This Is My Brain in Love

by I. W. Gregorio

  “You’re a genius,” I proclaim. “This is amazing. I can’t wait until tomorrow. You said your brother and Lauren can come, right? So we can shoot some of the black-and-white scenes?”

  “Yeah, I just need to go out today and get the last few things for a waitress uniform.”

  I review the script to think of any additional props I need to get. I should bring my laptop down so we can shoot some scenes where Mr. Regular is working while he’s eating. And then there’s the scene where the waitress is really tired and he offers her an aspirin, so I should probably bring a medication bottle or something…

  I blink. Turn one or two more pages. Flip back.

  I turn to Priya. “What happened to the scene where the waitress has a headache?” It was the most dialogue-heavy scene of the script and honestly the one I felt most proud of.

  Priya takes a sudden interest in the microphone attachment to her camera. “We-eell, remember when we talked about not needing so much dialogue? It just seemed a little forced, a little too on the nose. Plus, we only have seven minutes. It’s a super-compressed timeline. I mean, our deadline is in three weeks.”

  Basically, she says a lot but doesn’t actually answer my real question, and I can feel a sourness in the back of my throat. “Why didn’t you tell me you cut it? I thought we were coproducers.”

  “I’m sorry! I honestly thought we had talked about it when I edited the final script.” She finally at least looks at me, pursing her lips the way she did when she was trying to placate the kids she used to babysit. “You know what, just because we don’t film it this weekend doesn’t mean we can’t add it in. Let’s just see what our run time is.”

  I stuff the last of my PB&J in my mouth before I say something I regret, as if I could chew up my hurt and swallow it like the obedient daughter/student/friend I am. God, I know that Priya just wants what’s best for the film, but… it was my favorite part, their first real bonding moment before the food connection. It was kind of Mr. Regular’s “Save the Cat” moment, the little character-building act that made the audience think, gee that Mr. Regular’s a swell guy.

  Priya’s still fiddling with her microphone, swearing under her breath when it won’t stay right where she wants it to be and casting me occasional little worried glances.

  She cares about what I think, I realize. If I really wanted to, I could fight for the scene to stay in.

  But if Priya couldn’t see it when she read it, it probably wasn’t good enough. The thought settles in my chest like a heavy stone, solid and shameful and immoveable. I’m not a good enough writer. We’ll hopefully get into the festival mostly on the strength of Priya’s genius with the camera, but with no help from my shitty script.

  Priya finally puts the microphone down and fiddles a bit with her video program, tagging the shots that she thinks will make the final cut. Every once in a while, she asks me if I like one shot better than another, but I’m still hurt that she edited my script, and I don’t think I could stand it if she overruled me again. After the third time I answer, “Whatever you think,” she stops asking.

  “Well, I’ve gotta get going. The Patel wedding is tonight, and my mom wants us to go do Mehndi and hair with the cousins.” Priya rolls her eyes. Normally, I would groan and commiserate with her about how annoyed she’s going to be by her cousins, but today I can’t do more than just smile tightly. There’s something raw festering inside me, and I’m afraid that if I open my mouth, all that ugliness will ooze out.

  I had planned on doing a script breakdown after Priya left, maybe double-checking her shot list, but just seeing the Pot Sticker file on my desktop is like picking at a scab. Instead I bring up Word and look at the draft that I wrote of my statement of purpose for JBP. I stayed up well past midnight to finish it, using a strategy one of my English teachers gave us for dealing with writer’s block: She told us to turn off our monitors so that we didn’t let what we had already written interfere with what we were going to write next.

  Mrs. Wilson had a lot of other pithy little things to say, little literary pep talks. “Remember that the enemy of good is better. Don’t let your quest to be perfect stop you from being great. Never be afraid of writing a cruddy first draft.”

  Me, perfect? As if.

  Still smarting from Priya’s comments on my script, I can feel the sense of inadequacy welling up inside me as I look at my personal statement. Except maybe that’s the wrong metaphor. It’s not a hole that I need filled with positive reinforcement; it’s a gap in the weave of my life—something that affects my whole fabric.

  I’m staring at my mess of a first draft, wondering how the heck I’m supposed to turn it into a marginally readable second draft, when there’s a knock on our door.

  It’s Will, and seeing him makes my heart do a little jig despite my mood. It makes me feel off-kilter to have my soul in the dumps when my heart is singing. I glance at the clock when I open the door. “Alan should be back in a few minutes. His friend’s birthday party should be winding down. I know my mom was on her way to pick him up.”

  “No, that’s okay,” says Will, grinning crookedly. “It’s nice to see you. Does that mean…” He glances around our living room.

  “Yeah, no chaperone for the next few minutes. I finished a draft of my essay, I think.”

  “Really?” Will says, eyes wide. “Want me to take a look at it?”

  On the one hand, I feel so vulnerable that I can’t stand to expose any other parts of myself right now. On the other hand, Will’s a writer. And inexplicably, he sees the best of me. Maybe he’s the only one who can help.

  The instant I blurt out “Sure!” I second-guess myself. But there’s no going back—Will’s already leaning toward my laptop, eyes glued on the screen. I feel a faint sense of nausea. I’m suddenly terrified that he’ll think that it’s horrible, that it will completely and irrevocably ruin his opinion of me. I mean, what could be more of a turnoff to an editor than a piece-of-shit writer?

  “You know, maybe this isn’t the best time,” I say as he sits down. I reach out to shut my laptop, but it’s too late. Will’s hand gently holds my arm away, and he exclaims, “That’s a terrific lede. What a great first line.”

  I watch helplessly as he hunkers over my laptop, brow furrowed, eyes darting. He’s concentrating so hard his mouth opens a little. After a grand total of five seconds, I have to look away. I walk over to pick up the catalog on our coffee table and page through it.

  I can tell when Will sits back in his chair that he’s done. He doesn’t say anything at first, and I want to die on the spot. He must have hated it. My eyes are fixed on the stupid little hangnail on my left thumb, and I’m a millisecond away from saying that I have to go to the bathroom and curling up in the fetal position on my bed, when Will calls my name.

  “Jocelyn.” His voice is so soft, so filled with wonder that it stops my cycle of self-loathing in its tracks. But when I turn to him, he’s staring at me solemnly, and so seriously that my heart races, waiting for the hammer to drop.

  WILL

  Reading Jocelyn’s personal statement is frightening. That’s a weird word choice, I know, and it’s not something I’d ever tell her, because it has nothing to do with her essay and everything to do with how I feel when someone lets me read a piece they’ve written.

  I’ve always thought that writing down one’s truth is one of the most vulnerable things a human being can do, second only to the act of sharing that writing with another person. That’s why the literary device of reading someone’s diary is so effective—it’s a complete violation of one’s privacy and trust. When a friend—or non-girlfriend—gives you a piece of writing that they care about, it’s one of the most intimate things they can do. Lucky us that it doesn’t fall under Mr. Wu’s definition of “hanky-panky.”

  I’m frightened that Jocelyn trusts me this much. It’s like I’ve been given an egg and asked to juggle it with a pile of rocks, and I am so, so terrified that I will drop this egg, shatter it into a
mess of shell fragments and yolk that’s impossible to salvage.

  When I’m editing something, I usually read it two times in a row before even forming an opinion of it. Once to get an overall take on how it makes me feel, then a second time to track back and parse out the components that pop and the ones that could be brought out more.

  After my first pass of Jocelyn’s essay, I breathe out a sigh of relief because, thank God, it’s good. I won’t have to lie by omission or make up positive comments to soften any criticism I give. The writing is clean, her points salient, her word choice solid. As a personal statement it’s the perfect reflection of who she is: smart, honest, and witty.

  The second pass is where I notice how it can get better: Jocelyn’s too modest. The essay focuses mostly on her experiences growing up and brushes over everything she’s done with A-Plus in a single sentence. She talks about her grades almost apologetically and doesn’t mention how she can add up five orders in her head within seconds, or tell just by looking at a shelf how much inventory she needs to order for the next month.

  It’s not ideal to have the person you’re critiquing hovering over you as you formulate your thoughts, so that’s one thing I would do differently. When I finally look up from the essay, Jocelyn’s retreated to her living room couch, sitting with her shoulders hunched up and her leg bouncing, a wholesale supplier’s catalog on her lap. She’s not really reading it, though, and is focusing on her hands. She’s as frightened as I am.

  “Jocelyn,” I say, in the same voice I use when my mom’s resting in her room with a migraine. “It’s really great.”

  In an instant her brow unfurrows, her legs still. “You think so?” She looks up at me with a hopeful smile.

  “Yeah. My guidance counselor once said that if a personal statement makes you want to grab a cup of coffee with the person, it’s done its job. You nailed it.”

  Her smile is real now, radiant. I want so badly to go over to her, not even to kiss her, just to be able to put my forehead to hers so I can feel her warmth.

  “Thank God,” she says. “I had no freaking clue what I was doing. I don’t know what they’re looking for. I’m not like some of the other people who are applying. I can’t talk about how I’m starting my own sustainable energy business or anything.”

  “Well,” I say brightly. This is where I have to be careful about how I start juggling. I’ve weighed the egg in my hand, and I think I know how hard to toss it. “You’ve got your own strengths. I can’t imagine that anyone else out there has done as much as you have to sustain a business.”

  “Okay.” Jocelyn shrugs, turning a little pink with my praise.

  “Can I make a suggestion?” I turn her laptop over to her and point out a sentence I highlighted. “See here, where you say, ‘This past summer I’ve learned an incredible amount about how to grow a business, having taken the reins to improve my family restaurant’s bottom line.’ This is where you can really dig deep, knock them out with the details of what you’ve done with your advertising, outreach, and innovative campaigns.”

  She nods slowly as her eyes move across the screen, but the furrow between her brows is back. “So you’re saying I need to dig deeper,” she says neutrally, the radiance gone.

  I suddenly feel off-balance, like everything is one or two degrees off its axis. I blink and think back to what I said. “I guess what I’m saying is, you’ve done all this stuff. Now you just have to show it.” I’m grasping at straws to say what I mean, and I latch on to the stuff I’m working on with Alan. “It’s like I tell your brother, sometimes you know how to do a problem, but it’s not quite enough to just put down the answer—you have to show your work to get full credit.”

  It’s the wrong thing to say. I know it the instant the words leave my lips. Jocelyn’s mouth tightens and she looks away. Her hand makes a fist, as if cracking an invisible egg.

  JOCELYN

  Will pretends to like my essay. I mean, he says he likes it, and that it makes him want to get coffee with me, but of course he’s biased. Then he says what he really means, which is that it needs work. Specifically, I need to “show my work,” like I’m some kind of failed middle schooler who has to take summer school.

  I feel sick with embarrassment. I sit on my hands to stop them from shaking. “Okay,” I say to Will, who is looking at me concernedly as I melt down. “I get it. I have to rewrite it. That’s fine, it was just a crappy first draft anyway.”

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying,” Will insists. “Most of it, like eighty percent of it, is perfect.…”

  “There’s no such thing as perfect,” I simper, parroting every elementary school teacher, ever. Because it’s true, at least for me.

  He puts his hand to his head and sighs, and it reminds me so much of my father that I want to puke. “What I mean,” he tries again, “is that there’s so much that’s pure gold. You don’t have to redo the whole thing. Just don’t be afraid to put in specifics about what you’ve done. The committee will eat it up.”

  I take a deep breath, as if it’ll buoy me from the sinking sensation that threatens to overwhelm me. My legs feel like they’re fused with our thinning gray carpet and the sagging cushions on our secondhand couch. I couldn’t stand up if I tried. “But…” I struggle to put it in words, how it’s not going to be that easy, he makes it sound so easy. “I tried to. I wrote it out, what we did this summer, and it looks… it looks like I’m pretending to be a grown-up. I might as well be using plastic coins.”

  “No one expects you to be fully formed,” Will argues. “These programs can’t expect anyone to be ready to lead Fortune 500 companies. They’re just looking for potential.”

  “Potential that I don’t have!” I can’t help it, I’m yelling, because he just doesn’t get it. He has this weird faith in me as if I’m worth the effort, as if I’m not just some bargain-basement wannabe who’s going to disappoint everyone who ever put faith in me.

  “Oh my…” Will covers his face with both hands to muffle a scream of frustration. “Jos, everyone has potential. You most of all. No one works harder than you, and you’re so smart.…”

  “Well, my PSAT scores don’t really support that,” I mutter.

  “Because you haven’t taken a hundred hours of SAT prep courses. Plus, there are studies showing that they’re not the best predictor of success in college—grades are.”

  “Those aren’t exactly anything to write home about.”

  “They’re not horrible, either. They’re okay.” When I glare at him—does he really believe that?—Will throws up his hands. “I don’t know what you expect me to say. Do you want me to tell you to quit, not to bother? Is that what you want?” I feel a heavy thud as Will slumps to the couch next to me, just inches away from where I’m still picking at that hangnail.

  I don’t say anything, because I don’t know the answer to his question.

  Will’s voice is low when he finally breaks the heavy silence. “I’m sorry. I just remembered that it wasn’t your idea to apply to this program. It was your dad’s. You’re doing it because it’s part of that contract.” He pauses. “Jocelyn?”

  The ache in his voice pulls me out of my spiral. I hate that I made him sound like that. I hate that when I look him in the eyes I can see the hurt in them.

  “Jocelyn, you know that if you want to pull out of the contract, I won’t hold it against you, right?”

  WILL

  In the beginning of her freshman year, my sister started to act even moodier than usual. The only thing that would make her smile at any family gatherings was when one of our younger aunties cooed over her, “Look, Grace, when did you become so fit! Sha, are you a model now with that waist?” Invariably this would spark controversy with my nne nne’s generation, who grumbled that she was too skinny and should gain weight, and Grace’s resting frown would come back. She was always a picky eater, but that year she started to prepare her own food, mostly raw vegetables and soups. It wasn’t until she fainted one day aft
er tennis practice that her coach took my mother aside and told her that she’d caught Grace purging in the locker room the week before.

  “I do not understand it,” my nne nne vented to my dad on the way home from the hospital. She had flown in from Chicago as soon as she’d heard that my sister was sick. “Why does the girl think she needs to lose more weight? She is stick thin as it is.” She was truly flummoxed, completely unable to comprehend how her perfect grandchild had suddenly become the problematic one. “Such a waste. There are people going hungry in parts of the world, and yet children in America are vomiting recreationally.”

  “They don’t do it for fun, Mmá,” my mother said sharply. “It’s a disease.”

  Dr. Rifkin had introduced me a long time ago to the concept of cognitive distortions—those moments when your brain is an asshole and misinterprets your world. It was kind of the same thing with Grace—she had something called body image distortion, so that whenever she saw her body reflected it was like she was looking into a funhouse mirror.

  I’ve been able to recite the cognitive distortions I’m prone to since fourth grade. That doesn’t mean that I have total control yet over how I personalize (in short, my tendency to feel responsible for bad things that happen to other people), how quickly I jump to conclusions, and my apocalyptic-level ability to catastrophize.

  It’s always easier to see fault lines—both your own and others’—than to fix them.

  So when I realize that I’ve been listening to Jocelyn and silently ticking off the ways that her brain is tricking her (polarized thinking, overgeneralization, disqualifying the positive), I know that just pointing them out isn’t going to be helpful. Even after pretty much half my life in therapy, I still bristle when my dad gently points out a distortion or suggests that I write in the workbook Dr. Rifkin gave me for the days in between sessions.