When Laila imagined somebody saying the word dick, it was a male voice, but strangely, when she imagined somebody saying the word pussy, it was a male voice, too. Maybe she’d never touched herself because she’d never felt like that territory was hers to claim. Or maybe it was because for fourteen years, she’d felt to her core that guilt was the correct response to desire, and that self-deprivation of every kind had some inherent goodness.
Laila placed a hand on her thigh. Her fingers were cold. Did this require music? She took a breath that made her chest shake and lifted her fingers between her legs, brushed them into a thatch of hair with an unfamiliar, wiry texture. She couldn’t look down at herself, just stared at the stain overhead and wished this didn’t feel somehow clinical and dirty at the same time. How was she supposed to feel? She had no reference point. From curiosity, she’d read her share of online smut. Mostly fanfiction smut, which was just stupidly easy to find and came with the benefit of a preexisting attachment to the characters. That was the problem with porn, which she’d tried watching once for about two minutes. Personality was absent from the equation, substituted out with interchangeable body parts. Although, to be fair, nobody was watching a four-minute video called “Best Friend’s Wife Home Alone ! ! !” for the character development.
Anyway, the smut she’d read was mostly incidental, embedded in a larger romance, so the sex scenes were filled with narrators’ passionate realizations about their partners’ emotional baggage. Laila appreciated the authors’ attention to interior life but also didn’t know how to reconcile swoony devotion and/or furious emotional heat with descriptions of the actual physical component. When they did talk about the sex itself, it was heavily euphemistic and often referenced sensations of explosion, e.g., “He closed his eyes, body rigid, and felt the world crash around him,” or “Static excitement wired her into an electric grid of frantic, sparking need,” or “Frustration built up her back as she pushed toward release, until fireworks burst beneath her stomach.” Which somehow made perfect sense in context, but now that she was lying here with her hands between her legs, none of that seemed even tangential to reality. Maybe she wasn’t reading the right smut. She had to clear her search history.
Here was that mysterious component so often decorated to complete obscurity by pretty language. Her body. Rubbing at herself from experimental angles. Pushing her fingers along grooves of different-textured skin, like the inside of her lip. She tried to make herself think about people she knew she was attracted to. Half the cast of The Rest. Samuel, Sebastian. For a second, Felix, but that felt invasive and she stopped. Then Hannah, but that disturbed a wave of panic and doubt and she thought herself frantically elsewhere. She couldn’t focus on people, in the end. She ended up thinking about dangerous performance art. Dogs shaking off rain. Greenhouse gases. She thought about how it might feel to write a sex scene, how secret warmth would alight in her and how her fingers would pass over the keyboard. She thought about soap. She thought about small circles, smaller circles, unexpected moisture. About anatomy diagrams—no, too medical, made her think of dissection. Of heat and comfort, instead. She strained against her own hand. Drew her palm experimentally upward, liked the warm pulse down her thighs that resulted, and did it again. Shivered. She felt, for a moment, galaxies distant from her body, and in the next moment, closer to herself than she had felt in her life. She thought about those videos from sixth grade, the red stain in her teacher’s pale cheeks as the woman had stammered out the definition of an orgasm to a room full of kids who in that moment would have preferred death to eye contact. Laila thought about the girl in freshman biology who’d accidentally answered a question with orgasm instead of organism. She thought about the laughter. She thought, as she moved her hand in a sharp, urgent rhythm, about descriptions of explosion, tension, thirst, and hunger. Of joy. Of power. But the instant it happened—the sudden gridlock of her muscles, the hard press of an index knuckle, the pleasure that threw itself down her limbs and radiated back between her legs, where it buckled, throbbed, redoubled—she felt like it was nothing but a body-wide function of relief, having arrived somewhere that should always have been familiar.
The trip to the red planet’s fifth colony always made Eden think about stitches. She still had the cord of scarring up her calf where Diara fit the arch of her foot. When they took the Bullet from Earth’s surface out to Mars, colony five like a steel spider ahead, they always had the same discussion. Eden told Diara she would not go back to the drowning place, where she could look into the artificial river and still see her leg catching on the jutting strip of metal. Diara told her, “I’ll hold you the whole way there. I’ll hold you the whole way back.”
—
Felix and Hannah joked often about how Leo was too good for them, about how there was no reason he should put up with them. The joke came from a place of deep collective insecurity, but Laila was pretty sure it was also true. She knew the second she sat down for lunch on Monday that Felix and Hannah were angry, and that Leo had already tried his best to arbitrate. She opened her mouth to help, but then Felix spoke, and she realized she’d misjudged the situation. For once, Hannah and Felix weren’t angry at each other.
“So you go out with two of my best friends and one of my worst enemies?” Felix demanded, glaring at Laila.
Laila looked to Hannah, but Hannah was stabbing at a salad with vehemence that suggested she’d sworn a vow to eradicate all the world’s croutons.
“Dude,” Laila said, “I had a crush on Samuel before you hated each other.”
“Well, now we hate each other. You know he’s still trying to get with Imani, right? That wasn’t a date, what you guys went on.”
Laila’s eyes stung. She was too quick to tears. They came at the same time as the sensation of hurt. “I know, Felix,” she said, letting him hear her anger. “You don’t have to throw it in my face that we can’t all get dates with whoever we want.”
Felix looked guilty for a moment, but rallied. “Yeah, but now Sebastian thinks you want to date him. Because, you know.”
Laila felt a slow, creeping shame that had nothing to do with Sebastian and everything to do with what her friends thought. How much did they know? Had Sebastian told Felix they’d reached second base in the slick-walled stairwell of the Ave Maria?
Hannah had renewed her efforts to impale her food.
“Okay,” Laila said. “So you’re mad that I kissed one of your friends. This isn’t actually about Samuel.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Felix said and looked to Hannah. “Because—”
“You let us hear about it through Sebastian,” Hannah interrupted. “You couldn’t, I don’t know, throw a text out there? You couldn’t have walked up the stairs and told me?” She tossed down her fork. “Also, I’m just going to say it, you deserve better.”
“You’re so impossible, Hannah,” Felix shot back. “I mean, no wonder you can’t hold down a girlfriend for thirty seconds when you have these fucking ridiculous standards.”
Laila looked to Leo. He shook his head, hand poised over his physics problem set, drawing a right angle against a shallow incline. She could see his irritation drawing his narrow shoulders tight.
“Okay,” Laila said, standing. “I’m letting you two cool off. Let me know if you figure out an actual, coherent reason to be mad at me. Leo, you want to work in the library?”
“Yes, please,” Leo said. They left Felix and Hannah glaring at each other across the speckled plastic.
One of the school librarians, Ms. Jennings, was definitely a lesser demon from hell, but the other, Ms. Andrade, turned a blind eye to kids eating in the library as long as they kept a cap on the volume and cleaned up after themselves. Luckily, Ms. A. was in charge that period, so Laila and Leo holed up in the corner to eat where Laila could use a computer, too.
From: Laila Piedra
To: Tim Madison
Subject: stuff 12:08 PM
* * *
Hi Mr. Madison,
I really wish you were back at school right now. Hannah and Felix are having one of those lunch fights again, but this time they’re mad at me. The reason is so hypocritical. Since freshman year, they’ve both been trying to get me to go out with them on weekends and cut loose, and now when I finally do—not even that much!—they’re both angry. Just because of some guy I don’t even like. And now Leo and I have to deal with them being dramatic, and it’s not like we have spare time to have fights that don’t matter and make up.
Maybe I’m the only one who thinks this, but in my opinion, if you make friends with somebody, you should be happy with what they are. If you get all these ideas about what needs improving, you didn’t make a friend, you took on an art project. And oh my gosh, if you’re so obsessed with fixing problems, fix your own problems!!! Like Felix and Hannah don’t both have a million issues they could work through!!!!!
Sorry, this is so stupid that I’m telling you. I would tell my parents, but my dad would just be all “WELL THEN NO MORE DATES FOR YOU,” and Mom would turn on psychologist mode and I would just want to leave.
In less completely obnoxious news, I wrote a new draft of the Eden story . . . and this one is set on Earth! Kind of. It’s Earth in 2730, but still. So that’s attached.
Also? Important. Ms. Bird brought a get-well card to Ms. Nazarenko’s class yesterday for us to sign. She said she was going to deliver it to you when all your classes signed it. I bet she wanted to surprise you, but I knew you’d want to know beforehand so you can prepare yourself, so just act surprised? Anyway, I’m not saying this means anything, but you should probably buy a cage of doves and an engagement ring.
Laila
From: Tim Madison
To: Laila Piedra
Subject: stuff 12:39 PM
* * *
Dear Laila,
I’m not an expert on your friends, and I am very sorry to hear that you’re fighting, but once you have a little distance, it might be helpful to ask yourself where they’re coming from. I find that a lot of the time, students have these fights with each other because they’re scared or nervous themselves, and end up lashing out to cover up that insecurity. From what you’ve told me about Hannah and Felix, I wouldn’t be surprised if they thought acting angry toward you was easier than admitting they felt vulnerable in some way.
That’s just a bit of conjecture. But nothing is better than talking openly. Being fully honest can fix so many frustrating communication problems.
As for Ms. Bird’s card: thank you for telling me. You know me well . . . I find that sort of surprise very stressful . . . hehe
I am excited to read your next draft!
Sincerely,
Mr. Madison
13
55/100, said the paper. A terrible grade, obviously, but also the first grade Laila or anyone had made that was closer to an A than a zero. Laila had been reconditioned, and she felt a sweep of excitement that lasted the rest of the day, the need to draw out her laptop and labor forward. Two more eighteen-point leaps would put her on track for an A with a week to spare for Bowdoin’s deadline.
When she flipped through, she saw that Nazarenko had underlined a phrase on page thirteen and left no notes beside the red mark—implicit approval. The exhilarating thing was that Laila had known, as she’d written that phrase, that it would make impact. She remembered the sense that this idea struggling for description was something so true that it would no longer belong to her once she shook it loose. Upon rereading, she’d felt a satisfying sting, like the removal of a splinter. She’d felt that her words were valuable, even original.
Mostly Laila didn’t buy into originality. Everything she loved came into her life feeling familiar. Sometimes she was sure the human race had only a handful of sentiments to express and had spent three thousand years shuffling words around to express those feelings in ways that could masquerade as new. And why did it have to be a shortcoming to write about death or love like people had a thousand years ago, or wonder about pain and comfort like they had a thousand years before that? Old feelings strung rope bridges through history.
Still, there was nothing quite like the feeling of being unique. Even if she’d invented it. Even if she was wrong.
She arrived at Nazarenko’s room after school, trying not to let her sense of triumph show, but discovered the door closed. Through the strip of wire-gridded window, she saw Samuel Marquez speaking with Nazarenko.
Laila leaned against a set of rust-spotted lockers, looking at the last texts between her, Felix, Hannah, and Leo. The four of them had been exclaiming over a YouTube video that had taken the most dramatic clips from season twelve, episode one, and replaced the score with audio of a miserable-sounding soprano saxophone. “That’s good shit,” Hannah said. “Revelatory,” Leo said. “I cant breathe,” Felix said.
That had been last Friday. Nobody was speaking in the group text now. Breaking silence took activation energy. Laila wanted to say something, but she couldn’t find an appropriate catalyst.
She knew Mr. Madison was right. Hannah had all but admitted she was hurt because Laila hadn’t prioritized them, and for all she knew, Felix was fighting with Imani about Samuel, and Laila’s not-date had come at the wrong time. Still, she didn’t know why they would feel better taking that out on her.
Laila peeked through the window again and went still as Nazarenko’s eyes found her. She started to pull away, but Nazarenko beckoned with two fingers. Samuel looked over his shoulder, met her eyes, and half smiled. Laila felt a stupid lightness.
When she walked in, Nazarenko gestured for them both to sit. “Your pieces this week,” she said, “had similar deficiencies.” She pointed at Laila. “Your main character has a little chat about trauma with the one who loves her, and with a feeling of great relief, her psychological issues resolve.” Then at Samuel. “Your main character makes a single alteration to his self-presentation, and suddenly, he becomes attractive to his muse. The question here is of risk. What has either character endangered in making their choice? Was there ever a chance they would fail? Neither of them experiences any discomfort throughout the narrative. You are being far too kind to these people.”
Nazarenko rose from her stool, crooked a knuckle into a steel triangle at the top of the whiteboard, and pulled a world map down into multicolored life. “I was born here,” she said, tapping Ukraine, pastel purple, at its center. “After the Soviet collapse, Ukraine was left in disrepair. In the mid-1990s, hyperinflation made worthless paper out of the currency we earned by the end of the day we’d earned it. During the worst months, a friend of mine would take his paycheck to a store the instant it was put into his hands; he would buy one loaf of white bread with a week’s wages, cut it into seven slices, and eat a slice a day.”
Laila had never sat so still.
“You know this still happens,” said Nazarenko. “Especially now, when at your fingertips you have the nexus of all human information, you live in the shadow of the knowledge that no matter what happiness you take, someone in the world is in pain. If suffering is necessary to art, it’s because the recognition of suffering is a necessary step toward full consciousness in the world. The likelihood of suffering, whether physical or emotional—that is risk; that’s what frightens us; that makes a story. Go find some struggle. Go find some fear. Few things are more useful.”
Nazarenko tugged on the world map to dismiss it. The matte plastic trailed out of sight sluggishly. Something in the hanging mechanism had rusted. “I will see you both tomorrow,” she said, shouldered her bag, and left.
“Well,” Laila said faintly. “That was dark.”
“Yeah,” Samuel said. “Does she want us to go play on the subway tracks or something?”
“Let’s not do that,” Laila said.
Samuel sighed, looking down at his story drafts jammed into a folder, which wore the same logo as his sneakers. “Okay, w
hat, then?”
Laila wasn’t sure why he thought she would have the answers, but she searched for something. They could take a risk together. She pictured climbing a mountainside with him, his hand pulling her up over the edge of a cliff, and the sensation of relief as they both tumbled back onto solid ground.
Before she could suggest anything, though, a voice at the back of the class said, “Marquez.” Laila didn’t recognize the boy, but he looked angry.
“One minute,” Samuel said to Laila, and he jogged out into the hall. Laila looked at the whiteboard a long while. She tried to imagine Nazarenko wandering the streets of some documentary they’d watched in European history. Imagining her as a teenager was impossible. If she had ever been longer-haired, gangly or ungainly, or dirty, dressed in anything but the uniform she’d imposed on herself, the woman had lifted the image entirely away from the paper. If she’d been born once in Soviet Ukraine, she’d been born again in South Africa, again in France, again in New York City, her own deliverer at her own rebirth. Laila thought how liberating that must feel, to be something so carefully conceived and curated and brought to life.
Samuel and his friend were yelling outside. “I don’t want her talking to him,” Samuel was saying. Laila looked around for a distraction, but temptation presented itself instead. Samuel had left his folder open. A library of his stories was there.
As the voices in the hall piled over each other, she tugged one of the stories loose, dated to the previous week. With the pages came a scrap of paper Laila recognized at once: a page from Nazarenko’s notebook, covered in her red script. Laila found herself morbidly curious. Maybe Nazarenko had given Samuel a reason he should befriend a stranger, a reason that had been too embarrassing for him to tell Laila, the same way she’d hidden from Hannah why she was really going to Felix’s party.
Final Draft Page 12
