Final Draft

by Riley Redgate

  “If you need any help with the space bits,” Leo said, and pointed to himself.

  “Not much space in there anymore,” Laila said. “But thanks.”

  Maybe, she dared hope, she would make an A this time around. Then she might even be able to relax a little.

  Sixth period arrived, and with it, another checkerboard of papers splayed across the front desk. She was aiming for an 84, halfway between her previous 68 and a 100. With an 84, an A grade would be an achievable goal.

  The number on her last page was 62. A backslide. No longer a passing grade.

  Laila walked into Nazarenko’s classroom after school and didn’t bother saying hello. “Why did you mark this down?”

  Nazarenko was drawing something in her notebook. She didn’t look up, didn’t sound surprised. “Because it’s less compelling than your last story.”

  “How? Tell me how.”

  “Now that you’ve abandoned the genre constraints, something feels missing from your main characters.”

  “What’s missing?”

  “If I could tell you, I wouldn’t describe the element as missing.” Nazarenko gave her head a curious tilt. “Piedra, is my opinion on the piece the thing that matters most to you?”

  “No.”

  “So why the interrogation?”

  “Because I want this perfect. And you’re the only other person who wants it perfect, and I—I can’t do any more.”

  Nazarenko surveyed her a moment. She appeared to be deciding something, a little hollow puckered in her cheek where she was teasing the inside.

  Finally, Nazarenko said, “I recommend you take this week away from the piece.”

  “I can’t,” Laila said. “Next week is the deadline for my second application update. Bowdoin can’t see an F on my transcript.”

  “Second application updates are optional.”

  “They say that, but how interested are they going to think I am if I skip something? I have to.”

  “You don’t have to; you want to. Take the week. You have half a dozen more opportunities to revise before class ends.”

  Laila stared into her calm gray eyes. Was this a test? The same woman who’d kept a four-year vow of silence—she couldn’t mean that. Or was this about Mr. Madison? Putting her writing on hold would only make her feel like she was letting him down. She wasn’t going to quit. Nothing could make her quit.

  “No,” she said and went for the door. “I’m going to get this right.”

  Spring exploded out of adolescence into summer over the next forty-eight hours. Laila reacquainted herself with the million types of heat that marked the transition: the damp heat between backpack and T-shirt and sticky lower back; the frictional warmth rubbed into life between her chafing thighs; the heat interspersed with wisps of cool, earthy dryness when she passed the mouths of cavernous garages; the scented roar radiating from the sides of empanada trucks that made her irrationally angry at the existence of food; the reasonable heat in shade punctuated by crosstown bluster; the unreasonable heat at crosswalks in relentless, beating sun; and her own attempted avoidance by standing in the squat shadows of streetlamps. There was nowhere to escape. Even inside, when she stationed herself in front of her family’s living room air conditioner, the sweat that caught between her wrists and her laptop gave the season away. Summer, like dust, had settled into every crack, and it made irritation twice as easy. Waiting in grocery store lines, sweat itching at the roots of her hair, and standing on the J platform as sunbeams prickled dangerously at the exposed skin around her flip-flops’ straps, Laila found it depressingly easy to hate other people just for being thickets of heat generation.

  “Hey,” Camille said on Thursday afternoon, peeking into Laila’s room, “I finished the first Moondowners.”

  Laila waved a hand toward her bookcase and didn’t turn around. “Help yourself,” she mumbled, vaguely aware that several weeks ago, she would have asked Camille everything she thought about the series. No—several weeks ago, she would have had the time to ask Camille everything. With five days until her last deadline, there was no more time now. Not for anything except this. Her life felt utterly irrelevant, something to be abandoned as she threw herself instead into a place that didn’t exist: the mansion on the seaside of an unnamed country, home to her new main characters during their week together, torn between the crash of the ocean and the quiet whisper of a meadow.

  These people she meant to build were proving problematic. She’d never had an issue finding Eden’s voice, but twice now, she’d tried to write Eden’s dialogue and she’d recognized Hannah’s voice before writing a full sentence. Not acceptable.

  Hannah had tried to text her three times that week. On Tuesday:

  Hannah (12:32 p.m.): hey, you ready for the trip? i’m trying to decide what sour movie concession snacks to bring

  Then, Wednesday:

  Hannah (4:03 p.m.): how’s the story going?

  Hannah (6:23 p.m.): so not great?

  Then, in the tiny hours of Thursday morning, when Laila was still sitting at her desk, a smear of graphite down the side of her hand, scribbling and erasing fourteen variations of an opening paragraph:

  Hannah (1:14 a.m.): this weekend is going to be really awkward if you don’t talk to me.

  Hannah (1:14 a.m.): not that i don’t want you to be there. i do.

  Hannah (1:18 a.m.): laila, can we please talk about this

  No. They couldn’t talk about this. Laila couldn’t even think about the kiss; it was a distraction, nothing had come of it, it meant nothing. She had discovered a preternatural talent for directing her mind away from topics that might drain or disturb her. Of course, happiness felt distant. Instead she felt a single median emotion, the epicenter of a spoked dartboard of anger, sadness, cheerfulness, mirth, partitioned from them by an impenetrable metal ring. There were drawbacks. Trying to write when she couldn’t access emotional variation felt like trying to walk on feet that didn’t exist.

  Laila didn’t quite trust herself anymore. Was that twisted little jolt what happiness usually felt like? Or that dull, hazy satisfaction? She didn’t remember feeling that way in happy memories. What if the description wasn’t accurate? Over the course of the week, she’d started collecting other people’s words on the sidewalk or behind the register, to build voices and worlds out of snippets like “Three fifty, there you go, sweetheart” or “That’s the thing, bro, you don’t even know what he thinking,” or “She told me—no, she deadass said, ‘Frankly, you’re not cut out for’—like, blah blah blah, Kristen.” All these people had seemed more real than she felt, in possession of full and well-rounded lives, whereas hers was a two-dimensional blueprint. She’d tried to assemble a life for herself and had instead let the whole thing collapse. Fine. This was what she had on the other end. She needed a final shot of inspiration, that was all.

  But the more she watched and listened and mined for information, the hollower her interior felt. She was trying to fill a bottomless pit. She started to think that had to be part of the process. Wouldn’t she have to be a chameleon, no natural color of her own, to adopt everybody else’s? But it made everything so slow, imagining how everyone else went about feeling, and she had no time. She was starting to rely on the idea of the Catskills as the place she would have to shake that last inspiration loose, but she couldn’t trust the trip would give her that last shot of inspiration.

  So on Thursday afternoon, desperate, Laila flipped the loose caps on a pair of overflowing mailboxes near her subway stop and drew out a pair of postcards, crumpled them into her pockets, and unfolded them later in her bedroom. One said, in minuscule lettering that formed a word search of text in cheap blue pen,

  Sammy—

  Wonderful to receive your letter. Thank you for thinking of us. Yes, Otto is okay, he has been moved. He would like to hear from you if you can find time to give him a call. Jean and I are preparing to take a trip to Salt Lake City to meet Jean’s niece for the first time, so it appears th
at our travels will overlap, inconvenient, but the bird must fly! Do feel free to email me if that is faster and if you would like to. Jean has started to hate her email because the office sends her requests at ten-thirty! Miss you greatly!

  Yours,

  Ron

  The other read,

  Hey dork you asked for a postcard so heres that postcard you asked for.

  Rome is awesome, you suck, see you in 2 weeks,

  Your Worst Nightmare,

  David

  Laila returned the postcards to their mailboxes just before dinner and finished her final character sketches: Otto, the sickly sixty-five-year-old in and out of hospitals for decades, and David, the basketball player in love with his younger brother’s best friend. Loose adaptations, but she’d needed these seeds. She wondered if she should feel guilty; she didn’t. She would never meet any of those people. They would never meet her. Maybe these letters had felt like intimate confessions to the senders, but without context of them as people, the words felt anesthetized and general. She had to imagine the rest into place: a crooked joint that made Ron’s writing that shaky, the way David’s looping letters probably got him teased mercilessly in middle school.

  The lack of guilt wasn’t because she thought her story was more important than their privacy. Privacy hadn’t even occurred to her. Being hideously sad creates a type of myopic self-regard that is truly spectacular, and you can perceive this shift even from the inside. You can feel your perspective changing, but that doesn’t lessen the effect. The world’s population becomes a monolith of people you are letting down, an indistinguishable other, a force of stress and expectation, which makes them strangely into an object for your consumption. They’re all bound to hate you in the end, so why not snap at them, withdraw from them, borrow their mail and rifle through their personal lives, stare numbly at them as if they were speaking to you in Russian. Why even attempt positive engagement. What the fuck is the point.

  Really, since last week, the only thing that had really made Laila smile was her need to demonstrate to her parents that she was coping, her best act over dinner every night. They never mentioned Mr. Madison, but she’d never been able to hear an unspoken topic so clearly.

  “Feeling okay today?” her mother always asked, or some detail about the Catskills trip, which she and Laila’s father seemed to be clinging to as evidence that Laila was doing all right, that she was functional.

  “A little better today,” Laila always said, injecting as much energy as she could into the lie. Nothing stressed her out more physically than those dinners.

  Tonight was particularly bad. “How are you getting up to the mountains tomorrow?” “Are you excited for the eclipse?” “Is Leo bringing his equipment?” (Car, yes, yes.)

  The moment Laila’s plate was clean, she retreated to her room. For the first time in a while, she cracked open her laptop instead of her notebook. Maybe watching The Rest might relax her, she thought. She’d never finished the new season, after all. So she signed up for a free Yahoo! trial and made a little event out of the occasion, doused a bowl of popcorn in powdered Parmesan cheese like her father always did.

  She turned off the lights in her room, settled in, and couldn’t last through one episode. She kept thinking of Mr. Madison. How he’d gushed over the show’s surreal visuals, how they’d debated back and forth about the fate of the boy prophet, and how he would never know how that story ended. She remembered how he’d swooned over Grayson’s character, and in junior year, she’d let herself start agreeing, silently coming out to him in a way he’d never pushed or questioned. If he’d been there, maybe she would have been able to talk about Hannah, or even think about Hannah without feeling like a hand was clasping her throat. Maybe all this emptiness in her life would have been fixed if he’d been there, if he’d still lived in his apartment in Harlem that he used to joke about because of his awful upstairs neighbors and the heat that gave out every few weeks. If he’d still come into class anxious and humming and still talked to her over lunch about Camille and her parents and her friends even though he’d never known any of them. If she’d still been able to confide things to him that she’d barely admitted to herself yet. If he’d still been there for her. As the characters of The Rest fought off their own dreams, she thought of that unreal non-person she’d dreamed up behind Mr. Madison’s desk, and by the time she closed the computer, unable to take any more nightmare than she’d been prescribed, she was wondering if anyone else would ever look at her the way he had, with such transparent acceptance that they could arrive wearing someone else’s skin and she would still know, It’s you.

  19

  Hannah’s cabin gazed out from Cooper’s Hawk Mountain, a small but defined peak in the Catskills known for the beak of gray stone at its summit. The trail up the mountainside was complex and exhausting, much like Hannah’s family. Generally the hike took two hours. Hannah’s mother believed everything worthwhile required grueling work, including, apparently, relaxation.

  When they began their hike on Friday, the evening light was still crisp and clean, whittling narrow shafts to fit between evergreen needles. Plastic circles tacked to trees, bright yellow, lit the way up like little suns. As the group ascended, the smell of the air took on a subterranean coolness, as if it had just been exhumed from the heart of the mountain. Nothing in the city smelled like this, so recognizably like the life cycle, the pure emissions of oxygen from the breathing trees and the organic materials breaking down underfoot.

  They had to stop half a dozen times to hand off Leo’s telescope bag, which nobody could carry for longer than twenty minutes without falling behind, but eventually they reached the summit. On the outside, the cabin looked slick and greenish, as if there had just been rain. Its interior was modern, open-plan, minimalist. Leo vanished up the steps with his telescope, preparing to set up on the roof, and Felix loped after him, calling, “Yo, careful, the roof’s slippery.”

  Laila set her backpack beside the downstairs sofa, which she knew was more comfortable than any of the beds. This could still be a good weekend, she told herself as she followed them upstairs. A productive weekend.

  She perched in the seat by the bay windows upstairs, flipped her notebook open, and looked out at the mountains. She heard the others. Hannah was setting up pots and pans downstairs, moving too carelessly; they banged vocally against one another. Leo’s and Felix’s voices were muffled through the skylight in the next room, where they’d climbed up into the open air.

  Laila couldn’t focus. She slipped into a spare room and shut the door, put pen to paper, and tried to draw Eden out into the world again.

  Eden’s cousins had always described the mansion in colors. Pink for the twee columns their grandparents had wanted to remove and green for the marsh that stretched out behind its patio. The murk of the water was coming closer every day. She’d imagined a building bright as candy luring her out from the drive.

  But the light was cloudy that day, and the colorlessness of it was infectious. When she exited her car, the mansion looked threadbare and thin. Time had rubbed out the flesh and left bone.

  “Hey! You in there, Hemingway?” Felix swung the door open. “Dinner.”

  Laila wanted to protest. Finally, she’d gotten past the first paragraph.

  But Felix had a warning look in his eye that reminded her of his mother. Ms. Martinez was roughly as compromising as a brick wall.

  Laila took a deep breath, stowed her journal, and followed him downstairs.

  “Wait,” Hannah was saying, flipping a golden flapjack onto Leo’s plate, “Angela’s parents won’t let her take a trip with you after five years?”

  “Are you kidding?” Leo asked. “It’s a miracle they’re even letting her go to the same school as me.”

  “It’s Northwestern,” Hannah said.

  “Yeah. That’s why.”

  Laila sat at the table and waited quietly for the others to join her. Dinner passed in the same weird, anthropological silence s
he’d held the whole week, with the others bantering comfortably and her watching them, feeling like a ghost figure from a movie, unable to interact with anyone made from flesh and blood. The pen in her pocket was warm, heavy, waiting for her to return to that quiet upstairs room.

  After dinner, Hannah insisted on getting the dishes, Leo and Felix returned upstairs, and Laila set up her pillow and blanket on the downstairs sofa.

  Then Hannah sank onto the couch next to her. “Did Bowdoin ever get back to you?”

  It was the first time they’d been alone since arriving. Laila wanted to stay quiet. Hannah couldn’t make her talk.

  But apparently Laila couldn’t make herself stay silent, either. “I still need to turn in my updated grades from this semester,” she muttered.

  “They’re dumbasses for wait-listing you in the first place,” Hannah said. “Didn’t Mr. Madison write your recommendation?”

  Laila didn’t answer. She stared down at Hannah’s coffee table, a slab of white stone. The picture of him that printed itself onto the stone was painfully vivid, bottom rims of his glasses pressing into his fleshy cheeks, as if reserves of unsummoned memory had built up and combined.

  “He had to have told them you were a genius,” Hannah said.

  Stop, Laila wanted to say. Leave it. She wasn’t going to bare her heart to Hannah anymore. Maybe she should have been clearer when she told Hannah to get out of her room. Things can’t be the same, she should have said. They can’t just go back to the way they were.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Laila said stiffly. “I didn’t turn in my best writing with my application. My best writing wouldn’t exist if Nazarenko hadn’t taken over.”

  “Maybe. Didn’t Madison love your old stuff?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know. He loved a lot of things.”

  “So . . . that makes his opinion invalid?”

  Finally Laila looked Hannah in the eye. She didn’t want to answer that. Actually, she wanted to leave, bolt up the steps to meet Leo and Felix on the roof, help them with the tripod, listen to Leo talking about the moon and Earth and sun aligned in perfect syzygy. She wanted to be anywhere but here.