Work Text:
It was the first week of January, 1986, and Tammy was staying at the apartment her family kept in New York City. She didn’t particularly like the place; something always felt a bit off, but she couldn’t quite put a finger on it. No matter, it meant that she didn’t have to fly across the midwest to get back to campus in New Hampshire later in the month, and that was worth a lot. And Anthony was visiting his parents in the city, so that was also something.
She turned on the TV on the kitchen counter. Good Morning America was still on, so she hadn’t slept in too much. The coffeemaker, thankfully, was new. The year before when she had stayed in the apartment, the coffeemaker hadn’t been cleaned in a year, and when she opened it up, the smell ruined her appetite for the entire day.
As she finished measuring out the coffee, there was a knock at the door.
“Who’s there?” she asked from the other side. She wished the place had a peephole.
“It’s Anthony!” he said.
She hurriedly undid all the chains and locks, and opened the door.
“I didn’t think you’d be back already!” she exclaimed, throwing her arms around his neck. “I was just making coffee.”
He stepped in and put down his bag, closing the door. Tammy quickly closed all the locks again while he sat down at the kitchen table.
“Just a sec, I’m going to turn off the TV,” she said.
“Wait!” he said. “This is the ad I worked on in my internship!”
She watched. It was a coffee ad, with a young girl greeting her older brother on Christmas morning.
“That’s cute!” she said after the ad ended. “How much of the writing was you?”
“I helped with a bit of the dialogue, though some of the credit goes to the girl. She’s the younger daughter of the senior members of the team I was working on. I did some of the readings with her when we were fine-tuning the script, and then she read when we were auditioning the part of the brother. Turns out, she was better than any of the child actors we looked at, so we had an epiphany that it was easier just to use Jennifer.”
“She was cute,” Tammy agreed.
“Someone else on the production team wanted to hire an older actress instead,” Anthony scoffed. “Do you know how that dialogue sounds with a twenty year old actress?”
Tammy stopped and thought through the lines. “That would sound kind of weird coming from someone older than six or seven, yeah.”
He laughed. “Thankfully we shot that down before they could meddle. I mean, could you imagine?”
“Well, the coffee is ready”, Tammy said. “Want a cup?”
“Sure. Am I your present this year?”
“Ha,” Tammy snorted, pouring the cup, and adding a little bit of milk like she’d seen him do when he got his own coffee.
“Perfect, thanks.”