When the Messenger Is Hot Read Free

of the events) and made sure to work it out in the fine print that I’d be able to write the screenplay as well. I realize it’s a long shot.
    So yesterday I get this message on my machine saying, Hi, this is Apple Fowler and you may have already heard I’m going to be playing the part of Wendy in the film version of No But Wait, It Gets Worse…, and I was hoping I could talk to you about it… and so on. Very bizarre to hear someone refer to you as a “part,” like you’re either fictional, or not whole. To be honest, Apple Fowler is a good enough actress, but she’s kind of young to be playing me even where the book starts. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Anyway, I call her back, and she’s really nice, much nicer than you’d expect a movie star to be, and asks if she can come over for coffee. So we make plans and she comes over and asks me a lot of questions and looks around my apartment like it’s this curiosity, like it’s somehow different from any other average person’s apartment, which I suppose maybe she hasn’t had access to as the child of a famous director. It seems like she’s never seen a houseplant or a refrigerator magnet or, um, a dog. Still, she’s easy to talk to and seems genuinely interested in getting to know me and says that she loved the book and can’t even begin to imagine how I made it through everything, and I’m sure she can’t, given that she seems a little weirded out by my average-person’s apartment, which isn’t on the long list of things I personally consider myself to have made it through. Anyway, she eventually asks if she can stay for a week or so, to really become the character, and she offers to pay me rent, which isn’t an issue since my book’s been on the bestseller list for eight weeks, and I’ve got plenty of room, plus, I mean, who wouldn’t want to be friends with Apple Fowler? Maybe she knows George Clooney’s e-mail address. I agree with the condition that the bathroom is mine first and the phone is off-limits, which isn’t a problem for her since she’s got a cell phone, and also because she says she really wants to experience my life and intends to use the phone for emergencies only. She says she’ll be as quiet as a mouse.
    Which she is, and she sticks by her thing not to even use her own phone, but right away I realize that it’s not an awful lot of fun being watched, which I suppose is what the readers are doing in a certain way, except they’re not in my house. The first day or two she just takes a lot of notes. It’s immediately bizarre to me to see someone writing something down when I’m in the middle of doing something absolutely mundane, something that as a writer I hadn’t previously considered was worth writing down, like hand-washing a sweater, which of course is not something Apple has ever witnessed, which perhaps would seem even more unusual to a nonchore-oriented person when followed by using a tweezer to pry out the sink stopper, which broke ages ago, one of those numerous daily adjustments I stopped thinking about as anything that even needs a repair, like the way I play my answering machine messages back on my stereo because the machine records messages but won’t play them back, or the way I serve Leo (my pug) his Alpo out of my Chrysler Building mug on the sofa every night because he won’t eat until I’m eating, and he won’t even eat on the floor by the table because it’s too far from me, which I personally think is really considerate on his part, and therefore I do not mind fixing him his dinner in my Chrysler Building mug seeing as how he’s so obviously trying to keep me company, all of which Apple scribbles down as somehow being crucial and noteworthy character traits.
    After the watching and the note-taking, she starts trying to imitate me — my gestures, facial expressions,