Final Draft

by Riley Redgate

  Peter Goldman had finally gotten his wish, bringing forth a campaign of outraged parents to rail against the class’s 30-percent quarter averages. With three weeks left in the school year, Nazarenko had announced, looking slightly bored, that they would be changing the format of the class to adapt to the school’s unnecessary curricular standards. With that, she began assigning them entire books to read in three days. Five-page essays to write overnight. Laila didn’t mind. Work filled the space.

  Nazarenko’s notebook was stashed in her desk’s bottom drawer at home. She occasionally reread Mr. Madison’s last email to her, because the words made something turn over in her chest, and otherwise, she felt very little.

  The auditorium at Impact Future Leaders Charter School had recently been discovered to have a type of poisonous mildew growing in the folds of its curtains, so as a result of the toxic fumigation process, Laila’s graduation took place in the cafeteria. A coalition of school moms from the immediate area had done their best to beautify the most soulless-looking room in a building full of soulless-looking rooms. Along the walls, they’d planted longnecked lamps topped with globes of light in deep golds and moody blues. They’d strung heavy cloth in billows at the corners of the low ceiling and constructed an elegant fake stage in front of the kitchen doors, which extended from the place the trash cans began to where the refrigerators made vengeful sounds, like hordes of wasps. Even moms could only do so much.

  When Laila walked the stage and received her diploma, the drooping back end of her graduation cap bobby-pinned deep into her hair, she gauged the amount of cheering for her name, the metric by which she’d been subconsciously measuring everybody else’s success as human beings for the last forty-five minutes. She couldn’t hear anything at all, a fishbowl effect from the echo of her shoes against the resonant fake stage. She was also distracted by the sight of Principal Greene’s teeth. How could she have watched him make so many speeches and missed the gap between his teeth, between which she could easily have passed a pair of quarters? And now she would likely never look him in the face again, for the rest of her life. Strange.

  None of her extended family had the means to travel from Quebec or Quito for her graduation. A blessing in disguise, so that her mom and dad could afford to take her and Camille to a ridiculously overpriced tapas-fusion restaurant that night. They sat out in the fresh-smelling heat of the garden and sopped up thin, strong gravy with crisp French bread. They pierced rosemary chorizo on delicate-tined silver forks. “Summer,” her mother said.

  Her father agreed: “Summertime. Heaven.”

  Laila was watching the people at the table beside them, who were flailing their arms in an aerobic disagreement over the wine list. She looked back at her plate. She could see herself slipping into summer as if feetfirst into the deep end, letting it close over her head. Maybe she shouldn’t have committed to Brooklyn College, she thought, folding her wine-red napkin between her fingers in a soft accordion. She didn’t think she could live at home any longer. Maybe she should return to the woods, crawl into a thicket, and let it turn her to mulch.

  Her dad splurged even more on a cab back home, a luxurious forty-dollar procession of horns and furious exclamations. At home, two presents were waiting, one of which was relative silence, and the other of which was a box wrapped in gold paper, sitting on the counter.

  “What is that?” Laila asked.

  “Open it,” said her mother.

  Laila cut the flaps and peeled them back. Her parents had given her a spaceship.

  Only five hundred of these models had been manufactured, elegant titanium bullets that clicked and unfurled, revealing a to-scale model of the interior shielded from damage by sapphire glass. The showrunners of The Rest had released them in anticipation of season eight. Laila lifted the ship from the box, pressed the white button, and watched one of the worlds she’d loved open itself up to her. There was the Resting room, with those carefully preserved people for her to gaze at, static, unmoving. The same way she could rewind and watch them live out their joys and losses again and again.

  Her eyes watered. From the skew of her tears, electric-white stalactites grew down from the spaceship’s escape vents.

  “Laila?” said her father.

  “What’s—is something wrong? Lolly?” said her mother, at her side instantly as Laila bowed her head over the counter.

  She could almost hear herself telling them that, in fact, everything was wrong. She fought it back. God, so melodramatic, who did she think she was? She could hear herself saying she was so grateful, this was so thoughtful, everything was fine and thank you so much. She pressed that down, too, with more effort.

  “M-m-mom,” was all she could say. She turned until her head fit against her mother’s long, wrinkling neck. “I w—I—” She gasped for air and let too much in, her fingertips curling and icy with an excess of oxygen. “I w-want to wa-a-wake up.”

  “Jaime,” her mother was saying. She heard the rattling of the icebox as her father poured her a glass of water, the thing he knew to do best when faced with strain. When Laila closed her eyes against her mother’s dress, she felt as if she were pressing her face into layers of heated blankets, that her mother could keep her safe from everything cold and huge, everything from the vacuum of space to the unforgiving infinity of the future. With all her stories, she’d tried again and again to probe that question with her imagination—what’s next?—and found nothing but fear and her own smallness. She bowed under the heaviness of the hours she hadn’t lived yet.

  22

  “Necesitan ser suaves,” her father said, poking the potato with a knife. “Let’s give them a few more minutes.”

  In the week since her breakdown, Laila had hardly left the house. Since then, her parents had been purposefully involving her in their everyday activities. She’d cleaned the apartment with her mother, a strangely relaxing activity once her mother turned on some folk music and started warbling along. They’d dropped Camille off at ballet together, and on the way back, stopped for ice cream. Now her father was cooking with her every night, teaching her recipes and generally treating her like a chef’s assistant. It was like being nine years old again, the inability to be alone, the reminders to shower, eat, and go to bed on time. The rhythm soothed rather than angered her, like the swaying of a cradle.

  “How about those onions?” her father asked. “We need them soon.”

  “Almost,” Laila said, looking up to the ceiling as she blinked back onion burn. “I told Camille to get the gum out of my room like half an hour ago, I knew this would happen.”

  “Gum?”

  “Chewing strong gum stops you from crying.”

  “An onion shield?” her father said. “Why didn’t you tell me about this ten years ago?”

  “Because I was eight and not yet sentient?”

  “You make a decent case. Want me to go get it?”

  “It’s all right; I’ll do it.” Laila rinsed shreds of onion skin from her fingertips and slid down the hall in threadbare socks.

  Hand stabilized against the lintel to her room, she stopped. Camille sat at her desk, back to Laila, with a pack of gum and an orange folder at her elbow. Pages lay in an uneven stack before her.

  “Naña?” Laila said.

  Camille whirled around. “Oh,” she said, her hands already shuffling pages back together. “The gum was in your top drawer, and this fell out when I opened—I didn’t mean to—” She wheeled onto the offensive, suddenly indignant at an attack Laila hadn’t made yet. “If you didn’t want me to read it you shouldn’t have—”

  “Camille. It’s fine.”

  “It is?” Camille said, deflating. “Right. Yeah. I just know how weird you get about this stuff.”

  Laila looked at the mess of printouts in her sister’s hands and felt a weird longing. She hadn’t read a word of that story in months. Had it held her sister’s notoriously difficult-to-keep attention for a full half hour?

  “What did you think?
” Laila asked, when she was sure she wanted to know the answer.

  “What?”

  “Of the story. What did you think?”

  Camille shrugged, not meeting Laila’s eyes.

  “Seriously. You can say.”

  “Okay. What’s with the bit where she dies?”

  “You read to the end?”

  “Yeah, obviously.” Camille dropped the stack on the desk. “It’s kind of awesome, Laila.”

  Laila’s mouth was dry. “You think so?”

  “Yeah. I liked it better than Moondowners.”

  Laila felt a wave of disbelief so strong it felt like revulsion. That had to be a lie, she thought—there was no way—except that Camille had never lied to her. Laila could have listed two dozen of Camille’s personality flaws in under a minute, but her sister never lied. And she especially never lied in service of being generous.

  Camille sighed. “Except the bit where she dies. Were you just trying to get out of giving her a better ending? Because that seriously seems like a huge cop-out.”

  “I thought it would be less predictable.”

  “Um, no,” Camille said. “Everybody dies in these epic whatever stories these days. I’m not even surprised anymore. It’s like okay, guys, we get it, life is futile, existing is a tragedy. Smile for once, oh my God.” She made a face at the outline page, dropped the orange folder on the desk, and brushed past Laila, palming her the gum. “Harriet was reading this trilogy,” she said, already bouncing down the hall, “where literally the narrator dies at the end of every book and it switches perspective for the next one. I don’t even know why they . . .”

  Laila gave a last look to the folder before following her sister back into the kitchen. Her father had diced the last of the onions and begun to fry them. The room was filled with steam, her mother had arrived home from grocery shopping, and the rustle of a plastic bag against itself as she unloaded peanut butter onto the counter, the sight of her mother kissing her father on the cheek, two larger-than-life figures wreathed in white billows of condensation, the reluctant thunk as her mother yanked the sticky window up to reveal the evening, waving out the steam—this was what her life had always been. She remembered, now, or was beginning to.

  Later that evening, there was a soft knock on Laila’s door, and her mother slipped in.

  “Can we talk?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  She settled at Laila’s desk, her long back curved in a slight hunch. “We need you to tell us what’s happening.”

  “I know.”

  “Not necessarily all at once, and not necessarily everything. You deserve your privacy, but—”

  “I miss my friends,” Laila said, her voice tiny.

  “Oh, sweetie.” Her mother sighed. “Are you four not speaking?”

  “We haven’t been in the same room together in six weeks. And it’s hard to convince myself that I didn’t ruin everything forever. Everything feels really permanent right now. Like I’m always going to—” Her eyes prickled. “—be kind of numb and feel like it’s best that nobody spends time with me, because who wants to spend time with someone who doesn’t want to be here anymore, you know?”

  “Here in New York, or . . . ?”

  “Anywhere, I don’t want to be anywhere.” Laila scratched at a crusted spot on her jeans. “I don’t know. I keep feeling like everything would be easier if I . . . not even if I died, like, I don’t want to jump in front of a train. I don’t want to hurt myself. I just want to stop being. If we all get hurt for no reason and good people wind up in morgues when they’re thirty-one, overnight, when everything seemed like it was going to be okay, then what’s the point? And I feel like everyone’s thinking this all the time. Every second they get alone with themselves, really alone. When you’re awake too late or you just said something stupid and impulsive to somebody you really love, like the moment you stop resisting, it all floods in, this big nothing, and you start thinking what’s the point, and I guess I just forgot how to stop asking that question.”

  Laila could feel her heartbeat everywhere, in the tip of her tongue, in her straining throat. She couldn’t stop looking at her mother’s sandals, at her toes painted in cheerful stripes. “And if I do get better,” she said, “I don’t want to be somebody who—you see people coming out of these horrible places emotionally, and they always say, like, I’m grateful for this awful time I had because I came out stronger on the other side. But how much of that is actually real, and how much of it is them telling themselves there was something worthwhile in it because otherwise they went through hell for nothing?” Hell wasn’t the right word. Laila rewound. “I mean, I’m not hurting anymore. That freaks me out maybe more than anything else, because, I don’t know, will I ever be able to feel something that strongly again, even if it was misery? Was that the most human I’m ever going to get? And why am I not grateful that I don’t hurt anymore? Why do I just feel like I’m in this purgatory?”

  Her mother waited a long minute, maybe to see if the questions were hypothetical. Eventually she said, “The absence of hurt doesn’t always feel like relief. Draw your hand from an ice bucket and your skin smarts, then adjusts, and you forget how the ache felt. It’s natural, after you feel something so strongly, to worry that neutrality is a symptom, but most of the time, existing should feel like nothing, in the way that breathing feels like nothing.”

  Her mother’s voice was low and frank and lovely, and Laila wondered why it had ever made her want to hide.

  “And no, sweetie,” her mother said. “Humanness is not unhappiness. Don’t worry. The world isn’t nearly as dramatic as that.”

  Laila looked over her desk, still mostly clean from when Felix had reorganized it for her. A photo of Malak in a jeweled frame brushed her laptop, and beside that, a rainbow of folders and a jar of candied pecans wrapped in gingham ribbon. Her mother’s nail tugged at the wired edge of the ribbon. Outside the window, the sky was such an elegant blue that wisps of cirrus cloud looked like iridescence. She heard an imagined voice saying, We know what all this means to you.

  23

  Laila and her parents went into Manhattan so she could meet with a psychiatrist. While they were waiting for the train, Laila tugged at the edges of her shorts and sat on the lip of the bench, positioning herself so that none of her skin touched the wood. Hannah used to joke that the wood had rabies, or possibly scabies, which she would turn into a limerick with the other rhyme being babies, an inevitable disaster. Her father was standing farther down the platform, drinking up the afternoon light, holding out his corded arms to admire the way the sun glanced off his wrists.

  Laila looked down at her crossed legs. She remembered Hannah sitting at the end of this bench as they waited for a train. In sophomore year, they’d passed one particular ten-word-story note by leaving it in a deep crevice in this blocky wooden bench at the Gates Ave. stop, the dark gash that began next to Laila’s thigh. They’d used tweezers to plant and extract that one, because God knew what lived in that deep hole besides their fake spy messages. Laila wished she had kept a copy.

  For a moment, looking at that crevice, she wondered.

  Laila’s tongue seemed to have grown a size too large for her mouth, making it difficult to swallow. Quickly, so she wouldn’t think too much, she pulled a Pilot pen from her purse, clicked its nib out, and jabbed the end into the bench. It punctured something. Laila carefully drew the pen back until a corner of paper crept into the light.

  As she spread the note across her knees, she recognized the tea stain in the upper-left-hand corner, and her heart began to flutter. She recognized her own handwriting, but rounder, younger. And Hannah’s, but looser, freer. Laila hadn’t made a copy, but Hannah had kept the original.

  Once there was a girl who lived at the edge

  of a cliff in France also she was a robot

  Who had been discriminated against by France’s strict antirobot laws

  So she lived in her cliff house in complete isolation


  Waiting for the day another robot would come along and

  tell her, “We must overthrow France’s government—get your musket”

  One day there came the fated robot who was a

  giant, eight feet tall. And she could shoot lasers out

  of her fingertips. The first robot emerged from her cliff

  house and said, “Hello, my friend. Is it time, then?”

  So they began to walk toward Paris holding their muskets

  And hoping not to short-circuit out in the rain before

  they arrived side by side at the silver electric gates

  Below was a single line of crisp new writing.

  Let’s short-circuit in the rain. I loved you then, too.

  “What is that?” said Laila’s mother, looking over her shoulder. Laila folded the note quickly. “Hannah.”

  Her mother was quiet, waiting. Laila knew then that her mother already knew.

  Laila let the paper flower in her hands, tugged by the wind. “Me and Hannah.”

  Her mother settled onto the bench beside her. “We wondered.” She laid an arm around Laila’s shoulders and gave her a small, bracing squeeze. “We love you.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t . . .”

  “You have nothing to be sorry for, sweetheart.”

  “I just felt like I couldn’t say it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it doesn’t feel like anybody’s business. Hardly even feels like my business.”

  Her mother let a flicker of confusion show. Laila looked away. Hannah had understood that night on the bench, without Laila needing to tell her, that when Laila felt something—really felt—it became too huge and too personal for description. Of course Hannah had known. Hannah knew everything, knew Laila’s favorite shape of snowflake, and her preference for centered camera angles, and her love for the left eyebrow of The Rest’s Jason Kendo, and her affinity for swirl soft-serve out of those clunking ice cream trucks that sat screaming “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” on her block in July, and she even had a couple of spare jumbo-size tampons buried in her backpack in case Laila needed them, for God’s sake. She knew everything in the same way Laila knew that Hannah’s biggest shames weren’t her parents’ victim complexes or her older sister’s compulsive spending, but the tiny vanities Hannah let herself nurse every so often: making sure that the right side of eyeliner, which she drew on second, didn’t come out jagged. Laila knew why Hannah tracked marriages of people she hated, the tabloid darlings, when she stood in lines to buy waxed mint floss and toilet paper (“Isn’t it kind of refreshing to see people lying about each other’s lives out in the open?”). Laila knew the gushing liquid synth that poured from the headphones Hannah pushed deep into her ear canals—careful, Laila’s mother had told her once, you’ll lose your hearing by the time you’re fifty, but what the hell did Hannah care about fifty? Laila knew what Hannah expected for herself beyond the threshold of adulthood. Laila looked forward to age and knowledge like a sort of preemptive nostalgia, her future dyed sepia, but Hannah looked ahead at middle age like a curse waiting to be cast, sure she would be crisp and dry and flavorless and unsurprising at fifty, packed too full of prior experience and preexisting memory, and if it ever became more interesting for Hannah to dissect what she’d already lived than for her to look down the eye of the telescope into the next hour, she would just drop dead then and there. Laila knew so much about Hannah that she wondered whether, like the number of microbial cells in the human body can outnumber human cells, her knowledge of Hannah could be compared to her knowledge of herself at a two-to-one ratio. She knew so much that maybe the knowledge of Hannah’s fingertips over her waist had been too much. Maybe that had been the final tipping point, the heat of Hannah’s tongue at the sensitive juncture of her neck and jawline, her own body pushing back, saying, No, I can’t let any more of this in or I’ll lose myself in her.