Final Draft

by Riley Redgate

  “His opinion wasn’t invalid,” Laila said. “His opinion meant the world to me. And you know that. So don’t—” She swallowed twice, once to remove the lump and once to clear out whatever she’d been about to say. She stood. Enough of this. “Nazarenko’s pushing me to do better, is all I’m saying,” she said and headed for the steps.

  “She’s pushing you, for sure,” Hannah said.

  At the threshold to the stairs, Laila rounded on her. “Can you stop that? Half saying something?”

  “Okay. Fine. I’m—I’m fucking worried about you, okay?”

  “What?”

  “Getting so obsessed with this story has been terrible for you. You’ve been so—”

  “My mom’s a psychologist, I don’t need it from you, too.”

  “Jesus Christ, Laila, I’m not psychoanalyzing you.” Hannah stood. “I’m talking the absolute simplest facts. You used to be so excited about what you used to write, and now it seems like it’s sucking the life out of you. You’re not sleeping, you’re not smiling. You’re not you. And I know you, even if you want to pretend I don’t.”

  Laila felt like somebody had shoved a hand through her torso and grasped some bundle of nerves at her center, squeezing until erratic pulses rang in her extremities. She swallowed panic. She didn’t have time for this. She could walk away, singe the strings off this bullshit conversation and come back to Hannah after graduation when the electric charge had faded from the air.

  “The writing isn’t making me miserable,” she said. “I’m already miserable, okay? I’m trying to use it.”

  “So, what, you’re okay with staying like this, not getting any help, if you get some good material out of it?”

  Laila snapped. “I’m trying to wring one good thing out of all this, Hannah!” she yelled. “Do you want to take that away, too? How much do you need to take?”

  Then a messy clutter of footsteps echoed down the wooden stairs, and Leo and Felix emerged.

  “—than season nine,” Felix finished, but Leo went still. Felix looked over at Laila and Hannah and froze, too, uncertain.

  Nobody moved. Then Hannah spoke. “We just want you to be okay,” she said quietly. “Leo and Felix both agree with me. We always used to joke about you working too hard, and it’s not a joke anymore. Every day, you look like you walked out of a tornado. We can’t talk to you about anything. You don’t text, you don’t talk—you’re impossible to get in touch with even when you’re right in front of us.”

  It took everything not to say, Why are you acting like we have nothing to do with this? You and me? But Laila couldn’t make the words come out. Instead, she rounded on Leo and Felix.

  “You guys have been talking about this?” she demanded.

  “Yes, obviously,” Hannah said, before they could answer. “And it’s this teacher—”

  “She’s helping me. She’s making me better.”

  “Really? What’s with her getting you to stop reading the books you loved? Stop watching our show? Everything that used to make you happy?”

  “That’s not everything that used to make me happy. What I read and watched wasn’t my whole personality. And she didn’t do that, I did.”

  “Then what are you trying to do here? It’s freaking me out. What are you trying to turn yourself into? What’s next on the chopping block, huh? Felix or Leo? Me?”

  “You know what, maybe,” Laila said, and felt a shot of vindictive glee when hurt flashed across Hannah’s face. “Because I’m not worth the effort right now, I guess.”

  Hannah froze. Her eyes were the only thing that moved, fixing over Laila’s shoulder on Felix and Leo.

  She hadn’t told them, then. Fine. Laila didn’t care if it was out in the open.

  “I never said that,” Hannah said.

  “Yet here we are,” Laila said. “You know what, I’m fine. I know what I’m doing, I know where I’m going, and I don’t need you trying to hold me back because you think I finally care about something more than I care about you.”

  Hannah was never speechless. Now she just looked at Laila with a crack of darkness hanging between her lips. The clock on the end table clicked and whirred, hushing into the gearshift before the strike of eight. Hannah said, “I don’t even know why you’re friends with me, if that’s who you think I am.”

  Laila considered for a moment and realized she didn’t know, either. Laila was suddenly sure of it: She’d never been anything to Hannah but a dim reflection of her own cleverness. For four years, Laila must have seen something different in Hannah, or she wouldn’t have been so reliant. So excited to see her every lunch period and so eager to organize their watch parties, so willing to quip back and forth with a sharpness that nobody else seemed to be able to manage. But now her tired eyes were itching with openness. Not just in Hannah, but in every person in her life, she saw nothing but curated selections they’d opted to show her, and she didn’t have the patience anymore for their bluffs and hesitancies and filters. Finally, she was free of that, no longer a moon to reflect other people’s light. Mr. Madison was the only one who’d really seen her, who’d never tried to push or change her, who’d understood her to her core. But that was gone. All the simple, innocent, effortless things were gone. And she was done with pretending anybody else could measure up. With Felix, Leo, and Hannah watching as if she were a wild animal, she grabbed her backpack off the sofa and backed over the threshold.

  “Laila,” said Leo, but she was already zipping her backpack shut.

  “I’m going for a walk,” she said. “Don’t wait up.” She let the door slam behind her, grabbed a flashlight from the porch, and practically ran into the woods.

  What they’d said didn’t matter. She had no intention of going back. Buses ran at the bottom of the mountain, and the last was scheduled to leave at 10:15. She could still catch it if she hurried.

  Laila forged down the mountainside, hot and numb with anger. She kept replaying Hannah’s words, and her own, and she didn’t know whose she detested more. She hiked until she was sore, until her eyes felt hard with strain.

  She had to be most of the way there, although her phone was still lying dead in her desk at home, so she didn’t have the time. She stopped. How long had it been since she saw a trail marker?

  Laila turned, aiming the flashlight up the slope, and retraced her steps as far as she could remember. Beyond a crosshatch of fallen logs, the trees blended into one another, soldiers identically uniformed in lichen and moss. That patch of brambles looked familiar, but so did that lace of wildflowers to the left.

  She needed the trail markers. Cooper’s Hawk ended against the road on one side, but on the other, the slope melted into the valleys below. If she wound up in the valleys, she was lost.

  She heard shuffling ahead. She clambered forward over a shelf of rock to call her friends’ names. She let out a spark of sound—“Han—” before the sight ahead slammed a glottal stop over Hannah’s name. A dark, massive figure was crawling out from behind a tree, a glistening hulk of fur that didn’t even look like an animal until it turned its great head and fixed its eyes on her.

  Bears are somewhat romanticized by the media, like mental illness and adolescence and other things that look questionable on pedestals. This thing was unrecognizable as the source material of anything Disney. Laila had heard somewhere, or maybe seen in a video somewhere, that black bears were small, but this bear stood a foot taller than her at the shoulder, hundreds of pounds of glossy black coat and muscle. When it came to a standstill half a dozen trees uphill, Laila looked into the blank gleam of its eyes and saw her future stretch between them, as fragile and disposable as tissue paper. The bear’s eyes were primal and unrecognizable, more alien than anything she’d ever read.

  It shrank. Ducked shyly back into the forest. Disappeared.

  Laila sank against the nearest tree, suddenly so drained that she thought she might collapse. She looked up at the dusk. Tangles of her hair caught against the bark. The evening’s last
color had leached from the sky.

  She walked and walked. She thought herself in figure eights, coming back to the same defining points. The fury in Hannah’s voice. “I know you.” The way Felix and Leo had looked at her as if she were a stranger. She climbed back toward the mountaintop, the only certain destination, detoured again and again by trees and bramble patches and stone gulfs.

  She imagined the air was thinning, but really everything was getting colder, and her body was tiring. The sound of water brushed the air. She followed it, and when the hiss had turned to a hush and then to an energetic gargle, she emerged from a line of trees onto a cliffside that overlooked a thick cataract pouring through the dark, releasing clouds of mist that she could smell and taste, practically gather up into her mouth.

  Laila knew this place. She remembered perching here in the summer after sophomore year, listening to some softly reverberating EDM track through Hannah’s speakers, talking about how they would be happy to stay here forever.

  Something glinted nearby. Tacked to a tree not a dozen steps away was a yellow circle of matte plastic.

  Laila’s legs gave out. She collapsed feet from the edge of the cliff and crept into a nearby cubbyhole of stone, which shielded her from the wind that skated over the mountain’s east face. She looked a thousand feet below her, down at the carpet of the forest.

  Orange light began to pour onto the stone at her feet and hands. Chips of mineral glowed like LEDs. She looked up as a red blot crept across the moon, widening, and everything seemed to coalesce, all the pieces that had broken apart in the cavern of the woods. Earth was casting a distant shadow across its most faithful satellite. Leo would be watching from Hannah’s roof, eye pressed to spotless glass, twiddling fine mechanisms with careful finger-tips. Hannah would target the sky with her phone, cradle an elbow in her soft palm to stabilize the shot, and add six seconds of red moon to the choppy film reel of her video story, watched by fifty people the next morning who would regret, instantly, that they’d slept through this. Laila could almost see her friends balanced on the shingles, Felix peering into the telescope, Leo’s hand guiding the focus, could almost feel Hannah’s breathing. She remembered the feeling she’d had in her last conscious instants on the floor of Turntable, everyone hunting for the same fragile thing. She imagined she could hear the crackle of celestial noise three solar systems away. She was swallowed with wonder—it was like nothing she’d seen before, this ripening stamp in the sky—but mostly, she wanted something instant and filled with circuits. She wanted to capture this second in high-definition forever and fire it out, limitless, self-reproducing, like love or regret.

  20

  The next morning, Laila came down the mountain, out of the trees, tufts of hair escaping her braid, and hitched a ride to the bus station. At 11:15 she climbed into the belly of her bus back to the city, and the instant she sat, she dropped into a deep sleep. When she closed her eyes, the sky was all around. When she opened them, it had disappeared, replaced with a throng of people at the bus terminal talking and turning and fumbling with their tickets and checking their work email on their iPads and struggling with the zippers on their suitcases.

  Laila arrived home shivering. Her parents asked questions about the trip. She satisfied them with a false smile and some platitudes about relaxation and retreated to her room, where the smile sagged away into nothing and she crawled under her covers to shield herself from the tapestry of other worlds she’d taped across her bedroom. Nazarenko’s exercises had worked. She’d woken up, come out into the real world, and found so much life that she didn’t want those worlds on the walls anymore. They seemed small and too-bright and childish.

  Laila sat at her desk all day as a skull-spinning fever took her. Every time she lifted her pen to write, though, she found herself remembering instead how she’d once felt when she sat down to work. This had been happening in other aspects of her life too. Last week, every morning, when she’d taken the train to school, she remembered how she’d felt standing on the platform months ago, focused and energetic, when she’d had lunchtime brainstorms to anticipate. The mismatch from the present to the past made her feel as if she were an actor assigned to the part of herself, and she kept forgetting her lines, unable to inject this character’s movements with convincing inner life. Her parents, she knew, were beginning to notice, because her smiles at dinner that night looked as if she’d been told to show her teeth, and she’d run out of even enough energy to feign interest in conversation. Let them notice. Let them realize. Later she heard them arguing intently about something and couldn’t even give enough of a shit to eavesdrop.

  She spiraled through Saturday like a corkscrew, and by Sunday, the last day before her deadline, she was racked with coughs that belted up lengths of horribly polychromatic phlegm. “I left herbal tea for you on the counter, okay, Lolly?” her mother called from the door as she left for her morning run. “Anita from Tuesdays told me how to make it.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Laila croaked from the kitchen table. The tea was a radioactive yellow and would look beautiful when she poured it down the sink. Anita from Tuesdays was a Los Angeles expat who trafficked in homeopathic herbal remedies, or, as Laila knew them, poisons.

  She wrote, erased, wrote, erased. At 4 A.M. on Monday, she had sixteen pages of scraps, nowhere near coherent. She couldn’t see the words clearly anymore. What she could see was herself, as if in the third person, the distant point of view sometimes brought on by dreams. She had been convinced that something deep and spectacular could be wrung out of something as small and petty as misery, even though she was too old to believe in alchemy. She was one more person out of billions terrified of being forgotten, scrambling at the thing that seemed the most permanent, because a blood clot the size of a baby tooth could crush an entire life into nothing without an ounce of warning, overnight, to be announced in deadened tones the following morning. She was a romantic reject, a Bowdoin tryhard, a 62 out of 100 person who should give up, stop trying—was there anything sadder than somebody who gave a metric ton of effort and would never, the rest of the world knew, see results?

  How could Mr. Madison have looked at her and seen anything else? If he’d lived, how long would it have taken for him to have realized he was wrong?

  At sunrise, she sat sleepless at her desk, eyes ringed darkly, hair heavy with grease, in front of something she hated. She wondered how she could have made something she hated. Why would she keep going if sentence by sentence she could feel how malformed the piece would eventually be? Shouldn’t she have been able to feel, like running through something that hurt, the difference between the soreness of growth versus the stab of muscular damage?

  She stood up at 7 A.M., hours before she was supposed to palm gold into Nazarenko’s waiting hands, and collapsed onto her bed. Sleep came too easily, a default setting waiting to reclaim her, to switch off the circuit board and let her go dark.

  From: Bowdoin Admissions Office

  To: Laila Piedra

  Subject: Waiting List 4:15 PM

  * * *

  May 27

  Dear Laila,

  We regret to inform you that Bowdoin College’s incoming class has been filled to capacity. As such, the College is unable to extend offers of admission to any applicants on the waiting list. However, we wish you success in your future endeavors.

  Sincerely,

  Paulina Dearborn

  Director of Admissions

  21

  Laila had been eating lunch in classroom 344 for a month. Classroom 344 was a biology classroom, and it occasionally smelled of formaldehyde, but the impact on the taste of her food was negligible if she held her breath.

  Leo joined Laila here sometimes. They rarely spoke. He sat beside her. The grips of his chair squeaked against the tile as he shrugged his backpack off. Then he spent the period inking perfect answers to problem sets in beautiful cursive. That was his level of confidence: He answered his problem
sets in ink. Sometimes his presence made Laila want to embrace him. Sometimes his presence made her want to cry instead, but that was rare.

  The past month had been gray. After she’d recovered from her mountain fever, she’d gone through several nights where she could only cry instead of sleep, although she’d forgotten the actual feeling of sadness; the crying was a reflex associated with night, like exhaustion. Staying that sad for so long had started to feel selfish. Look at me, her lack of recovery had said. Look, I’m a sad teenager. Laila couldn’t think of anything more boring. But that awareness didn’t help at all with the omnipresent sadness, just gave it a superficial layer of irony. Look, I’m a sad teenager, but at least I know that’s a cliché thing to be. Now can I stop breaking down a minimum four times a day? No? Fine.

  So now the crying was gone, and that was better. A deadening quiet had lowered over her head. The days felt pointless and overlong and identical, like an infinite ream of those syndicated comics that never have punch lines, and that was also better.

  Hannah had tried to call, twice. Hannah hated phone calls. They made her anxious, disrupting the unflappable exterior she’d fashioned for herself, so she avoided them at all costs. But she’d called twice. Before the second, she’d sent a text: “pick up this time?”

  Laila hadn’t picked up. There had been no more texts.

  Felix seemed to have chosen Hannah in the realignment, but he and Laila had both committed to Brooklyn College. Felix wasn’t in the honors program, but sometimes, in little spurts of hope, Laila imagined them reconciling. Mostly she tried not to think about him, or about Hannah.

  She completed her homework. She was pleasant at home. She hadn’t spoken to Nazarenko in a month and had reverted to a previous draft of her story, the one that had earned her a 68/100. She’d submitted the same draft for four consecutive weeks and hadn’t bothered trying to change a word.