Eleven Pages

The contract was eleven pages long and Mei Halloran read nine of them.

She read the first two because her agent was watching, and pages three through nine because they contained the schedule — dinners on Tuesdays, one premiere, two “spontaneous” airport arrivals, and a clause about hand-holding that had clearly been drafted by someone who had never held a hand.

She skipped pages ten and eleven because Vera Sant walked in.

They had been compared for two years, which in this industry is a kind of relationship. Same age bracket, same casting calls, the same three roles circling both their names in the trades. Mei had lost two of them. Vera had lost one. Neither had ever said a word about it in public, which the internet had correctly interpreted as a story.

“You’ve read it?” Vera asked. She sat down without being invited, which Mei noted, and set her copy on the table already annotated in three colours, which Mei noted more.

“Most of it.”

“Which parts did you skip?”

Mei considered lying. “Ten and eleven.”

Vera turned to page ten and slid it across.

Clause nine had a sub-clause. The sub-clause said that in the event either party formed an actual romantic attachment during the term of the agreement, the agency was to be notified in writing within seven days.

Mei looked at it for a while.

“That’s not standard,” she said.

“No.”

“Why is it in there?”

Vera took the page back, squared it against the others, and did not look up. “Because I asked for it,” she said. “I’ve done one of these before. It’s better if there’s a form.”

Later — much later, when the whole thing had gone the way it went — Mei would think about the fact that the very first honest sentence Vera Sant ever said to her was a procedural one.