Off the Record by Camryn Garrett (read more books TXT) 📕

during the holidays. It was hard when Mom kept looking at me at Thanksgiving dinner. It was hard when the websites I read started posting diet tips or “inspirational stories” about people (mostly women) losing tons of weight by starving themselves or doing a bunch of crazy eating things that I’m trying to learn my way out of.

I don’t want to hear about people’s diet tips or weight-loss stories. People just see my body and automatically assume that I’m dying to know how their niece lost forty pounds on Weight Watchers or the new lemonade diet.

Most of the time, I can handle myself. Sometimes I slip. It feels like everyone is trying to tear down my self-esteem and I’m barely able to hold it up.

“Josie?” Maggie says. “Do you want to keep talking?”

I shake my head. I’m trying not to blink. If I do, tears will spill over, and Alice will say she didn’t mean it and that I’m too sensitive and she didn’t really say anything so bad.

I know why thinking about Marius makes me so uncomfortable. It’s not just because the movie was sad. It’s because I see Marius whenever I try not to think about him. It’s because I’m trying to train myself to stop wanting something I can’t have. Just like being on a diet.

“Come on,” I say, standing up. “We should head over to the hotel.”

@JosieTheJournalist: if you don’t see race you don’t see all the ways black people are (a) super cool (b) suffering from racism every day! #themoreyouknow :)

I don’t know why I thought I’d be exploring Austin. According to the itinerary, we’re doing something called a press roundtable. That means a bunch of members of the press show up at a fancy hotel—the same one Alice and I are staying at while we’re here—and eat lunch in its fancy conference room and basically get treated like royalty.

“Stop looking around like that,” Alice says. Somehow, I got her to come with me, despite the better plans she shared in the airport. “Try to look natural. No one looks as impressed as you.”

It’s hard to look natural. First, they gave us both bags of swag, even though Alice didn’t have a press badge on and I had to explain to the security guard that she was my chaperone. The bags have stuff like a flipbook with hi-res photos from the movie, a bottle of alcohol (which Alice will probably steal from me when we leave), a branded notebook, a branded pen, and something called a “self-care kit,” which is pretty much a little pouch filled with small containers of ChapStick, lotion, and bath salts. I guess it has to do with the fact that in the movie Peter sees a therapist who talks to him about self-care.

It’s still a little weird, but I like free stuff.

Now we’re eating “lunch,” which arrives on plates that look like the china we have at home. It’s not even normal food. We already had two courses—an avocado caprese salad and a creamy roasted red pepper and cauliflower soup with goat cheese—and now everyone has fish or chicken. Even the conference room is fancy. Gold—or what looks like gold—trims the chairs and the walls. There’s fancy wallpaper with pretty flowers. The windows are wide, and we can see the fountain and green, green grass outside by the main entrance, with its towering Greek columns.

“I’m trying, but it’s hard. Like, is it just me,” I whisper, leaning closer to Alice, “or does this feel like a wedding?”

“I guess the director has money, huh?” She glances at my salmon. “Do you want that?”

“Not the director, exactly.” I slide over my plate. “The studio. Maybe they spent a lot on this because of the combination of Dennis Bardell and Art Springfield.”

Alice nods, but she’s too busy tucking into my lunch to really be ingesting any of this. I turn my attention to the rest of the room. Alice is right—no one looks as impressed as I feel. Most people are typing on their phones while they eat. Some people chat with each other. A few people gather their things and head toward the door. The security guard standing there nods at them before glancing away.

“Hmm,” Alice says. “Do you think they’re leaving early?”

I glance back at the empty table. It isn’t the only one here; there are at least two more without any jackets or chairs or backpacks.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “I think they’re calling us to interviews in small groups.”

“When do you go?”

“I don’t know.” I tap my fingers against the table. “When they call me, I guess.”

Instead of eating, I busy myself with looking through my questions. I wrote some for the director and every member of the cast, even though I’m not sure how many I’ll have a chance to ask.

The longest page in my notebook has questions for Marius. Some of them verge on being too personal, though: asking if he used any of his own experiences when playing Peter, how close he is to the material, and which scene in the movie he connects to most. But those are the sorts of things I want to know about him. I figure everyone else will want to know them, too.

Maybe I’ll try during our next one-on-one interview.

“Excuse me.” A woman dressed in a suit appears in front of us. “This section is next.”

There isn’t anyone else sitting at our table, but there are three other tables in this section, making about twenty reporters. Everyone gets up and grabs their stuff. I fall toward the back of the crowd as we leave the warm, bustling room, heading down the hallway.

I wish I weren’t so nervous. I’ve already done this before—well, not a roundtable exactly, but something close to it. But I get scared to talk to people every time. I don’t know if it’ll ever go away.

“Here we are,” the woman says. “Hope you enjoy.”

It seems like a strange thing