Final Draft Page 2

  “Twelve hundred.” Laila chanced another whiff of the air and nearly gagged. “God, what is that?”

  “Right?” said Camille. For a moment, the fight slipped away, and they made pained eye contact. “I swear it’s compost or something.”

  For the sake of their mother’s feelings, Laila forced a neutral expression when they emerged from the hall into the stench of the kitchen. The pair of them longed for the weekends, when their father was in charge of cooking, with the billows of pork-flavored steam, the mountains of rice, the hissing of plump vegetables against cast iron. He’d enlisted them to make llapingachos, potato patties with onions, cheese, and pork tucked into their centers, that weekend. Every time their father cooked something with that much grease involved, he wound up squabbling with their mother, who taught Kundalini yoga to Williamsburg hipsters and genuinely seemed to believe that excess cholesterol could block one’s chakras. Apparently chakra blockage tasted like heaven.

  Chakras and heart attacks notwithstanding, it would have been impossible to convince her father away from fried foods. He was Ecuadorian, their mother French-Canadian; this earned Laila a lot of, “What an interesting mix,” which was an efficient way to make her feel like a sinister genetic experiment.

  “Laila’s out of her digital prison,” her father announced at a decibel level that suggested he was trying to inform the apartments above and below. Her dad was a little too much of everything. Louder than IMAX, taller than a good chunk of the NBA, brawnier than a Greek statue. He even looked too bright, wet streaks of light caught in his black hair, still only half-dry from the shower.

  “I’m out,” Laila agreed. “Down, Mal. Get off. Sit.”

  The dog blundered into her ankles a few more times before jogging back into his corner, where he slumped onto his side and thwacked his ropy tail against the floor, clearly pleased with everything he had accomplished. Malak was a mutt with the graceful legs of a whippet and the guileless face of a retriever. Counter to both of these traits, their father had named him after Knights of the Old Republic’s Darth Malak. Secretly—this had to be secret, because her father was a personal trainer whose reputation was built around being a hardass—Jaime Piedra was the biggest nerd in Brooklyn. He owned the entire Star Wars expanded universe novel collection, all read to pieces. At six foot five, he was also probably the largest nerd in Brooklyn.

  As Laila settled at the table, she made the mistake of glancing at her phone. With the season release tomorrow, her group text with her best friends had grown so frantic that the vibrate function had started to resemble a metronome more than an alert system. She’d hardly opened Leo’s text when her father stopped at her shoulder, a loaf of bread dwarfed in his massive hand, and swiped the warm slip of metal from her grip.

  “No phone at the table,” he said, a phrase that would surely be inscribed on his gravestone. Laila grabbed for his arm, but he shoved the phone into his pocket and swatted her away. “No. You look at this thing more than you look at your poor old parents.” He flourished a hand over the counter. “¡Mira! You’re missing your mother’s beautiful face.”

  Laila sighed. “Yes, Dad.” Hannah, Felix, and Leo would have to wait. Arguing would only encourage the rest of her father’s usual monologue: that he knew she took writing seriously, but it couldn’t be healthy spending so much time in front of a computer, especially when she poured hours into all those TV shows, and—and!—read books on an e-reader. Couldn’t anything just be an object anymore without a glowing backdrop? You never would have seen people ignore one another like this in Quito in 1982. And so on.

  Her mother placed a bowl of greenish soup in front of Camille, beside whatever meat substitute she’d decided to prepare. Even Malak, canine vacuum cleaner, couldn’t stomach some of these chicken replacements.

  “Lolly, would you say grace?” her mother asked. Laila hadn’t been able to pronounce her own name until she was six. Her mom had never stopped calling her the bastardized version.

  Her father brightened and gave her an expectant look.

  Laila drew a deep breath. “Okay.” There was nothing to worry about. They’d just gone over this yesterday. She couldn’t have forgotten already. “Bendícenos, Señor,” she said, “y bendice los alimentos que . . . que vamos a tomar, para . . . nos . . .”

  “Mantenernos,” her father prompted.

  Laila felt prickly with embarrassment and finished the phrase in a rush. “Mantenernos en tu santo servicio. Amen.”

  “Amen,” everyone repeated. Her father gave her an approving nod, but she wished she could rewind. Re-tape her hiccup. If time travel were an option, actually, she would rewind through the last twelve years and tell her child self to take her dad’s impromptu language coaching more seriously. She would tell herself to swallow her pride and take Spanish in school like everyone else. Now her Spanish was so fragmented that she could barely talk to Tía Graciela when her father inevitably passed his phone conversations to her (and God help her if she tried to politely decline). She spent half the time saying, “Puedes repetir mas despacio, ¿por favor?” As if the problem were how quickly her aunt was speaking rather than her total lack of vocabulary.

  Laila looked to Camille, half expecting a smug expression—her sister could be petty when they were fighting—but Camille was just chipping at her glitter-coated nails. She was going to regret ruining that final layer. Camille had decided last week to sell off her nail polish to her classmates bottle by bottle. She was making shocking amounts of money from this. Someday Camille would be a ruthless businesswoman.

  Laila considered again trying to end the fight, but how? Camille had to apologize before Laila could forgive her. This all felt so unnecessary. Because they fought so rarely, neither of them was much good at it. Laila had described it halfheartedly to Mr. Madison the day before as, “Me and Camille are on a break, or something.”

  “You two are fighting?” Mr. Madison had said mildly. “That’s not like you.”

  “It’s more like a stalemate. I already know she’s going to ignore me for three weeks and then pretend nothing happened.”

  Mr. Madison seemed confused. “Did you do something?”

  “No, she did something, and also doesn’t get how the silent treatment works.”

  Luckily, she and Camille were not required to talk at dinner. It was Thursday, so as usual, there was strife at the yoga studio. Laila’s mother never talked about her day job—she couldn’t, really, being a psychologist—but the two afternoons a week she taught yoga were invariably followed by descriptions of some conflict between undergraduate volunteers and grown-ass adults.

  “Honey,” her mother said to her father, with the sly, indulgent tone of gossip, “did I tell you? Justin’s threatening to quit over the Amelia problem.”

  Her father sliced into his fake chicken. “That boy needs to toughen up.”

  “Well, I’m not so sure. The rest of us can’t ignore it anymore, either. Amelia’s a sweet girl, really. She gives such clear demos, and students love her classes, and I’m not just saying that . . .”

  Laila’s mother always assembled a cloud of compliments before letting herself insult anybody. Maybe she thought it negated the blow. All it really did was heighten the suspense.

  “. . . but how do we tell her that she smells like she hasn’t showered since 2012?” her mother finished.

  Her father snorted. “Say that. Should go over well.”

  “Emily and her friend—oh, who’s her friend? Sally. No, Sarah. They had the idea to plant deodorant in her bag,” said her mother. “Which I don’t think is entirely without merit. Mimi, sweetie. Eat your soup.”

  Camille stared in dread at the bowl. She looked so pathetic that Laila took pity and cut in. “Hey,” she said, “I’m still okay to go to Hannah’s tomorrow night, right?”

  Her parents exchanged a blank look.

  “Remember? Season twelve is dropping?” Laila said, trying not to sound impatient. She pulled at the collar of her The Rest: Sea
son V shirt, making the screen-printed logo twitch indignantly in her parents’ direction. She’d only been waiting for this for nineteen months and twenty-six days.

  The Rest wasn’t entirely responsible for Laila’s “whole sci-fi thing,” as Camille called it, but the show never failed to keep the fires of obsession burning. Laila had never been so rabid about a show for so long. Concept: with the earth in full-blown environmental collapse, massive motherships transport 0.5 percent of the world’s population out of the galaxy, cryogenically frozen until their arrival at a habitable planet. The freezing process is called the Rest, and in order to keep the Resters’ vitrified brains at the level of activity necessary to prevent neurological atrophy, a network of nanomachines crawls through their neural pathways, linking them into an intricate virtual-reality system. But this system, meant to simulate the planet they left behind, goes terribly wrong and strands the Resters in a hostile jungle of nightmare imaginings that are trying to kill them off from inside their minds. Meanwhile, back on Earth, the world—the rest of the world, wink nudge—is spiraling into chaos.

  Laila didn’t care that the show was about to release its twelfth season, when it had obviously peaked in season five. She didn’t care that it had been displaced from HBO to Netflix and now, humiliatingly, to Yahoo. She still hung on every plot twist. Cried at every death. Texted Hannah and Felix and Leo in all caps whenever she rewatched an episode that involved any two characters flirting. They’d introduced gay characters last season. Hannah considered it a victory every time they made it through an episode without dying.

  Her father sighed. “Well, you can’t come in at some unholy hour of the night again.”

  “I . . . won’t,” Laila said uncertainly. “Unholy hour of the night” was a meaningless phrase in the Piedra household. Her parents were asleep every night by 9 P.M., so that they could wake up at 5:30 to run together to Maria Hernandez Park. Sometimes they wore running gear that matched. Laila and Camille remained unconscious for this as often as possible.

  “We’ll watch three episodes,” Laila said. “I’ll be home by 11. Promise.” Whenever this conversation replayed, she wondered: Was any birthday more useless than an eighteenth birthday? So ridiculous that she was legally an adult when every hour of her life was still somebody else’s jurisdiction.

  “Can I come?” Camille asked.

  “You don’t even watch The Rest.”

  “And?” The red tint to Camille’s cheeks betrayed her.

  “Right. Got it,” Laila said. “Don’t worry. I’ll text you as many pictures of Felix as I can take without him noticing.”

  “Oh my God. That is not what I meant,” Camille said, with completely unconvincing disgust. Laila wanted to tell her that it was okay, that it had been strange for her, too, and actually for the whole senior class, when Felix had suddenly turned attractive last summer. She knew better than to admit that to Camille, though. Especially not in front of her mother, who’d openly wanted her to date Felix for three years now.

  Even if Laila had been interested in Felix, she wouldn’t have dared make a move for fear of being murdered. Camille was more territorial than a hormonal wolverine.

  “Forget it, Mimi,” her father said, making a little stabbing gesture with his fork. “I don’t want you hanging around Hannah, too.”

  Laila felt a hot jab of irritation. The edge of her spoon dug against the flat of her thumb.

  “Jaime,” said her mother cautiously.

  “What?” He shook his head. “Girl needs an attitude transplant.”

  Laila couldn’t stay quiet. “Yeah, well, you haven’t met Hannah’s family. You have no idea how well she turned out, considering.”

  “Hey,” her father said. “Don’t talk back.”

  Laila looked to her mother for backup. Of anybody, shouldn’t a psychologist be on her side about Hannah’s obvious, deep-seated neuroses? Hannah’s older sister was the type of person to find joy in walking down a convenience store aisle and snapping all the chocolate bars in half. And her parents? Laila had seen better parenting on National Geographic from species that occasionally ate their young. Hannah was comparatively Mother Teresa.

  Her mother tucked a thin ringlet of gold hair behind her ear and avoided Laila’s eyes. Her father shook his head, rubbing two square fingers down the block of his cheekbone, and they all ate in silence for a while.

  Hannah Park, Laila’s best friend, was an acerbic Korean girl who could have collected people’s negative opinions about her and created a bountiful scrapbook. From a third-person perspective, Laila knew she and Hannah looked like photographic negatives. Hannah was a perplexing combination of judgmental, stubborn, and extroverted. She liked to pretend she had a core of cold wit where most people had emotions. But she also had the ferocious intelligence that made Laila feel equal parts intimidated and awake. She activated some version of Laila who operated at one-and-a-half times normal speed, somebody who could banter with a quartz sparkle. She looked at Laila with laughing expectancy, with the snare-hit instant recognition of catching your own eye in a momentary reflection.

  Now Laila watched her father, wondering if he would actually stop her from going out over something as stupid as his grudge against Hannah. He was glaring into his soup as he ate it, although that could have been an effect of the soup itself, which tasted—unfortunately—exactly the way it smelled.

  “11 P.M. sharp,” he said.

  Laila felt a rush of relief. “Got it. I’ll tell them.” She held out a hand. “Can I have my phone back? Please?”

  He sighed and flipped her phone into her palm like a coin. “Just promise me that when Apple wants to stick a computer chip in your cabeza, you’ll say no.”

  4

  Theoretically, the next day should have been ideal—Friday! New The Rest episodes!—but before Laila even arrived at school, she was in a foul mood. She’d told Camille to shut up over breakfast, because the sweater-exposed nerves were still raw, and her father told her sharply that he didn’t care who started the fight, it was Laila’s job to end it. She descended into a quiet resentment that simmered all the way to the Gates Ave. subway station. The J train showed up so late that when the cars screeched into view, people were packed window to window, and Laila spent the ride crammed against a man who got much too comfortable pressing into her personal space.

  From there, the day did not improve. In third-period physics, she and her lab partner ended up with a spectacular 132 percent margin of error. Laila did her best to stuff the assignment into her binder before Leo saw it, but he’d definitely seen her panicked expression, which was maybe worse. As they headed down the hall together, he said, “The lab went well, I’m guessing?”

  “Rub it in,” she grumbled. “And Dr. Chung gave me that look, like, you sad little person.”

  “That’s how the dude always looks.”

  “Not when he’s fawning over your perfect lab reports.”

  Leo bobbed his shoulders with an angelic “Who, me?” expression. Leo Major, one-fourth of their The Rest obsession group, whose name sounded like a galactic formation and who was exclusively interested in galactic formations, had never made anything below a 95 percent in Dr. Chung’s class. Twice as quiet as Laila and just as perfectionistic, Leo was the closest thing to a brother she had. They even looked related: They were both exactly five foot ten and a half, their skin was an identical warm brown, and they both had so many The Rest–themed shirts that Hannah kept a running tally of how many times they matched. Today was one of those days.

  “Cool shirt,” Laila said.

  “I got nothing but cool shirts,” Leo said, drifting toward a classroom door. “See you at lunch?”

  “Maybe,” she called after him. But when the first lunch bell rang after fourth period, Laila swung by Mr. Madison’s room so they could finish yesterday’s conversation.

  The room was locked and empty. He’d forgotten their lunch plans.

  To really round out the day, she slipped on a puddle of
some brownish fluid in the cafeteria, and a rainbow of folders cascaded out of her backpack. Before she could stuff them all back in, Hannah reached under the table and snatched one up—the hazard-orange folder where Laila kept Mr. Madison’s hard copies.

  Laila’s heart stumbled horribly. “Hannah.”

  Across the table, Felix and Leo exchanged a glance. Hannah was already unfolding the pages. “Yes?”

  “I’m warning you . . .”

  Hannah gave a feral smile and let her dark eyes bore into Laila’s. This was one of several reasons people were terrified of her: the Hannah Park stare. If it weren’t enough that Hannah was beautiful, in the same way an ice storm or a forest fire was beautiful, she also had the habit of making more unbroken, intense eye contact than was comfortable for anybody.

  Hannah started reading aloud. “The day they called it war, Eden knew she had to fix the impulse generator on her back left wing.”

  “Hannah!” Laila snatched for the papers. “Freaking—stop that—”

  “‘Freaking,’” Hannah repeated. “You’re so cute.”

  Laila caught the story and yanked it away. “Stop it, cojuda.”

  Felix choked on his soda. Leo clapped him on the back.

  “Fine, fine, good Lord.” Hannah slouched back into their half of the booth as Laila scraped the rest of her papers into order. “What’s a ‘cojuda’?”

  “It’s like, ‘moron’.”

  “Don’t shoot the translator,” said Felix, “but it’s also what you call a dog that didn’t get fixed.”

  “Awesome,” Hannah said. “I love thinking about dog penis right before eating.”

  “You asked for it, story thief,” Laila muttered. As she slid into the booth beside Hannah, she remembered Mr. Madison’s words. “You know nobody could be harder on your writing than you are.” But Mr. Madison had never met Hannah. Laila doubted any of her stories were good enough to show her, or worse, smart enough. Hannah loved The Rest, but she considered the show a guilty pleasure and never read genre fiction—no fantasy, no thrillers, no sci-fi. No fun. Hannah consumed a steady diet of Dostoyevsky, Fitzgerald, and anything the New Yorker described as “elegiac.”