Final Draft Page 3

  Laila wondered if she could build up to Hannah. Start with somebody less brutal. What about Leo or Felix?

  “I know I’m beautiful,” Felix said, “but didn’t your mom ever tell you it’s rude to stare?”

  Laila looked away. “I’m not staring.”

  “It’s only because she’s desperately in love with you, Felix,” Hannah said, “and wishes you to ask her hand in marriage.”

  “Nah,” said Felix, with a brilliant smile. “I know the way that looks on a girl.”

  Hannah lifted one eyebrow. “Really? Which girl? I’ll send her a condolence card.”

  Laila and Leo exchanged an idle look. Over the years, they had set up an intricate look-exchange system, able to convey any possible emotion about Felix and Hannah’s back-and-forth: exasperated, amused, knowing. This was a necessary coping mechanism. Hannah and Felix’s entire friendship was a comeback contest in which nobody would ever get the last word. That had been obvious from the early days, when the four of them had been stuck together by alphabetical fate at a table in their freshman English class—Major, Martinez, Park, Piedra. Within a week, they’d realized they were all The Rest superfans. Within two weeks, Hannah and Felix had begun ferocious debates as to whether the captain of the USR Washington was secretly evil, the most hotly contested theory among fans.

  “Who’s ready for season twelve?” Laila asked. “You’re coming, right, Felix?”

  Felix frowned. “What? Yeah, of course I’m coming.”

  “Hey. I wasn’t sure. You did that thing where you didn’t answer my text, but then you Snapped me like nine straight pictures of you eating sorbet, so I know you had your phone.”

  “Typical,” Hannah said. “What is it, bulking season?”

  “Wrestlers don’t bulk,” Felix said sourly, and he bit down with a grotesque crunch on a forkful of salad.

  “Also, who bulks on sorbet?” Laila muttered to Hannah.

  “I don’t know. Middle-aged moms. Also Felix.”

  They traded grins. Felix was a collection of ridiculous habits glossed over by a thin veil of machismo. These days, he didn’t have any problems finding girls to date, but until sophomore year, he’d been so short and scrawny that people had still asked him what elementary school he went to. He remained hypersensitive to anything that might nudge a girl’s needle away from thinking of him as datable. Being a fan of The Rest fell on the losing side of this scale, as did his love for mid-nineties grunge rock, as did his possession of a life-size poster of Sputnik, as did the truly obscene amount of time he spent on his hair. Sometimes Laila wondered if the girls Felix dated knew anything about him at all, besides the fact that he was muscular and had great bone structure.

  “I’m wondering if the new season’s actually going to be good,” Leo said. His eyes were obsidian dark and unfocused, chin perched on the heel of his hand. He tended to drift off like this. Sometimes Laila thought Leo was the most normal of the four of them, even-keeled enough to temper her obsessions, warm enough to balance out Hannah’s sharp edges, reliable enough to force Felix to be halfway punctual. Then again, he also seemed to spend most of his time mentally distant from the earth, as if loosely tethered by an astronaut’s cable.

  “No,” Hannah said. “Come on, Leo. Like, fuck no. The trailers are total manure. Watching this show is like Stockholm syndrome at this point.”

  Laila and Leo traded another look. Hannah had been saying this sort of thing with the same unflappable authority since freshman year. She took years to admit she liked anything. This also went for people. They’d all been watching The Rest together for a year and a half before Hannah begrudgingly referred to Felix as “acceptable.”

  “Yo, wait,” said Felix. “I didn’t show you guys, did I?” He tugged his wallet from his backpack and flashed an ID at them.

  Hannah snatched the slip of plastic and tilted it toward the fluorescent light, letting the holograms lift off its surface. “Not bad. Not as good as Leo’s, though.” She clicked its edge against the lunch table. “Does this mean I don’t have to ask my sister to get all the liquor for your birthday party?”

  “You’re off the hook,” Felix said.

  “God, that’s a fucking revelation, then. Your dad’s or your mom’s place?”

  “Mom’s,” Felix grunted. Mr. Martinez was an advertising agent who lived on the Upper East Side with his second wife. They mostly pretended that Felix and his mother didn’t exist, but occasionally his father was struck by guilt and overcompensated for his absence by letting Felix throw parties at his apartment. Felix, for his part, talked about his father roughly once every three months, with the tone of voice he might have used to talk about filling a cavity.

  “It’s going to be great.” Hannah tilted her thermos and slurped her noodles pointedly at Laila, who sighed. Felix’s eighteenth birthday party was a week away, and Hannah had been trying to badger Laila into coming for weeks, but Hannah’s descriptions had made the process sound about as appealing as getting her appendix removed without anesthetic.

  “I won’t have fun when I’m the only sober person there,” Laila said.

  “Au contraire,” said Hannah. “You can be like a drunk-person anthropologist. Like the David Attenborough of drinking culture.”

  Laila tried not to smile. Sometimes—not that she would ever admit this—she wished she drank. Never to be drunk, which seemed equal parts boring and embarrassing, and definitely not for the hideous, unholy taste of alcohol. But when her friends came back with stories of sloppy nights drenched in regret, the enthusiasm of their conversation made Laila wonder if she was missing something by staying sober. Some deeper truth about the human condition. Although she wasn’t sure how the secret to enlightenment could hide inside the pounding migraines that made Hannah sleep through first-period physics on Monday mornings.

  Her curiosity wasn’t enough to overcome the worry, though. What if she was one of those drunk people who blabbered gibberish in languages they only half spoke or, worse, made out with everybody within a fifteen-foot radius? Laila’s entire experience with kissing was an awkward, garlic-flavored incident in the aftermath of junior prom last spring. It wasn’t as if she required a shower of rainbows and birdsong when it happened the next time, but not being hammered would be a good baseline requirement.

  “You guys have fun,” she said. “Send me embarrassing texts at midnight or something.”

  Hannah sighed. “I swear, someday you’re going to look back at senior year and wonder what it would’ve been like if you weren’t such a recluse, and you’re going to be all, ‘Hannah! Alas! Why did I allow the ephemeral pleasures of life to slip past me?’ And—”

  “I don’t talk like that.”

  “—and I’m going to resist saying ‘I told you so,’ because I’m not an asshole.”

  “No percent of what you just said is a fact.”

  Now her friends were the ones trading looks. Even Leo looked amused, which Laila thought was pretty rich, since he only ever went out when his girlfriend, Angela, pleaded for several weeks in a row. Angela went to some fancy private school on the Upper East Side. She and Leo had been dating since seventh grade, and sometimes they were the only thing that made Laila believe that love was real.

  “All right,” said Felix. “Don’t relax or have fun, ever. Stay home and write about aliens.”

  “I will. Thanks for the advice . . .” Laila picked up Felix’s fake ID. “. . . Quincy Chase Wellington from Wyoming?”

  When Felix shrugged, it was more of a shoulder spasm. He moved like a wet cat. “Apparently I’m adopted.”

  Hannah let out a shout of laughter. “Quincy Chase Wellington? Oh my God, that sounds like a BBC extra.”

  “Or a law firm,” Laila said.

  “Or some clown in the Financial District yelling into an earpiece about ‘buy solar!’”

  “Or—”

  “You two.” Felix shook his head. Waves of oil-black hair shuddered down to his shoulders. “Always ganging up on me
.”

  Laila and Hannah bobbed an identical insouciant shrug. He wasn’t wrong.

  “You’re just so easy to gang up on,” Hannah said, but Laila kept an eye on his expression to make sure they hadn’t injured his feelings, which could be delicate. Felix liked to pretend he was the hardest guy in school, especially around his boys on the wrestling team, but Laila had stopped falling for that when he’d cried for a straight half hour after The Rest killed off the dog in season ten. Since Felix’s wrestling friends were cooler than any of them—a bunch of wiry, good-looking Puerto Rican guys—Felix also liked to pretend he was being charitable by hanging out with the three of them, and that everything they did or said to him was a minor persecution. Laila figured he wouldn’t have kept inviting them to his apartment to watch movies if either of these things was true.

  Felix had adopted his favorite long-suffering facial expression. “You’re lucky I’m even coming tonight. You know I had this date lined up with Imani Morgan?”

  Hannah looked insulted. “What? She’s way too pretty for you.”

  “Yeah, well, your last girlfriend was twice as hot as you.”

  Laila cut in. “Let’s maybe keep Virginia out of this?”

  Hannah made a grumbling sound of assent. She was on good terms with most of her exes, but Virginia was the exception. They’d broken up three months ago, but Hannah still received weekly texts that alternately 1) begged Hannah to Just Talk About Things One More Time or 2) told Hannah she was a heartless bitch who would die alone.

  Everybody wound up looking at Leo, who was reading something on his phone. After a long moment, he realized he was being watched. He flashed his phone screen. “Lunar eclipse in May,” he said, cheerfully.

  Hannah grinned as she stretched a licorice ladder between her teeth. “I don’t know how you put up with us, Leo.”

  Laila looked between the three of them and felt a wave of fondness followed by sharp, sudden restlessness. They’d received the last of their college admissions letters the previous week: Hannah was bound for Caltech, Leo was going to Northwestern (with Angela), and Felix was deciding between Brooklyn College and Syracuse. If, God willing, Laila got off the wait list for Bowdoin College—perched on the coast of Maine—none of them would be under six hours apart.

  The prospect of this final downhill stretch, their last months together, wouldn’t have been so terrifying if the others had seemed anywhere near as dependent on her as she felt dependent on them. Lately, Laila had started to picture their friendship as something alive, something she was clutching in a vise grip so that it couldn’t escape, but holding on that tightly only gave her a close-up view as it choked out its last moments right there in her hands. She kept remembering how Hannah’s older sister had told them, in a frighteningly casual way, how the friendships she’d thought meant everything in high school had withered in college, turned into pencil-sketch outlines of the paintings they’d once been, and all the participants had sat back, watched it happen, and declined to file any protest.

  —

  Creative writing was Laila’s sixth-period class. She arrived to find a substitute, a long-haired Indian lady, poring over a piece of paper on Mr. Madison’s desk. He hadn’t forgotten Laila after all, then. A small relief. Exhausted, Laila sank into her seat, glad for the mind-numbing assignment she knew the sub would pass out. Nobody in the history of civilization had ever learned something from completing a worksheet in response to a movie, but the exercise was a well-loved substitute-teacher tradition, like the ritual mangling of Avi Srichandanray’s name during roll.

  But when the bell hit and the woman looked up from the desk, Laila frowned. That wasn’t a sub. That was Ms. Vaswani, who taught honors biology. Without her, who would explain humiliating diagrams of the reproductive system to a room full of grimacing sophomores?

  “Good afternoon,” Ms. Vaswani said. She closed the door. “Actually, if you could all just . . . yes, please put away your things?”

  Laila felt something unsettle in the center of her body. Teachers at this school didn’t make polite requests; it was an invitation for demolition. Now even Samuel Marquez, who as a rule never paid attention to anything that happened within the confines of room 431, had gone still-faced, his dark eyes affixed on Ms. Vaswani.

  “Everyone,” she said, “I’m afraid we have a tough situation on our hands. For the foreseeable future, Mr. Madison will be on medical leave. He was hit by a car yesterday evening.”

  Laila’s hand slackened around her pen. Her mind slipped into defensive kickback. Logically that couldn’t be true, because she would have known, she would have heard. With the world’s instant information systems, how could she have gone the entire school day without knowing? But the question had hardly surfaced before the answer yanked it back under: Mr. Madison was part-time, only taught afternoons, so his first class was fourth period Intro, all freshmen, so word might not have gotten back to Laila within a two hour window, so all this was possible after all, so she stared at Ms. Vaswani and realized she’d missed a stream of words, long seconds in which the woman’s lips had seemingly been rolling against each other and releasing strange, muted tones. Now the sound sharpened. An SUV had made a turn into him when he’d been halfway up a crosswalk. His injuries were extensive—nerve damage, broken ribs, severe concussion—but after surgery, he was stable.

  He was stable. That was what mattered. Relief dissolved Laila’s attention span, and words about substitutes and assignments seeped through with groggy slowness.

  She felt dazed, as if she’d been slapped half a dozen times. Not even thirty seconds ago, all the day’s irritations had felt so involving. Now her anxiety about her story seemed petty, and the wait for the train, and the physics lab corrections that would only take an hour, anyway. During every one of those distractions, Mr. Madison had been unconscious beneath a scalpel.

  Laila couldn’t remember the last thing she’d said to him. It suddenly seemed important to remember, but no matter the angle she used to think about yesterday’s lunch period—thinking herself back through the door, into this seat—nothing came.

  The rest of the day elapsed in static fuzz. Her seventh period teacher didn’t address the accident, seemed mostly normal, but now that Laila knew to look, she caught hints of expressions that teachers normally had no business wearing. Laila found herself staring at her French teacher, Ms. Benson, who was famous throughout the school for having exactly one facial expression—the impatient, hyperalert look of a rat terrier. But now her eyes were glazed, her voice subdued. She watched Ms. Benson’s throat turn into columns of tendons and wrinkles between French phrases as the tiny woman swallowed hard, pulling at her braided necklace the way Camille did to her jewelry when she was nervous. Who was this person? What alternate planet was this? The only real thing was her phone, alive and moving in her pocket, where her friends’ reassurances built up. Every so often she looked down at it, the corner of a glowing screen peeking out of her pocket, and felt herself slipping inside that digital place they had together, where the world was made out of words and everything was safe.

  5

  Leo had insisted they postpone the watch party so Laila could have a little time to herself, but now, with time to herself, she wished she had a distraction instead. Dinner had gone as expected. When she’d given the news, her mother had gasped like a 1950s movie star and gone on to unleash a barrage of questions, most of which Laila couldn’t answer. Her father, on the other hand, had shaken his head and said, “Good teacher. That’s a shame.” Camille didn’t say anything at all and suddenly seemed very young.

  For once, none of them gave Laila any grief about hiding away in her room for the evening. She considered starting the new season of The Rest, but Hannah would have considered that an unforgivable betrayal, so she wound up at her desk instead, laptop open. But something weighed her down, keeping her from liftoff. The laptop looked alien: the font serifs were harsh, unfamiliar little spikes, and the word processor’s background lo
oked too bright, and as she reread her story, Eden’s conflict seemed overblown and melodramatic. At the same time, the sentences themselves seemed simplistic. Flavorless. As if, instead of coming from her brain alone, they’d been cobbled together from a thousand other people’s voices.

  She’d just begun to delete swaths of paragraphs when a knock rattled her door.

  She should have known her mother wouldn’t let her hide the whole night. Laila’s mother’s clients paid good money to talk to her about their problems, but Laila sometimes felt like the psychology degree put an unbridgeable gap between them. Every time they talked about a problem that actually mattered, Laila felt as if her mother was flicking a switch, transforming from family into a doctor figure, remote and empty, made out of training and diagnoses.

  “Come in,” Laila said, but when the door swung open, it wasn’t her mother in the threshold.

  “I swear to God,” Hannah said, shutting the door behind her, “if your dad’s going to make fun of my hair every time I come over, maybe he should work on his bald spot.”

  Laila just looked at her, and for the first time since the news, the world felt recognizable. Here was Hannah, with her stupidly messy crimson pixie cut and her mismatched earrings and her giant white-and-gray T-shirt that dangled off one tan shoulder. Here was Hannah with her crotchety remarks, holding some book as thick as a fist and smothered with award stickers, index finger stuck between the pages like a bookmark, built out of known quantities.

  For a moment, neither of them spoke. Laila knew Hannah’s silence was an offer: either to talk about the accident or around it. In that moment, she could have hugged Hannah just for giving her the choice. Laila had relived the announcement for five hours, remembered it every several minutes with the dizzy cold shock of closing her eyes too tightly during a fever. She didn’t want to translate any of that into conversation.