Final Draft Read online

  “Sorry,” Laila said. “He hates short hair on girls. And hair dye. So.”

  Hannah’s expression resolved. Onward, then. No difficult conversation. Laila knew Hannah was secretly glad, even if she would never admit it.

  “You’re chewing again,” Hannah said.

  Laila stopped chewing on her hair. Out of all the nervous tics, she wished she’d landed with one that didn’t make her look like a maladjusted goat.

  Hannah flopped onto her bed. “Are you writing?”

  “Yep.”

  “Sorry about lunch, by the way. I wasn’t actually going to read past the first line,” Hannah said in the perfunctory way she always offered apologies. Hannah appeared to dispel guilt as easily as somebody might wave away a gnat, which didn’t seem fair. Laila felt guilt and embarrassment and regret in metric tons, carried over years too long. That was residual Catholicism for you.

  Laila closed her laptop. “Sure you weren’t.”

  “Hypothesis,” Hannah said, stacking Laila’s pillows behind her head. “Is one of your characters based on me? Is that why I can’t read it?”

  “No,” Laila said, too quickly.

  Hannah’s face filled with glee. “Holy shit, I’m right. You wrote me into something. Did you give me an epic battle? Please tell me I have amazing sex with a hot alien.”

  Laila’s cheeks burned. “Shut up, I didn’t write you in,” she said.

  In actuality, she kept writing Hannah into her stories by accident. These adaptations of her became a little more ruthless every time. In a story from sophomore year, Hannah had been an ace sniper. In the latest, she made a cameo as a mercenary. Laila couldn’t help it. Hannah’s particular mixture of I-don’t-give-a-shit and I-care-so-intensely-that-the-sheer-force-of-it-could-shatter-glass bled onto the page whether Laila wanted it to or not.

  Otherwise, Laila kept the contents of her life strictly partitioned from the contents of her stories. She didn’t want her innermost thoughts about the people in her life publicized. In some nightmare parallel universe, she’d probably written a thinly veiled Samuel Marquez into a makeout scene, and he’d inevitably found it in some dramatic revelation. Even the concept made her cringe.

  Her bedroom filled up with quiet, wall to wall, from the Ecuadorian flag strung up on one side to the massive The Rest mural tacked opposite. Hannah looked disinterested, the way she always did when she was deeply invested in something. She was icing over. Laila felt it happen, like the distant cold breath of an air conditioner.

  She wished she didn’t care. She imagined shoving that orange folder into Hannah’s hands and telling her, go ahead, read it, and if you don’t like it, I can always change it. But of course she couldn’t.

  “Mr. Madison’s on your side,” Laila said without thinking. “He always tells me I should show more people my stories.”

  After a pause, Hannah said, “You think you’ll visit him?”

  “I bet he’s got family coming in already,” Laila said, but the second the words were out, she questioned them. She knew Mr. Madison’s parents had passed away, and he’d mentioned once that he was an only child. “I don’t even know if I’m allowed to visit him,” she added. “He’s probably still passed out, right?”

  “Maybe. Still, though. Did I ever tell you about Virginia’s cousin?”

  Laila tried not to look too interested. Hannah had five ex-girlfriends, none of whom she’d dated for longer than four months, and she never volunteered information about any of those relationships. At this point, Laila, Leo, and Felix didn’t bother asking Hannah about her exes, or about anything personal, really, because they knew any question would get instantly redirected. Crushes and relationships were part of the undercurrent—vast pockets of context Hannah refused to address, which also included her entire pre-high-school life, as well as information about her family. The three of them hadn’t met Hannah’s parents until halfway through sophomore year, which had probably been strategic, since Mr. and Mrs. Park had been awful to Laila and worse to the guys. They hadn’t known she had an older sister until last July, when Molly had come home from her senior year of college and started plying Hannah with watery beer. Hannah never even talked about her other friends, a white-and-East-Asian friend group that was so proportionally white and East Asian that they looked like an advertisement for an exchange program. In general, it was like being friends with a CIA agent.

  “What cousin?” Laila said.

  Hannah lay back on Laila’s bed, staring at the diagram of the Moondowners planet that hung above. “She had this cousin on life support. Every few weeks, she went up to his room and read books to him, and news, and fucking—I don’t know, like, recaps of this show he used to watch.”

  A hard knot had beaded up in Laila’s throat. “Is he all right?”

  “No idea. Weirdly, she doesn’t put information about her comatose cousin in her angry-ass drunk texts.” Hannah sighed. “But she used to talk about how she’d hold his wrist and feel the blood going and that was, I don’t know, like this stabilizing thing for her. So maybe seeing Mr. Madison will help even if he’s not awake.”

  “Would you go with me?”

  Hannah paused. For once, she wasn’t making eye contact. “When?” she asked, offhand. Laila had grown sensitive to those hints of caution beneath the monotone.

  “I don’t know.” Laila hadn’t even meant to ask the question. The idea of Hannah in a hospital seemed inappropriate somehow, wearing her uniform of ratty jeans and distressed jacket, emitting the waves of hostility that always came along with her discomfort.

  Before Laila could retract the question, though, Hannah had said, so quietly Laila wondered if she’d hoped the words into existence, “Obviously I’ll go.”

  Laila wasn’t sure she trusted this hospital to promote human health, given the downright venomous lifelessness of its waiting room. The average coffin looked more geared toward human comfort. And why were all waiting rooms equally, identically depressing? She’d seen this room fifty times if she’d seen it once: muted greens and teals were stirred into the color scheme, which otherwise consisted of a flood of beige, white, and fluorescent glare. The quiet music was the string-instrument equivalent of somebody humming tunelessly under their breath. The lines of chairs snaked around the waiting area in vaguely intestinal formations. And the room’s most colorful elements weren’t the indecisive Kandinsky-knockoff canvasses, but the grid of thick plastic cubbies that offered pamphlets with titles like YOUR LIFE WITH HIP DYSPLASIA.

  “This place looks like disappointment feels,” Hannah muttered.

  “At least you’re not waiting for a syphilis test,” Laila said, flicking a pamphlet into Hannah’s lap that read SYPHILIS: THE FACTS.

  Hannah swatted the glossy paper back. “Yeah, thank God. Pass me the herpes one?”

  Laila had called ahead to make sure Mr. Madison was in visiting condition. Still, they waited for twenty minutes before a nurse admitted them through the swinging door behind the receptionist. Walking into the ward was like drawing a deep breath. There was something relaxing about finally seeing motion in a place that demanded urgency, doctors walking with purpose, paging through reports, nurses adjusting IVs that swayed at the top of slender poles. Laila caught glimpses through the occasional window into brightly lit rooms. The glow reminded her of the neon coolant bulbs that emerged from the submersion tanks in The Rest, lights that seemed to melt against the white background of the Resting Room. A holding chamber full of unbreathing, motionless people.

  At room 613, Hannah took a seat, and the nurse allowed Laila into Mr. Madison’s room. The room was small, and—once the heavy door clicked shut—quiet. The air smelled of talcum powder and disinfectant. A band of windows was mostly curtained, darkening the room, but an open sliver offered a view of a nearby apartment building’s brick face. The overhead lights were heavily dimmed, making the white blankets on his cot look tan.

  She’d expected his body to be hidden by a trapeze of suspension cords, sling
s tucked into elevated casts and bandages wrapped over every joint, but whatever apparatus they’d used on him was invisible beneath his bedcovers. By appearances, nothing had happened but a hard punch to the face. Bluish bruises had trickled into his left eye socket, purple sinking into a dark well beneath. She’d never seen him without his glasses. His face looked too small and too empty.

  “Hi, Mr. Madison,” Laila said.

  “Laila,” he said, with a painful-looking smile. “Great to see you, as much as I can see you without glasses.” He was speaking slowly, but the clarity was reassuring.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “A little woozy. Sorry it’s so dark. Concussion light.”

  “No, of course, that makes sense. I don’t mind.” She moved a chair to his bedside and sat. “How long do they want to keep you here?”

  He blinked. This happened in slow motion, too, eyelids drifting down as if he’d fallen asleep a moment, twitching up reluctantly as if his muscles were too tired even to do that much. “Not long. The doctors just want to make sure there’s no intracranial swelling, and then they’ll transfer me to a physical rehab center. I’ll start therapy over there.”

  “Right,” Laila said. She’d thought of a list of questions to ask on the way over, reassuring questions—why couldn’t she remember a single one? Suddenly she felt as if she shouldn’t have visited. In a way, she felt as if she’d never seen him before, not like this, as somebody who could be affected by the world’s random incidents. Teachers were supposed to be insulated from that. Even seeing them walking to the train was enough of a disruption to the routine.

  She felt distant, suddenly, looking down at this friendship that she’d thought was a contiguous part of her life and realizing it was an island. She’d thought of their friendship as personal, like what she had with Hannah, Felix, and Leo. Maybe even more personal, because Mr. Madison knew so much about her private thoughts and ambitions. But what did she have of him? Laila could have written an essay on Felix’s relationship with his father, who treated every interaction with Felix like a transaction. Laila could have described for hours the way Leo seemed hammered into quietness by his gregarious father and his worrying mother, the way he seemed to take refuge in other galaxies because space was the only thing as quiet and distant as he was. God knew Laila could have written books about any aspect of Hannah’s personality. But Mr. Madison? When had she ever known a part of his life that way? He was too professional to let her see past the curtain. She suddenly felt like she was shrinking with embarrassment, that she’d never seen how much their relationship revolved exclusively around her.

  “What was the accident like?” she asked out of nowhere, before she even realized she’d been wondering. Then she felt a cold shock of humiliation. How inconsiderate could she possibly be? “Wow,” she said. “I’m so sorry. Forget I just asked that.”

  “Doing research?” he said and tittered. Only the right half of his face could commit to the laugh. “No, I’m joking. Honestly, the parts I remember aren’t very impressive. The impact was . . . well, I think the adrenaline dulled the pain. Mostly I was disoriented because I really flew. A few rotations. My head hit the curb. That was the first thing to hurt. The rest didn’t set in until the ambulance.”

  Laila nodded. She looked for an answer that didn’t involve the words me or I. “You seem okay.”

  “Good. I feel okay, I’m just tired. And I hate to miss your last quarter. Your class is such a good group of kids.”

  Laila was horrified to feel her eyes burning. If she cried, he would try to console her. This wasn’t about her. She blinked hard.

  “Have you met the substitute?” he asked.

  “I don’t think they’ve found one yet.”

  “They have. I got a call.” When he smiled again, the painful creases made her imagine his face cracking like porcelain. “This might be for the best, even.”

  “What?” Her voice rose. “No, it isn’t.”

  “Oh. I . . . well . . .”

  He sounded so small and pathetic. She hated that she’d raised her voice. Of course he couldn’t argue like this. Now her eyes were watering again. She couldn’t shake the horrible suspicion that she was the only visitor he’d had. She wouldn’t be able to visit him in rehab, would she? That wasn’t for her. Too private, too personal.

  “Do you think I can send you emails at the rehab center?” she asked.

  “Oh, the doctor says I’m not allowed to look at computer screens. Any screens.” He lifted his eyes to the television across from him, which was turned off. Laila remembered when a kid from some SoHo school had slammed Felix’s head into the wrestling mat their sophomore year, giving him a concussion so serious that his mother had hidden his phone for a month, doctor’s orders.

  “But,” he went on. “I’m sure I can ask somebody to print out your emails. I’d love to read whatever you write next, or hear how things are going with the new teacher. Maybe I can even write a short reply for them to type up.”

  “Okay,” she said. “That sounds great. I’ll do that.” The room had one other screen, angled away from Mr. Madison. Laila watched the graph of his heart rate that spiked there, the numbers that charted his blood pressure in sans serif. She followed white wires to the plastic clamps over his fingertips and thought of the medical nanotechnology that The Rest’s crew had aboard the USR Washington. This seemed insufficient in comparison. She didn’t trust these cheap, plasticky-looking wires to fix him. His bed blurred into a fuzzy pill as her tears brimmed over. She forced herself not to sniffle. “I’m really sorry this happened,” she said.

  “Not ideal,” he said, “but thank you for visiting me, really.” And she realized he couldn’t see her crying, because he wasn’t wearing his glasses.

  When she was back in the hall, she realized Hannah was already holding a box of tissues. She laughed, running her knuckles over her eyes. “I’m that predictable?”

  “Yeah, well, you cried at the end of that episode with the bugs,” Hannah said, plucking three tissues from the soft plastic X with three quick hushes. “It’s a low bar.”

  Laila arrived home to a quiet apartment. A wrapped package sat on her bed, a collage of tape and loose ribbon. Laila tugged it open. Soft wool, red and white, sagged out. A clean version of the sweater Camille had ruined. She lifted it, hesitant, to her nose. The wool smelled like the light, nonspecific perfume of a department store, the spritz of a dozen different scents.

  Laila turned to call back into the hall, to ask, but Camille was already at her door. “Are you going to stop being mad at me now?” she asked, with a somewhat half-assed attempt at her usual imperious tone.

  “How did you buy this?” Laila asked. The original had been a gift from Tía Graciela, who had expensive taste.

  “I told you I was selling my nail polish.”

  “That was for—? You didn’t have to.”

  Camille screwed up half her face in the yeah right expression that her friends had transmitted to her like a disease. “Do you want it or not?”

  Laila hugged the sweater to her chest.

  “Yeah,” Camille said. “That’s what I thought.”

  “Did Mom tell you to do this?”

  “You think I can’t do anything nice if Mom doesn’t come up with the idea first?”

  “That’s not what I meant. Thank you, seriously.” Laila climbed onto her bed, sweater still hugged close. “Also, I’m not mad at you.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m serious. I’ve had bigger things to worry about the last couple days.”

  The belligerence leaked out of Camille’s voice. “I know,” she said uncertainly. “You just seem angry, ñañita.”

  Don’t get into the details, Laila told herself. It wasn’t fair to expect her thirteen-year-old sister to prop her up emotionally. “I am angry, I guess,” she said. “Not at anybody, though. Except that idiot driver who didn’t look where he was going.”

  “Yeah. What a dumbass.” />
  “Language,” Laila said wearily. Camille got an obvious adrenaline rush from cussing; unfortunately, as a rule, this made cussing about thirty times less cool. Laila wondered if Camille had picked up the habit from Hannah. God only knew how, but Hannah made curse words sound at once effortlessly natural, slyly ironic, and brutally edgy, the ideal every stoner kid with a skateboard seemed determined to achieve.

  “Fine, fine.” Camille sank into Laila’s beanbag, her bony behind punching her deep into the hush of beans. She thumbed the worn spines of the Moondowners series on Laila’s bookshelf, flanked by the older classics, C. J. Cherryh on the left, Andre Norton on the right. “What are these even about?” Camille asked, pulling out The Sky Most Gray and Ancient.

  “How have I not told you yet?”

  “You tried once. I left the room.”

  “Cool. Right. Well, last chance to leave.”

  Camille didn’t move.

  Laila sank into an explanation she knew like a monologue, having already given it to Leo, Felix, and Hannah. There was a lot of ground to cover. Moondowners was set on a planet with a single Pangaea-like continent divided into nine regions, eight of which were struggling to take power from the ninth, which had maintained control for two hundred years. Crisscrossing the planet’s mostly oceanic surface were the orbits of seventeen moons. Each moon’s core secreted an elixir called Na-Thira, whose composition differed on each moon. One small, corn-yellow moon contained a well of poison; another generated a radioactive gel that, smeared on any organic substance, caused invisibility. The ruling region, the Darsinnian Isles, had control of the most valuable moon of all, whose caverns were full of a serum of eternal life. An injection of the serum had the side effect of sterility, though, so the inhabitants of the Isles had lived for half a thousand years and never had children.

  “What?” Camille said, overflowing with scorn. “How does it take immortal people seven books to win?”

  “Immortal, but not invulnerable,” Laila said. “The Darsinnians can get killed like anybody else. Also, I don’t think they’re going to win. The seventh book is actually—a lot of people think the Darsinnians are going to end up on top, but I’m like, come on. They’re all terrified of dying, because when someone immortal dies, it’s this permanent impact on the Isles’ population. I bet in the final battle, they’ll end up running.”