The Map from Here to There

by Emery Lord

  “Oh my God.” I rolled my eyes, even though she couldn’t see me. Her paper was titled “Sexual and Reproductive Health Teaching Practices and Outcomes in American Public Schools,” and I knew this because she quoted passages from it regularly.

  “Leave her alone.” Tessa gave me a look of solidarity.

  In the rearview mirror, Morgan waggled her eyebrows at me. “Are you and Max … ya know?”

  “Morgan!” Kayleigh said, smacking her leg. But then she turned to me. “Are you? You’d tell us, wouldn’t you?”

  My mouth fell open. None of my friends ever discussed details like that—no dishing about which bases and when. It just wasn’t our style.

  “I certainly would not. My personal relationship is none of your business,” I said, all daintiness and manners. I wasn’t committedly abstinent like Morgan, but it felt like a huge deal, and still far away. “And we’ve only been together and in Oakhurst since August.”

  “Yeah, but it’s you and Max,” Morgan said.

  What did that even mean? “Next topic, please. I don’t see Tessa getting interrogated.”

  “Oh, they’ve tried,” Tessa noted.

  Kayleigh twisted all the way around in her seat, so she could see Tessa. “You and Laurel are going to stay together next year, right? Even if you go somewhere farther away?”

  “I hope so,” Tessa said.

  I waited to be asked about long distance, but no—all three of them talked about my relationship in the future tense, Max and me always together in next-year scenarios. They thought we might be sleeping together because it was us, Paige and Max. Not for the first time, I thought that my own idea of my relationship—going out with a boy I knew well but was still learning about—might not match what people saw of us.

  My thoughts circled like a whirligig, round and round and round. Did Max think we were seriously committed? Sure, he’d joked about me being his “dream girl,” but that was a sweet compliment, in appreciation for my bad puns. Right? I felt woozy all of a sudden, and I cracked the window to breathe in fresh air.

  “Paige!” Morgan was saying. “Hello? Dairy Queen or Kemper’s?”

  “Kemper’s,” Tessa insisted, in a tone that suggested I’d blocked out a heated debate.

  I glanced over at her. “Didn’t I see you with an ice-cream cone at the football game?”

  She lifted her button nose into the air. “My personal relationship with ice cream is none of your business.”

  That did it, at least. I laughed, pushing at her leg as we reached the front of the exit line, on our way.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I came home from work one Thursday evening to my mom examining the kitchen cabinets, arms akimbo—the Wonder Woman of home design. She turned over her shoulder. “Hey, honey. I was just about to put your plate in the fridge.”

  She removed the aluminum foil cover over some chicken casserole and green beans, and set the microwave. It felt strange and grown-up to arrive home late, tired from a day on my feet.

  “What’s with the paint samples?” I asked, pointing to a gradient row of whites taped to an upper cabinet, where we kept the cereal. “You’re redoing the cabinets?”

  “I think so. Refinishing them. White would be brighter, don’t you think? More modern?” She tapped a finger to her lips. “What do you think?”

  “Definitely.”

  She moved to the side, considering the tones at a different angle. “But I don’t want it to be too bright.”

  “Right. Like when new sneakers are so white, they’re almost blue.”

  “That’s precisely why I disqualified Powdered Sugar. Although anything off-white will look dingy.” She looked back at me, a quick smile. “Oh, well. I’ll figure it out. Anyway. How was work?”

  “The usual,” I said, gesturing at an oil stain on my vellum-thin shirt. “Glamour. Prestige.”

  “I’m worried,” she announced. This was not exactly a big proclamation. Like me, my mom worried as a baseline of her existence. She removed her glasses and massaged the bridge of her nose. The frames were new, a dramatic burgundy color that had surprised me. And dramatic they were—she used them for a lot of exasperated gesturing. “I’m worried that you don’t have time for classwork and studying and applications. Maybe it’s best if—”

  “Mom.” I gave her a trying-to-be-patient smile. “We’ve talked about this.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Cam has school and then dance practice, right? My schedule is like that, only I have a job instead of a club.”

  “Dance is not a club!” Cameron called from her Netflix nest in the living room. “It’s a team.”

  “Okay!” I yelled back. My mom put her glasses back on, which I took as a signal that she was done with this topic. I pointed at the paint swatches, squinting. “I think the one on the far right.”

  “That’s what your dad thinks, too. Swan Flight has a warmer undertone, but I’m not sure if that’s a good thing. I might try one of each to see how they look in the light.”

  My mom factoring in my dad’s opinions about the house: this, essentially, was why I thought he should just move back in. Once, after they split, he dropped Cameron and me off on a rainy Sunday night. With genuine concern, he asked that I remind my mom the gutters needed to be cleaned out. I conveyed that information as if it were my idea—my realization. Water is dripping off the house pretty hard, I told her as casually as I could. In hindsight, sixth grade wasn’t exactly the peak of my still paltry acting skills. My mom huffed. Tell your father I’m perfectly capable of caring for this house without his input.

  Now, they discussed paint colors together.

  She looked back, her expression shifting back to Mom Mode. “You have a lot of homework?”

  “Catching up on some reading. Then stuff with Maeve.”

  “I don’t like how late you two talk.”

  “Well, she’s on Pacific Time. We don’t have a ton of options.”

  “You could e-mail.”

  “We do. And text.” I chewed a bite of green beans hard, forcing myself not to get snippy. This conversation occurred every Thursday, and I couldn’t tell if my mom forgot or if she just wanted to alert me of her continued displeasure. “But talking stuff out is a lot faster. That’s why we only do it once a week.”

  She said nothing and began pulling plates from the dishwasher. You wouldn’t think it was possible to passive-aggressively unload dishes, but Kate Hancock had a gift.

  “You know, some seventeen-year-olds do actual bad things,” I said, unable to resist. “I’m staying up to perfect college application material.”

  “I’m aware of that. But I’m your mother,” she said simply. It was the high card in every argument. Turning toward the living room, she called, “Cameron Rose! Why am I unloading the dishwasher when you agreed to do it earlier?”

  I saw my exit, and I hurried upstairs before I could once again become the subject of parenting. When I emptied my tux pocket, I found I only had four scraps of paper since my last chat with Maeve. And one of them read, in unfamiliar handwriting: ACTION MOVIE FT. VERY ATTRACTIVE GUY. ASIAN, YOUNG, ATHLETE, CHARMING. POSSIBLE CHARACTER NAME: HUNTER.

  I texted him a picture of his little joke with a laughing emoji.

  Wow, what a great idea on your part! he typed back. Cinema gold!!!

  Maeve and I worked through the plot on my comedy piece—underdeveloped, according to her, though she thought the dry humor was reading well. I highlighted the too-on-the-nose dialogue in her family drama scene. We were just getting into potential shared projects when my mom ducked in, tapping an imaginary watch.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You need sleep.”

  “I know.” When I heard my mom’s bedroom door close, I looked back at Maeve’s heart-shaped face—her soft cheeks sloping into a sharper, dignified chin. “Does she think I’ll be in bed at ten p.m. next year? Truly, what is the point of this nagging?”

  “My mom’s doing it, too, even though I mig
ht be really close to home,” Maeve said. She rolled her eyes, lashes pumped up by mascara. “It’s, like, their last moment to parent us, so they overshoot.”

  Simultaneously, we pointed at each other. “Mother-daughter movie.”

  “Flip-the-script humor?” Maeve’s thick, black-as-ink eyebrows rose. “How do we reverse it? The daughter overparenting the mom?”

  “Maybe Mom goes to college?”

  “Mmm. Romance subplot: Mom wants to date her professor?”

  “Or she discovers one of her professors is an ex-boyfriend from her early twenties?”

  “Ugh,” she said good-naturedly. “Someday, I will be better than you at the love story hook. Someday!”

  “Um, Aoife and Ahmed?” I said, citing both her parents’ names and the working title of her most cherished project—a romantic drama beginning with their chance meeting at a grad school lecture, through twenty years of marriage. The draft had clobbered me; I could hardly read the last scene through the tears in my eyes.

  “But I didn’t craft the plot!” Maeve said. “It really happened. Well, mostly.”

  My phone lit up beside me, Max saying that he was going to bed and hello to Maeve.

  “Max says hi,” I told her.

  Maeve cracked a smile. “Did I summon him when I mentioned dating a professor?”

  “Ha!” I said. Because, well, Max and his rolled-up shirtsleeves and his excited gesturing when someone got his obscure references. But also because Maeve felt comfortable enough with me to joke about my boyfriend. She’d insisted on “meeting” him on video chat over the summer. I’d known then that we would stay friends beyond our weeks at NYU. “I’m telling him you said that!”

  “I’m jotting down the mother-daughter idea on the shared doc,” she said, eyes fixed on the screen. “And, in parentheses, listing the professor’s name as Max.”

  I realized, sitting across the desk from Cristina Fuentes, that I was not getting this job. Mythos Contemporary Theater was too cool for me, and the assistant producing director currently holding my paltry CV was definitely too cool for me. The only information my dad had offered was “she’s awesome,” which I now found to be a fair assessment. Her hair was short and blunt, revealing studs in tiny interior places on her ear. We were in her second-floor office, and the hopelessness of the situation relaxed me. If you’re certainly not getting the job, you have nothing to lose. I’d chock the interview up to good experience and be glad for it.

  She’d already asked me a few preliminary questions, tapping a pen on a large desk calendar.

  “You took playwriting at NYU.” Her eyes scanned the résumé page. “And an improv class. Contributed to a short film. But you’re not interested in acting?”

  “Correct.” Extremely correct. But I’d learned at NYU that many aspiring writers and directors were also aspiring actors. Maeve wanted to be, in her words, the Irish Egyptian Mindy Kaling.

  “And your traditional theater experience is fairly limited.”

  “Limited to … audience member, yes.”

  “Here at Mythos?”

  “Yeah! In fact, walking through the lobby just now, I was thinking about the last play my grandma brought me to. About the earliest known version of Monopoly and the woman who created it.”

  “Sure. Do Not Collect Two Hundred Dollars.”

  “Yes!” I pointed at her, a gesture that struck me—too late—as embarrassingly informal. I lowered my hand.

  “I enjoyed that one,” she said. “And this play, 2BD, 1BA. You’ve read it?”

  “Yep! Yes. Twice.”

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s great,” I said. “I have more experience with film and TV scripts, but this play really pops for me.”

  “Pops,” she repeated. “What about it?”

  “Well, I think when you’re vamping on a well-known piece like The Odd Couple, it’s easy to dress it up with modern slang and issues but not really say anything new. But this play challenges some of the norms in the original and digs into what friendship means in adulthood more meaningfully. No offense to Neil Simon.”

  “That is …,” she said, leaning back in her chair, “what I think as well. What norms do you think it challenges?”

  I nodded, giving myself a moment to layer what I’d learned in classes with my instincts about the script. “Well, in the original, there are a lot of throwaway jokes about Felix being suicidal. I noticed this play takes ideation more seriously. But it doesn’t careen the tone into a maudlin place! It’s an impressive balance.”

  We sat there for a few pleasant beats, long enough for me to register: Oh, I think this is maybe going very well.

  “How’d you get into all this?” she asked, waving a hand. “Scripts, writing?”

  “My grandmother. I was really into I Love Lucy as a kid, and she wanted me to know that a woman helped write the show. Madelyn Pugh was from Indianapolis, so that made her feel real to me.” As relaxed as I was, I added, out of genuine curiosity, “What about you?”

  “Um, that would be María Irene Fornés. Such an innovator as a playwright. And Cuban, like me. And Desi Arnaz, actually!”

  I reached deep into my memory and said, hesitantly, “Fefu and Her Friends. That was Fornés, right?”

  Cris sat up a little. “Right! You know it?”

  “I’ve only read an excerpt for a class.”

  “You should read the whole thing.” She glanced back down at my single sheet of accomplishments. “Well, Paige Hancock. Anything else you want to tell me?”

  What did I have to lose, really? Might as well swing for the fences.

  I was spending too much time with Hunter.

  “I guess that …” I paused, searching, but I couldn’t think of a better way of phrasing it. “I know it’s a support role. So, I’ll happily do coffee runs or pitch in with stage crew or whatever needs to be done. I’d be really grateful to observe and learn.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “Rachel said you’re good at putting your head down and getting to work.”

  It took me a second to realize she meant Ms. Pepper, who had offered to be a reference. I knew her name was Rachel; I could have told someone if they’d asked me. But I only ever thought of her as Pepper. “Rachel” seemed like the name for her outside-of-work identity, a person who had a beer with friends and wore sweatshirts.

  “Oh, you talked to her. Great. Yeah.”

  “Can I be honest with you?”

  I braced myself. I was too young, too inexperienced. At least, after getting used to my workshop classes this summer, I could take criticism without crying on the spot.

  “I thought I was interviewing you as a professional courtesy to Dan. But I’m impressed.” She leaned back in her chair again. “Your schedule is fairly limited, yes?”

  She was … she was talking about this like it might happen. I cleared my throat. Composure, Hancock. C’mon. “Yes. I work Tuesday and Thursday after school and Saturday and Sunday, usually. I could be here three days a week.”

  Cris Fuentes nodded. “If you can get tech week and show week off in late March, I think that’ll work. I have a college intern who’s here daily, so you’ll be her backup.”

  She continued to explain the schedule, but I lifted off my seat, levitating a good foot above the chair. Cris Fuentes was using the future continuous tense to speak about my role here. Was she saying I had an internship?

  “That sounds great,” I said. Someone said. Probably me. I felt like a ventriloquist of my own self, puppeteering my mouth while I had an out-of-body experience.

  “You’re welcome to sit in on auditions in a few weeks, to observe the process. If you like.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, please.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I didn’t realize the problem until after a celebratory dinner with my family and the elated texts I’d sent to my friends. I opened my planner to add my internship, officially, but in late March, where I needed to add TECH WEEK and OPENING NIGHT, my handwritin
g already spelled out QUIZBOWL QUARTERFINALS. But no—certainly I could make both work. I could use a sub for QuizBowl that one night; we had so many new members, after all … But so much of tournament success was about knowing your teammates, their rhythms, their weak spots. It would be unfair to compete all year, knowing I’d miss a linchpin qualifier.

  The choice was obvious: I wanted to be at Mythos, learning from Cris and her team. Standing in the theater that reminded me of my grandma, so present in my memories that I could almost smell her perfume. But QuizBowl had been so special to me last year, a strange and vital source of confidence, of camaraderie. It showed me that being wrong, even publicly, wouldn’t kill me. It showed me that you have to keep trying if you ever want to get it right. But this was the right move.

  At least, I was fairly sure, until I had to tell Max. Until I had to watch his face across the table at Alcott’s on Sunday afternoon.

  “You’d consider quitting QuizBowl?” He looked so hurt, like I was quitting my relationship with him.

  I swallowed back a lump in my throat. “I don’t want to, Max. At all.”

  “No, I know. It’s just … QuizBowl’s our thing,” he said. His eyes were flickering around, like he was tallying a math error. “Would you still come to practices?”

  “If I wasn’t going to compete on the team?” I asked feebly.

  “Yeah. That’d be weird, I guess.”

  “I’m sorry.” My voice cracked, and Max jerked up like he’d been in a trance.

  “Oh no, Paige! Hey.” He grabbed my hand. “Don’t apologize. It caught me off guard, that’s all. The internship is amazing, and you’ve gotta do it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Of course. It’s just, when I imagined our year, I thought we’d have all this time together carpooling to matches. Like last year.”

  “I know.” That was a big part of how we’d gotten to know each other, driving home from neighboring schools on quiet highways. “But last year, we needed an excuse to have that time together. Now I’ll drive to Anderson with you any time you want.”