Very few people I know love food as much as Samantha Puckett. I don't know how she eats so much and still keeps that amazing figure. I suspect it has something to do with being Cat's roommate…well I guess that's girlfriend these days. I love Cat like a sister but it can be exhausting and occasionally a little nauseating trying to keep up with her. She's a sweetheart, but people like me can only handle sweet in small doses.

But when Sam throws her endorsement behind something food-related, you know it's gospel. And one of her favorite haunts in LA was Bots. And with good reason.

It's not a classy place. Probably not the kind of place you'd take an executive from a film studio. But something told me my new pal Liz would be into it. Turns out, I was right. She was like a kid at Christmas. Ordering from a PearPad, picking appetizers from a little Roomba-looking thing with a tray, and of course, the human-sized robots that brought out your meal. It was all clearly beyond her, but she enjoyed her state of disbelief.

"Those have to be costumes," she said as the big red robot rolled by. "Or maybe someone's in the back with a remote control or something."

"Maybe," I said before downing a slider. Sam was right, those things were damn good. "The first time I was here, my friend and I broke that red one. The blue one had to wheel it to the back."

Liz shook her head as the blue robot in question cleaned off the table next to us. "I love living in the future," she said with a chuckle. Then she turned her attention to me. "So, tell me about yourself. How'd you end up taking coffee orders for that windbag?"

My shoulders tightened a bit. I hated sharing backstory, especially with someone I just met. I felt like I could trust her with it, but it still raised my blood pressure to have to share anything about myself. "Eh, you know. Couldn't really cut it in the 'real' world. Figured the movie business sounded like fun."

She arched an eyebrow at me like she knew something. Which, of course, she did. I wasn't surprised in the least, I'd seen her tapping away on her PearPhone while I was driving us to Bots and figured she was checking up on me. "I see," she said. "So this isn't you?"

Liz flipped her phone around and showed me a small write-up about a play I'd done in high school, Clowns Don't Bounce. Not my best work, I admit, but it definitely got some attention.

"So you Googled me?"

Liz smiled. "You Googled me too. As soon as we sat down."

She wasn't wrong. "Busted. I'm just not a fan of backstory. Sometimes the wrong people get ahold of it and…well, unfortunate things happen."

"Do you think I'm the wrong people?"

"No, I really don't. Just a reflex at this point. But yes, that play was mine. Not one of my best, but it got plenty of attention, as you can see."

Liz nodded as she nibbled on a fry. "Yeah. Maybe it was the real blood."

"That was a weird hiccup," I said. "I relied on my friend's brother to get me the fake stuff but apparently she didn't clarify the part about it being fake. It was all I had, so I just went with it."

"Understandable." There was an awkward pause. "What's your goal in the industry? What are your plans?"

Well, that one caught me off guard. I hate being caught off guard. "I guess I'd like to make movies," I said.

"Oh, come on, I asked for your goals, not a line on a resume. What gets you out of bed in the morning? What makes you think slumming with that creep is worth your time and energy? You don't strike me as someone who would put herself through that without a solid reason."

I appreciated Liz's bluntness, even if I was getting annoyed with all the personal questions. Technically it was all still backstory. I gave it some thought, absently stirring a fry in the pool of ketchup on my plate. "I've got a feature I wrote my senior year. It's my baby, I guess. If I could get it made before I die, I guess I'd die pretty happy. But beyond that, I need to create. I need to write, to sing, to express myself. That's what drives me. To take all the shit that's swirling around in here and give it at least a little bit of a voice."

I glanced up to find Liz's eyes on me. She wasn't eating or drinking. She was entirely focused on me. I looked back down to my fry and the massive glob of ketchup that had accumulated on its end.

"I appreciate your candor," she said. "I know what you're getting at. You have to do those things. Those creative needs, they're like air and water. If you don't meet them, you wither away."

Oh, this woman.

We ate in silence for a few moments. I played back over our conversation thus far, looking for any hidden meanings, words between words, to try and figure out where to take things from here. It's not every day you've got the head of a production company eating cheese fries with you. I didn't want to waste my chance. Besides, I'd answered plenty of questions. It was her turn.

"So, what's your plan?" I asked. "You said you've got a short script but no way to get it made right now?"

Liz nodded and took a sip of her tea. "Yeah. It's something I wrote when I was probably your age. I wouldn't call it my baby, but I was proud of it at the time. It's a little sappy I guess, one of those doe-eyed, optimistic stories about a naive girl finding her way in the big city."

"Ah," I said, understanding. "A little different from the usual."

"Well, back then I wasn't sure quite who I was. I wrote what I knew. Not quite an autobiography, but some of my personal struggles are in there. It's not my favorite thing, but it's what Les is looking for, and a bit more in line with the feature."

"So trite, cliched, made for the drooling masses?"

Liz laughed a bit. "Pretty much. Or to use the industry term, it's more mainstream."

"That sounds so much more palatable. Why not direct it yourself?"

"I know my talents," Liz said. "Directing isn't one of them. I can tell a decent story. I can manage all the moving parts. But the details of the project? What lens to use, what angles? Not my thing."

I downed another slider. I might have to get another order to go, I thought. These things were so much better than they had any right to be. Somewhere between the first bite and the last bite of that beefy goodness, an idea hit me. It was probably a bad idea. If I had taken a few seconds to think it through, I'd have never opened my mouth. So whether it was a food high from the sliders or sheer desperation or an even crazier sense of connection with Liz, I blurted it out. "Why not let me direct it for you?"

Liz chuckled dismissively. "You gonna do it for free? Because, you'll recall, the problem here is a lack of money."

"Sure."

Liz's smile disappeared. "You're serious?"

Her skeptical expression caught me off-guard. Maybe I overestimated her goodwill. Oddly enough, a thought came to me. The words of my acting instructor, Sikowitz, and a lesson he had taught us our senior year when we were putting together our reels. Never work for free. This industry runs on people wanting to know what's in it for them. If you're not looking to get paid or get something out of it, they won't trust you.

"Look, I know you don't have any money to put into it right now," I said slowly. "But if I did this pro bono and it works, if it gets you the funding for your big feature, would that be worth funding my feature? I can shoot it low budget. And trust me, it's definitely the kind of thing Grim produces all the time. Just with my own little spin on it."

My eyes were confident, my smile was genuine, but from the neck down I was a wreck. My stomach tied itself into a knot and my right foot was shaking so bad I thought the table would start trembling. I curled my toes in my boots and dug them into the bottom, trying to focus all of the nervous, anxious energy into those ten little contact points as I waited for Liz's answer. I could see the wheels turning. I hoped I played my cards right.

"You've got a lot of guts," she said. "You've known me for an hour. That's not an easy ask."

I shrugged. "If it were easy, it wouldn't be worth doing. But you know that."

A cautious grin tugged at her lips. "All right, Jade. Tell you what. Let's exchange screenplays. Send me yours and I'll read it tonight and consider it. And I want you to really look at mine. It's nothing like your play, or like anything else we've done at Grim before. If you believe you can make it work, and if I think your script is worth investing in, we'll talk next steps. What do you say?"

It was literally all I could do not to leap out of my seat and dance around like an idiot.

"I say that sounds like a damn good plan."