She turned the phone toward me and pointed at Jethro’s avatar, the photo I’d taken with his phone of us making out on the porch. He’d sent it to me so I could make it his avatar as well.
“It’s us. Kissing. You see, Marta, when a boy likes a girl, it’s this thing they do with their lips—”
“He is all over you. Who took this picture?”
“I did.”
“You did?”
“Yes. I took it with his phone and then he texted it to me.”
She stared at me blankly, in a way that reminded me of a bomb about to detonate. But when she spoke she did so in an eerily calm tone. “You’re telling me that the park ranger has this picture of the two of you on his phone? And you took it?”
“That’s right.”
Marta stared at me like I’d lost my mind. “Are you trying to ruin your career? What is going on here? Do you need a vacation so badly that you’re sabotaging yourself?”
“You need to calm down.” I swallowed past a thick knot of something uncomfortable in my throat. Marta’s assessment was mostly wrong, but part of it rang with uncomfortable truth. Maybe part of me—a very small part of me—saw Jethro and a life with him as an escape from everything I hated about being a celebrity. Maybe.
But so what? If being with a man I adored gave me the impetus to change my life for the better, gave me the strength to plot a new course, then where was the harm in that?
“Calm down? When he sells it to TMZ along with all the sordid—fake—details of your love affair, don’t expect me to clean this up.”
I snatched the phone away, a weird mixture of embarrassed and angry heat slithering up my neck. “What is wrong with you?”
“What is wrong with me? You think you’re dating a park ranger. In Tennessee! How do you think people are going to feel about that?”
“Who cares?”
“You should care.”
“No. I shouldn’t. I absolutely shouldn’t care.” And I believed this. My mantra since the success of my first film had been: Never care about media opinion. Work hard. Do what’s right.
But Marta cared. And more frequently than I wanted to admit, her caring had the habit of affecting my career choices. Her caring was why I hadn’t yet taken a vacation. Ultimately it was my decision, but the thought of letting her down had been unbearable.
Until now. Until I had something other than myself to fight for.
I wasn’t sure whether I was more concerned about disappointing my eldest sister or my manager. Sometimes I forgot who she was most to me. Perhaps she forgot, too.
“How can you say that?” She looked like she wanted to strangle me.
“Because if I allowed myself to care about what the talking heads were saying, I would be horribly unhappy and nowhere near as successful as I am now.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she ground out angrily, marching away from me toward her desk.
“It’s not ridiculous. It’s true.” I followed her across the room. “They call me the fat funny lady, Marta. I’m plus-sized at a size fourteen, which—whatever, I don’t care about the label, plus-sized is fun-sized—but this business hates that I’m average-sized and successful. They hate that I’m a woman and write funny movies.”
“We are not average-sized for film, Sienna. We are big. We are fat. Pretending we’re not fat doesn’t make it so.”
I ignored her spiteful comment. My sister had always struggled against her natural shape and I knew her size—our size—was a sore spot for her. I’d always hoped to show her through embracing my gifts that she didn’t need to measure herself against society’s silly mandates.
“But we are average for the US. Size fourteen is the average. You can’t read an article about me without the writer bringing up my audacity for not caring, criticizing me for not starving myself. So you think I should listen to that crap?”
Marta lifted her voice over mine before I finished speaking. “You think you’re successful because you don’t care? Well guess what, you’re successful because I care. Because I push you. I am the only reason you are taken seriously. You would be nothing if it weren’t for me.”
I flinched, my ears ringing in the sudden silence. I couldn’t be more surprised if she’d slapped my face.
Seeing my expression, or maybe realizing what she’d just said, Marta covered her hands with her face and released a loud exhale. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”
I ignored her apology and presented the facts as I saw them. “You’re wrong. I am successful because I don’t care about media opinion. If I cared then I wouldn’t be writing comedy film scripts, because women aren’t as funny as men.”