Chapter 11
ZARIAH
THAT HASN’T CHANGED
When I heard the plan, I thought Denali was kidding.
Because the twelve-seater party pub bike looked like the punchline to a joke.
It was covered in gold tinsel with a faux slot machine that our guide, Guillermo, used to steer.
Early two-thousands music blared from the speakers as hockey players filed out of the hotel, laughing and taking their seats.
“We’re riding this?” I asked, surprised.
Elijah took the high-up seat next to Denali. “Do you want to see your professor or not?”
“I do, I just wasn’t expecting this.” I slipped into the seat beside him and Guillermo slammed on a button. A woman’s voice crooned over the speakers with ‘you’re a winner!’ and we were off.
I should’ve known there’d be a problem with my plan to get to Mitchnum College. Public transportation in the US is like crossing your fingers and hoping for a magic carpet. As a native Houstonian, I speak from experience. I should’ve been prepared and I wasn’t.
Sure the party bike was right outside of the hotel, but I didn’t see it as a solution—especially since most of us couldn’t legally drink yet. I had to give credit where credit was due.
Guillermo said we were the speediest group he’d ever had, and the hockey players were determined to prove him right. I couldn’t keep up with them by a long shot. I watched Denali as he urged his teammates to go faster on the pedals.
“This is my fucking jam!” Nick belted with the next track and the hockey players bobbed in their seats.
“Z?” Elijah held out a beer. “You want this one? It’s cold.”
“I don’t feel like drinking, you can take mine.”
A small smile lifted his lips. “You and Denali, huh?”
I paused. A beat passed and I was quiet for too long. “Uh…what do you mean?”
“Denali’s really uptight about drinking,” Elijah explained, unaware of my sudden awkwardness. A group of older ladies flashed us from the sidewalk and the team erupted into cheers. Elijah leaned into me, speaking so only I could hear him. “Denali doesn’t drink before games.”
I snuck another look at Denali. He tossed a beer to one of his teammates, his eyes steady on the road ahead. My gaze lingered, drifting down to the strong muscles of his back and his thick, dark hair.
A Denali who didn’t like drinking was someone I didn’t know. Because five years ago…things were different.
Sometimes Hersch would be restricted to the hospital, and his doctors were always desperate for him to stay.
When they managed to keep him for a few days, we were alone.
Just me, Denali, and an apartment full of booze.
It wasn’t hard to sneak out bottles. Hersch didn’t notice.
Even if he did, by then, he didn’t care.
On the party pub bike, the longer I watched Denali, the more I wondered how much he had changed.
It was hard to separate the boy with the bottle-cap glasses who cried when he watched It’s a Wonderful Life from this man, knocking his fist against the makeshift bar counter, barking at his teammates to go faster.
I didn’t know what to make of him.
Why he rented the party bike, especially after I embarrassed him in front of his teammates, had me confused.
But I was grateful that he did it for me.
A shiver of excitement hit me when I saw Mitchnum College’s formidable gates. Finally. I’d been emailing Professor Wright with updates about my script. She'd been so busy, she hadn’t the time to reply.
I could fix where I’d fucked up. This was my opportunity to prove myself.
Guillermo wrestled with the parking situation, but I assured him I could make the walk, leaping off the party bike. Elijah’s seat squealed with his shift towards me. “We’ll be back in an hour! Don’t go to any strip clubs without us!”
“No promises!” I grinned, waving at the hockey team. They waved back too erratically to be serious as the pedal bike suffered through a rough arc around the other cars. For a moment, I rocked back on my heels. I debated whether to say anything at all. “Denali?”
Denali glanced my way, his face unreadable.
“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it.
He nodded and I could feel his gaze while I made my way across campus.
Students stopped to stare at the party bike blaring music, while I moved against the current.
The theater school was tucked in the northwest section of campus.
It was surrounded by trees already melting into oranges and reds with the changing foliage.
Students streamed out of Professor Wright’s door, and I spotted her, yawning with her purse in hand.
I picked up the pace. “Professor!”
She stopped. “Zariah?”
Weirdly enough, she made a quick right, almost like she was looking for an escape. I pulled off my backpack and carefully brought out the manila envelope. “I have the updated script. I put so much feeling in it. Lots of romance. Lots of kissing.”
Professor Wright gazed at the envelope like she found a long-dead fish in her car. “And you brought it here.”
“You said if I change the script, I’ll complete the class,” I said, hoping to prompt her to action, but she didn’t open the envelope.
“If you brought a script. Not your previous script.”
“I edited it, I cleaned it up. If you could just take a look—um—if it’s not on the right path, I can edit it again—”
Professor Wright thumbed through the papers, too quick to read. “You’re not on the right path. There. That’s my feedback.”
She handed me the script and walked to her car.
I stumbled after her, more confused with every step. “Professor? I did what you asked. I—I put in a romance—”
“You don’t ‘put in’ a romance, you build a romance.
Your audience isn’t brain-dead, they can feel when you shove things in.
” She opened her door. “It isn’t even October and you think you’re done?
Zariah. I gave you a chance to improve. I expect effort.
What is this? Why would you bring this if you know it isn’t your best work? ”
“It…it is my best work.”
“I said your house is infested with termites, and you painted over it. Does that sound like your best work?”
I froze, so cold inside. “Oh.”
“You clearly haven’t learned anything, and you don’t want to. A romance isn’t saying that ‘people are in love.’ If you state ‘people are in love,’ that’s a documentary. Do you want to make documentaries?”
I hesitated. “No.”
“Then stop writing like one.”
I watched her car leave, hollowed-out, like a mummy stuck in the embalming process. Tears pricked my eyes and I blinked quickly. I wasn’t fast enough. I wiped them away with my sleeve, and flipped over the script, staring at the title page.
I’d been writing stories since before I knew what writing stories meant.
I stapled chapter books in second grade, created zines in middle school, ran my writing club in high school.
It was more than Professor Wright’s dislike of my work that affected me—what if all I knew how to do was write, and I couldn’t even do that?
What if my life’s purpose wasn’t good? How could I be shitty at the one thing I knew about myself?
My steps were slow to the recycling bin. I unclipped the script and stuck most of it under my arm, ripping the pages down the middle. If anything, this script had to go.
But what was I supposed to do now?
My conversation with Professor Wright took four minutes. The party bike wouldn’t be back for another hour. I didn’t care that the hockey team would find out about my failure. I wanted to leave Mitchnum more than I wanted to avoid humiliation. I yanked out my phone and dialed Elijah’s number.
“Pick up, E,” I mumbled. “For once in your life, pick up my call.”
Voicemail. As always.
Ugh, I could’ve called Cleo, but she wouldn’t be thrilled about the party bike full of underage hockey players. And I didn’t have the numbers of any of Elijah’s teammates; I had no way to contact them.
I squeezed my eyes shut. “That’s not true, Zariah.”
I had my residents’ numbers but that was a one-way street. Every building did it for privacy reasons. I had Denali’s number, which was preemptively blocked, but he didn’t have mine.
With one call, he’d have my number.
Did I want Denali to have my number?
That was a moot point, wasn’t it? Stuck at Mitchnum College made it a moot point.
I unblocked his number and placed the call. There was no reason to be chickenshit. Denali and I were basically Elijah’s handlers anyway, it was probably a good thing to have each other’s numbers.
The call went through and Denali’s voice rang out, clipped and professional. “Hello, this is Denali Maddox. Can I ask who’s calling?”
Oh my god. That’s how he answers calls?
I snorted, I couldn’t help it.
“Zariah?”
Taken aback, I paused. “How did you…?” I shook my head, pushing away the surprise. “Yeah, it’s me.”
“How’s the—uh—professor thing going?”
“She told me the script isn’t worth it, so I’m done here.”
“Oh. Holy shit.” There was a lull over the line, and I could hear Denali’s husky voice, muffled.
“We need to do a U-turn.” Someone argued against it, but Denali spoke over them.
“Hey? Hey? I don’t give a fuck, we’re doing the U-turn.
” Complaints and groans followed before Denali returned to the call.
“We just got into traffic so it might take us a couple of minutes.”
I nodded, dejected, moving to the gates where they’d dropped me off. “Sounds like a plan.”
“Are you okay?” he asked quietly.
The rasp of his voice layered goosebumps over my body. It took me a moment to reply. “Kind of bummed, actually.”
“You shouldn’t listen to her. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
“She’s a screenwriting professor. She has to; that’s her résumé.”
“It’s subjective, isn’t it?”
“Not this subjective.”
“You’re beating yourself up over nothing.”
His assurance soothed the sting, like a kiss to the back of my neck. It was so intimate. I was hanging on to every word, which was a dangerous thing to do but that had always been one of my favorite things about Denali. He was so comforting and sweet.
But something about this was too familiar. Replaying a song I didn’t even like, not knowing why I’d added it to my playlist in the first place.
All of a sudden, I realized why Denali had booked the bike in the first place.
Oh my god.
I’m a fucking idiot.
I was being played all over again and I didn’t even see it because I wanted to ignore the warning signs. I straightened up. “I’m not going to sleep with you, Denali.”
He fell silent, I could practically hear his wince.
The guys on the other end were singing along to the music, Elijah belting loud too, the only noise on the line. It was so stupid, but I wanted Denali to say something. To refute it. That’s crazy, I’d never do that! But we both knew that wasn’t true.
“I know your playbook,” I said in the silence. “Asking me about my writing, getting me to talk about my projects, then time for a blowjob—I’m older, Denali. That’s not how it works anymore.”
The real issue had never been about me not wanting sex.
I was a horny fifteen-year-old, desperate to feel like an adult and desperate to ignore the problems around me—of course I wanted sex.
But that wasn’t the only thing I wanted, and pretending like that was the crux of our relationship was dishonest.
When we were together, I’d wanted to be loved the way…I’d loved him.
The truth was a bitter pill to swallow, I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. What we had wasn’t a fling, or just us fooling around, or us mistaking constant sex for something deeper. I had loved him.
I’d given him so much of myself, and it didn’t matter, I wasn’t an equal partner in that relationship.
He had these plans for us. Marriage, moving in together, having kids—and this wasn’t a discussion about things five, ten years in the future, it was a talk about the here and now.
I was fifteen, I wasn’t ready for any of that. And when I tried to explain that over and over again, to say how uncomfortable I was, I was dismissed. Ignored. Denali snapped at me with ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about.’
I was an integral part of his future, but I wasn’t allowed a voice.
It was so lonely loving Denali, because his love was so shallow. I was nothing more than a pet. Some days, it felt like I could’ve stayed silent, and he never would’ve noticed.
Over the phone, Denali cleared his throat, bringing me to the present. “I’m not doing that. Trust me, I know we’ll never—you know. I know it’s not going to happen.”
I put my chin in my hand. “Then why are you saying any of this?”
“I still think you’re a great writer,” he said softly. “I’ll always think you’re a great writer. That won’t change.”
I should’ve ended the call. The team was picking me up, so it really didn’t matter, but inexplicably, I stayed on the line. Why? I didn’t know. Because I certainly didn’t believe him.
“Denali!” Elijah’s voice broke in with a tipsy note I hadn’t caught earlier. “Who are you talking to?”
“Zariah,” he said quietly.
Elijah must’ve grabbed the phone from him, his voice bellowed through the call. “Z! How’d the professor shit go? She loved it so much you got early dismissal?”
“She hated it.”
“Ah, rough.”
“That’s what I’m telling her,” Denali interjected. “The professor doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
“And I’m telling you that’s not true,” I said. “It took me until now to realize it but she’s right, Alaska. I’m holding back with my scripts. I can feel it—”
“Denali,” Elijah corrected me. “His name’s Denali.”
I frowned. “What did I say?”
“You called him Alaska.”
“What?” I blanched. “No, I didn’t.”
“Uh, Z, yeah, you did.”
I froze as I played back the words. It’d been years since I used Denali’s nickname. I was the only one to call him Alaska.
My face flamed red, and I ended the call without another word, speedwalking away from the bench. Music blared from around the corner, and I broke into a sprint, racing up to it.
I’d done everything to move on. I wasn’t the same person anymore, I would never put up with that bullshit ever again.
That summer had finished.
And I wasn’t about to let Denali drag me back to it.