Final Draft

by Riley Redgate

  “Did you bring the chloroform?” Hannah asked.

  “Shut up,” Laila said.

  Hannah grinned. “They said by the stairwell. We’ll just, I don’t know, lie in wait.”

  “Should someone stay here?” Laila said. “Keep an eye on the door?”

  “I got it,” Leo said, slipping between a column and the wall so the shadow swallowed him. “I’ll text you if he shows. Go, move.”

  Laila followed Hannah through columns that rose from the floor with no apparent planning. Deep blue paint peeled from the I-beams that spanned the ceiling, and every so often, a whisper of nimble feet made Laila picture a rat the length of her forearm. In a back corner, Hannah yanked a rusting chain through a pair of door handles, revealing a pitch-black threshold. Laila’s phone flashlight betrayed it as a stairwell, clouded with cellophane and rotten candy and, depressingly, condom wrappers.

  “God,” Hannah said, kicking an entire condom box away. “Find a nice alley somewhere. This shit is desperate.”

  The dark gave Laila a temporary, anonymous hit of boldness, and she said, “You mean you don’t only do it in warehouse stairwells?”

  Hannah glanced back at her. The LED flashlight turned her face into an exercise in artistic values. Her left eye was a dark pit; her cheek was a blinding curve. “I never reveal my secrets,” she said, and winked.

  “Dweeb,” Laila said. Her face had filled with heat, but she let herself hold Hannah’s eyes, because she knew that—for once—Hannah wouldn’t be able to see her cheeks darkening.

  Hannah paused on the landing to the second floor, still regarding Laila with impish amusement. Laila waited for a gentle insult volleyed back, but Hannah just shook her head, grinning, and pushed through the door.

  The warehouse’s second floor had twelve-foot ceilings, crown molding, and decaying walls with significant holes, like a demolition crew had gone to lunch and forgotten to return. “The old offices,” Hannah said knowingly. She tended to speak about things she’d never encountered as if they’d been known to her since childhood.

  “Did they mean here?” Laila whispered. “Which floor? How are we supposed to know?”

  “Keep that light away from the window.”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “No, it’s fine. Let’s check the next floor.”

  They did. This was storage, ancient cardboard towers stacked against plaster columns, corners of boxes pried out and their contents raided.

  They’d barely entered the fourth floor when a beam of light swung through a threshold ahead. They sucked in a unified breath and dodged back into the stairwell. Hannah caught Laila’s shoulder in a viselike grip, keeping her from the edge of the steps.

  “Found it, I guess,” Hannah breathed. “You think that was him?”

  “I don’t know,” Laila said. They were motionless for a second, studying the door. Hannah seemed to realize she was still gripping Laila’s shoulder, and she drew her hand away as if Laila’s jacket had grown uncomfortably hot.

  “Um, I’ll just,” Laila said quickly and hurried forward. Before putting her ear against the door, she passed her gloved hand over the metal, knowing it would probably clear away approximately none of the germs, but at least the gesture was reassuring. The voices behind were deeper than Felix’s.

  “Not him,” Laila whispered. “Let’s go wait with Leo.”

  They retreated, but on the second floor, Hannah’s phone buzzed. “Leo says he heard a door open down there,” she whispered. “He thinks maybe there’s a back entrance or something.”

  “So we should watch the stairs,” Laila said.

  “Yeah. I’ll tell him to stay put. Let’s just—” They slipped into the second-floor offices but left the door cracked enough to monitor the stairs, and they watched as a procession of unfamiliar bodies trickled upward. Fifteen minutes until the fight, then ten. All but two of the arrivals were boys, and they were all talking at earsplitting volume, which ruined the tense, breathless feeling that had given Laila the ability to hear her heart knocking gently behind her eardrums since they’d crawled through the windows. “People come here a lot?” she asked Hannah.

  “I’m sure, to smoke,” Hannah said. “I’ve smoked on the roof of the warehouse a few doors down a half dozen times. It’s really nice, there’s a skyline view and everything.”

  “What’s smoking like?” Laila asked.

  “Why, is this next on your gotta-try-it-to-impress-a-teacher list? Because if she says anything about meth, please give that shit a hard pass.”

  “I’m not trying to impress her, I’m . . . I don’t know.”

  “Hey, you don’t need to explain.” Hannah was looking at her with something unusually like fondness. “I get it.”

  “Do you?” Laila said. Her eyes were adjusting to the streetlight bleeding in from the windows in the next room over. It made Hannah’s hair look colorless and soft.

  “Yeah,” Hannah said, folding her legs, “I do, I get it.” That cross-legged position made Laila remember sleeping over at Hannah’s for the first time, in freshman year. Laila’s mother had been thrilled. Camille had slept over at her friends’ houses since she’d been seven years old, staying after ballet class with their tiny feet red and suffused with blood, getting up early to slurp cereal from matching bowls. Laila had never been anything but alone, and the sleepovers came late, at a time when Hannah was still ferocious and loudmouthed and hardly even admitted to enjoying Laila’s company—utterly unsocialized, like a girl raised by mountain lions who’d loped in from the wild.

  “I don’t want people to think this is some rebellious phase or whatever,” Laila said. “She’s making me better at the only thing I care about. I feel like I’m waking up.”

  “So this isn’t a bucket list,” Hannah said.

  “Nah, it’s just—it’s insurance,” Laila said. In case she never got the chance to do these things again, here, with people she loved. In case she was going to leave, and Felix and Hannah and Leo would never have seen her become something or anything else, never seen her slip into any chrysalis and emerge evolved, and then they would think of her as a crystallized artifact of their previous lives, and they would leave her behind. In case she stepped out onto a street and a truck took a corner too fast. In case she put her fingers to the keyboard and nothing came out, and suddenly she was dry of experience or thought.

  Then Hannah’s hand was on her wrist. Her fingers were warm. The touch sent a rush of strange white heat up to Laila’s shoulder, and her eyes landed on the chewed neck of Hannah’s sweatshirt, which was high couture and therefore looked as if somebody had assembled it with iron-on prints at an eighth-grade birthday party.

  But Hannah wasn’t looking at her. She had her phone out again. “Leo says the cops are here,” Hannah whispered.

  “What?”

  “Get up, we have to go. Hurry.”

  They stumbled to the next room, peered down through its row of windows at the street. Two police cars sat at the bottom of the road, empty. Four officers crawling around this place.

  Laila knew that Hannah was thinking the same thing: They had to find Felix before he got caught. Then they had to run from the cops. This wasn’t what she’d planned for. Laila wondered if every questionable decision was destined to snowball, if that was just how risk always played out, with particular attention to gravity.

  She and Hannah hesitated at the door to the stairwell but hadn’t taken a breath before two bodies, bulky with items at their belts, jogged upward. They flinched back, waited, and hardly a minute later, Felix’s long body twitched up the steps before them. They barreled through the door, grabbed him, and yanked him back. He was halfway to punching them before he realized.

  “What are you guys doing here?” he said. “I didn’t tell—”

  “The police are here,” Laila hissed.

  “I—they what?”

  “Two of them are upstairs,” Hannah said. “Let’s go. Come on.”

  “No. I need to get
this over with.”

  Laila snapped her fingers in his face. “Are you listening? The cops! Do you want to go to jail? You want me and Hannah to be the ones to tell your mom about that? Because—”

  Yelling ricocheted from the fourth floor of the stairwell. Hannah shoved the door open and shouldered them both through. “Fucking go.”

  They fucking went. Laila leapt down two steps at a time, dodging the silvery snatches of chip bags. Each time her toes missed one, she pictured turning her ankle, hurtling headfirst down the poorly lit steps, arms outstretched, two snapped forearms, skull meeting wall. She reached the bottom of the first stairwell and grabbed the rail, which felt like pure slime, a fulcrum to send her rocketing down the next set of steps. Beside her, Felix was going three at a time, until—suddenly—his feet became misplaced, his arms overreached, his body betrayed him. His right foot hit the ground floor at an angle that Laila could see was wrong, even in the vibrating light from Hannah’s phone. He didn’t let out a sound, but his jaw fell, lashes drawn up from widened eyes as if electrified. Laila staggered to place herself beneath him, to catch his fall. Her arms closed around his waist, and she stumbled back with his momentum until her head knocked into the cinder block. Showers of light rained into the stairwell. Hannah was stringing together curses in new and spectacular formations, her hands seizing both of their forearms, because footsteps were so close above now that Laila could hear the details around their corners, the specific scrape of grit.

  Felix drooped. Laila’s back pulled with the weight of him. Hannah rotated them—Laila had a faceful of Felix’s hair, could see only slivers of barely lit concrete—and then Hannah killed her phone light, and they were beneath the bottom stairwell, hunched into a triangle of black space so thick with cobwebs that Laila couldn’t breathe without feeling them tremble around her lips. Felix had slumped back against her. She hadn’t thought of him so physically before. He smelled like afternoon rain and fabric softener, and he quivered in her grip, tiny breaths tripping from his mouth as his hands thrashed the air in desperate pursuit of his ankle.

  Laila remembered season six, episode nine, of The Rest, the most controversial episode of the most controversial season, which took place entirely in a blackout, with fragmented objects in negative space the only thing visible. “The experimental cinematography doesn’t guide the eye,” a scathing review had said, “so much as suggest that the episode’s director considered that somebody might be watching and decided, deliberately, fuck your need for guidance.” Which, to Laila, had sounded strangely like praise amid the rest of the sentences in the review, which had been filled with phrases like “overwhelming incompetence” and “this backbreaking disappointment of what used to be so enjoyable.”

  Light broke the nest of invisible sensation, and a clank rang out from the door’s long-rusted opening mechanism. Somebody barreled out of the stairwell door and directly into the two other police officers, who were waiting calmly on the first floor for the kids they’d known would run, terrified. That could so easily have been them if Felix hadn’t twisted his ankle. This seemed unfair—the police’s advantage of experience and training, a totally unbalanced situation, although that was of course how law enforcement was supposed to work. Laila closed her eyes, her hand finding Hannah’s and squeezing so hard that Hannah’s grip gave out beneath her fingers. “It’s okay,” she heard Hannah whisper, barely loud enough to hear, but so close that she could feel Hannah’s mouth moving a millimeter from her earlobe. “Just wait. It’s okay.”

  Felix had sagged too far. Laila pulled Hannah’s hand to the front of his hoodie, and they maneuvered him silently to the filthy floor. Laila tried not to picture vermin or insects ground into dirt by the years. She squatted by Felix’s twitching body, still in shock, and stroked his hair back from his face, which was a labyrinth of sweat trails, and they waited in the shadows until the first police officers, the ones who had run up the stairs to flush out all the miscreants, had returned down the stairs, saying to a trio of strangers with slumped shoulders, “Go. Go. Watch your step.”

  “You can tell the truth,” Leo said. “You just did this to get out of going to the Catskills.”

  “You got me,” Felix said. His twisted ankle was propped ostentatiously on a mound of cushions, an ice-filled Ziploc sagging over the joint. “I hate nature and I hate you.”

  “Hmm,” Leo said, unbothered. “Doesn’t matter, I guess. Hannah can give you a piggyback up the mountain if this isn’t better in two weeks.”

  “Are you trying to kill me, Leo?” Hannah said. “Come on, let the guy rest.” She set a bottle of ibuprofen and a glass of water by Felix’s bedside. “Get some sleep, Wrestlemania. Or else.”

  “Remind me on Monday,” Felix said. “I gotta add doctor to the list of jobs you should never have.”

  Leo ushered Hannah out into Felix’s living room before she could retort. In the threshold, Laila looked back at Felix and smiled. “Rest up?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Thanks, by the way. I owe you guys.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Laila said. “See you Monday.”

  Five minutes later, Laila and Hannah were outside Felix’s building, silent, watching Leo’s cab edge down the one-way street. After he disappeared, Hannah said, “You okay?” She’d absorbed her parents’ rushed, reluctant pronunciation of these words. Y’kay?

  “Yeah,” Laila said. “You?”

  “Fine.”

  “Weird night, right?”

  “There have been more normal nights,” Hannah said. “Want to get some ice cream or something else packed with sugar?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “Thought so. I already found a place.” Hannah zoomed in on a cluster of red pins on her screen. She turned once, then in the other direction. “This way. I think. No, this way.”

  This was the first warm evening of spring. They were close enough to a street full of clubs to hear the distant syncopated thuds and to hear bands of people laughing their way from block to block, their voices blending into a lively cluster of midtones. Hannah and Laila were quiet, walking. Hannah pulled at the shred of a scarf tucked into her weathered army jacket. There was a spot of something dark and sticky from the warehouse on the thigh of her charcoal jeans, which formed drainpipes into her most severely decomposed vintage sneakers.

  They exited the northwest corner of Crown Heights, heading through Fort Greene, then passed between the waist-high iron grilles that bounded a tiny park. In this neighborhood, the pursuit of green space had become a ferocious battle between housing commissioners and wealthy residents. This was a malnourished alleyway more than a park, a ten-foot-wide strip of gravel bounded by a dozen skinny willow trees, but it had been the subject of meetings and petitions and counter-petitions and protests since 2011. In the wake of the rain, the park smelled as soft and damp as moss.

  They’d been walking in contented silence, but suddenly Laila was speaking. “You didn’t mean what you said on Thursday, did you?” she asked. She hadn’t even realized she’d been thinking about it.

  “Which part?” Hannah said.

  “About me being boring,” Laila said. “You—I don’t know, you said I wasn’t fun.”

  “I don’t mean anything I say. Ever.”

  “Right . . . but—”

  “No,” Hannah said. “Being serious: I thought you’d know I didn’t mean that. Sorry.”

  “Yeah. I know you were kidding,” Laila said. “Sorry, I don’t know why I brought it up.”

  But she did know, as Hannah went quiet and looked back over the strings of chains, scrutinizing the willow bark. Laila wanted Hannah to tell her all the ways she was exciting and fun. Hannah never did that, though. Laila would lead her to the precipice of some obvious compliment and Hannah would stop every time, yanking, obstinate, refusing to say the words. In the early stages, Laila had used to think this was a tactic Hannah used to keep people interested. Like playing hard-to-get. Now she knew Hannah had no language to express things lik
e appreciation or affection; they were too difficult, and had to be talked around for years in phrases like “I already found a place.”

  As Hannah perched on a bench near the park exit to lace up her sneakers, she said, “So, was tonight useful? Going to write it into something?”

  “Yeah. Nazarenko told me to take a risk.” Laila sat down beside her. “I guess I pictured risk being fun, but I’m kind of freaked out. Those guys could get time for that. Could’ve been us.”

  Hannah sighed. “Yeah, well, that’s what happens after the adrenaline rush. Consequences.”

  “The likelihood of suffering.”

  “What?”

  “Nazarenko told Samuel and me that risk is the likelihood of suffering.”

  “God, she sounds emo.”

  Laila laughed and looked up at the street of sky overhead. After a quiet moment, her smile faded. “You know, one of his assignments,” she began, and hesitated.

  “Samuel’s?” Hannah said.

  “Yeah, his last assignment. I found this note Nazarenko wrote. She told him his female characters seemed like glorified sex dolls.”

  “I retract my derision, I love her.”

  “So, she said he should spend some time with a girl he thought was unattractive.”

  Hannah waited a second for her to continue. Then it seemed to sink in. She straightened up. “Laila.”

  “I’ve always tried so hard not to think about what I look like,” Laila said, rushing through the words. “Or, I mean, what strangers think of me, generally. It seems like such a waste of time. But now that I’m trying to put myself out there and get out in the world, I feel like—I don’t know, I’m losing all this control I had when there was only us four, and Mr. Madison, and my family.” She swallowed hard. “This would never have happened before. Suddenly wondering whether I’m attractive. I miss when I could just send you guys a biweekly picture of me with Malak, and I knew you guys loved me, and I didn’t have to care that this is what people see when they look at me.”

  Hannah was quiet for long enough that Laila managed to blink away the hot itch of tears.