Page 76 of Little Miss Fortune

A wave of heat and embarrassment washed over me at the implication.

‘Spike is a good middle name,’ I deflected.

‘You literally just told me about how horribly uninformed he was. I am not taking the name of some fool. Plus, I think Spike is a character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I am off vampire media for a minute. Anyway, it’s late. Let me know how the shoot next week goes. Something tells me it might be a hoot.’

Toby would love it here right now, even if the only enjoyment he got out of it was relishing the extent of my awkward suffering.

‘Fuko-chan, what do you think of this shot?’ John pushes me to sit down next to him.

I despise the use of the chan suffix, which is mainly used for children. Me being an intern is not helping. I feel as if every time John speaks, he is trying to do one of two things—seduce me or insult me. He is only successful in the latter.

The product that we are working on is a natural skincare line for teenage girls. I study the shot where the product falls into honey (one of the main ingredients), encasing the pink packaging. It... is weirdly sensual. This is meant to be for teenage girls, no?

I watch over it another few times to confirm what I saw—the final shot, with the honey pouring over, the way it falls around the plastic.

‘John.’ I cut in to his conversation with one of the runners.

‘Yes?’ He hums, waiting to hear praise or for me to plant my lips on top of his in a passionate whirlwind.

I look around: man, man, man, man. There are seven men around here. I am the only woman. The phone in my hand takes a quick picture of the screen to send it off to Toby later.

I turn back to John, smothering the words coming out of my mouth with a thick layer of sweetness. ‘You’ve made it look like a vagina.’

‘What?’

‘Look. You made the final shot look like it’s a vaginal opening.’

I have seen this look on him, when he found out that the president of Japanese society at uni (the girl that he was trying to chirpse for a month) was not Japanese, but, in fact, Cambodian (she still to this day likes all my social media stories, as I do hers). The completely blank stare of an error that could easily have been avoided if only a single brain synapse had been employed.

John stops moving, frantically replaying the video again and again. Malik comes behind us, tapping John on the shoulder to ask a question about a memory card.

‘Fu-u-u...’ John says under his breath, shaking the hand off.

‘You all right, man?’ Malik asks his boss but looks at me.

I try really hard to suppress my grin. ‘John made a vaj.’

‘What? Where?’

I let Malik take my chair.

He studies the footage for a solid minute, then kisses his teeth, and throws his arms in the air. ‘Ho ho ho.’

He laughs and walks away. The entire set is now picking up on the strange energy emanating from their director.

‘Just reshoot it, mate,’ I say with my hands behind my head, leaning back on the chair. ‘Or maybe just swap the shots around and cut before it forms a—’

‘We can’t deviate. It’s in the contract. We have to follow the storyboard that was approved. It has to end with a honey drip. That’s the whole marketing campaign.’

He shows me the storyboard. It doesn’t look suggestive in the draft version. I stand up and play around with the lighting settings to see whether there is any other way to submerge it without its vulvonic glory.

Malik and the crew help out with the lenses. We try to lower the pink tube down the honey fish tank using different angles, but it sinks too quickly to be used. The ‘honey’ is actually dyed corn syrup, which is a much cheaper material, but it still feels like a waste every time we have to wipe it off.

Nothing is working with the way the camera is set up. The tone and the story are off. What if, instead of a bird’s-eye shot, we use an eye-level... No, that looks wrong.

I walk around with the camera, asking the crew to change the lamp’s intensity and the hue. We just need one shot that does not look like a reproductive organ—I did make it look like a penis, which was picked up on by everyone immediately, of course. Steven has now joined in and is fully caught up. He makes a quick jokey quip that ‘he knows a good optometrist company who could have helped with that’, and I can’t lie, I do laugh louder than I want to.

The fish tank is transparent on the bottom... Now, what if...