“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Phoebe said. Says who? Umma would’ve said if she’d heard her daughter talking like that.

“Hey, she’s Serafina Clark’s assistant. You scratch her back, maybe one day she’ll scratch yours. It doesn’t hurt to have the inside track with somebody from On Set.”

“Any word on the parties?” Phoebe asked, remembering the woman she’d met this morning in the great hall. “I heard Bump to Pump is the big one. Think we can get me in there?”

“I wish. That’s only for the highfliers, at Ted Stabler’s house.” Phoebe should’ve known. She packed her hope back into the little ring box it came in and stuffed it in her pocket. “Getting an invitation is basically impossible, but there are plenty of others I can get you into. Did you bring the dress?”

“I brought the dress.”

They’d spoken in greater detail about the dress than they had about the film. Alicia had convinced Phoebe to think of the networking parties tonight as a gauntlet to train for. The gown, a frothy pink concoction, would help Phoebe clear the first hurdle.

“Good. I know it feels shallow, but you need to do anything you can to get people’s attention.”

“Okay, time to smize.”

Phoebe headed outside to the garden. There were tall cocktail tables and a bar serving juice and seltzer. Phoebe didn’t see anyone with the promised purple hair. She asked for mango juice at the bar and found an empty table to lean against. The conference attracted attendees by providing access and connections and by staging itself at a movie studio, but this part of the campus could have been anywhere, a hotel, a tech start-up, a think tank. To get to where the actual work of Stabler Studios happened, it appeared you had to go around a bend in the garden path, which the organizers had blocked off with the caterers’ staging tent.