Before Laila could let her frenetic mental calculations slow down, before she could allow logic or fear back in, she said, “I think every word means something.”
He looked at her from the frizzy part zigzagged into her thick hair to the soft sweater Camille had replaced to the rhinestone watch at her wrist to the knotted and re-knotted neon laces of her sneakers. “Hey,” he said, “what if we kept comparing notes? I bet we can figure her out.”
She nodded, they locked eyes, and Laila saw the same thirst she felt. Not for each other, but for the idea that they could each be something great.
She abandoned the hall to the cafeteria, strode for the stairwell, and ran up four flights. Pits of her lungs aching, she came into the elective hall and through the door to find Nazarenko still at her stool, chewing, something splayed in her lap that she was reading with a frown. Her jaw moved with a left bent when she bit down. To see the woman eat felt invasive. Bodily functions didn’t fit her aesthetic.
Laila fussed with the zipper on her jacket, grasping for extra seconds of preparation. By the time she faced Nazarenko properly, she had caught her breath and felt, if not ready, on the verge of it.
“Yes?” Nazarenko said.
Laila strode up the aisle, her fists tight at the outer curves of her thighs, holding her body fast under the probable onslaught. “You only left notes for me and Samuel,” she said. “You wanted us to ask.”
Nazarenko flicked an apple core into the trash. “Ask?” she said, not looking at Laila. She wasn’t grading papers, Laila realized, or reading a Hannah-style tome. She was paging through a catalog of cooking utensils.
“Ask for advice,” Laila said. “For—I don’t know, for an explanation.”
“And . . . that’s why you’re here,” said Nazarenko, surveying a page full of stainless-steel nonstick pans. “To relay this epiphany.”
“Yes. I mean, no. I want to know what you thought about my story. What you really thought.”
Nazarenko flicked to the next page of her magazine. Whisks and butcher knives. “What do you do outside school?”
“What?”
“What do you do, Piedra. Outside school.”
“I . . . I basically just write.”
“What else?”
Laila balked. “I don’t know, I—”
“You don’t know.”
“Reading. I read a lot.”
“That was assumed,” Nazarenko said. “Do you have friends?”
“Yeah, of course I have—”
“What do you do together?”
“We, um . . . we watch this show we all like.” It sounded as small and miserable in the open as she’d worried it might.
Nazarenko let the magazine slap onto Mr. Madison’s desk. She extracted her notebook from her coat and paged through with excruciating deliberateness. At last she stopped, looked up at Laila, and tapped the page three times with her index finger. “You have two choices,” she said. “I can read this to you, or you can leave now.”
Laila held still, staring at the window of jagged red lines beneath Nazarenko’s nail.
“Very well.” Nazarenko lifted the notebook. Laila had the sensation of sitting on the subway tracks as the J train roared toward her.
“This student can write a coherent narrative and turn a distinct phrase. Unfortunately, her piece’s strengths end well within those confines. The plot contains nothing original, nothing even passingly surprising, and I can only assume that the student has tried to substitute pulp science-fiction narratives for her own life, given that there are no echoes of reality’s chaos or contradictions here. Rather than lacing a predictable otherworld setting with incomprehensible jargon, the student would do well to refocus her efforts on building a world through the creation of a character with a detailed history. Unfortunately, she seems disinterested in character altogether.”
Nazarenko licked the tip of her thumb and turned the page, a process that seemed to last several months.
“This piece,” Nazarenko went on, still with perfect neutrality, “is a portrait of war and risk drawn by a person who has clearly never seen the face of either. The student doesn’t seem to grasp that the enormity of loss stems from the fundamental assumption that human life is interesting and valuable. This is a story about the supposed destruction of humanity populated with not a single recognizable human being.”
Laila tried to swallow, but something against the back walls of her mouth was dry and refused to grip, and she thought, for a second, that she might choke. When had she risked anything, really? She looked back through her life and saw a procession of school-day routines, chores, conversational chatter. She felt like a witness to the massacre of all her time. For a horrible moment, she wondered if she’d only ever written science fiction to build an escape chute from her life’s insistent monotone.
Nazarenko placed the notebook back into her pocket. “Revisions are due Monday morning.”
Laila nodded, but she couldn’t leave and couldn’t reply. In the thick silence, she heard an echo of a second, more familiar voice. “Have you ever considered that getting some distance from a piece could be valuable?” Mr. Madison, she realized, had been giving her the same advice.
A reservoir of energy loomed suddenly behind a dam Laila hadn’t known was there, walled up between her ribs and skin. She had to surface from her virtual reality, rip the intubation from her throat, and let the world pour in. She had to mine real life for raw material until her product came out of the furnace alive and breathing, sternum heaving, blood raging. She was going to make something that even this watching figure, wordless and elegant, perched on a pedestal before her, couldn’t ignore.
Still her words were quiet and halting. “So what do I do?”
Nazarenko gave her a thin, unpleasant smile. “You never ask that question again.”
9
Laila (3:47 p.m.): Felix, what time is your party tomorrow?
Laila (3:47 p.m.): Hannah, shut up
Hannah (3:48 p.m.): ? I didn’t say anything?
Laila (3:48 p.m.): You were typing something obnoxious
Laila (3:49 p.m.): I could smell it in the air
Laila (3:49 p.m.): like sewage
Laila (3:50 p.m.): “omg are you actually going to LEAVE your HOUSE”
Hannah (3:51 p.m.): fair.
Felix (6:27 p.m.): lol its at 9.
Hannah (6:30 p.m.): SEE YOU THEN, HERMIT
She was pulling at bits of her torso, brown pinches of flesh that didn’t seem to sit in the right place. The shirt had fit last year and was one of the only pieces of clothing she owned that felt presentational. The neckline drew a diagonal from the left side of her neck to her right armpit, preempting a sleeve. For Laila, a one-shouldered shirt was the outer boundary of edgy fashion. Mostly she owned landscape clothing: heathery T-shirts, dark denim jeans, and black pants so nondescript that they could disappear into any backdrop. She’d had experience with being physically noticed in elementary school and would gladly have lived the rest of her life without repeating any of that.
Nobody had given her serious trouble about her weight for years, but being the fat kid in elementary school was so much visibility so early, it created an impact that never really smoothed away. Every identity felt final and fateful back then—being the smart kid or the quiet kid or the short kid—even if the traits didn’t stick, even if they weren’t actually accurate. In Laila’s memory of fifth grade, a boy named Jeremy Bowman had the freakish shape of a stick insect, impossibly tall and knobbed at every joint. She’d looked at a yearbook last fall and the discrepancy had stunned her. In those photos, he was normal. Sure, on the tall side for a ten-year-old: maybe five foot one, with a more triangular jawline than the other kids. But Laila remembered a caricature. So she suspected that in everybody else’s caricatured memories, she wasn’t the chubby little girl from the photos, either, but something exaggerated to the point of distortion, and that was the old version of herself she carried around, too: mostly inve
nted, impactful anyway.
“Lolly, I love that shirt,” said her mother, who had appeared in the door.
Laila met her eyes in the mirror. “Really?”
“Yes, really, absolutely,” said her mother, who never used just one affirmative when she could use eight. “I haven’t seen you wear it since last year. You know, I thought about giving it away.”
Her mother had hardly entered the room before she started straightening up. Laila’s grandparents owned a bed-and-breakfast in Quebec, and her mother still had habits left over from working there when she was young. Instinctive cleaning, stacking the family’s plates whenever they ate at a restaurant, using a towel to smooth stray water off the edges of a sink after she washed her hands.
“Are you going somewhere?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Laila said. “Felix’s eighteenth birthday party.”
“Oh, wonderful. Getting out and about will be good for you, I think. What a tough couple of weeks, huh?”
“I’ve had better,” said Laila, wondering if her mother was trying to coax out some secret anguish about Mr. Madison’s accident. She wasn’t wearing the Deep Sympathy facial expression, so that was a good sign.
“Well, wish him happy birthday from me,” her mother said. “Felix is so nice. So handsome.” She raised her eyebrows, which, unlike the rest of her hair, were the dark color of burnt caramel.
“Stop. He’s dating someone, Mom.”
“That’s a shame.”
“No, it’s not.” Laila laughed. “I don’t know why you’re so set on me dating him.”
“Because he’s a good friend,” said her mother. “Your father was my best friend for years before we started seeing each other.” She stopped behind Laila, arranging Laila’s volumes of hair. Laila loved seeing herself beside her mother. At five foot ten and a half, Laila hardly ever felt small, but her mother still had half a head’s height on her. Anything less would have made her father look like somebody who’d married a gnome.
“And,” her mother added, “Felix is so nice.”
“Okay,” Laila said, bemused. “Are you worried I’m going to date somebody who isn’t nice?”
Her mother’s hands rested on her shoulders, her nails ten beads of uneven blue that Camille had lacquered with a gummed-up brush. “Well, Hannah is your best friend.”
The hesitance in her mother’s voice was the only thing that gave Laila the restraint not to shrug her grip off. Even then, her voice came out more snappish than she intended. “I’m not dating Hannah.”
The sentence felt strange to say. She pictured Hannah then, suddenly and vividly, the way her lips pulled to the side when she was thinking hard, the pair of dark freckles seeded into her brown irises. Even in her imagination, Hannah looked unimpressed. Laila’s face grew warm, and she couldn’t meet her mother’s eyes anymore. “I should go,” she said. “I’m going to be late.”
“So, we’re obscenely early,” Hannah said, thumbing Felix’s buzzer.
“What? We’re on time. Didn’t he say nine? He definitely said nine.”
“Like I said: obscenely early.”
During the walk up to Felix’s fourth-floor apartment in Crown Heights, Hannah gave a summary of every person invited, divided into two tiers: those Felix wanted to come, half of whom wouldn’t show up, and those Felix didn’t actually want in his place, but whom he’d invited anyway to fill space. “Anyway,” Hannah said, “we’re going to beat everybody there, so we can introduce you to whatever other weird people come an hour and a half early. God, I hope Samuel doesn’t show up.” Hannah glanced over at Laila. “Did you end up . . . I don’t know, talking to him, or whatever?”
Laila didn’t know why she hadn’t told Hannah yet. After meeting with Nazarenko yesterday, she’d retreated to the cafeteria and sat quietly while the others dreamed up ideas for Leo and Angela’s fifth-anniversary celebration. Laila had said nothing about Samuel, about his secret interest in writing, about the pact they’d made to play Nazarenko’s game together, and she felt even more reluctant now.
She wasn’t afraid Hannah would tease her. They teased each other about absolutely everything, with contractual regularity. Mentioning those ten minutes in the classroom felt wrong in a different way. She didn’t know how Hannah would react. How could this be the thing that was too personal to share?
“No,” Laila said. “I, um, I thought about saying something, but I got scared.”
Hannah’s expression cleared. “Yep. Obsession is the root of all fear.”
“I’m not obsessed with him. He’s just a perfect physical specimen.”
Hannah laughed. “So romantic. When somebody talks about me like I’m a science fair experiment, I’ll know I’ve found The One.”
“Oh, Hannah,” Laila said in a dreamy voice. “Your hair is redder than an algae bloom that would cause massive coastal die-offs.”
“Perfect. Where’s my engagement ring?”
“Hidden in the Champagne we can’t legally buy yet.”
Grinning, they passed an apartment door that leaked a cloud of weed scent down the hall and another decorated with a bedraggled wreath.
“So,” Hannah said, “why’d you change your mind, hermit?”
Laila wanted to tell Hannah what Nazarenko had said, the accusation that Laila hadn’t lived enough for her writing to come alive, but her voice failed again. Hearing the criticism had been humiliating, but telling Hannah would be worse. Maybe Hannah even agreed with Nazarenko. Hadn’t she told Laila again and again that someday she’d look back and have regrets?
“I wanted to make sure Felix didn’t get his nose broken,” she said, finally.
“For real,” Hannah said. “It would ruin the celebratory atmosphere.” She banged on Felix’s door. “FBI, open up.”
In the tense moment before Felix answered, Laila dipped her fingers into her coat to pull at her neckline. Hannah had reassured her that nobody cared what anybody else wore to house parties. Apparently somebody had worn a fluorescent blue Morphsuit to Isabella Bianchi’s start-of-school party last August. But, planning for the temperature of Felix’s apartment when it was twenty people beyond fire-code capacity, Laila had changed her one-sleeved shirt for the only tank top she owned. This was beginning to feel like a dangerous move. She hadn’t worn this since the summer before junior year, and now her boobs bubbled up toward the scoop neck as if they were trying to make an escape. The rest of the tank top, of course, sagged around her ribcage like a sock stretched out by thirty years of wear, but hugged her stomach in a death grip. So many plus-size clothes fit like they’d been modeled on a thin person’s body and expanded outward, so they weren’t appropriate for an actual fat girl so much as a thin person digitally magnified to computer-glitch dimensions.
“Hey,” Hannah said.
“What?”
“You’ll be fine, L.”
Before Laila could accuse her of secretly being a nice person, Felix answered the door visibly drunk and waved them in. “Laila! You made it? For real?”
“Yeah, try not to choke.” She hugged him. “Happy birthday, old man.”
“Where’s your mom?” Hannah asked. “Did you lock her in there?” She nodded to the corner. Felix had moved the sofa against his mom’s bedroom door and rotated the bookcase toward the wall, hiding the glass knickknacks on the shelves.
“She’s at the restaurant,” Felix said. His mother was a manager and bartender at a steakhouse in Fort Greene whose prices made even Hannah cringe. Her schedule rendered Felix’s curfew basically nonexistent, although it didn’t stop his mom from trying.
Felix’s wrestling friends stormed him. Laila mumbled a greeting to them and followed Hannah to a cooler on the kitchen counter.
Hannah slapped an icy beer into Laila’s hand. The can’s weight felt stupidly significant, like the key to a gateway beyond which lay her second life. She wondered if Camille would think differently about her if she knew Laila was drinking. Laila wouldn’t have been surprised if Camille w
ere drinking already. Her friends were the type, the early-blooming even-featured girls who acted invincible, looked invincible, were for all intents and purposes invincible. Laila didn’t even know how to pretend to be anything other than perpetually vulnerable.
“Need some help?” Hannah said, taking Laila’s can, popping the tab, and handing it back.
“Thanks, so helpful, I’ve never opened a can before.”
Hannah grinned. “You looked nervous. Have some.”
Laila steeled herself and took a long drink. She resisted the temptation to gag. The sticky fizz itched down her throat like contaminated water and left a rancid aftertaste.
“Awful, right?” Hannah said. “Don’t worry, after three of those, you won’t care about the taste.”
“Three? Veto.” Laila knew how that story went. After three beers, she would be staggering drunk. Then she would spot Samuel Marquez across Felix’s living room and think it was a great idea to try and talk to him. She would hesitate; Hannah would cajole her, possibly drag her over. After she sufficiently humiliated herself, she would leave the party crying and swearing to herself that she’d never do this again.
Final Draft Page 8
