Love at 11 - By Mari Mancusi Page 0,34

producer? I have a script for you to voice.”

“You think I’m going to voice something I haven’t even read?” Terrance reached out and yanked the script from my hand.

“No. Of course not,” I said, a bit taken aback. “I want you to read it. If you want to tweak it that’s fine, too.”

I stood there, hovering like an idiot, while Terrance grabbed a black sharpie from his desk and started making corrections to the script. Actually, corrections might be an understatement. I watched in horror as he made sweeping Xs through almost every line of text, mumbling as he did.

“No! No! NO!” The last no was almost a scream. Several other employees looked over, and I felt my face heat.

“Is something wrong?” I asked, a bit freaked out.

He looked up, a brilliant newsman smile on his face. “Oh, no. Nothing. I’m just making a few tweaks, like you said.”

A few tweaks, my ass. There wouldn’t be a word left on the page after he was done with it. But what could I do? He was the million-dollar anchor; I was the lowly producer. Even though Richard had said that this was a producer-driven segment—that Terrance should simply read what I wrote—if Terrance wouldn’t do it, I didn’t have a leg to stand on. I couldn’t force him to read it, could I?

This sucked. My beautiful, thought-provoking, factual, and fair script now looked like a two-year-old had gone mad with a marker. How was Newsline going to see my work if it never got on the air the way I’d written it? I mean, I could see tweaking. Editing. Questioning But not ripping to shreds. There was simply no reason. It was a good script.

“Retype this with my corrections,” Terrance said after he finished his Texas Chainsaw Script Massacre. He handed me the paper’s mutilated corpse. “Then I’ll voice it.”

I stared at him. “Was there something wrong with the script?” I asked, trying to bite back my tears. Maybe we could work together. I could learn to write in his style and then in the future we could avoid this embarrassment.

“Besides the fact that it was the most shoddy, badly written piece of drivel that I’ve ever had the misfortune of reading?” he asked, picking up a hand mirror and teasing his anchorman hair.

“But—”

“Look.” He set the mirror down and turned to face me. “You obviously only spent about five minutes on that piece of garbage. If you’re going to be writing for me, you need to work a lot harder. My viewers have certain expectations. I cannot, in good conscience, let them down.”

I swallowed hard, crossing my arms under my breasts. “I worked hard on that script. I didn’t whip it out in five minutes.”

He shook his head, a disgusted look on his face. “Well, if that’s your best work, darling, we have a major problem.”

I opened my mouth to defend myself again, but the phone rang. Terrance grabbed the receiver.

“Hello?” he said. “Oh, hi Susan … Oh really? The new Armani ties are in? Okay, pick me up one red and one blue … Oh, you think blue’s too much? Okay, okay. Well, of course. You’re my personal shopper after all. I simply must trust you.”

He looked over at me, still hovering like an idiot. He frowned and waved his hand in a you-are-dismissed-insignificant-one kind of way. I backed off, humiliated beyond belief, while he continued to argue the pros and cons of Prada footwear.

I ran upstairs into the safe haven of Special Projects. David was out on a shoot so I had our cube to myself. I put my head on my desk and started to cry. I knew it was a babyish thing to do, but I couldn’t help it. All the events of the past week—my parents’ divorce, Lulu’s party, Jamie and the one-night stand, and now being told I was no good at the one thing I knew I was good at—came crashing together. I couldn’t take any more. I wanted to die. I knew that sounded overly dramatic, but I was in an overly dramatic state of mind.

“Maddy? Are you okay?”

I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up, my face probably disgustingly bloated and red from my cry. For the third time that week, it seemed Jamie would be my guardian angel. He must have thought I was a pathetic blob of a human being, always crying about this or that.

“Yeah. I’m fine.” I sniffed, my nose running like crazy. Jamie reached