6
SUMMER IS SUPPOSED TO BE WARM AND REJUVENATING AND INVITING, BUT there is nothing warm and rejuvenating and inviting about me.
I hold grudges like security blankets. I treat everyone I meet like a thief, someone who will inevitably betray me if I’m dumb enough to let them inside my house. I resist change, like if I sit solidly in place and keep everything around me very still, nothing new will come through the net I’ve cast around my little life, and that means nothing can hurt me. Not anymore.
Not ever again.
Because I am also weak. I have these rules and no desire to grow past them, because the truth is I am a gaping Jenga tower, and I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m just one move away from crumbling.
Last night was a mistake. I shouldn’t have spoken a word to him, let alone allowed him to cradle my most valuable possession. His words from years ago hurt me; he made me question my sense of self, he made assumptions. I hate him.
The hatred is so sharp, so saturated, that I just start writing. I don’t know what I’m typing or if it makes any sense. I have no outline or plan, but this is catharsis, this is therapy, this is me turning my nebulous and stinging thoughts into physical shapes on a page, like pinning an emotion down and spreading it open, giving it an autopsy, studying its inner workings, stealing its color, draining it of its hurt and essence, until it is harmless and dead.
When I’m done, I have ten pages, and I’m exhausted, my feelings wrung right out of me and spread onto the page. It’s unusable, but at least it’s something. At least I’m writing.
And I don’t think too hard about the fact that, after months of being stuck in a creative drought, he is the one who finally got me out of it.
THE COFFEE SHOP IS CLAMORING. I USUALLY PREFER A QUIETER environment—no one close enough to look over my shoulder at what I’m writing, no conversation so loud it drowns out my thoughts—but unless I plan on buying the coffee shop and becoming its only patron, I have to deal with it.
For the last few days, I’ve come here early in the morning and left midafternoon without getting anything done. That is, if you don’t count online shopping, checking my horoscope on every site until I find one I like, or looking at photos from college just to make myself feel something.
Today, in addition to my laptop, I have a notebook. This coffee shop has wi-fi, and I’m apparently incapable of resisting the internet and all its various black holes of distractions, so I popped into a place that sells fifteen-dollar notebooks with silk-soft pages and pens with fancy names. I bought one of each and expensed it to CAA.
As a kid, every year, when I was the top of my class (because it meant getting the scholarship we needed), my mom would take me and my sister to the Hello Kitty store. It was all stationery and plush toys and characters with somewhat disturbing anatomy, but I especially loved the notebooks: puffy with pages of sticker sheets and rainbow-colored notebook lines. We got to pick out one thing each, so one year I got a notebook, and the next I got one of those pens with a half dozen different colors inside, and I never used either. To take one of the stickers was to waste it. To draw on any of those colorful pages was to ruin it. I’ve made rules to live by since childhood, it seems.
For a moment, as my pen hovers over this luxury notebook’s page, I think about just keeping it as it is. Spotless. Perfect. Unchanged.
Then I think about how that Hello Kitty notebook I refused to ruin is probably sitting at the bottom of a landfill, pages yellowed, stickers having long lost their stick, and I draw a big X on the first page.
“There. Ruined,” I say to myself, and then I start to write.
Not a screenplay, no. I write the list.
“The studio’s movie fell through,” Sarah said on that phone call, two months ago. “They’ve already invested millions in setting up the permits and logistics for filming in New York City. They want to hire you to write a story around these six locations.”
Originally, I said no. No way I was writing a screenplay set in a place I hate.
Then Sarah told me the fee. It’s enough money for me to have the kind of freedom my mom always wanted for me. The kind that would ensure I’d never have to rely on anyone else. The kind that would make me feel like if something unpredictable—like hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical care—came at me again, I could handle it.
The kind of money I wished I’d had when my mom didn’t go to the doctor for years, because she didn’t have good insurance. The kind that would have paid for any treatment she needed when she finally did—and the medicines that cost more than mortgages.
We were able to get that kind of money, in the end. My mother lived her last year under the best care. But only because I was desperate enough to make the biggest mistake of my life to get it.
Never again.
So, I said yes. The studio offered to rent me an apartment in the city to help inspire me . I refused, thinking I could write the screenplay from LA, and I tried, up until Penelope kindly suggested that maybe going back would be a good idea.
The cards all fell together when I agreed to house-sit, because the apartment’s owner is someone I am apparently physically incapable of saying no to.
So now I’m here, spending the summer in a city I despise.
I take my time writing the list of movie locations, making my normally questionable handwriting as legible as possible, because, again, I will do absolutely anything but actually write this screenplay. When I’m done, I sit back and stare at the list. I wait for the name of the first location to shake something free in my brain and for a bunch of words to fall out behind it.
I stare so long that my eyes glaze over, and my list becomes a bunch of jumbled shapes.
“What’s that?” a voice says, and I startle so much, I almost spill my latte on my closed laptop.
Forget horror. My life is a series of unfortunate events, leading to a no doubt tragic ending.
Parker Warren is standing there with an espresso in a to-go cup, wearing a button-down shirt and slacks far too formal for a Saturday afternoon.
I use my hands to wall off my list like it’s the damn nuclear codes. “What are you doing here?” I demand.
He raises an eyebrow. “It’s a coffee shop, Elle. What do you think I’m doing here?”
I eye his espresso cup with disdain, and he notices.
“Is there something wrong with my choice in coffee?”
“Yes.”
He takes a seat that I certainly did not offer, and I close the notebook. “Explain.”
“It’s the worst thing you could have possibly ordered.”
He frowns. “Is it?”
I nod. “You might as well drink a 5-hour Energy or something. There’s no milk, no foam. What’s the point?” I say, then open my laptop, pretending like I’m actually going to start writing.
He slowly pushes my screen down so he can meet my eyes, and my chest feels unexplainably tight. “Elle,” he says, very slowly, callused fingers still curled around the top of my laptop. “You are a complete snob.”
I bristle. “And you are a complete menace . What do you want?”
“Who are you?” His eyes are clear. Sincere.
“I’m Elle, your neighbor,” I grumble, “unfortunately.”
He presses his hands upon the table, and they’re big hands. I’m staring. I’m unbelievable. He nods. “That, I know. What else?”
“What do you mean, what else?”
He shrugs. “What do you do? Why are you here? Why do you have three beverages in front of you?”
Through gritted teeth, I say, “I write. I’m house-sitting for the summer. And the latte is for energy, the water is for hydration, and the hot chocolate is for fun.”
He nods. “Interesting. Tell me more.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I answer with complete honesty, because what do I care what this person I spent hours hate-writing about a few nights ago thinks of me? “Because I don’t know you, and I’m almost certain I don’t want to.”
He sits back in his chair. Nods. Doesn’t look deterred in the slightest. “You know, I could find out everything about you with a few strokes of my keyboard. I’m being polite by asking.”
“Because you’re a stalker?”
“Because I have access to basic internet.”
A slow smile forms on my face. What he doesn’t know is he’s talking to someone who lives her life under an alias. Someone who has scrubbed the internet clean of her presence. Someone who doesn’t have social media.
“Is that so?” I say. “Good. Google away. Find out everything about me.”
I force my laptop back up, erasing his face, and pretend to start writing. It’s only when I hear the scrape of a chair and footsteps that I know he’s finally left me alone.