Chapter 12
Scarlett
Deep in my creative writing master’s program, one of the members of my cohort mentioned once that he never deleted anything. He said he had a whole file titled graveyard.docx where he put everything he cut from any manuscript, no matter how large or small. He swore up and down that he would use it later, and that it saved him a lot of time when drafting similar scenes because he’d pull something from his graveyard to use in new works.
That guy was a moron. If it’s garbage in one manuscript, inserting it into another isn’t going to make it magically worth something. It’s like putting makeup on a rotting corpse and pretending it’s alive.
I much prefer to just let it die.
But I’ve done a lot of work with my therapist, and it’s her voice in my head telling me that callously deleting the two thousand eighty-nine words that are currently highlighted on my screen would be two giant steps backward, both for my manuscript and my mental health.
I tuck my hands into the sleeves of my hoodie and sit on them as I narrow my eyes at the hot garbage in front of me. It would feel so good to just hit that Delete button. So easy…
“Bad Scarlett,” I mumble as I move my hand from under my ass long enough to toss my laptop onto the couch cushion next to me. Step one: Remove the temptation. Step two… What is step two? Walk away? Have a snack? Call a friend?
The problem is I don’t want to do any of these things. I want to delete the fucking words and start over because I know they’re terrible, and it would be a waste of my time to try to fix them. Not even Ryan can fix this nonsense. He might still think he’s some wise and witty syntax sorcerer, but he can’t really do magic. Not this kind anyway.
The back of my head meets the back of my couch as I stare up at the ceiling and snort at the memory of the nickname he gave himself. That one popped up frequently over the years we were together, mostly when I wanted to give him shit for how good he thought he was at his job.
Never mind that he’s the best editor I’ve ever worked with. Even before he was my actual editor, his feedback was always more useful than what I got from the people on my team.
I ball my hands into fists inside my sweatshirt sleeves, holding them tight against the desire to save him the trouble of trying to find something salvageable in this wasteland of prose. A growl of frustration starts deep in my chest and builds to a crescendo as I jump up off the couch and bury my fingers in my already-tangled hair.
This shouldn’t be this hard. It shouldn’t be this emotional. Leave it and move on.
Why is this so hard? Why is my kitchen a mess again? Why has it been so difficult to get out of bed? Even brushing my teeth has started to feel like a huge accomplishment. Anything that stands between me and working on the manuscript is something I can do later…and then something I don’t do later. And right now, the manuscript itself is somehow standing in its own way.
I grab my phone from the kitchen counter and hover my finger over Ryan’s name. He always knew what to say when I started feeling like I was buried alive under pages and words and books and contracts.
This is ridiculous. I’m not working with JMP anymore; I’m not beholden to their insane deadlines and strict timeline. I’m no longer required to pump out two bestsellers in less than a year or answer to editors who believe that tearing me down is the best way to build me back up again. So why can’t I just enjoy it this time? Becoming flew out of me. There was none of this second-guessing myself. The last time I felt that good about a book was when I wrote my debut. When I was writing for the love of it, before the publishing industry decided my only worth was the money I made for them and disguised it as a boon for me in the form of a giant contract that essentially asked me to sign my life away on the dotted line. And smile while I did it.
The contract that had been Ryan’s idea. Because he thought more money would soothe these wounds, not cause a million more problems.
I can’t call him. I don’t want him to know I’m barely better off than when we were together. The last time we talked, when he was standing here with my handwritten notes, I was well adjusted and able to handle this job. I don’t want him to think otherwise. And I certainly don’t want him to think that offering me more money would fix anything. I can’t do that again.
My thumb drops a half inch to Trina’s name. I push hers instead and put her on speaker so I can stand over my counter with my back to my laptop and lodge my fingers in my hair.
“How’s my favorite writer doing today?” she answers cheerily.
“Tell me not to delete everything I’ve written.” My voice is weaker than I thought it would be. When was the last time I ate anything?
“Scarlett…” Trina’s tone immediately drops into worried territory. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” I moan. “I was fine , Trina. I was doing fine .” With each sentence, I clutch at my hair a little more, letting the pain in my scalp bring me back to Earth. “What the fuck happened?”
“Is this about Ryan? Because I told him to keep it professional with you, but if he so much as said one word out of line—”
“No. God, Trina, what did you say to him?”
She groans, and I wince at how loud it is coming through my phone speaker. “He was all mopey. Totally distracted. I was trying to tell him about your idea for the new book, and he was barely even listening to me.”
That doesn’t sound like Ryan. There never used to be anything that could get in the way of him and his love of editing. Except me. My stomach clenches as a million reasons for that kind of distraction race through my mind. One, in particular, stands out, and I smack my forehead hard with my open palm. I can’t believe I haven’t thought about this before.
“Is he seeing someone?” I mutter. Then my eyes widen, and I clamp my hand over my mouth. “Shit, I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”
Trina’s cackle is distorted by the speaker. Her mouth must be right on top of her microphone. “For a brilliant person, you are really dumb, you know that?”
“You’ve told me this before,” I intone drily.
“Someday you might even listen to me.”
Sighing heavily, I push off the counter and open my pantry. If Trina is going to razz me, I might as well put something in my stomach while she does it. There’s an open box of cereal at the back. I remember buying it, though I couldn’t tell anyone when that was, so it can’t be that old. I shove a handful of it into my mouth dry because I know without looking that there’s no milk in my fridge. It only tastes a little stale, so I grab another handful.
“He’s not the type to get distracted,” I say around my mouthful.
“I’m so glad you’re eating that I’m not even going to tell you not to talk with your mouth full.” Even though I know she’s giving me a hard time, I allow myself a pat on the back for at least having the presence of mind during my earlier spiral to call her. Her sarcasm has knocked enough sense into me to push me to put some food in my mouth.
Let it go , I tell myself. Don’t ask. The conversation has moved on. It’s only going to make you look desperate. “What’s going on with him, then?” I flatten my lips together as soon as I say it. Why do I never listen to my own advice?
Maybe Trina is right. Maybe I am really dumb.
“He’s worried about you,” she says as if telling me is against her better judgment. “In his defense, you should not have emailed him your second draft at two in the morning.”
“But that’s when I finished it.”
The silence on her end of the line stretches for so long that I think she might have actually hung up on me. “Trina?”
“Dumb, I tell you. Like…you can’t even see it?”
“See what?”
“ That you should not be up working at two in the morning . It is not good for you to pull those late nights, Scarlett. Not sleeping is part of what got you into this mess in the first place. What would Dianne say?”
She must be serious if she’s referencing my therapist by her first name.
“She’d probably tell me to set better work-life boundaries,” I begrudgingly admit. “But I don’t have a life anymore, so I don’t think those boundaries apply.”
I mean that to be cute and self-deprecating and not as sad and lonely as I fear it came across. Luckily, Trina laughs. “They do if it means the difference between you being able to continue this work sustainably or having another breakdown.” Leave it to her not to mince words. But it’s good. I need to hear this.
“I’m not going to have another breakdown.”
“Oh yeah?” She clearly doesn’t believe me. “Then why did you call me and ask me to tell you not to delete everything you wrote today?”
Touché.
“It was a moment of weakness.”
“And how many moments of weakness have you had since you started writing this one?” she asks pointedly, but she doesn’t wait for me to respond. “Listen, we negotiated better deadlines for you this time around. There is no reason why you need to be doing edits and drafting simultaneously anymore.”
“I’m not. My edits still haven’t come back.”
“They will,” she presses. “Take a break, Scarlett. Your problem right now is that you’re not thinking past this next book. You’re thirty-two years old, for fuck’s sake. You need to figure out how you’re going to do this for thirty-some more years until you can retire, because whatever is happening over there is not it.”
“Boundaries,” I mumble.
“Boundaries,” she repeats triumphantly, as if she’s so excited I’m finally catching on.
Maybe I do need to sleep more. I’m not really going to argue that, even with myself. Better sleep leads to better mental health. I found that out the hard way. But there are other boundaries that could protect me, too. Here I am, thinking I need to do everything all the time. Thinking I need to work with Ryan again just because he said a few nice things. As if five years apart was long enough to forget enough of what we had together to make a work relationship plausible. As if the memory of his touch, his smile, his words didn’t come crashing right back into me the moment I laid eyes on him in that conference room.
As if I haven’t been burying myself in a new manuscript at least partially to avoid thinking about him. When he’ll send edits back, what he thinks of my revisions, whether or not he’ll stop by again. Why he hasn’t stopped by again.
Why hasn’t he stopped by again?
No. I’m not going there. And honestly, I need to eliminate all the reasons I’ve found for my mind to keep coming back to him.
I swallow hard. The last of the dry cereal scrapes against my throat. “Can you see if there’s maybe someone else who could take over edits?”
Trina pauses for a moment. “Is that really what you want?”
“It’s what I need.”
“Those are not the same thing, I take it.”
No, they are not the same at all. But boundaries are about what you need, right? And I need to separate myself from Ryan, no matter how hard it’s going to be now that I’ve seen him again.
I drag my hand through my hair. My fingers get stuck on a knot. “Everything is starting to feel really fucked up again,” I say honestly. “I’m not sure how much his involvement is tangled up in my mind, but I think removing him from the equation might be the best way to find out.”
She pauses again, then sighs. “I’ll see what I can do. But…take a break, too, okay? If he’s not working with you, I can’t guarantee the next editor will care as much about your well-being.”
When we hang up, I expect a load to be lifted off my shoulders. At the very least, I expect to feel moderately better. I’ve eaten something, resolved to step away without deleting thousands of words, and made a decision about my editorial team that I know is in my best interests.
So why do I end up curling myself in a sad little ball and falling asleep feeling worse than I did before?