Final Draft Read online

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-1-4197-2872-3

  eISBN 978-1-68335-263-1

  Text copyright © 2018 Riley Redgate

  Jacket illustrations copyright © 2018 Nathan Burton

  Jacket and book design by Alyssa Nassner

  Cover copyright © 2018 Amulet Books

  Published in 2018 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

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  For my kind, brilliant father.

  Here’s another book that, regrettably, does not include steam locomotives, linguistics, wine, Irish clocks, or bird-watching.

  Sorry.

  1

  Every day after school, she left earth for another galaxy. The launch apparatus was a pine desk in her bedroom that had been loved into ugliness, ringed with water stains and stippled by ballpoint pens. She opened her laptop there, and under the light of the screen, the desk faded, and the apartment, and the corner of Brooklyn through the window. She wrote herself away, into a city of glass tubes that crisscrossed a toxic planet, into the perforations of gently tumbling asteroids, into sunships that breached the surfaces of red giants and emerged crackling with plasma. She watched hordes of aliens catapult through wormholes toward a blue-green paradise braced for war, and she could have sworn she heard the hum of their engines.

  Out there, danger wasn’t something that erupted purposelessly in parking lots or at traffic intersections; it was peril, pure and moral and invigorating. Unifying. Out there, love bridged the space between planets, and betrayal risked the destruction of universes. Life was lived along a spectrum so vibrant it felt ultraviolet. How could the world outside the window seem anything but gray in comparison?

  2

  A hindwind caught Eden’s tail. There was a shudder from her ship’s flankwake to its nose. In the rearview monitor, three silver ships burst out of the white horizon behind her, heralds for ten thousand more. The entire Ta’adran horde. The admiral’s line had broken, and now the world was in her hands.

  Eden yanked the accelerator. Her ship could still reach the enemy station, which rose like a mountain from the ice forests. Hideous prongs at its crown were accumulating a gray glow of power. A ghostly beam focused toward their sun: the Ta’adran Stardrainer, poised to harvest every scrap of solar energy.

  There was no time for the original plan. She could never break into the Stardrainer and unhook its wiring before it fired. But she had one final weapon: her ship, a fuel cell cutting the air at Mach 4.

  Eden slammed an elbow into the rocket prop, and her ship began to scream in overload. The sun would rise tomorrow, and the day after. She realized she’d known for months that she would die defending it.

  Mr. Madison set down the pages. “This is my favorite thing you’ve written,” he said.

  “Really?” Laila asked.

  “Really,” he said through a mouthful of soup. Speaking through soup was harder, logistically, than speaking through other foods, so this resulted in a messy splattering situation that Laila pretended not to see, because somebody had to be gentle with him. Mr. Madison was incurably self-conscious and—Laila loved him, so she was allowed to say it—an absolute pushover. To worsen things, he was small and pale and looked about thirteen years old, the human equivalent of a weed that had spent most of its life beneath a boulder. All in all, the type of teacher that kids bullied not because they wanted to do him any particular emotional harm, but because Jesus, it was right there.

  “Here,” said Mr. Madison, with one of those stutter-y, beckoning motions that somehow looked apologetic. He leaned over his desk to return Laila’s story. He’d circled so many passages in blue that each paragraph looked like a map of elliptical orbits. Mr. Madison was the type of deeply involved reader who couldn’t touch anything without leaving evidence. Laila always emailed him her stories, and he always handed back a copy she could hold. They’d kept this ritual for almost four years.

  “Thanks,” Laila said, but as she paged through, familiar doubts nudged her. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust his opinion. When it came to science fiction, Mr. Madison was even more obsessed than she was. They shared a favorite series, Moondowners, an epic space opera whose final book was set to release this fall after a five-year wait. He could out-quote her, something hardly anybody could do, even in the Moondowners forums. Not that any of this made his opinion more valid, but if she shared taste with somebody, she would’ve liked to think they had high standards, and if Mr. Madison had high standards, he couldn’t consist entirely of checkmarks and exclamation points.

  “You’re not just saying that, right?” she asked.

  He stopped eating, his eyelids aflutter over his watery eyes. The panicked blink.

  Laila hurried to diminish the blow. “It’s just, every story can’t be your favorite, right?”

  “Oh,” he said, mollified. “Hmm. I guess I—” Mr. Madison chuckled. He had a nasal little laugh that obviously embarrassed him. He never laughed during class, just smiled widely and let his narrow shoulders tremble in silence. If you walked down the hall, you could see a half dozen kids mimicking this at any given time.

  “I’m not embellishing,” he said. “I promise. Have you considered that maybe you’re just getting better with every piece?” Mr. Madison had a habit of phrasing even his firmest opinions as questions. Laila could never decide whether this was a pedagogical strategy for engaging students or a depressing inability to show any confidence whatsoever.

  Suddenly she felt guilty for second-guessing him. Mr. Madison had read every word she’d written since freshman year, had spent so many thankless lunch periods discussing her stories. Having someone who took her writing so seriously made the whole exercise real in a way that it had never been when she was little, scrawling loopy cursive into the notebook she’d clutched under the gummy light on her bedside table, ten years old and terrified to show her parents even a glimpse.

  “I’m curious, Laila,” he said, plucking his round glasses from his nose. He wiped them with a microfiber cloth he always kept neatly folded beside his stapler. “Are you proud of this story?”

  When she realized she couldn’t say “yes,” she nearly cringed. What did it say if she’d worked for more than a month to write a single twelve-page draft, and she wasn’t even proud of it?

  Outside, four floors below, car horns blared dissonant chords. Laila glanced through the windows. Thick clouds had trapped the March sun and flattened Manhattan into a lithograph. She caught herself picking at the tips of her black hair—subdividing the broom of split ends—and sat hard on her hands.

  “I don’t know about proud,” she told him. “I mean, it’s a first draft. I’m fine with where it is. I can lock myself in this weekend and fix the whole admiral section.”

  Mr. Madison was usu
ally too nervous about miscommunication to rely on sarcasm, but he surprised her with a wry note: “And are you planning to come up for air at all?”

  Laila leaned back in her chair and smiled. These were the moments when she felt like Mr. Madison understood her better than any of her friends did, or even her family. Whenever the world didn’t directly demand her attention—between classes, between sentences, on the train—her imagination took over, as reflexive as breath. Laila spent every day yanked taut between this world and another, and he was the only one who knew, because he’d listened patiently to her wandering through brainstorm after bizarre brainstorm; he’d seen her first drafts, fifth drafts, tenth drafts, all ripped down to the phrase and reassembled.

  “Actually,” she said, “I do have plans. The new season of The Rest is dropping tomorrow, so me and Hannah and the guys are going to meet up. Watch a few episodes.”

  “That sounds like fun. Anything nonfictional planned?”

  “Nah,” she said. She never planned nonfictional things. At most, she let Hannah and Felix and Leo drag her to dinner every once in a while.

  Mr. Madison’s nervous chuckle pushed through his nose again. “Laila, you know I’d never criticize your work ethic, but have you ever considered that getting some distance from a piece could be valuable?”

  She had to resist a grimace. “Yeah, I see people saying that online. ‘Take a break.’” She shook her head. “Maybe distance works for them, but whenever I go a day without working on this stuff, I feel . . . not even lazy, more like . . .”

  She took a long moment to arrange her thoughts, knowing he wouldn’t push her. Mr. Madison had a type of quiet, reassuring patience that nobody else in this school seemed to understand. In group projects or casual snippets of conversation, other kids always cut her off halfway through a sentence, and the interruption flustered her—and once she’d lost momentum, she could never get her social interaction gears restarted. That left most of the school—Hannah, Leo, and Felix excepted—with the totally misguided idea that “quiet” was her only personality trait.

  “I guess I’ve got this image,” she said, “that these stories are already out there, like these perfect little islands floating around, and I keep trying to rope them in, but I keep getting these mediocre versions that only even passingly look like what I want. So I’ve got to spend all my time out there casting nets, because if I spend too much time away from that universe, I’ll go and forget how it feels in there, and I’ll get farther and farther from those perfect versions of what I’m trying to do, and—” She smoothed the dogeared pages in front of her. “This has to feel lived-in, you know? I’ve got to live in it.”

  Mr. Madison bobbed his head from side to side, half nod, half consideration. Before he could answer, the bell hammered to signal the end of first lunch, one of three that rotated throughout fifth period. Voices rose into a distant muddle in the hallway.

  “Can we pick this back up tomorrow?” Mr. Madison asked. “I’d love to talk more, but if you’re late to Ms. Bird’s class again, she’ll come after me.”

  “So you’re saying I should definitely be late.”

  “What? No.” Mr. Madison went red up to his prematurely receding hairline. “G-go to class.” He fussed around with some pencils that didn’t need rearranging.

  Laila grinned and shook her head. His obvious crush on Ms. Bird might have been gross if it weren’t so bewildering. The woman looked more like a member of a biker gang than a calculus teacher. Laila was pretty sure Ms. Bird could have inflicted physical harm on Mr. Madison just by snapping her sharp-nailed fingers at him.

  “Laila.”

  She looked up from loading her books behind the strained zippers of her backpack, tucking a frizzy curl of black hair behind her ear.

  “Can you try to do something for me?” he asked.

  “Sure. What?”

  “Every so often, take a moment—a real-world moment—and let yourself be proud of what you’re working on. Okay?” Mr. Madison’s eyes arched into crescents when he smiled. His face was all softness. “You deserve approval from somebody other than me. Nobody could be harder on your writing than you are.”

  The urgent fires that always seemed to be burning in her chest dimmed. “Yeah,” she said. “I’ll try.”

  But the words left a metallic aftertaste. Laila prided herself on her honesty—mostly, she considered herself so vanilla that she had no idea what she would lie about—but she didn’t know if she could do what he was asking. “Be proud” sounded too much like, “Go easy on yourself,” something her mother always said, and which Laila hated. Her goals were more important than a momentary burst of pleasure that might come from a lapse in self-criticism. She wanted to pierce the furthest frontier of her ability. Satisfaction didn’t feature in any step of any plan she’d imagined toward that end.

  Laila looked down at her pages, imagined them from anyone else’s perspective, and watched them transform into something smaller and shallower. This story would be perfect someday, refined by time and exertion, every facet as lucid as a gemstone’s. She had to fit it between her hands and press, press, press until she felt it fuse.

  3

  That afternoon, Laila sat at her desk and reread the crash sequence from early in the story. Eden’s glass ship hissed over the ice planet’s crust, stirring powder up in its wake. Laila had her steering into the caves and out again, but they felt too secluded from the main body of the battle. Could she redirect the chase over the ocean? No, the frozen waves gave off the wrong atmosphere—too bleak, too remote. She needed something active, something alive. A volcano, maybe, waking after a long dormancy, that would incinerate the alien ship on Eden’s tail. Yes. Better. Eden would look down as she passed over the mountain’s eye and watch an iris of magma gleam . . .

  Then Laila’s sister hammered on her door—“Naña, for the millionth time, dinner”—and Laila blinked, glanced at the rattling knob, and found herself unpleasantly back on Earth. Also, she was freezing, because their apartment windows had all the insulating power of one-ply toilet paper. Also, whatever their mother was making for dinner smelled like burning fungus.

  Laila hit save and went for the door. Camille stood barefoot in the hall, teasing a comb through her fragile golden hair, which zigzagged like a cluster of lit filaments in the dry air. Camille had inherited their mother’s pale coloring, feline blue gaze, and matchstick physique. Laila, on the other hand, looked unmistakably mestiza, taking after their dad. With her corkscrewing black hair and dark tan, not to mention her general largeness—of height, hips, mouth, eyes—hardly anyone guessed that she and Camille were sisters. Laila’s life had been a parade of near strangers squinting at her and Camille and saying, “Oh, yeah, I sort of see it,” as if they’d been handed a spot-the-difference puzzle.

  “Hey,” Laila said awkwardly.

  “Hey,” Camille mumbled.

  They couldn’t meet each other’s eyes. They were in the middle of one of their biannual fights. Camille was in eighth grade and Laila was in twelfth, which usually left enough distance for Laila to chalk any obnoxious behavior up to her sister’s age-related inferiority. But the previous weekend, she’d borrowed Laila’s favorite sweater without asking and ruined it with Tabasco sauce, a repeat offense. It was enough of a task for Laila to find clothes that fit her chest and didn’t also make her look like she was wearing a circus tent. Now, two sweaters and her vintage The Rest: Season II shirt were stained beyond wearability, all because Camille had the total inability to keep food inside her incompetent thirteen-year-old teeth.

  They padded down the hall. “Writing?” Camille asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Let me guess. I’m not allowed to read this one, either.”

  “Nope,” Laila said, looking down her nose. Camille was growing like bamboo, but for now, Laila would lord the extra height over her for all it was worth.

  Camille muttered, “You let Mr. Madison read your stuff.”

  “Yeah, he’s my c
reative writing teacher, Camille.”

  “So?”

  “So, if you were in charge of my transcript, I’d let you read anything you wanted, too.”

  “Whatever,” Camille sniffed, and went back to combing her hair. “You have to show people eventually.”

  Laila stayed mulishly silent. She hated that Camille had a point. Even Mr. Madison told her on a biweekly basis that she should show other people her writing, and although he never made her feel pressured—Tim Madison probably couldn’t pressure a handful of dough if someone gave him a rolling pin—he said enough for her to consider what that exposure would feel like. All evidence so far suggested something along the lines of well-publicized nausea. She’d had multiple nightmares in which Samuel Marquez, an absurdly hot junior who only took creative writing for Mr. Madison’s signature automatic A, read out paragraphs from her stories while a full auditorium laughed uproariously.

  Mostly she rationalized her privacy by telling herself that other people’s opinions weren’t the point, but that was a thin excuse. Obviously, writing had private benefits. She wrote to learn who she was. She wrote to make a record of what she’d been. She wrote to see the way her thoughts looked with polish applied. And maybe those inner satisfactions were enough for other people, but to her they didn’t seem like the complete set. Someday, she wanted the give and take, the sense of tradition and participation that came from going public with her stories. Ultimately, what was the point of messing around in all this language if she didn’t want to communicate something?

  “Tell you what,” Laila said. “You can read one of my stories if you read the first Moondowners book.” She worried for an instant about the sex scenes, but then again, she’d read The Sky Most Gray and Ancient when she was younger than Camille, and she’d emerged unscathed. Also, there was no chance that Camille hadn’t already seen something worse on the internet.

  Camille gave her withering side-eye. “That book’s like a thousand pages.”