black-and-white studio photograph of the elusive Gigi laughing her surgically lifted ass off, her hair blowing gently in the wind machine with a bewildered Labrador trying his hardest to look frolicsome for the camera and his hysterical owner. Rumor had it that Gigi only took on clients who looked like her, with oversize lips, undersize nose, and parched blond locks. Or perhaps she had grown to look like her clients over the years. Nobody really remembered how the cloning had begun, but I’d stake my life that being a fly on the wall at a Christmas party for Gigi’s client list would be a wild, freakish thing.Still, it was perfect for Talitha to be a latchkey assistant because she was resourceful enough to spend her days on Friendster in search of her ideal studio executive.
Courtney, on the other hand, was sly, opportunistic, and deeply plain. Her appearance was only just saved from being irredeemably dull by a flock of freckles across her nose. For her, gossip was currency, and I imagined that it was not coincidence but evolution that was responsible for her long, twitching ears, which poked out through her flat, brown curtain of hair. She didn’t miss a trick in the office, and I knew that somewhere she kept an extensive filing system documenting everyone’s mistakes and shortcomings that she would not hesitate to use against them in a court of law or watercooler debate. She would slander, insinuate, and eye-roll her way to the top of the tree, and then she’d sit there for the next twenty years filing her nails and bitching about what everyone else was wearing. Whenever Courtney was around, I tried to make myself invisible to escape her hypercritical eye.
But when I mentioned my Malibu weekend to my fellow assistants, they were instantly like a pair of irresistible kittens purring all over me. And though I suddenly remembered Lara’s lecture about not dating anyone in the
“Morning.” I walked into the office on Monday.
“Hey,” Lara managed as she typed an e-mail. She was le dernier cri in her third new Marc Jacobs dress in a week. From whence? I wondered. As did everyone else in the office, judging by the looks on theirfaces. But who cared? Thanks to Winona, shoplifting your clothes had become almost as cool as knitting them yourself. “How was the apartment?” she asked.
“Oh, great. I took it.”
“Cool. It’s a great deal.” She barely looked up.
“Yeah, though it’s not like I spent much time there this weekend.”
“Oh, well.” Lara was back in work headspace, but I was desperate to tell somebody about my amazing day.
“I was up in Malibu at some guy’s house,” I persisted. And that got them. Not Lara, but the other assistants in my office, Talitha and Courtney.
Until this moment my fellow assistants had been almost entirely uninterested in me. They’d looked me up and down on my first day and pretty much ignored me since. Talitha had brown, sloe eyes and long, blond mermaid hair. Her midriff was permanently exposed in an array of jewel-colored, mind-blowingly expensive hippie clothes. She was the exception that proved the black-clad Hollywood rule. She was also staggeringly ignorant of anything that happened outside the Los Angeles city limits. Except for dating, and then she was interested, conversant, and very, very prepared to travel. Apparently her parents were both prestigious Hollywood writers, but you’d never have known it, and her only ambition seemed to be to have a romantic life as colorful as her Schiaparelli-pink skirt. Her boss was a permanently absent woman called Gigi whose back I’d only ever glimpsed being trailed by a small wheelie suitcase out of the door. She was always on location with some actress or other in London or Zagreb or Sydney. I did see her face once, though, when I went into her office to find a copy of a script that Victoria asked me to read. There, on her wall, above a long-dead plant was a six-by-four framed black-and-white studio photograph of the elusive Gigi laughing her surgically lifted ass off, her hair blowing gently in the wind machine with a bewildered Labrador trying his hardest to look frolicsome for the camera and his hysterical owner. Rumor had it that Gigi only took on clients who looked like her, with oversize lips, undersize nose, and parched blond locks. Or perhaps she had grown to look like her clients over the years. Nobody really remembered how the cloning had begun, but I’d stake my life that being a fly on the wall at a Christmas party for Gigi’s client list would be a wild, freakish thing.Still, it was perfect for Talitha to be a latchkey assistant because she was resourceful enough to spend her days on Friendster in search of her ideal studio executive.
Courtney, on the other hand, was sly, opportunistic, and deeply plain. Her appearance was only just saved from being irredeemably dull by a flock of freckles across her nose. For her, gossip was currency, and I imagined that it was not coincidence but evolution that was responsible for her long, twitching ears, which poked out through her flat, brown curtain of hair. She didn’t miss a trick in the office, and I knew that somewhere she kept an extensive filing system documenting everyone’s mistakes and shortcomings that she would not hesitate to use against them in a court of law or watercooler debate. She would slander, insinuate, and eye-roll her way to the top of the tree, and then she’d sit there for the next twenty years filing her nails and bitching about what everyone else was wearing. Whenever Courtney was around, I tried to make myself invisible to escape her hypercritical eye.
But when I mentioned my Malibu weekend to my fellow assistants, they were instantly like a pair of irresistible kittens purring all over me. And though I suddenly remembered Lara’s lecture about not dating anyone in the