Final Draft Page 5

  “Okay, so what’s the point?” Camille asked.

  “What?”

  “What’s the point of the series?”

  “Debatable,” Laila said, bouncing on her starry bedspread. Camille was probably just humoring her, but even talking about the series was easing a weight from Laila’s shoulders. “The main throughline is about war,” she said. “Like, trying to keep your humanity in horrible circumstances, even though some of the characters are so enhanced that they’re not really human. But there’s this whole framing device . . . basically, there’s this secret colony of people inside one of the moons, and they’re called the Watchers, and they’re these self-appointed historians who are actually relating this whole chronicle to foreign solar systems. So their job is to be impartial and stay distant, but—” She cut herself off. “I don’t want to spoil anything, or you’ll never read it.”

  “I’m not going to read it.”

  “Come on. Please? I read the first one when I was your age.”

  “‘When I was your age . . .’” Camille croaked, hobbling out of Laila’s beanbag. “Fine. But only because Dad keeps trying to get me to start the Star Wars books, and I’m running out of excuses not to.”

  Laila felt her lips tug. “Be careful with it. Robin Jensen signed that copy. To me. I met him.”

  “How?”

  “He lives in Brooklyn.”

  Camille considered the book’s immaculate binding. “I’m going to dunk this in ketchup.”

  “Don’t even joke, tonta.”

  Camille’s smile was a streaky apparatus of yellow rubber bands strung between her braces. As she tugged The Sky Most Gray and Ancient from its lineup and collapsed back into the beanbag, Laila took her laptop from her backpack, and the last of the stiffness between them evaporated.

  The fight had been stupid. They’d always known how to negotiate their push and pull: Camille pushed, and Laila didn’t push back. Laila sometimes wished that she could be something else with Camille than the one who capitulated, but that was how the dynamic had to be if this was going to work, at least until Camille grew up a bit. Laila could be other things to other people, and for now, she couldn’t push anybody in any direction. She felt like an object to be moved. Maybe that was why her friendship with Mr. Madison was perfect. Neither of them was ever allowed to be the assertive one with anybody else.

  Laila opened her laptop and picked over her half-deleted story, but the heavy thing that weighed upon her hadn’t let go. She felt the heaviness skewing her trajectory, sending her toward a different galaxy. She let the computer’s blue light burn into her eyes for so long that they began to ache, but words wouldn’t come. She couldn’t imagine the war this time, couldn’t make herself picture the threat toward a planet. All she could think about was the way a threat to a single person could feel like a threat to a universe.

  6

  Monday, sixth period. The replacement was almost late returning from lunch. Laila was already judging them, whoever they were. Mr. Madison’s classroom was preset every day before any of them set foot through the door, lectures and related videos loaded on the projector, readings waiting on the desks. He had a punctuality obsession. The only time Laila had seen him genuinely irritated was when someone slunk in forty-one minutes late to their fifty-five-minute class period, and nobody blamed him. At that point, it was more respectable to skip.

  Thirty seconds before the bell, Laila heard the clunk of boots. Mr. Madison and his dad sneakers wouldn’t have made a sound, and they wouldn’t be walking through the door right at the strike of 2:15.

  The replacement appeared, nineteen pairs of eyes began their analytic scan, and Laila’s resentment stilled like simmering water removed suddenly from heat. She was tall, golden-skinned, and square-shouldered, her thin mouth affixed into a flat line. Somewhere in that age range where Laila couldn’t distinguish how old grown-ups were, exactly—thirtyish to forty-fiveish. She had gunmetal-gray eyes, kept her hands behind her back like concealed weaponry, and wore an expensive felt coat buttoned to her neck over black skinny jeans. A leather satchel hung over her shoulder. Somehow this all looked formal.

  She wasn’t what Laila had expected. Laila didn’t know what she’d expected, actually, but it wasn’t someone who looked cool.

  Their principal, Dr. Albert Greene, a reedy, balding man with a mustache reminiscent of a particularly bushy centipede, loped in behind the substitute. “Everybody,” Dr. Greene said, breathless. He always sounded a little breathless. It didn’t help that he spoke almost exclusively in sentence fragments, which stuttered out of his mouth as if a manufacturing mechanism in his throat were catching on something repeatedly. “Good afternoon,” he said. “A few announcements about what to expect for the rest of the semester. So pleased to introduce—oh! Yes, of course, let me take that—”

  He cradled the substitute’s satchel as if it were a priceless artifact and placed it on Mr. Madison’s desk. Dislike ignited in Laila’s chest, and she took an extinguishing breath. Obviously the woman had to use Mr. Madison’s desk. Obviously. It was just that Laila couldn’t look in that direction without expecting to see him looking back. It was just that all this felt like an attempt to erase the fact that Mr. Madison was their actual teacher, especially since Ms. Vaswani had removed all of Mr. Madison’s decorations, including his The Rest: Season IV poster, which had triggered Laila’s first real conversation with him. Freshman year, Intro to Creative Writing had been her lunchtime elective. One week into the school year, she’d started talking about the show to Mr. Madison, and she hadn’t been able to stop. God, Laila wondered, how had he put up with her? She’d been so annoying then. He’d been so patient.

  She kept seeing the pattern of bruises over his eye. She fixed her eyes on Dr. Greene’s mustache instead.

  “So pleased,” Dr. Greene began again, “to introduce Nadiya Nazarenko.”

  Laila looked at the woman again. She knew that name. Why?

  She scanned the class. Everyone else seemed unfazed.

  No. Not everyone. In the front row, Peter Goldman’s back had gone ramrod-straight, and his protuberant blue eyes looked ready to emerge from their sockets. At the beginning of the year, Peter Goldman had told everyone that his favorite book was “The Fountainhead, I’ve read it four times, or God, maybe Lolita?”; also, he’d once referred to Laila’s second-favorite sci-fi series, In the After Path, as “escapist trash.” Laila had debated writing him into a story as some sort of ill-fated hyena.

  “Ms. Nazarenko,” Dr. Greene said grandly, “is a literary giant. The author of seven books that have, as the New Yorker put it, been foundational to the landscape of the modern novel. The winner of last year’s Pulitzer Prize for her most recent book, A Flight of Roses. An international bestseller, with more than twenty million copies of her books circulating worldwide.”

  Now the whole class was Peter. Unblinking. Cartoonishly bug-eyed. Laila could hear the thin breeze whispering past the windows outside.

  “She’s also a dear friend, and as a personal favor, for which I am just so grateful,” Dr. Greene shot her a look, mustache quivering with emotion, “she’s agreed to teach the remainder of your class this year.”

  Nazarenko had perched on a stool beside the whiteboard and was watching Dr. Greene with removed curiosity, as if she’d never met him before.

  Dr. Greene went on. “Difficult circumstances, I know. We all wish Mr. Madison the quickest of recoveries. But this is a tremendous opportunity for you as young writers. A true privilege, really, to learn from her. She’s one of the finest authors of her generation, and—well, enough from me. I’ll let you take it from here, Nadiya. Thank you again, really.”

  His wheezing voice left a vacuum of silence behind.

  The door closed. Nadiya Nazarenko made no move to stand.

  “Is anyone absent today?” she asked. Her voice was flavored with half a dozen accents. Her vowels were little adventures. She sounded like she was from nowhere at all.

  He
ads shook. “No,” murmured Peter Goldman, sounding reverent.

  “Good. Names.” From her vantage point on the stool, Nazarenko pointed down the rows of desks, and the students introduced themselves. The basketball players at the back, who comprised five-eighths of the class’s male population and were here for the GPA boost, sounded wary as they gave their names, as if they were reconsidering the contents of their birth certificates.

  When Laila said her name, Nazarenko’s eyes brushed hers. The skin on Laila’s forearms prickled hotly. Odd tendrils of thought frayed out. She’d seen A Flight of Roses every time she walked into a bookstore for the last year, columns of amber covers in tall vertical displays. She’d been determined to maintain her animosity to Mr. Madison’s substitute out of loyalty, so that if she visited him again, she could honestly tell him she wished he could come back, but the goal suddenly seemed childish. Twenty million books? The Pulitzer? How had Dr. Greene convinced this woman to spend one day here, let alone the rest of the year?

  Nadiya Nazarenko stood, and stood. She moved slowly, gracefully, as if underwater. “Explain to me how you used to do this,” she said, scanning the class. Her voice was smooth and impassive and utterly without volume. She must have known she didn’t need it.

  Along with a few other kids, Laila half-lifted her hand. The movement wasn’t wholly voluntary. She felt like a cobra lifting her head before a charmer.

  “Harden,” Nazarenko said with a casual glance to Gigi Harden. This had to be faked, Laila thought, feeling almost indignant. Nazarenko couldn’t memorize everybody’s names and faces instantly. She was wearing an earpiece. Somebody was feeding her information. None of this was real.

  Gigi Harden, who had so many piercings that her ears drooped in surrender, said in her usual anxious rush, “Um, usually we get in and we free write from prompts on the board, or sometimes we had outside readings, but he only gave us a couple reading quizzes. If people wanted to share their stuff, then we workshopped, but not like a serious seminar or anything.”

  “I see.” Nazarenko removed her coat and folded it over Mr. Madison’s desk. She returned to the stool. “I’ve never believed in writing classes,” she said. “I consider them useless. A poison of the market economy, which has taught us that everything can be commodified. Every writing class I’ve seen has been a mercenary blend of subjective criticism and thinly veiled envy.”

  Laila watched in a stupor. Nazarenko’s gestures were purposeful and rotational, as if she were folding dough. Who talked like that? Last year, in French, they’d learned that every place on earth had its own filler sounds, the uhs, ers, and ums that signified thought or delay. Like in English. Alors in French. Pues in Spanish. Clutter and redirection and hesitation. Everywhere except, apparently, wherever the hell this woman was from.

  “Naturally,” Nazarenko went on, “when Albert asked me if I’d like to try instructing a class myself, I accepted. I wanted to see what the excitement was about.” She folded her hands in her lap. She wore three silver rings: neat, unadorned bands. “First, let me clarify an important point. I don’t consider fiction a precious concoction of emotion that deserves coddling. I won’t instill in any of you a false sensation of success. The antidote to progress is complacency.”

  Laila didn’t dare look to the back of the room, but she could imagine the stricken expressions on Samuel Marquez and his friends. In her fingertips, though, a strange new pulse began to beat. Suddenly, as if a password had been entered, she had access to the memory of her final pre-accident conversation with Mr. Madison. She remembered his soft request, “Be proud,” and how she’d agreed to try—but all the while, the fierce little voice that guided her every action had whispered those words: The antidote to progress is complacency.

  Nazarenko bent her lips in a motion that imitated the essential shape of a smile, and the classroom seemed to bend a degree toward her, drawn in. “Please turn in in your most recent submission,” she said. “I’d like a sense of your status.”

  Frantic fumbling ensued. Papers sluiced up the aisle between busy hands and landed in stacks on the front desks. Laila pulled the copy of Eden’s story from its orange folder and watched Mr. Madison’s blue circles disappear ahead.

  Laila spent the rest of the day imagining the procession of her class’s stapled pages from Nadiya Nazarenko’s leather bag into her silver-ringed hands, and from there, onto a gleaming walnut surface where Nazarenko would peel her story out of a stack of everyone else’s work. She imagined a heavy-barreled pen between Nazarenko’s fingers and margin notes left in sharp script. By lunch the next day, she felt sick with nerves.

  Thanks to the hair, Hannah was a difficult person to miss at any given time, but she never stood out more than when she was alone. Isolated in their usual corner booth beside one of the allergen-friendly refrigerators, looking like a single matchstick, red on tan on a wash of white linoleum, she drew Laila’s eyes instantly.

  Laila slid into the booth across from her. “Where are the guys?”

  “Leo’s doing some extra-credit thing with Dr. Chung.”

  “Is he not satisfied with his 103 average?”

  “Only a 104 will do. And Felix—” Hannah nodded across the cafeteria to a booth where Felix faced a girl in a suede jacket. “Went on that date with Imani on Friday, apparently.”

  “Wow. She is pretty,” Laila said. Her voice stuttered across the last word. The original thought had been, Wow, she is hot, and the sentence had transformed on the way out. Laila couldn’t talk about anybody like that. Not even her celebrity crushes, not even avatar of perfection Samuel Marquez. A barrier of shame as impermeable as plexiglas walled her off from everything sexual, every thought, every action, even something as small as the difference in connotation between saying “pretty” and “hot.” Hannah had teased her about this once and had stopped when Laila didn’t come close to smiling. Her inexperience didn’t feel charming or virtuous, like she was some good-girl persona from a movie. It felt furious and heated, humiliating and childish, as if physicality were a language she was supposed to have learned, and here she was in senior year, surrounded by a horde of native speakers, unable to translate the most basic concepts.

  Mostly, she blamed her reluctance to touch the topic on her own awkwardness, but she did wonder sometimes if her ex-Catholicism was the actual source. After all, she still couldn’t even say “Oh my God” without a basal section of her brain wondering if the syllables were a disgrace to the chamber in her heart filled with Jesus’s grace, even though she hadn’t been to church since sophomore year. In eighth grade, she’d picked up a confirmation name—Mary, sort of a starter confirmation name for the people who were thirteen and already checked out—and her religious journey had been a gentle decline into nothingness since then.

  Her parents had been disappointed, especially her father, but she hadn’t been able to resist. She had too many questions about the Bible’s stern prescriptions, and when they weren’t the Bible’s, they were the community’s. Maybe she could have overlooked the questions if she hadn’t stopped believing, but she had. She hadn’t wanted it badly enough, so it had left. Religion was needy that way. Religion also wouldn’t have wanted Laila to look at Imani Morgan this long, to imagine the feeling of her hair or her skin or her mouth. Needy and jealous. No wonder she’d cut the cord.

  Hannah cleared her throat. Laila looked away from Imani quickly.

  “So,” Hannah said. “I’ve been hearing some tales about the new lady. She’s famous or something, right?”

  “Or something. She won the Pulitzer last year.”

  Rare shock flashed across Hannah’s face. “She—Nadiya Nazarenko is your teacher? I’ve read her shit! It’s quality.”

  “Stop, I’m already terrified she’s going to hate my story.”

  “Well, yeah.” Hannah had already regained her composure. “But I mean, if she does, fuck it. She doesn’t write sci-fi. And she still only gets one opinion.”

  “Her opinion isn’t a normal
opinion, though. I mean, she knows people. I bet she could get my story published if she wanted.”

  Hannah made an indecisive sound. They were both on their phones now. Felix had texted them about rescheduling.

  Felix (12:14 a.m.): I caved. I watched the first 5min of the season......if we dont meet up tonight ill watch the whole ep. Hannah is ur house open?”

  “Felix, our savior.” Hannah looked at Laila triumphantly. “Perfect distraction. The Rest tonight?”

  Laila nodded, but even the promise of the new season seemed pale. Someone besides Mr. Madison had read her story. She’d wanted to refine that piece into perfection before she showed anyone else, let alone a real author.

  In sixth period, she arrived in Mr. Madison’s classroom feeling as if Nazarenko had been perched on that stool in front of the whiteboard for weeks, waiting to pass down her verdict.

  “Grades,” Nazarenko told the class. “You’ll receive only one test score for the remainder of the semester, a mark out of one hundred. I’ll revise that score every week according to the progress of these pieces. You’re welcome to start from scratch as many times as you’d like.” She paused and concluded, “I’m mostly saying that there’s no need to panic.”

  The class laughed without humor. It didn’t actually sound like a joke.

  “You’ll find your current grades on the final page,” Nazarenko said with a wave to the papers gridded across Mr. Madison’s desk. “Help yourself.”

  Laila slammed her thigh into her desk in her haste to stand and jockeyed Peter Goldman out of the way. Her story was easy to find, pages longer than anybody else’s. She returned to her desk and riffled the packet open to its last page.