Final Draft

by Riley Redgate

  “Excuse me,” Mrs. Stanton said, looking back at them. “I am so sorry.”

  Laila realized with a strange, hot jolt that Mrs. Stanton’s dark eyes were full, shining with two thick bands of water. The sight was as bizarre as if she had lifted her face to reveal a stranger underneath.

  “We heard some awful news this morning,” Mrs. Stanton said hoarsely. “Our creative writing teacher, Mr. Madison, passed away suddenly last night from complications after his car accident.”

  There was an instant filled with recoil, the moment that trails the punch of the hammer into the bullet.

  Something alien happened to Laila’s body. She was sinking into the ground. She was hovering in zero gravity, somersaulting underwater, feeling the nauseating effects of slow revolution. Mrs. Stanton was taking what couldn’t have been more than a second’s breath, but a year’s worth of space accordioned out within that pause, fold after heavy fold, creating a gross excess of time that seemed to unbalance the axis of reality, so that by the time the woman’s voice stirred back to life, Laila had already slipped from her world as it had existed.

  What was Mrs. Stanton even saying? Talking about counseling services, about the school body? How did any of that matter? What mattered was Mr. Madison getting the card they’d all signed. Ms. Bird had to bring that to him, with all their initials and flippant little notes, and he had to ask her, in some faltering, nervous way, if she wanted to get coffee sometime. He had to go home from the rehab center and catch up on season twelve of The Rest, no spoilers, please. He had to read the last Moondowners book when it came out this September. He’d been anticipating the last installment for five years with everybody else, worked into a frenzy of theories, and he and Laila had to tear through the thirteen-hundred-page finale in a breathless twenty-four hours, and Laila had to send him an email the instant she closed the cover—What did you think? Can you believe it? Can you believe what happened? And by then, September, he had to be back here at school, shaky but healed, waiting at Open House to welcome a new class of freshmen who needed somebody to show them a little faith.

  Laila couldn’t breathe. Her hands felt cold, tingling in an absence of oxygen. She wished he had been wearing his glasses when she’d visited the hospital. She wished his last sight of her had been clear, and that she’d seen him clearly, but she’d been crying, and she remembered a blur. She had no idea, now, what she’d been crying about. He had been alive. He’d been right there, right in front of her.

  16

  “Laila?” Three tentative taps on her door. “You have visitors.”

  As her mother drew the door wide, Felix, Leo, and Hannah crowded into the threshold.

  “Hey,” she said.

  They closed the door at their backs. “You weren’t answering our texts,” Hannah said.

  “Which is fine,” Leo added.

  Laila knew Hannah didn’t think it was fine. Hannah had been stressed. Laila had watched a torrent of Hannah’s messages come in for eighteen hours before her phone died.

  “You think you’ll miss school tomorrow, too?” Felix asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “If you do come,” Leo said, “they brought a half-dozen counselors in. They’re on call in the office.”

  “My mom’s a psychologist,” Laila said. “If I needed one. I don’t need one.”

  Nobody had to reply. The words gained an absurd edge as Laila sat there behind them, wearing yesterday’s clothes, smelling like herself in a way that wild animals probably did to create a unique scent identity, having slept for maybe three hours because last night her dreams had been determined to wake her up. Room 431 had appeared in every dream, but not as a classroom. First it was a transitional chamber where a flickering python chased her through a window into an eternal drop. Next came a sanitized-white version of the room lined with surgical carts, onto which Laila crawled and lay spread-eagle, the ceiling spiraling up above her, her skin tingling as she waited for a scalpel. Once she saw him. Mr. Madison was sitting at his desk, but his face was different, unrecognizable, and when she woke up, she wondered how she’d even known it was him, that bizarre imitation with thick dark hair, a face she might have stitched together from advertisements on the subway or faces in the school halls.

  Hannah muttered something under her breath to the boys. Leo rummaged around in his backpack. Felix moved to her desk, and Hannah crouched to collect clothes from the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Laila said.

  “Making sure you don’t rot in squalor,” Hannah said, hanging towels from hooks on the back of the door.

  Laila considered protesting, but that would take energy. And as her floor revealed itself, as Felix stowed binders and loose-leaf and old assignments inside drawers, she felt a small stressor smooth away.

  Leo approached her bed with a short stack of books he’d fished from his backpack, which he placed on her dresser. Laila took one of the books, Halla’s Promise, which she knew was Leo’s favorite, but she didn’t open it.

  “What’s wrong?” Leo asked.

  “I haven’t been reading much of this stuff lately,” Laila said. After leaving school yesterday morning, she’d tried for the first time in a while to dive back into her favorites of these worlds, hungry for escape. But she couldn’t read Moondowners, with the immortal Darsinnians questioning the meaning of life. She couldn’t read In the After Path without picturing Mr. Madison listening to a CD player in her sunny, peaceful concept of a rehab center. Besides, that series centered on a family of aliens who lived along the rim of a black hole and knit alternate realities into existence, and the jealousy she felt at the idea of alternate realities was so intense it nauseated her.

  “Why not?” Hannah asked.

  “I don’t know,” Laila said. “Maybe I’m growing out of it.” She scanned the posters on her walls, weary. The Season IX mural seemed cartoonish. She looked at it and all she could see was Mr. Madison’s classroom. Brutal reality.

  For the next hour, Hannah and Felix sprawled on Laila’s ragged deep-pile rug and did homework. Leo took the desk. Occasionally they spoke. Felix read out tidbits from the section he was reading on the Cold War. Leo explained that the density of a dwarf star was so high that a tablespoon’s volume scooped out of such a star would weigh several tons. Laila huddled under her covers and made a few small comments in reply, which the others treated as normal.

  By the time Leo and Felix left, she was sitting upright on her bed, feeling as if a balm had been spread over a burn.

  Hannah had lingered afterward. She approached Laila, stopped a pace away. She hadn’t slept either, Laila saw. Without eight hours’ sleep a night, the circles beneath Hannah’s eyes darkened as quickly as paper over flame.

  It felt strange for her to be so close. With a sort of desperation, Laila had been turning the memory of last Saturday over and over, a memory that felt louder and more destructive than a demolition, utterly destabilizing. If she didn’t have anything else that felt real, she had this. She had them. She remembered Hannah’s tongue brushing her upper lip. The darkness of a bench shielded from a streetlight by rustling leaves. Hannah’s fingers forming roots up the back of her neck: hard, fixed, necessary.

  Laila touched Hannah’s forearm, let her fingers brush down to the knob of her wrist. She could see points of gooseflesh lift in response, but Hannah moved her arm away.

  “Listen,” Hannah said quietly. “I’m thinking we should hold off.”

  Laila’s hand faltered. No, she thought. Don’t make an idiot out of me. Don’t decide this was a mistake and walk it back. Not now.

  “I want this to start right,” Hannah said. “You need to be taking care of yourself right now, not some new thing.”

  “You came to tell me you don’t want to be with me?” Laila said blankly. Her thoughts were leaden and wouldn’t transfer correctly from neuron to neuron. She couldn’t believe how alone the idea made her feel, run through with a potent mixture of panic and fear, as cold and stro
ng as the drink she’d sipped at the Ave Maria.

  “Laila, no—I do,” Hannah said. “I do, so badly, but this isn’t the right time.”

  Laila’s voice rose, shaking. “We don’t have any other time. You’re moving across the country in four months.”

  “I know. But if we start now, the dynamic will be this shitty imbalance. Me trying to hold you up, probably getting in the way. And you not having space to heal.”

  The pieces began to work together. Laila could see with perfect, sober clarity. Hannah didn’t want to invest a fortune of emotional energy into propping her up. Hannah needed to slip out from beneath the promise she’d made when they’d kissed. Hannah was going to leave her apartment, and then, soon, this city, and she wanted a clean cut.

  “I get it,” Laila said.

  “Laila—”

  “I get it. You can go.”

  “But—”

  “Go.”

  Hannah stood there a moment, her mouth a tight line. Finally, she moved for the door. She kept hesitating, kept inviting Laila to ask her to stay. But then the door was closed. She was gone.

  Laila showered, changed, brushed her teeth, and sat down to dinner. Her parents matched today. Her father had swung by her mother’s yoga studio to try out her class that afternoon. They were wearing neon, a yellow so pure it verged on green. She couldn’t look at them.

  “How are you feeling today, sweetheart?” asked her mother. Camille and her father seemed to have surrendered all talking duties to her mother. Laila felt like a patient.

  “Hungry,” Laila said.

  “That’s good,” said her mother. “An appetite is good news. So is being out of bed. Here.” She offered a basket of rolls. Laila practically breathed one in, the first thing she’d eaten all day.

  “You have wonderful friends,” her mother went on. “They’re so thoughtful to come over and help out.”

  Laila couldn’t watch the veins trailing from her mother’s mouth to her soft jawline. She eyed the checkmark logos of her parents’ workout clothes, those matching marks, making them a unit positioned against her.

  “I think getting back to school will be good for you, Lolly. Getting back into a routine.”

  Laila ate another roll and didn’t reply. Didn’t meet Camille’s wary eyes or her father’s concerned gaze. All three of them were a Battleship cohort, like they’d used to play when she was younger, sending over missiles at her invisible playing field, hoping to make impact. From here any attempt at contact felt like an attempt at brutality.

  “Laila?”

  She’d eaten too quickly. A cavity had ballooned open somewhere between her stomach and her heart, contorting both inward. Its reach stretched up to her head to yank her thoughts downward, affecting her vision, so the kitchen seemed to turn slowly until she was corkscrewed too deeply inside this apartment, she was stuck in the tightest, smallest space, she had to get out.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I feel sick.”

  She dashed back to her room, locked the door, and gagged twice over her trash can. Nothing came out. She collapsed onto her bed and hid herself beneath the covers, squeezing handfuls of comforter in a death grip, but the air grew so hot, so close. She needed breath. She needed out.

  She slid her window wide and climbed down the fire escape into the chirping spring night.

  —

  Laila lived a fifteen-minute walk from a club called Turntable. Hannah went there on a monthly basis. At 10:30, Laila stopped wandering around Bushwick and joined the line outside the club almost without realizing it. The queue was filled with people who stood, spoke, and dressed exactly like Hannah. Laila felt as if she’d fallen into some ancient hipster primordial soup from which Hannah had emerged at age fourteen, fully formed. Kiss a girl once and suddenly the world seems built to support her existence.

  Have you ever had a day that felt like it changed the trajectory of your entire life?

  She shouldn’t have spent so many of her last words to Mr. Madison on something doomed to fail. She should have seen the expiration date printed against the memory of herself and Hannah together.

  Laila cycled through the line that snaked up the sidewalk. A woman beyond the ropes yelled over the crowd to have their IDs out. The bouncer, in the roaring warmth just behind the door, was a tall man with a tattoo of a snake coiled around his throat. He hardly glanced at Laila’s ID before waving her through. As she hunted through the front room’s wall-to-wall crowds for anything that might indicate a coat check, Sebastian’s story about sneaking his friend into Turntable returned to mind. Laila could understand the joke in everything he’d said, now. Just think about this place, with its golden railings and opulent cloth ceilings, getting fooled by a kid and a hand truck wheeling some garbage into a side door. Wasn’t it funny?

  Two drinks and twenty-six dollars later, because apparently drinking was an exercise in bankruptcy, Laila had managed to stop seeing Hannah in every short girl with dyed hair. Another drink in, she forgot to care about the price of what she was pouring down her throat, and she launched herself up the purple-carpeted steps, where a spinoff current of clubbers was lured toward a beat that staggered behind the rhythm of the main dance hall. A pair of tall walnut doors cracked wide and admitted her into a room that alternated between electric pink and pitch black, swimming soporifically from light to dark in thirty-second alternation. Laila looked up. The light oozed across the ceiling like lava, migrating toward a distant stack of speakers. For a moment, she thought Knight Gard was performing, had shown up to urge her along again, but it was some skinny pale kid who looked hardly older than Laila, cutting some of Knight Gard’s most avant-garde tracks into a repetitive synth hook from an eighties disco song. Circular booths spanned the nearest wall, pressing into one another’s oblong sides like soap bubbles, and Laila trailed down the line. She would settle for half a booth. A quarter of a booth. Any empty space.

  When a hand grabbed her wrist, she looked down, thinking for a wild second that it was Hannah’s hand, thinking that in the place she’d banished herself for distraction’s sake, she’d sent herself right back into Hannah’s palms, but of course Hannah wasn’t there. Instead she saw four girls in a booth, one wearing a sweatshirt with cutoff sleeves that advertised The Rest: Season IV. With nauseating clarity, Laila remembered the Season IV poster Mr. Madison had pinned beside his desk, all those beautiful faces gazing sternly down on them as they debated the boy prophet’s motives. She remembered the noon light drawing gridded squares on the linoleum in his classroom, toeing those lines with her sneaker sophomore year, during one of Hannah and Felix’s worst fights. He’d talked her down every day for a week. She remembered when Mr. Madison had the flu in junior year, and he’d missed eight days of class, and Laila had nearly punched Peter Goldman for snidely suggesting they should just replace him. Every day, every conversation, these faces had looked out from the poster on the wall, the sleeping people suspended in their Resting fluid, just waiting to wake up.

  “Your patch,” sweatshirt girl said. “I looked for that patch for like seven seasons.”

  Laila didn’t know what she was talking about for a moment. Then she looked down at herself. “Oh,” she said. “I found it in a thrift shop.” The patch on her denim jacket’s left pocket was a silhouette of the USR Washington, with the motto of Earth’s former postapocalyptic dictator stitched in red lettering. LEAVE NOTHING BEHIND.

  “You should sit down,” said the girl, and Laila didn’t argue.

  By 2 A.M.., delirious with lack of sleep and too-strong whiskey gingers, Laila felt like she’d known the girls at the table since birth. They’d told her they were seniors at NYU and had spent more time introducing their majors than their names (economics, French, chemical engineering, art history). Laila had told them she was a senior, too, but at a small school in Brooklyn. She’d also said she was here with a couple of friends who had ditched her. Amazing that they’d believed her. Everything she said sounded like bullshit; she could hardly sit u
p straight anymore.

  They were still talking. The one with the rimless glasses, Ella or maybe Etta or Anna, it was hard to hear, was from Brooklyn, too. The others were all planning to move to Brooklyn after graduation and live with each other, and were trying to convince Ella/Etta/Anna to go in on a four-bedroom with them, despite the fact that she could live at home for free. This was a tough sell, Ella/Etta/Anna told Laila confidingly, and everyone else told her to shut up because she was an economics major and already had a job offer from Goldman that was set to pay her—according to Aditi, art history major—“like practically six figures, which, what? You’re not even twenty-two yet.” Aditi, art history major, said twenty-two as if it were impossibly young, instead of the way the number felt to Laila, which was like an impossibly distant and ancient future. These girls were so nice, even if they were old in that undecided way—jobless and kidless but so distinct from Laila and her friends that she could have circled the giveaways in one of those spot-the-differences images. The tattoo on the wrist, the wallet thick with cards, the way they spoke without any evident fear of being cut off or taken like a joke. The way they were obviously comfortable with being alone, the offhand way they referenced it. They were being so welcoming to her.

  She felt an urge to tell them that the thought of her college decision made her feel ill. It would give her away, but who cared? How could consequences intrude into a space like this?

  No—she cared. She did. She had to stay discreet. Normal. Sit up. Drink a little more water, wake the hell up.

  “Also, wow,” said Jen with the cutoff sweatshirt, “sorry, but your friends suck. They haven’t texted you?”

  “My phone’s dead,” Laila said. “We should have figured out a place to meet.”

  Jen, Aditi, Ella/Etta/Anna, and the other one (Chloe? Carly?) were exchanging looks. Laila had overstayed her welcome. She was angling her torso to slide out of the booth when Jen said, “Okay, well, you should stick with us.”