Final Draft

by Riley Redgate

  “One beer,” she said. “One.”

  “Your body processes a drink an hour,” Hannah said. “Drinking one beer at a five-hour party is like drinking one coffee to get through the week. Oh, look, the whole gang’s here.”

  Leo grabbed Hannah into a hug with a swish of his windbreaker. “Hey, tiny,” he said.

  “Where’s your girl?” she said, still suspended in the air. “Do I need to hide?”

  “Angela’s still on the train and still doesn’t hate you,” Leo said. His high, mild voice was nearly swallowed in the bopping bass. He put Hannah down and shucked off his windbreaker. “Back me up, Laila.”

  “Uh,” Laila said. Angela had once asked Laila if they were all friends with Hannah out of pity.

  The door flew open, rescuing Laila. A communal “HEY” of recognition roared from corner to corner as a dozen people streamed in. Felix flicked off the living room light, leaving only a diffuse fluorescent glow seeping westward from the kitchen counter, and the tall windows punctured with the distant Manhattan skyline, the gray wash of cloud that netted eight million lights. The fourth-floor walkup had the uninterrupted view going for it. With that tiny alteration, the awkward scattering of people lost in too much empty space transformed into a dim, intimate event. Laila would have been able to pretend it was classy if she hadn’t been holding something that tasted like chilled extract of plastic bag.

  The room broke into subdivisions. Around the bookshelf huddled a squad of phone-checking loners. The bright U-bend of the kitchen tiles rang with conversation. Music from a Bluetooth speaker clotted up in one corner, although a song couldn’t finish before somebody hijacked the mix, creating a bizarre montage of moody electronica and bubblegum pop and Kendrick Lamar. The couch, inevitably, looked like a rough draft for a harem.

  “I’m going to get another drink,” said Hannah, who had already drained her first.

  “Wait,” Laila said, but Hannah ducked behind a guy wearing a superhero T-shirt. Then Laila was alone, surrounded by backs and arms and profile views of strangers’ faces. She wasn’t sure how her phone found her hand so quickly, as if a magnet in her palm had yanked it from her pocket, or bag, or wherever it had been. As she tapped from app to app, scrolling through previously read messages and an email inbox with no new emails, the jitters stayed at bay. Phones were magic. Now she was disguised as a girl who had some other calling in the world, which was of such pressing importance that surely she had no time to talk to these plebeians.

  A pleasing blue icon alerted her to a new email. She opened it, triumphant. She wasn’t even pretending anymore.

  From: Tim Madison

  To: Laila Piedra

  Subject: stuff 9:12 PM

  * * *

  Hi Laila,

  Thank you for the recommendations! I asked my nurse if she could hunt down those audiobooks, and she returned with a Walkman disc player and a stack of CDs. Between that and the yellow notepad I’m using to write this reply, I feel like a time traveler. I’ll have to ask you not to reveal season twelve’s secrets to me—unfortunately, I’m allergic to spoilers!—but it’s kind of you to offer. I’ll be able to use a screen myself in a week or two.

  Ms. Nazarenko sounds like an interesting woman to meet in person! I hope the class isn’t being too hard on her,

  Laila snorted.

  but I’m sure you’ll all learn a great deal. She is truly a world-class author, one of my personal favorites! When I was a freshman in college, I loved telling people that Catalina’s Mothers was my favorite novel, and I made good friends from doing so. Some books are made for conversation. If you haven’t read that one, I would highly recommend it—a dynamic and mesmerizing story, not that she needs me to sing her praises!

  Rest assured that I am in good hands, and doing well. I’ve begun physical therapy, which is hard work, but the team here are great people and to feel myself making progress is very satisfying.

  Please do send your revised story when you get a chance!

  Sincerely,

  Mr. Madison

  “Figures Felix would buy the worst beer ever,” Hannah said, reappearing with another silver can. “I asked him where he was hiding the good shit, and he was like, that is the good shit, and I was like, you’re hopeless.”

  “Hey! Hannah!” Two members of Hannah’s other friend group pushed through the phone loners, dressed in boxy felt coats and wispy scarves. Laila knew the boy, Ethan Xu, but the other must have been Bridget Whitman, the new girl who had transferred last month, because Laila didn’t think she’d ever seen her before. Impact Future Leaders Charter School wasn’t small—fifteen hundred kids—but Laila knew the seniors’ faces by now, especially the distinctive ones, and Bridget was distinctive. Wire-framed glasses encircled her spoon-round eyes. A silky chestnut bob clung to the middle of her neck, spiked earrings protruding from the curtains of hair like miniature flails.

  “Hey, you two,” Hannah said. “Bridget, this is Laila.”

  Laila stowed her phone into her pocket but left her fingers loosely curled around it. “Nice to meet you,” she said.

  “Yeah, absolutely. Nice to find out you’re real,” Bridget said. “Sorry. That sounded rude. We’ve got this joke that since Hannah’s always talking about you and I’ve never seen you, you must be her imaginary girlfriend in Canada.”

  “Dude,” Hannah muttered into the lip of her beer, “shut up.”

  Laila felt a sting of hurt. Felix teased Hannah about dating virtually any girl within eyeshot, and Hannah never sounded like that when she replied—so curt, so embarrassed. Was Hannah that humiliated at the idea of caring about her? Laila knew Hannah wanted people to think she was above earthly relationships, but Laila was also used to being the exception to all Hannah’s rules.

  Maybe Hannah regretted that Laila had come to this party at all, that she had to be associated with Laila. Laila turned her phone over and over in her pocket, wondering if she could leverage it to escape.

  “Better than Ethan’s fake boyfriend in Minnesota,” Hannah added.

  “He’s not fake, we met on the internet,” Ethan said.

  “And you two are adorable,” Bridget said, with a knowing tone of placation that, for some reason, irritated Laila. Based on Hannah’s stories, Laila had assigned Bridget a voice, height, and facial features that didn’t at all pair with reality. The mismatch disconcerted her, as did the realization that she’d created some out-of-character fanfictional version of an actual human being. Real-life Bridget had, first of all, a lofty English accent. Hannah hadn’t mentioned she was apparently a transfer from London. The voice itself emerged in a high, ethereal tone that reminded Laila of the dream-runner’s voice in the Moondowners audiobook. With this girl’s crinkled silver dress and widely spaced eyes, it was easy to picture her kidnapping dreams through a digital siphon and smuggling them over the bridge above Tan-Wua Chasm.

  Also, why hadn’t Hannah mentioned that Bridget was gorgeous? Hannah always mentioned when a girl was gorgeous. Laila glanced over at her, but Hannah was scrolling through Twitter.

  “Oh, Hannah,” Bridget said, “did you get a chance to send in my order?”

  “Yeah, on it.”

  “Order for what?” Ethan said.

  “I need a fake ID,” Bridget said. “I get here two months after turning eighteen, and suddenly I’m not allowed to drink anymore. It’s rubbish.”

  The beer sweated against Laila’s palm. The novelty of this—the setting, the alcohol, the premeditated future lawbreaking—compounded, each element making the others exponentially more stressful. “How, um, how does it work?” she asked, trying to sound casual.

  “There’s this guy in Williamsburg,” Hannah said. “He makes these new ones that scan and everything. You just send him, like, identity-theft amounts of information, and voilà.”

  “How much is it?” Laila asked.

  Now Hannah was frowning. “Wait. Are you actually considering this? Af
ter two years of me badgering you?”

  “Maybe,” Laila replied. Now Hannah’s eyes were fixed on hers, critical, probing. Laila had the sudden fear that Hannah could pull her conversation with Samuel Marquez from the recesses of her memory, that she would predict that Laila was only here because a teacher had told her to be here, and wasn’t that pathetic? Laila’s hand tightened on her phone. She checked her home screen just to break eye contact, but she knew the feeling of Hannah’s scrutiny, and she knew Hannah hadn’t stopped studying her.

  “Oh my God,” Ethan complained. Somebody at their back had hoisted the Bluetooth speaker onto his shoulder and was propelling it like a battering ram through the kitchen. He shoved at their circle, squeezing them out of the linoleum alley, and they spilled into the living room as the volume rose.

  Most of the room had started dancing. Laila staggered into someone’s shoulder. A quarter-size drop of beer leapt from her can, hit her thigh, and soaked a dark spot into the denim. A hand caught her shoulder, steadying her. “You okay?” said a girl with glitter trails painted down her face. The sound barely poked through the sampled guitar. Laila nodded. The crowd tumbled and rearranged her toward the sofa, where two couples (three? unclear) were entangled in practically Cubist strains of body parts. Her calves bumped a solid surface. She climbed up and backward to retreat, drained the last of her beer, and warmth sparked behind her cheeks, wrists, fingernails. She drew a hot breath of air recycled out of fifty throats. She wondered if this was the shard of the night she would remember in ten years, run up on a microfiber storage ottoman in the corner of Felix’s living room, fingertips brushing his ceiling, looking out over a dark meadow of bobbing heads and bodies that jerked with the insistent buildup of the repeating electronic phrase. In the corner hovered a dozen illuminated rectangles clasped in dark hands. Outside, across the river, were buildings built out of stippled lights, high offices whose inhabitants were working too late, broadcasting their presence with lamps in the windows. Laila realized that she was tipsy, her mind skipping seconds, slipping vacantly across moments, and she lifted her phone and took a ten-second video to preserve the time more clearly, and the software made it loop, performing the same sweep of the room again and again from door to skyline, and up here, separated from all these people by a screen and two feet’s height, she waited for a sudden hit of loneliness that didn’t arrive.

  10

  Eden had been to the trading post every week for twelve years and had never seen the place so busy. The ceramic floor disappeared under herds of feet wrapped in brightly colored reinforced cloth. She ordered breakfast not to eat but to listen. She slid into one of the vertical booths that hovered in a corner and listened to the table of Southstar Defectors below, who were talking like Southstar Defectors did. Loudly. There were Ta’adrans in the back room, they said, who were selling their old tech.

  Eden drank her cattail soup slowly. Her mother hated Ta’adrans. The would-be colonists had stayed on the coasts after the war, as if they hadn’t arrived with the intent to replace every person here. Eden wasn’t sure how she felt. The surviving Ta’adrans were families, not soldiers. Their fighting forces had been ruined. And she needed to fix the impulse generator on her back left wing. If the Ta’adrans were selling the tech stripped from their old ships, some of the fastest in the galaxy, could she really turn her back on the chance? . . .

  From: Laila Piedra

  To: Tim Madison

  Subject: stuff 6:23 PM

  * * *

  Hi Mr. Madison,

  I had a conversation with Ms. Nazarenko since I sent my last email, and she inspired me to rewrite the whole piece. I just turned the new version in this afternoon—it’s attached to this email.

  Do you ever make something and get nervous right away that nobody will remember it? I was going through old emails and found this story I sent you in early freshman year, and I didn’t even remember writing it. It’s about this kid who’s a space patrolman even though he’s twelve, so he’s this obnoxious prodigy. Reading it, I sort of wondered whether I was trying to make myself that kid, and now I don’t remember, and that’s so weird, because I feel like the old me has disappeared forever and this might be the only record of the way I was then, if that makes sense.

  Maybe you should write a story while you can’t look at screens and send it to me, if you have time to kill! We could trade.

  Anyway, I’m glad physical therapy is going well. Get ready for that bit with the bomb in the second In the After Path audiobook, because they add an actual bomb sound effect, and whoever did the sound mixing wasn’t that good, so the explosion is incredibly loud. Just be ready.

  Laila

  From: Tim Madison

  To: Laila Piedra

  Subject: stuff 8:45 PM

  * * *

  Dear Laila,

  As wonderful as ever—bravo! Something this small-scale is quite a divergence from your usual stories. I’m glad you’re breaking out of your shell.

  I hate to say this, but I haven’t written anything of my own in years. I simply prefer reading. There are so many good books in the world, and I already feel as if I don’t have enough time to get through everything I want to read. That said, I’m flattered that you would want to read any story I might have to tell!

  As for the story about the space patroller: do you mean the one about the boy who lives on the dormant volcano slopes? Call my lenses rose-tinted, but I remember loving that story, and I thought its protagonist was a hoot, too.

  Sincerely,

  Mr. Madison

  Laila was rereading the story on her phone on the way to sixth period, which was useless, since she couldn’t change anything now. They’d turned in their first revisions yesterday, and the anticipation of getting them back had made her jittery all day. At lunch, Leo had asked her if she needed to listen to some of the eight hours of meditative music he had on his phone. She’d agreed. As the ethereal taps of a vibraphone floated through the earbuds, she’d pictured him stargazing to this soundtrack upstate and felt a single, fleeting moment of relaxation.

  Not anymore. As Laila took her desk, she shielded her phone screen with her hand so she could keep reading. Scanning her own writing in public felt arrogant, a feedback loop pushing her own voice back into her mind, but she needed reassurance that she hadn’t vomited something totally incoherent onto the page. This one is different, insisted a voice she couldn’t quell. She could like this one. Even Mr. Madison had admitted the story was unusual for Laila.

  She closed the document. She needed to keep her hope under her heel.

  She glanced over her shoulder. In most classes, the time immediately before the bell was occupied by students frantically compressing conversations into two-minute increments, sitting on desks or the backs of chairs or anything else they could get away with, trying to capitalize on their own time before the bell handed the power to the teacher. Not this class. Everyone had already settled, watching Nazarenko, who was scribbling in her notebook again. She looked strangely small today, folded up on her pine stool, hair neat like a newsboy cap. Samuel Marquez’s eyes were fixed on the stack of papers face down on Mr. Madison’s desk, and Laila wondered if he’d spent the weekend the way she had, shut away in her room in a fever of productivity.

  At the bell, Nazarenko swept the papers up and walked the aisles to distribute them. They flapped like doves into waiting hands. “Most of you have kept all but a paragraph or two of your original assignments,” she said with faint disgust. “I promise you, two dozen words were not the difference between mediocrity and excellence. Make a habit of burning something to ash before expecting a rebirth.”

  That reassured Laila. Not only had she scrapped the entirety of her original story, she’d also emerged with a piece eight pages longer. Nazarenko couldn’t say she hadn’t put in the work.

  The woman passed Laila’s desk. The rush of air she
left in her wake smelled cold and clean, like water. She dropped Laila’s story without making eye contact. Laila bent the back page open so quickly that the edge of the paper sliced deep into her index finger.

  37Ǐ100.

  Nazarenko had left her one sentence:

  Length and quality are uncorrelated.

  The criticism impacted again on a soft, unprepared surface. Laila watched the wave of grimaces ripple through the rest of the class, paper by returned paper. She watched Peter Goldman’s fist crumple the corner of his story, watched Samuel Marquez press his eyes tightly shut so that his dark eyelashes formed a comb against the top of his cheek.

  Laila’s teeth sought purchase on the slick wall of her cheek for the rest of the class. By the time she stood, she’d tasted blood for half an hour. Something was calcifying at her center. A hard knot of resolve tying into place. The new quarter started tomorrow. She had four more weeks before Bowdoin’s deadline to update her transcript, four more chances to get this right.

  After school, she returned to Nazarenko’s classroom, closed the door, and approached the stool. Nazarenko was reading a novel today, a slim paperback volume with pages so dark with age they reminded Laila of skin.

  “I got rid of the war,” Laila said. “And the saving the world.”

  “That you did.”

  “I—I went to—I got out of the house this weekend, I based the story on that.”

  “You left your house to buy illegally smuggled spaceship parts?”