Page 36 of Dating and Other Theories
She looked down at his hand, nodding. “Okay.”
He retracted his arm and sat back on the couch again. “What about Emily, the female lead? Did you like her?”
Esther winced. “Well…”
Jonathan groaned. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s a Manic Pixie Dream Girl—you know what that is, right?”
“I’m in film school,” he said with a scowl. “Of course I know what it is, and Emily’s not a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She’s real.”
Esther shifted on the couch so she was facing him more. “You mean she’s based on a real person, right? Someone you cared about?”
He looked down at his hands, which were clenched in his lap. “Sort of.”
Esther tilted her head to catch his eye. “Tell me about her. The real Emily. What made her special? What did you like about her?”
His fingers drummed on the cushion next to his thigh, and Sally took the opportunity to smush her face against them. “I don’t know,” he said, idly scratching her head. “I guess…she’s funny.”
“Okay, that’s a start,” Esther said. “Funny’s good. The script could use a little more humor. Make her funny.”
He gave her a weary look. “I thought I had.”
She pressed her lips together to suppress the urge to smile. It wasn’t funny, but in a way it kind of was. Darkly funny. “You’ve got to actually write her being funny, not just say she’s funny in the character description.” Esther tipped her head to one side, peering at him. “Can you write jokes?”
He let out a long-suffering sigh. “Apparently not.”
“We’ll put a pin in funny for now. What else do you like about her?”
“She’s smart, I guess.”
Esther shook her head. “Smart’s hard too. Give me something more concrete. Like, a specific moment when she did something small and seemingly insignificant that made you feel something about her.”
She propped her elbow on the couch, watching him while he thought about it. He was chewing on his lower lip, with his face all scrunched up in a frown. He was more than cute; he was actively attractive. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Her hate goggles had blinded her to the fact that there was a hot guy underneath that beanie.
After a moment he sat up, shifting to face her. “This is kind of lame, but…there was this one time, we were at the beach, and she spent like an hour building this really elaborate sandcastle with a bunch of kids we didn’t even know.”
“That’s perfect.” Esther said. “That’s real. Put that in there.”
His brow furrowed. “How am I going to get a sandcastle into the script if they don’t go to the beach?”
“It doesn’t have to be a sandcastle. Make it sidewalk chalk or Legos or something. Whatever. It can be anything. But that tells me something about who she is. It makes me like her.”
“Yeah,” he said, reaching for his laptop. “Okay.” He was almost sort of smiling, for the first time since he’d showed up at the door. His hair was sticking up, and it made Esther want to smooth it down for him.
She cleared her throat. “Am I allowed to ask who Emily was?”
His smile faded. “Just some girl I knew.”
“She seems like more than that.”
He stopped typing and stroked his hand down Sally’s back. “She was my first girlfriend. My only really serious girlfriend.”
“What happened?”
“She dumped me for someone else.”
“I’m sorry.”
