Page 9 of Friends with Benefits

Without a credit on a union project, Evie’s application to IATSE—the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees—is null and void. After everything she put herself through for that film. Evie didn’t just bleed, shedanced. Learned complex choreography and let herself love it again. Not the all-consuming love that defined her adolescence, but a quietmaybe I don’t have to let go of this part of melove. It was the first time she dared to let dance back into her heart since she fell. Two months before graduating high school, Evie tumbled out of Theo’s arms, her ankle buckling coming out of a simple lift at her last competition. An accident that not only shattered the future she had imagined for herself, but also led to a diagnosis that explained it all—the fall, the bone-deep exhaustion, the pain that she’d become so used to living with. In the decade since her diagnosis, she’s grieved the reality that audienceswill never watch her dance again. In therapy, she’s felt all her furious feelings that a joint had to fracture—thather body had to break—in order for her pain to be taken seriously. Accepted the reality that even with physical therapy,even in remission from Crohn’s, her ankle will never be strong enough to dance at the level she once did.

But it felt incredible, being Ginger Rogers. Though no one saw her dance again, theyheardher. It’s not recognition that she requires. Evie knows no one sits through the credits.

But damn it, she needed that credit.

“Shit,” Theo says.

“Ross would’ve done the Foley with tap shoes on his hands if it weren’t for me.”

She sighs, impulsive fury fading until she just feels deflated and defeated about the whole thing. Maybe it’s a sign. She’s meant to edit together unsolicited relationship advice from Amber B. and Tiffany P. and any influencer who wakes up one day and decides to start a podcast. She’s good at her job. ShelikesAmber B. and Tiffany P.—their commentary is smart and their notes for the edit are spot-on and they don’t pop the mic. It’s just not her passion. Maybe that’s okay.

Maybe a job can be just that.

A job.

“I’m sorry, Evelyn,” Theo says.

He’s the only person, besides her grandparents, who calls her by her full name. Even when she started going by Evie in sixth grade and had to correct the pronunciation of teachers a many on the first day of school (EH-vee,notEE-vee), she never corrected him or asked him to make the switch when she entered her Evie era. Evelyn is for family, and Theo is family.

“When he promised me a credit, I believed him. It’s so embarrassing, Theodore.”

Theo’s name is not Theodore.

It’s just Theo.

But she is Evelyn to him and he is Theodore to her.

“Is there not anything you can do?”

“As an unpaid intern?”

Theo has no response. He knows as well as she does that in this situation, she’s powerless. After a beat, he shifts to face her. “It’s bullshit. Ross is a dick. But there will be more opportunities. Better projects.”

Evie knows this is true, objectively, but damn it, she wasn’t supposed to hustle and freelance and lose any more sleep pursuing this path than she already has. Maybe there will be more movies or television shows or video games to break out her career as a full-time Foley artist.

ButGingerwas supposed to bethebreak.

Evie is allowed to mourn the reality that it isn’t.

Theo is not allowed to brush her feelings off.

“Do you know any arsonists?”

“Evelyn.”

“Still kidding.”

In this moment, she misses Lori so much. Theo’s mom would’ve at least humored the arsonist in Evie before rubbing her back and letting her cry, assuring her that her feelings are valid. She’d make matzo ball soup and they’d watch Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan fall in love again and again. Lori Cohen was more of a mom to Evie than her actual mom, who’s very much alive and off gallivanting around Europe with her husband, Jean-Paul, and their six-year-old daughter, Margot. Naomi Deleve-Laurent’s new family. She’s currently somewhere that beginswith the letterM. Marseille? Mykonos? Evie doesn’t know and, quite frankly, doesn’t care.

Theo cleans the kitchen.

As he ladles leftover soup into Tupperware, Evie lets it go, him brushing off her feelings in pursuit of a solution. Pep and Mo’s bungalow is an open floor plan, so she just has to shift her position on the couch to watch him move as comfortably in her grandparents’ kitchen as if it were his own. Theo grew up baking challah and folding hamantaschen in this kitchen alongside her and Imogen and their grandparents.

Evie lent Theo her grandparents, and in return, he gave her a mom.

“How’s Gen liking Culver?” Theo asks.

“She’s so in love. I miss her so much.”

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