by Emery Lord
Even if I hadn’t overheard them, I’d have smelled the money stress like a trail of smoke. When you grow up with occasional income dips—a lag in freelance work, layoffs at the paper—you sense the tension long before you witness the fire. My parents’ work had stabilized, as far as I could tell, in the past few years. My mom primarily wrote for and edited a parenting magazine, and my dad was at the city paper. But most of my life, their bickering had spiked highest around finances.
“So, honey,” my mom said to me, all false cheer, “I was reading online today that there are some very good screen-writing master’s programs. Lots of people go that route!”
“Right …” But I could also get my screen-writing degree in only four years of undergrad. Why would I tack on more time and debt?
“You could still get a more versatile English degree in-state, like you planned. And if you still want to pursue screen writing then, you can move on to grad school!”
If. I nodded slowly, not because I agreed but because I heard her loud and clear. I’d changed the plan on her last night, and she didn’t like it one bit. Fine—I’d rather know where she stood.
“Katie,” my dad said, quiet.
“Well, she could!”
“Or,” my dad said, “she could pursue it now, full on. You read what her professors said.”
I flushed, taken aback. I’d shared copies of two glowing recommendations to prove I might have a future in this. I hadn’t necessarily expected them to be referenced.
“No, I know,” my mom said. “Just a thought!”
For the first time since I was little, I walked upstairs feeling entirely sure my parents would have a whisper-fight in my wake. Because of me.
“Hey,” I said, nudging my sister’s half-open door. Cameron’s room was eternally messy, more clothes on her floor than in her closet. She looked up at me from behind her laptop. “You happen to overhear anything downstairs?”
“Not really.” Cam believed wholeheartedly in my parents’ togetherness because she didn’t remember the pre-divorce years as well as I did. Sometimes it felt like the three-year age gap between us made for two different childhoods under the same roof. “They were just discussing your college stuff from different points of view.”
So, bickering. “Was dance good?”
“Mm-hmm,” she said, eyes already back on her baking show, and I shut the door behind me.
I stripped off my work uniform, the smell of stale popcorn clinging to every fiber, and I keeled onto my bed, straight as a felled tree. Before this past spring, I would have called my grandmother for reassurance—waiting to hear her voice from a few miles away in her retirement community.
When I hauled myself up, it was only to read the sole finished piece in my writing portfolio. To remind myself why all this was worth it—why it had to be this way.
Why Screen Writing?
500-word maximum
My grandmother, for all her efficiency and no-nonsense worldview, loved watching television. Sometimes I think her recollection of The Wizard of Oz airing on TV in the 1950s was the first love story I ever heard. For most of my childhood, I hopscotched around my parents’ disagreements and, eventually, between their houses when they split. Through it all, I loved TV; I loved Lucy. And I loved sitting beside my grandmother. She taught me about Madelyn Pugh, who had GIRL WRITER on the back of a director’s chair on set. She was a girl and a writer. But she was also a writer of girls—Lucille Ball’s character, specifically—and she had lived in Indianapolis, like me.
Shortly after I turned fifteen, the boy I’d been dating over the summer drowned in a freak accident. I spent days—weeks—in my room, curled around my laptop and desperate not to be alone in my mind. The television shows I watched in those days seeped in—fused with who I am. Eventually, I began to wonder, Why do I like this particular show so much? What makes it good? Why am I invested? Those questions became Google searches and script reading and every podcast that has ever featured a writers’ room.
My grandmother died last spring, right after I found out I’d gotten into NYU’s summer screen-writing program. I had the nerve to go, in part, because I was reeling again. Grief-stricken and desperate for distraction. Hoping to honor her.
I found more than that. I found my TV-writing spark could be easily fanned to fire—by professors, by classmates, by critique. By the sketch comedy class I hated but grew from, by the late-night debates with my bright, weird, interesting classmates.
Screen writing is my path because it’s my passion, the creative space I come home to. But it’s also a love story. The first act: my childhood with TV as a reprieve from hurt. In the second act, I learned to harness my pain to create. The story needs a third act, and in it, I plan to become one of the people who makes TV—for little girls whose parents are splitting up, for teenagers shocked by heartache, for anyone who needs to live in another world for a while.
I’ve been a grateful inhabitant. I’m ready to be a builder.
Things would be so much easier if the essay were an exaggeration. But I really felt this way—clear-eyed and certain.
I switched over to my e-mail, hoping for something from Max in Sicily, his last excursion before heading across the Atlantic. We’d texted and video-chatted all summer, but when the other person was asleep and we couldn’t wait, we e-mailed. I was glad for the documentation, snippets of who we were, how we were. Thirty-five hours, two minutes, and counting.
CHAPTER TWO
The next day, I hustled into Alcott’s for my lunch break—a daily practice that had been Max’s idea. Why eat my paper bag lunch in the dingy cinema break room when my favorite place in Oakhurst was one intersection away? This bookstore had been my small salvation more times than I could count, the cove I steered toward in any storm. Now I ate my sandwiches by a sunny window, book in hand. This week, Americanah on recommendation from Tessa’s girlfriend, Laurel. I nursed a small iced coffee—cheapest thing on the menu—and nestled in.
My break was almost over when something swooped into my line of vision. Blinking, I set my book down.
A tiny paper airplane hit the wall and dropped back onto the table beside me.
Max. The word rushed through me like a whisper, a quiet magic that could only ever be his. But he couldn’t be here. Not till tomorrow morning—I’d taken the day off work, even. I swiveled my head a full one-eighty, searching, but no.
My heart punched at my rib cage as I reached for the airplane, its sharp nose bent from impact. OPEN, it said across the flat wing. In his handwriting. On what appeared to be a folded-up boarding pass. My fingers trembled, nearly ripping the neat angles of paper.
In the dead center, two words: Miss me?
I rocketed up, combing both hands through my hair. Why—WHY—had I clipped my bangs back this morning instead of doing something with them? In less than zero of my daydreams about our reunion was I wearing my work shirt and stupid baggy-legged tuxedo pants.
“Max?” I stepped into the nearest aisle, searching, but only glossy-magazine-cover faces looked back at me.
“Are you serious?” I said, louder. Because I couldn’t get out the full sentiment: You’re home early? You have the patience to wait even one more second?
He stepped into view, grinning and different and exactly the same. His denim button-up shirt and Converse and Maxness. I squealed something unintelligible—“Oh my God!” or “You’re here!” or “It’s you!”—and flew at him like a freed bird. It was nearly a tackle, sending him off balance.
“Hey, girl,” he said, laughing. I kept my arms around his neck, stunned by the realness of him, solid and graspable.
This time last year, I didn’t even know Max Watson. He’d started as the dorky cousin of my actual crush, Ryan Chase. Max had transferred to Oakhurst from private school, sat beside me in English class, and, somewhere along the way, became a true, trusted friend. He slid into my life like some part of my heart had always been saving a seat for him—this boy who matched wits like fenci
ng, who read me like a favorite book.
Max eased his hold, freeing me to drop down, but I stayed pressed against him.
“Sorry,” I said. “You have to live like this now.”
It was some kind of ecstasy, to hear Max’s laugh right next to my ear. To feel his chest rise and fall against mine. No ha-ha via text message, no laughter distorted through computer screens. Sometimes I imagined my feelings for him rivaled any commercial airplane. They could soar out of Indiana, over Ohio and Pennsylvania, cut through Connecticut. They’d propel themselves across the Atlantic and flamenco through Spain and then swim the final sea-length to Italy.
When my feet hit the ground, I took him in, trying to believe he wasn’t a mirage. His darkest-brown hair, grown out and thick. His usually pale skin, as tan as I’d ever seen it—a souvenir from the Italian sun. New glasses I hadn’t seen in person until now, frames that looked nice with the green of his eyes.
I could feel the goofiness of my smile, but Max’s smile was just content—the feeling of waking up late on a Saturday morning.
“You’re here,” I said, only barely convinced. “How are you here?”
“One of our excursions in Sicily was canceled, so I caught an earlier flight. I got in at four a.m.”
“You could have told me!” I said, stepping back to push his shoulder. “I would have tried to switch shifts!”
I didn’t add “I would have looked cute,” even though I thought it. On some level, he was still my friend Max, and I didn’t want to admit how much I cared what he thought of me. How he thought of me.
“And miss seeing the tuxedo in person?” His eyes flicked up and down the work uniform he’d been joking about since I got the job. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh my God.” I attempted to cover the awful pants with both arms.
“I didn’t think I’d actually make my connection at JFK. Figured I’d rather surprise you if I did.” He linked our hands together. So many times last year, I’d imagined reaching for his hand, and now it was simple—an invisible barrier dropped.
“How am I supposed to go back to work?” I demanded. “My break’s almost over. I can’t stay there knowing you’re a few miles away!”
“Well, good. But I need a nap, and I want to catch up with my mom. But tonight, do you want to—”
“Yes.”
He glanced down at his sneakers, smile tucked into his mouth.
“Oh,” I said. “Wait. Laurel’s bon voyage party is tonight.”
Tessa had plans to send her girlfriend off to college in style, with favorite snacks and a nautical theme.
“Oh, right.” Max’s mind was working quickly, his eyes ticking around before they landed on mine. “How about a quick dinner, then we can head over there? I’ll have to modify my excellent first-date plans, but … needs must.”
I would have eaten dinner curbside in the smoldering cinema parking lot, wearing my tuxedo, if he was the one sitting beside me. “Sounds great.”
“Oh, and I’m, uh, not going to mention to anyone else that I’m home,” he said, watching for a light of understanding in my eyes. No influx of text messages from our friends, no demands to see him right away. One dinner, just us.
I mimed zipping my lips.
“Good. I’ll text you later?”
“You’ll see me later,” I said, and he squeezed both my hands.
I reentered the theater in a haze, a cartoon with hearts circling my head. Donna was standing with Hunter, glancing between her watch and me. “Cutting it a little close, aren’t we?”
I did not care for Donna, overall.
“I’m here,” I said, fingertips quick on the clock-in screen.
She turned toward her office, perhaps to note that I’d been flippant about my near lateness. It didn’t matter. Even the hideous theater carpet—drab maroon with flecks of teal—suddenly looked celebratory, like confetti on a velvet backdrop. I turned back to Hunter, close to bursting. “Max got home early!”
“Yeah, he stopped by, looking for you. Told him you were at Alcott’s.” Hunter crossed his arms, appraising me. “Wow. I knew The Boyfriend was a big deal, but you are beside yourself.”
“I am, yes.”
“Go ’head,” he said. “Do the little dance that you’re clearly bottling up. Let’s get it over with.”
I did a little skip-around thing, with a twirl, then some hip movements.
“Wow,” Hunter said, leaning his cheek against his hand. “Cute.”
“Yeah, pretty good, right? I think it’s only missing …” I turned to him, continuing the whole routine with my tongue stuck out at him.
“You could take this on the road! Stage show. The big time.”
Lane walked past us, halfway out of her jacket for break. “Do I want to know?”
“It’s a good day, Lane!” I said.
After work, I raced home for the quickest shower of my life, where I frantically scrubbed the smell of butter and salt from my skin. I tousled my hair as I blow-dried it, hoping to override Max’s memory of my clipped-back greasiness. Scrutinizing the finished product in the mirror, I tried to believe I was a cute and together person, capable of minimal awkwardness in a date scenario.
Downstairs, my sister hunched over her latest batch of sugar cookies, a hobby she’d picked up around the time my mom started taking in stray furniture. I’d learned by now not to interrupt her while she was piping—a process that required a stern, almost glaring concentration.
When she stood back up, surveying her work, I cleared my throat and gestured to my outfit. “Yeah?”
Cameron looked over the rims of her trendy glasses, inscrutable. I’d chosen a striped T-shirt dress, a SoHo clearance-bin find. “Let me see the shoes.”
I lifted one foot. She had no particular love for my Keds, but they were me and, in my opinion, immune to criticism.
“Good,” she said simply.
I pointed at the cookies, glossy red apples in neat little rows. The pencil shapes were cooling, waiting for goldenrod icing—an homage to our school colors. “Back-to-school bake sale?”
“Mm-hmm. Practice run.” She tapped one finger against her lip. While baking, she kept her hair piled like a haystack on top of her head, apron knotted at her waist. We’d always looked alike, but lately I saw more flashes of my mom’s features on Cameron’s face than on my own. “I added lemon zest to the base recipe this time, so we’ll see. Max on his way?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are you, like … nervous?” Cameron peered at me. I hadn’t realized I was rapping my fingers on the island until she nodded toward the sound.
“No.” I pulled my hand back.
She gave me a look as if anxious behaviors were a new development for me. “Why? It’s just you and Max.”
Before I could reply, my mom came in from the backyard, blotting her face with a bandanna. “You look nice, sweetie!”
“Thanks.” Why did I care so much? This boy had seen me in ratty, study-marathon clothes, on the school mornings when I’d hit snooze too many times.
“She’s flipping out,” Cameron said, twisting the icing bag for better control.
I glared at her. “No, I’m just rushed. We don’t have a lot of time before we need to be at Tessa’s.”
Cameron gave my mom a knowing look. “Translation: Max and I don’t have time to talk to you two.”
“That’s not—” I began, but what was the point? She wasn’t wrong. I feared they would pull Max in, ask him about Italy, and fawn like this was senior prom instead of a casual first date.
“Oh, honey,” my mom said. “We won’t keep you! And we won’t embarrass you.”
“I know,” I lied. At any point, Cameron could tell Max how long I’d taken to do my hair. She didn’t need that kind of power.
My mom picked up a mixing bowl Cameron had left by the sink. “You do realize … we have met Max before? He’s been in this home? Repeatedly?”
I did know. Still, I bolted up when Max knocked.
I strode down the hallway, affecting the posture of a more confident girl. I had hated my required improv class at NYU, truly, but at least it had some real-life applicability.
I opened the door expecting the Max from earlier today, with tired eyes and thick hair rumpled. Instead, he looked bright-eyed, his hair neater on the sides.
“When did you get a haircut?” I asked.
“My mom cleaned it up,” he said, sighing. “She said I wasn’t presentable.”
“It looks good!”
“Yeah?” His hand went to the back of his neck. “She was overenthusiastic, in my opinion.”
“Well, I like it.”
“Good.” He’d stood in this same place at least a dozen times before. Coming over to study. Picking me up for QuizBowl practice. After my grandmother’s funeral, wearing dress pants and a worried frown. And one windy afternoon last April, before the first time we’d ever really fought.
I motioned him in, but before we even made it to the kitchen, my mom and sister popped into view like two nosy little birds on a windowsill. Please, God. Make them not be like this.
“Hey, sweetie! Oh, look at you.” My mom gave Max a quick hug. “Tell us about Italy. Was it a dream?”
“Absolutely. Like walking around in a movie.” Max gestured at the countertop, full of Cameron’s icing handiwork. “Gotta say, they’re even better in person.”
“Why, thank you.” Cameron dipped her head, a little bow. So often, my snippy back-and-forth with my sister seemed inevitable. I assumed she bickered with everyone in her life. But I had noticed, all summer, Cameron commenting on Max’s photos on social media: OMG and so jealous!!! and bring some of that gelato back to Indiana. The most I’d ever gotten from her, on one photo of me that Tessa had taken, was cute. Max, in turn, liked every one of her baking posts.
“I know you two have to get going,” my mom said. “But come over for dinner soon, okay? You’re welcome anytime.”
“I’ll be here,” Max said. Then, to me, “You ready?”
He smiled over at me as we settled into his car, and I shoved away the guilt, the weight of my film school plans hidden in my back pocket. He’d asked once, when I first got home from the city, if I would apply to NYU. And I wasn’t lying when I said no. It was too expensive, too far, too improbable a career. You’re playing small! Maeve had huffed on one of our last nights in the city.