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snowy Rockies on the day she signed the deal, she felt high—not just from the altitude up there in the mountains, but also from a certitude that she had never felt before. She had taken a gamble on her own future and drawn a winning hand despite the odds.
    That was how she’d ultimately ended up here, in the packed lobby of this theater, surrounded by friends and film industry acquaintances and people who had worked on her movie and a vast number of complete strangers. The movie had finished screening; and even though there wasn’t a standing ovation at the end, the audience cheered and sat through the entire credit sequence before making a beeline for the free bar. Now, the crowd drew together in small clusters, chatting and shaking hands and exchanging cards and then breaking apart to form new clusters, a hive of bees performing some kind of intricately orchestrated honey dance.
    A group of grips loomed over the food tables, guzzling their sponsored-vodka cocktails as they double-dipped in the hummus. The suits stood in the corner, rapidly typing on their BlackBerries. Claudia’s film-school peers, led by her friend Esme, stood in a protective semicircle around her, eyeing the strangers who approached. Jeremy was in position by the crudités with his friend and bandmate Daniel, who’d brought her a bouquet of yellow lilies. Even Jeremy’s father, Max, had come out and shuffled around in his corduroys and flip-flops and untucked dress shirt, lingering lasciviously near a clutch of twenty-something actresses who played bit parts in the film.
    Claudia stood in the center of it all, feeling vaguely like a stuffed pheasant in a display vitrine. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation. She was the axis around which the entire room seemed to turn. She arranged herself directly in front of her movie poster— SPARE PARTS in capital letters, the faces of her lead actors in profile against the Los Angeles skyline, the Variety quote (“Sharply funny …. Addictive!”) just below—and dizzily accepted the congratulations, the pressed hands and overenthusiastic hugs. “Huge fan, huge fan,” a total stranger whispered in her ear.
    Standing at the center of all this adulation, it seemed perfectly reasonable to expect Spare Parts to be a hit. Didn’t she have glowing reviews from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter and, now, Entertainment Weekly? Even the Academy Awards was dominated by plucky little independent films these days, especially upbeat ones like hers. Yes, Spare Parts was opening in only twenty-three theaters this weekend, but next weekend it was scheduled to open in two hundred more, and yet more after that. She was days away from signing a movie development deal with a major motion picture studio; her next film was going to be big budget, cast with stars, a serious endeavor about issues of real importance (human smuggling on the Mexican border!). Maybe she’d revive her drug addiction script next.
    “Claudia, I’m so sorry I can’t stay long, but the sitter’s threatening to call the cops on the twins,” she heard in her ear, and turned to see RC. RC’s real name was Renata Calliope, but she’d been going by her initials for the last twenty-five years, ever since she arrived in Los Angeles as a fledgling screenwriter in her early twenties and realized that Hollywood didn’t take women seriously. By now, RC’s screenwriting credits—including a handful of award-winning films and a long-running television hospital drama—were high-profile enough that the androgynous moniker was no longer effective or necessary, but she often told Claudia about the delight she once took in showing up for a production meeting in a miniskirt and heels and seeing the profound confusion on the producer’s faces when they realized they’d accidentally hired a chick to script-doctor their TV pilot.
    These days, RC rarely wore heels. A mother of ten-year-old twin boys, she had traded in the stilettos for sneakers years earlier, and