REAL JOBS
1 - Neither beautiful nor well written
A dark purple filter dims the crowd that makes up the bulk of the hall. Every seat is filled as the light remains on Julia and Julia only.
“Hi,” she says into the microphone bubble in front of her mouth. It resonates all the way to the last row, all four walls, and the double door entrance. Julia smiles sheepishly. The crowd smiles back. She takes a moment to breathe.
“As some of you might know,” Julia says, but is interrupted by another wave of star-struck cheers and whistles. “Yes, yes, thank you, thank you so much.” She starts over. “As some of you might know, I’m a writer and a poet and I wrote a little something called The Secret of Neverward–” Cheers. Jubilation. People with Neverward shirts rise from their seats. People raise their Neverward posters into the air. “And I am, obviously, extremely successful. Mad successful. And they ask me: Julia! How come you’re so successful? Well, I’m here to tell you!”
Julia clicks on a PowerPoint via a tiny remote in her hand, then grabs a bottle of revitalizing color-protection shampoo from the shower basket and squeezes a dime-sized amount into her palm.
“This right here is not what the writing process looks like.” Julia points at the screen behind her. The PowerPoint shows a photo of herself at a desk in a room with a large window, smiling a toothpaste-advertisement smile into the camera, one hand confidently placed on an old-timey typewriter, the other hand holding a cup of coffee up to her lips. It draws a sensible chuckle from the purple crowd.
“In actuality,” Julia says while massaging the shampoo into every centimeter of her pink-stained scalp, “it looks more like alarm clocks set to four-thirty in the morning. It looks like drafting scenes in the notes of your phone while on public transport, because every second counts. And also-” Julia turns up the water, picks up the showerhead, and starts rinsing, “I drink green tea rather than coffee.”
The audience laughs.
“Honestly, it’s healthier, and it gives you almost the same effect.” Julia smiles ahead and her reflection in the shower screen smiles back, water dripping from her lashes. She lets the hot water run over herself a bit longer.
“When I wrote Neverward,” she says, “it was sandwiched between jobbing at Subway and studying for my linguistics degree. I had no money. I had no guarantee anyone would want to read it. I had no time. I made time anyway. Because that’s the thing-”
Julia shuts the water off and watches the showerhead’s stream turn into a drizzle. The bathroom’s quiet now. “I knew that I wanted to create something meaningful, and to get this piece of myself out there in the world where it could be meaningful for someone else, too. That was what I really wanted.”
Carefully, she steps out of the shower. “Once you have a goal, a real goal,” she whispers, “you can start working toward it. You can start to figure out how to get there. And once you know how to get there, there is only one more thing you need. Determination.”
Julia dries herself off and wraps the towel around her torso. With it firmly trapped underneath her arms, she shuffles across the part of the apartment’s living room that’s actually the living room and to the part of the living room that’s actually the kitchen. She boils water.
Clipping her hair down to a crisp 5mm last week easily shaved ten minutes of blow-drying and ten minutes of styling off her morning routine. Not to mention, it saves her two hair washing sessions a week. No one can tell whether her hair is greasy if it barely exists, and that’s valuable, valuable time. Dress, cardigan, tights – laid out the night before. Another pair of tights because chub rub has chafed through the inner thigh area. Finally, Julia sits down at the kitchen/living room table with a mug of green tea.
The tiny desk in Julia’s room can’t rival the magical feeling of a common area before anyone else is awake. Hayal is the only possible encounter at five in the morning, should she drag herself out of her room on a quest for coffee. She’d give Julia that specific look and say “you really don’t need to sleep, do you?” and Julia would answer: “Oh no. Absolutely not.”
Julia closes her eyes and takes a breath, hands hovering above the keyboard.
Okay. Go.
She opens her mailbox.
Nothing. No subjects in bold, no names that haven’t been sitting there already, not a single message with a Re: in the subject line. Face illuminated by the white shade of empty inbox, Julia taps her fingernail on the laptop’s surface. She refreshes just in case, then scrunches her lip. Fine.
Still drumming on the laptop, Julia moves the cursor to the Sent tab, takes a sip of green tea, and leans in close. Then, she opens the Word document she wrote the email in.
Is this a pointless exercise? It might be. Pretty sure it’s not acceptable to send a query letter to an agent twice, even when the words have been switched out for better words.
… not just a whodunit with superpowers but an analysis of what makes humans lose their humanity. She deletes humans and writes people. Sure, it was a word play, but it made her sound like a psychopath.
It’s fine, one of these days she’ll have to send more queries anyway.
Actually.
The entire sentence feels like something an unpleasant person would write. Not just a whodunit – who does she think she is?
…it’s a whodunit with superpowers.
Julia takes a sip of tea.
… a whodunit with superpowers where every superpower fits into
… a whodunit with superpowers where every character’s unique power fits perfectly into the murder case, making it a mystery until the end
… until the very end
… until the end
… a whodunit with superpowers where every
Julia paces the kitchen. “A whodunit with superpowers…” The stove time display tells her that about twenty minutes ago it turned six. “A whodunit. With superpowers.” She catches the eye of her reflection in the microwave. “What the hell. You’re just saying words.”
With a fresh cup of tea, Julia sits back down in front of the whodunit with superpowers. She closes her eyes, shakes her head to rearrange her thoughts, and goes back in. Calmly, she reads the paragraph she’s been working on, whispers along. Then she reads the paragraph again, slower this time.
Julia leans back into the chair, all the way, as if she could merge into the backrest. Her eyes burn. She uprooted the entire paragraph. The sentence is nicer, but the rest doesn’t fit anymore. Everything’s just pieces, nothing’s connected. The query letter is falling apart in front of her eyes.
Julia reaches for the backspace button and knocks over the mug with her elbow. It sends a stream of green tea trickling down the side of the table and Julia watches. Watches, until two hot tears run down her cheeks and she wipes the mug off the table and listens to it break on the wooden tiles.
She sits there until it’s seven, waiting for this feeling to pass. There’s been a sob, maybe two, but she’s breathing now.
She takes another, deep breath.
She moves the cursor to the little x in the top right corner and closes her mailbox.
She closes the document and doesn’t save the changes.
She cleans up the shards from the floor and slides them into the trash bin.
She blots up the tea. She closes her laptop.
Julia sits there, pointless and still, as the room progressively sheds the night and the gray becomes lighter. Three hours gone to waste. Nothing got done today.
It’s quiet. Julia sits.
Then she stands up, grabs her Subway uniform, her university backpack, and leaves for work.
2 - That white canvas must be turned into something
Hayal wakes up dehydrated, disoriented, and with a side of that headache that presses down onto your nose bridge. She shifts in her bed, rustling the sheets, but doesn’t manage to get up. Sweeping her arms across the mattress, she feels for her phone, then for her charger, plucks it in, and finally unglues her eyelids to look at the time. It’s 13:38. Hayal puts her phone face-down and burrows herself in her blanket.
The fact that she didn’t have to be anywhere was such a cathartic thought to wake up to in the first weeks post-uni.
Several minutes pass.
Hayal groans and pulls the phone into her cocoon. There are things. So many. The little bar at the top of the screen is littered with icons. Instagram and Twitter, four new emails. Four? Hayal resists the urge to shut the whole thing down. Air starts to become scarce in her blanket shell, and she strikes a deal with herself that she’s allowed to break out of it as soon as she’s answered those goddamn emails. She slows her breathing, and the sound of her overgrown nails hitting the phone screen takes over.
Two people are inquiring about new commissions and two people are inquiring about commissions that are overdue. One week and two days, respectively. Hayal goes into her notes and copy-pastes her answer templates. She tells the first two people what she’d charge and that she’d be happy to accept their commissions on those terms. She updates the other two on the status of their art pieces and asks them to be patient just a few days longer.
Finally, she wrestles herself out of the blanket. For another several minutes she lies there, head on her pillow, eyes closed, and breathes in the recycled air as long as it still feels fresh. She’s won that battle, let’s not lose that grip. Get up. Get some water, don’t let dehydration make a home here.
Hayal rolls off the mattress and manages to catch herself just before stepping on the drawing tablet on the floor. God, that would have been fatal. She makes a mental note to either put it away properly next time she passes out for the night or pull back the curtains before she tries to navigate her room. She knows neither of these will happen.
Tablet under her arm, Hayal emerges from her door and squints into the kitchen/living room. “Morning.”
“Morning,” replies the green-dyed weirdo at her kitchen table without so much as raising an eyebrow. “How long have you been going for?”
“Don’t know. Five or six. Seven, maybe?” Hayal drops the tablet on the couch and trudges over to the overstuffed cupboard to pry out a can of instant coffee powder. “I see the SAI interface when I close my eyes.”
Kiwi hums thoughtfully and returns to the academic discipline of distressed typing.
While the electric kettle labors, Hayal fills a glass with tap water and sips it looking over Kiwi’s shoulder. “Do you think you’ll ever be tired of writing Stasi papers?”
“I’m legally not allowed to be tired of writing Stasi papers, I think.”
Kiwi’s sacrificing a lot of typing speed on account of the fact that only one of his hands is actually on the keyboard. With the other, he attempts to simultaneously text what Hayal can only guess are several people.
Hayal spoons a generous amount of coffee powder into the communal Stay strong, Friday’s coming! mug Kiwi got from his parents. While pouring hot water, she takes a moment to mourn the broken espresso maker. “Julia’s gone already?”
“Yeah, Subway.”
“I thought she didn’t have to work until evening.”
“That’s Monday.”
“What’s today?”
“Wednesday.”
“Oh.” Hayal blows onto the coffee-adjacent broth. “That’s harsh.”
“Yeah.”
The almost comfortably familiar sound of Kiwi bouncing his foot like an industrial grade jackhammer draws Hayal’s attention toward the fact that he not only has his stupid-big platform boots on, but also a generous amount of stupid-big eyeliner. His phone keeps buzzing.
“You heading out?”
“I’m meeting the band in a minute,” he says. “But also I’m rushing a deadline, so.”
Hayal takes a careful sip. The coffee still burns her tongue.
“And I kinda messed up because Tien’s already at the bus stop.” Kiwi’s fingers stop typing as he throws Hayal a glance from the corner of his eye. “She’s coming over so she doesn’t have to wait in the cold while I finish this thing up.”
Hayal holds her breath to narrowly avoid choking on her coffee and pulls the mug away from her face. She wipes at the few drops that hit the ground with her sock. “Is she? Now?”
“I mean,” Kiwi turns and holds onto the back of the chair. His voice is drawn out and apologetic. “You were kinda still asleep five minutes ago, so I didn’t really...”
A key turns in a lock, followed by a click. There’s just enough time for Hayal to shoot Kiwi a strong-eyed look before the door swings open to reveal Tien in all her pierced face, spiked hair, combat booted glory – the living proof that punk is on life support.
Hayal is painfully aware of how she’s standing here in her pajamas and dark under-eye circles and overgrown side-cut, leaning against the counter with a mug of coffee in her hand at two in the afternoon like someone who’s got nothing better to do.
Hayal looks at Tien, Tien looks back.
“I thought you’d ring,” says Kiwi.
Tien tears her eyes away from Hayal and jangles a pair of keys. “Yeah, well, I still got those.” A glance back to Hayal. Back to Kiwi. “I can still give them back.”
“No, no, someone reliable outside the apartment having spares is a good thing.”
Tien pockets the keys and closes the door.
“Give me like five more minutes,” says Kiwi and – now two-handed – steps up his typing pace.
Hayal would give a leg for something to type. Kiwi’s the only one barely escaping the weird energy in the room. She tries giving Tien a smile but it ends up all teeth, and all sideways instead of upwards. Tien blinks at her a few times, no smile, but nods. Then, she leans against the doorframe, going through her phone. God.
Hayal stands there, winding the grimace off her face. She could go and hide in her room but not without making the impression that she’s going to go hide in her room. She sips her still too hot coffee and reads Kiwi’s Stasi paper over his shoulder.
“Alright,” he says finally, and shuts the laptop.
Tien sighs in relief. “You done?”
“No.” Kiwi stands up, disappears into his room, and emerges with his guitar case. He slides the laptop into his backpack. “I’ll take it along.”
“You suck at multitasking,” says Tien.
“I’ll make it work.”
Kiwi slips on his leather jacket and throws his guitar case over one shoulder, the backpack over the other. He waves to Hayal before heading out of the door. “I’ll be back at some point tonight.”
“Have fun, be yourself, et cetera.”
Tien gives a slight smile before pulling the door shut. “See you around, Hayal.”
With the door closed, the apartment is vacant. Except for Hayal, of course. She empties her coffee mug in silence, drops onto the couch, and pulls out the drawing tablet from underneath her.
See you around.
What the hell, she thinks, as she puts pen to screen, is that supposed to mean.
3 - An oddity, a nonentity, or a disagreeable man
“I feel like I should’ve warned either of you,” Kiwi says, trying to sit on the metal bench in a way that wouldn’t have him freeze his ass off. Throughout all of December there’s been the cold without the snow and that trend is continuing well into January.
“We can handle it,” says Tien. “We’re all adults here.” She’s given up on the bench, instead leaning on the glass wall of the bus shelter, partially blocking out an ad with a grotesquely big and uncomfortably close face of a white woman with white teeth that watches over the bus stop.
Kiwi and Tien may have occupied the glass house, but they’re not alone at the stop. Three teenagers on their way home from school and two older women shift impatiently. Kiwi can look at them through the ad-free wall to his left and they can look right back. Which, he supposes, is the reason why they’re staying outside, limiting themselves to the occasional outraged glance thrown his or Tien’s way. The teenagers whisper and giggle with each other.
Kiwi drags the soles of his boots – five centimeters thicker than they need to be – back and forth over the concrete and fidgets with the straps of his guitar case. It could be the eyeliner, it could be jeans so thoroughly ripped that he’s wearing tights underneath to not freeze to death. It could be the fact that his hair is green – or meant to be green, as it’s also bleach-blond where Hayal’s missed a spot or two with the dye, and dark brown where the roots have grown out. It could be the fact that all that spills over a wildly outdated glam-punk bandana. It could also be the fact that he’s a man* with an asterisk that, no matter how hard you look, never leads to any tangible footnotes. At least Tien is flashier than him. And at least she’s here. Had he been alone, he would’ve had to tone it down.
Kiwi pulls out his phone and texts Oskar.
Kiwi [14:11]: We’re on our way
Kiwi [14:11]: For real this time
Kiwi [14:11]: Sorry
The bus turns into the street just as he shoves the phone back into his pocket. When they get on, Tien manages to snatch seats facing each other. It’s not too crowded yet, just enough for each double-seat to have – in true German fashion – exactly one person and one bag on it.
Kiwi doesn’t want Hayal to be the topic hanging in the air so he says: “I’m just gonna need five minutes to work on the essay at Oskar’s, ten tops.”
“You’re not gonna do it.”
“Am too.”
“Wait.” Tien’s eyes focus on something Kiwi doesn’t immediately manage to pin down.
“Wait, let me see your tongue.”
Kiwi scans the interior of the bus – he catches the gaze of one of the women from the bus stop, who immediately averts her eyes – before he turns back to Tien and reluctantly sticks his tongue out just enough for her to see the piercing.
“Goddamn,” says Tien. “When did that happen?”
“Last week. Saturday.” Kiwi lowers his voice. “Does it look infected? Because it’s kinda…” He gestures vaguely.
“Yeah, no. It’s just gonna look shitty for a while.”
Kiwi’s phone buzzes.
Oskar [14:13]: oh nice cause mona and I realized songs arent quite the same without any strings
Kiwi [14:16]: I said SORRY
Oskar [14:17]: are you bringing food as an offer for forgiveness
Kiwi [14:17]: I’m not
“Had no idea you were planning on getting something like this done,” says Tien. Her legs are stretched all the way to the seat across from her. “I could’ve recommended you a place.”
“I wasn’t.”
Tien slides a few centimeters up on her seat, props her elbow against the window, and tilts her head against her fist. “Did you have beef with your mom?”
“Why is that – why are you the second person asking this?”
Tien gives him an overstated shrug. Kiwi squints at her before he goes back to typing.
Oskar [14:17]: boo
Oskar [14:18]: but seriously
Oskar [14:18]: you ready for now?
Kiwi [14:19]: If you mean the song you gotta put that in quotation marks or something because otherwise that’s confusing
Oskar [14:20]: youre the one who named it that
Oskar [14:20]: ready for “now”, the song?
Kiwi [14:21]: Actually I think we should take out the spoken part before we try the whole thing for the first time
Kiwi [14:21]: The “I tried wanting less, I tried wanting more” part
Oskar [14:22]: kiwi, my dude, my love
Oskar [14:22]: weve been revising for the past like month
Oskar [14:22]: you have that is
Oskar [14:22]: and i mean didn’t you text me at 2 in the AM about how we need that part
Oskar [14:23]: about how important it is
Oskar [14:23]: about the emotions
“By the way,” Kiwi taps his fingertips on the phone screen without actually typing. He speaks very slowly. “Did I mention that she invited herself and dad over? Again?”
Tien grimaces. “Seriously?”
“They’re still guilt-tripping me because I didn’t come home for Christmas so I couldn’t really, you know, say no.”
Slowly, Tien’s face transitions from empathetic disdain to suspicion. He sounded too prematurely apologetic just now, didn’t he? “When did they say they’re were gonna come exactly?”
Kiwi shifts his weight, keeps his eyes on the phone. “Friday.”
Tien rises in her seat, lips thin. “So, what, you’re gonna miss practice?”
“I’m trying to move it to Saturday, okay? My mom just takes two days to reply to a message.”
Tien drags a hand down the side of her face. “Kiwi…”
“’I’ll be there. I’m gonna make it work somehow. Promise.”
Kiwi [14:24]: I guess it’s too emotional
Kiwi [14:24]: Kinda cringy
Kiwi leans back against the squiggly bus seat pattern and looks at Tien. “You’re so serious about this lately.”
“Maybe,” says Tien, “I’m getting kinda impatient. We’re not really doing much.”
“We can’t really do much until my finals are over.” Kiwi bounces his leg. On the other side of the dirty window, towering grey blocks start to make way for yards and fences. “At least I can’t, anyway.”
“When’s that?”
“The last one’s Monday in two weeks.”
“Hmm,” says Tien.
Oskar [14:25] were not gonna film today
Oskar [14:26] so id say lets try it out anyway
The outskirts of town harbor a now empty house that belonged to Oskar’s grandparents before they died two years back. In those two years it’s been left mostly untouched, which is why Kiwi would never dare to actually go inside the house, but the shack that stands in its yard – formerly a workshop and equipped with electricity – couldn’t be a more convenient place for Divine Discontent to practice their songs.
Kiwi and Tien haul their instruments off the bus and walk the rest of the way through a desolate early afternoon suburbia. Fewer eyes means Kiwi doesn’t feel compelled to powerwalk constantly, but there’s something eerie about this place. Like it’s saying that if he only changed the trajectory of his life five centimeters to the right, he, too, could have a lawn and a fence someday.
Because you can’t hear the doorbell in the workshop, Tien hands Kiwi her bass case, vaults over the fence, and opens the gate from inside. The stiff winter grass crackles under their boots as they make their way across the yard.
Mona’s spinning idly on the stool behind her drum-kit as Kiwi opens the door to the practice shack. Her drumsticks are fixed behind her ear in her rose-colored hijab, and with the matching pastels and expertly-carved makeup, she looks like someone who either has fifty thousand followers on Instagram or who aspires to have fifty thousand followers on Instagram. Oskar rests one of his arms on the mic stand, the other in the pocket of his sweatpants. He wears big shirts and lets his dark hair grow to his shoulders. Hayal once said that nobody in Divine Discontent looks like they’re playing the same music. Tien argues that they can make the lack of consistent style work as a style in itself. Kiwi, meanwhile, maintains that post-progressive pseudoglam queercore cannot be reduced to a singular cohesive look.
Oskar and Mona abruptly turn and start clapping in formal unison as Tien and Kiwi enter.
“Oh, fuck off,” says Kiwi. A grin sits on his face though, and he can’t seem to wipe it off. After easy greetings and one-armed hugs, he squats down to unpack his stuff. There’s no point in taking any jackets off, since the workshop is barely any warmer than outside.
“So, are we all good to go?” Oskar asks.
“I’ve been for weeks,” says Mona. “I really wanna know what it sounds like in all its glory.”
Kiwi sits there, backpack unzipped, his hand inside instinctively grabbing his laptop.
He looks up, at Tien, her bass guitar hooked to the amp, and at Mona, drum sticks in hand, hovering over the toms. One second passes, two seconds pass.
“Yeah. Yeah, sure.” Kiwi zips the backpack shut again.
Oskar picks up the mic and throws Kiwi a glance. “So, with or without the spoken part?”
Kiwi breathes in. “Without.”
Disappointment flashes over Oskar’s face for a second, but he shrugs. “Sure thing.”
Kiwi leaves his backpack by the door and unsheathes his guitar. He throws it on and takes his spot in Divine Discontent’s formation.
4 - Times New Roman, Twelve-Point, Double-Spaced
Julia kicks the door shut behind her. Her legs are sore, her backpack is heavy, a grocery bag dangles from the crook of her arm because her hands are busy – one with the keys and the other holding the phone that she, under no circumstances, can take her eyes off.
It’s all about the tiny 1. All about that little symbol and the promise of 1 new message(s). She saw it on the tram home, the sender, the subject, everything but the actual email. Reading the actual email requires preparation and a specific setting, but she can confirm that the email’s neither from Amazon nor Duolingo and that is, in fact, a Re, and what’s more, it is Re: QUERY SFF.
A drawn out “Welcome back” wavers over to Julia. Groceries in her arms, she crosses the living room, past Hayal who’s sprawled over the entire length of the couch, eyes staring up at the ceiling and the drawing tablet on the floor.
“Having a crisis?” Julia asks, pulling discounter pasta, tea, and soup cans out of the bag and stuffing them into her third of the cupboard. There’s no time to actually cook dinner tonight.
“Yes.”
Julia stocks her part of the fridge in record time and throws the shopping bag on the shopping bag pile. An unheard-of amount of energy is bristling within her, as she slips into her room and re-emerges with her laptop. “What’s the crisis about?”
“I thought I could take a break and play Animal Crossing for like an hour,” says Hayal.
“And you can’t?” Julia props the laptop up on the kitchen table, presses the power button, and sits.
“I can’t.”
The moment the laptop whirs to life, Julia starts drumming her fingers on the table. Deep breaths. She knows there’s nothing to expect. She knows that everyone who’s ever published anything will tell her that they’ve collected fifty or seventy or a hundred or two-hundred rejections before there’s been a trace of interest from a literary agent. So, this is going to be a rejection, and that’s fine.
“But aren’t you having a break right now?” she asks Hayal.
“I guess I’m having a break.”
Julia’s desktop appears and her fingers fly over the trackpad. Her inbox still shows her the same notification when it stretches across her screen – as if she needs reminding. This wasn’t the first agent she messaged, but it was the first who responded. Okay, reject me.
“Then what’s stopping you from playing Animal Crossing?” she asks, hovering the cursor over to the email.
“Gee, Julia.” Hayal says. “Am I supposed to have my break and enjoy it too? Like some hedonistic glutton?”
The notification dissolves as Julia clicks the email. Then it sits before her, open, accessed, unveiled. It’s shorter than expected, just a small block of text, but you can’t start a message like this at the beginning. You start in the middle, you start where your eyes happen to look the moment it appears, and you start with keywords. And there is one:
Unfortunately.
That’s a rejection. That’s a rejection, alright.
Julia reads the whole message, beginning to end. Beginning to end, again. Still a rejection.
Julia breathes in and out. A rejection was fine five seconds ago and it is fine now. She expected nothing else. It’s time to say ‘okay then’ and close the email and make soup for dinner. But the cursor doesn’t move a pixel and neither does she.
A wave of some type of emotion washes over Julia, and that’s a problem. There’s a problem and it needs to be reviewed right now, or she’s not going to last.
She opens a blank Word document.
You got your first rejection, how are you feeling?
Bad.
But why so?
Judging by the immovable blinking cursor, she’s already written herself into a corner.
Am I arrogant? I didn’t really think the first rejection wasn’t going to be one. This is the first agent who responded. Of course it was going to be a rejection. It would be so incredibly arrogant of me to think it wouldn’t be one.
Behind her, the couch rustles. She turns and watches Hayal collect her drawing tablet and pen from the floor. Julia refocuses on the Word doc in front of her and tightens her lips.
Did you hope it wasn’t going to be a rejection? She types.
I guess. But wouldn’t everyone?
She taps her finger on the table and straightens up.
Why did you hope it wasn’t going to be a rejection?
Julia already knew she wouldn’t be able to answer that question when she typed it, so she’s not surprised when all she can do is sit and stare at the letters.
A few seconds pass before Julia hits the table with the palm of her hand and rises from her chair in the same motion Hayal jumps.
“Sorry.”
“Writing problems?”
“No. Not at all.” Laptop in hands, she scurries off to her room. There, she powers up her old printer. While it sputters ink onto paper, Julia rummages through her drawers until she finds a roll of tape and rips a piece off with her teeth. She snatches the email – still warm – from the printer, climbs on top of her office chair, and tapes the rejection to the wall.
Carefully, she steps back down and takes a moment to behold her work. A white A4 paper – two thirds blank and one third standard rejection lingo – taped to the center of the wall above her desk.
She can work with that.
4.5 - Julia is sixteen
And the pattern of her room’s carpet stamps itself onto her calves as she sits cross-legged on the floor, leaning in on the screen in front of her.
“Once you know what you want, you can start to figure out how to get there,” Michelle says. Very emphatically, because it’s very important. “You break that huge goal into tiny goals and then you set yourself one or several tiny goals every year, or half a year, or even every month, whatever works best for you. You’ll be there before you know it.”
Julia pauses the video and pats the carpet in search of her journal.
Monthly goals, she writes down, underlines it.
Monthly chapter goals.
Monthly submission goals?
She unpauses the video.
“But you need to put in the work,” Michelle continues. “It’s not going to be a walk in the park, alright? If you don’t ‘have time’” – she does air quotes – “to work on your project, you need to make time. If you don’t feel like writing today, that’s just a feeling, and you can push past that.”
The background in Michelle’s videos is one giant bookshelf. Some of the books are facing forward – those that have her name on them.
“Number three. Effective time management is pivotal,” says Michelle. “Try taking the twenty-four hours of the day and assigning them a purpose. If you mark down work for eight hours, plus getting there and back – that makes it nine hours – and sleep for eight hours, you are at seventeen. That leaves seven hours you can potentially spend working on your project.”
Julia seesaws her pen up and down against the pages of her journal. On bad days, school’s also eight hours. But she needs to account for homework. The view count below the video hits around thirty thousand. How many of these people are still in school, Julia wonders. Not a lot, probably. She’s got a head start.
“Number four. It’s obviously a long-term commitment, maybe a forever commitment, and putting in the work is key, but there’s a useful thing that you can do right now. It sounds cliché, but I promise it’s going to give your confidence a boost, and it seems like it worked for Octavia Butler, if that’s anything to go by. That is, speak your goals into existence. Say ‘I’m going to be a best-selling author.’ Or write it down, after all, we’re writers.”
Not all thirty thousand are going to be bestselling authors. Or authors at all. Who knows how many of these guys even have a finished novel to their name? Julia does. Almost.
“Say it not like it’s a thing that you want to happen,” Michelle says, “but say it like it is a thing that is going to happen. Make it destiny. Make it inevitable.”
Julia grabs her journal and her pen. Then she puts the pen back down it in favor of a sharpie. She dedicates one page for each statement.
I am going to be a published author before I’m 20.
She flips the page.
I am going to be a renowned author before I’m 25.
She flips the page.
I will be extraordinary.
5 - The Sad Lesbians, not the Cool Ones
With a single tap of Hayal’s pen, gray fills the entire canvas. She sighs and reverses, zooms in and squints for gaps in her line-art. Ah, there we are. A shirt line doesn’t quite connect to the skirt. She draws in what’s hardly more than a dot and tries to match the pressure so it’s the same weight as the rest of the lines. Good, fixed. On the next, resolute tap, gray spills over the entire canvas again and Hayal hangs her head in defeat.
She shoves her tablet closer to the edge of the bed and drops onto her back, closes her eyes, and takes a second to very purposefully, very consciously, groan. With a question of what’s the time, anyway, she pulls out her phone. 22:31, the night is still young.
A couple of seconds later, Hayal’s scrolling through Twitter. And another couple of minutes later, a notification pops up on the top of her screen.
“What-!”, she yells, before the phone slips out her hand.
For a moment Hayal lies there in silence and accepts that she dropped her phone on her face. She picks it up and rubs her nose. When she turns the screen back on, she does so carefully, with the lightest press of a button, like the message is going to disappear if she looks at it directly.
No, it’s still there.
Tien [22:34]: How are you?
“What!” Hayal reiterates.
She stares at the message until another one comes in.
Julia [22:36]: What are you yelling about
Hayal pushes herself off the bed, zigzags through her mess and, two seconds later, stands in Julia’s room, gripping the doorframe.
“Tien messaged me,” she says.
“She did?”
The tidiness of Julia’s room is passively shaming. There’s not a thing on the floor, instead, the things are on shelves, and some of them are organized alphabetically. All that’s on the bed is Julia, already in her pajamas, the phone next to her, and the journal she’s just putting down.
“Look,” says Hayal. She clambers onto the bed and levels the phone to Julia’s face. “It’s all spelled out, too. And the first letter is capitalized. I know she has auto-capitalization off. She’s a lowercase texter. And the punctuation? There’s a whole question mark.”
Julia’s eyes move from left to right until a smile springs up in the corner of her mouth. “’Lean Mean Tien Machine’?”
“That’s from back when we were still together.”
“And you didn’t change her name?”
“Was I supposed to?”
“I guess people usually would.” Julia shrugs. “One could argue that it implies that you’re not over her.”
“I mean, I absolutely am not over her but that’s got nothing to do with my shitty phone organization.” Hayal withdraws her phone and scrolls. “Most of my contacts are just numbers. I read the messages to figure out who it is.”
“Am I saved as anything?” Julia asks.
“Yeah, you’re ‘Julia’.”
“Ah.”
“Okay, focus.” Hayal calls up the message again. “What am I supposed to say?”
“Well, how are you?”
“That’s a loaded question.”
“You could tell her that.”
“I don’t know,” Hayal sways from side to side. “She’s being serious, right? She’s using her serious voice, with the question mark and all. Shouldn’t I be serious, too?”
“You weren’t?”
“No, it was a joke.”
Julia shuffles a bit. Hayal squints at the phone, chewing on her lip.
“Do you think she wants to get back together?”
“Did she text you at all since you broke up?
“No.”
“Chances are good, I guess.”
“Ah. Oh.” Hayal grinds her teeth and leans against the wall. “Oh man. Oh boy.”
“Do you want to get back together?”
“No.”
Julia smiles a little helplessly. “You should probably tell her that?”
“Don’t want to.”
“Why?”
“’Cause. That’s not really a good answer to ‘how are you’. Also I love her so, so much.”
“Oof,” Julia sits back, journal clutched to her chest. “Oof, Hayal.”
Hayal keeps sitting on Julia’s bed, back to the wall and the phone in her lap. She takes several deep breaths. She calls up the messenger keyboard and backs out again. She briefly considers sending only a solitary crying-laughing emoji. Then she’s typing.
“You got something?” Julia flips through the pages of her journal, furrowing her brow every few entries.
“Mhm.”
Why are you asking, Hayal types, and deletes.
How come?
She deletes.
Why do you ask? She hits send, sets her phone to vibrate, and puts it face down on the blanket. Don’t look at it again, don’t wait for typing… to pop up next to her name. Just chill. But how? Julia’s scribbling something in her journal. Hayal slides down the wall a couple of centimeters and folds her arms. There are tall stacks of paper and even taller stacks of books on Julia’s carefully organized desk. The walls are blank save for a singular slip of white paper printed in a font too small to read from here.
The phone buzzes.
Tien [22:54]: You looked really done when I saw you today
Hayal’s mouth opens as if she’s going to say something. Obviously, she isn’t.
Hayal [22:54]: Yeah I’m kinda tired
Tien [22:55]: can’t sleep?
Hayal [22:55]: Drawing all night
Should she mention it? Yeah, she’s gonna mention it.
Hayal [22:56]: Sort of live off it now
Tien [22:56]: FOR REAL?
Tien [22:56}: THAT’S INSANE
Hayal [22:57]: I guess
She peppers the crying emoji into the message. Twice. Then she deletes the second one and sticks with that.
Hayal [22:58]: It’s a lot tho
Hayal [22:58]: I haven’t seen the sun in months
Tien [22:59]: don’t leave the house much?
Hayal [22:59]: Not at all
Hayal [23:00]: Like I straight up couldn’t tell you when I last went outside
Tien [23:00]: hayal. that’s like a recipe for depression
Hayal [23:01]: I know
Hayal chews on her bottom lip. She’s halfway into deciphering the individual book titles on Julia’s desk, when the phone buzzes against her palms.
Tien [23:03]: actually
Tien [23:03]: do you feel like leaving your cave
Tien [23:04]: cause I’ve been meaning to talk to you for a while
Hayal slams down the phone like it bit her. She looks at Julia with big eyes. Julia looks up from her journal.
“She says she wants to talk.”
“Oh, there it is.”
“What do I say?”
“Don’t ask me, you know yourself better.” Julia furrows her brow. “And Tien definitely. Do you want to talk to her?”
“I think. I wanna see her.”
Julia vaguely gestures towards the phone. Hayal picks it back up and takes a deep breath.
Hayal [23:05] When?
“I’ve never actually been in a real relationship, you know?” Julia says, eyes back on her journal. “I’m probably not the best person to ask for advice.”
“You haven’t?”
“I mean technically I have.” She bounces the closed pen off the current page. “But I don’t really think that counts because both of them were before I realized I like girls.”
“Ha,” says Hayal, “how long did they last?”
“Longest was three weeks. I honestly thought I was the problem.”
The phone in Hayal’s hand buzzes.
“Still not entirely sure I’m not.” Julia says.
Tien [23:07]: i’m kinda tied up with some band organization stuff right now, but have you ever seen us all play
Hayal [23:07]: Only on youtube
Tien [23:08]: you could join us for next band practice
Tien [23:08]: that is if you want
Tien [23:08]: it’s friday
Hayal holds her breath, tracing the little letters with her eyes. She gets up, opens Julia’s door, and shouts into the rest of the apartment: “Kiwi?”
After a couple of seconds, there’s a muffled answer through the wall: “Yeah?”
Hayal crosses the kitchen and pokes her head into Kiwi’s room.
“Do you mind if I tag along on Friday?”
5.5 - Hayal is seventeen
Closer to eighteen, and when she comes home from school, her mom is waiting for her in the kitchen, sitting at the table in a superficial state of calm, holding a dainty cup of coffee to her lips. The green-white-checkered tablecloth has been cleared of everything but an equally dainty saucer, and a stark white envelope.
There’s a moment of pause in which Hayal’s brain time-lapses the past couple of months, trying to recall something that she’s done that she shouldn’t have, and arrives at the conclusion that there’s nothing in that A-student life of hers that fits that description. But then – hold on – hold on. Hayal steps closer and scans the address on the letter.
“No.”
“It’s the moment of truth, baby.”
It’s been how long since she sent in the portfolio? Months, too many. She thought they’d ghosted her by now. Hayal hesitates to pick up the envelope. It’s all by itself on the table, flat and white, and automatically generated, valid without signature. Looming.
Hayal grabs it. Pokes through the glue, pries it open with her fingernails. Unfolds the letter.
It’s quiet. Enough for Hayal to hear the ticking of her mom’s wrist watch.
“’You have been admitted.’”
The cup clinks against the saucer, Hayal’s mom rises from her chair.
“You have been admitted,” Hayal says.
Her mom wraps her arms around her, actually picks her up a little, which she hasn’t done in approximately eight years.
“’You have been admitted’!” Hayal screams. She pumps her fist into the air, letter still in the other one, nearly topples her mom. “I’ve been fucking admitted!”
“I’ll excuse the language this time.” Hayal’s mom sets her down, hugs her again. “This is fantastic. I’m so proud of you, Hayal.”
There’s a sting in Hayal’s eyes, but it’s the best kind of sting that could possibly be in one’s eyes.
“Oh,” she gently frees herself from the hug. “I need to –”
“Yes. Go.”
Hayal runs to grab the jacket she put down five minutes ago and pockets her phone, her keys. Erdem’s head pokes out from the corner, exuding an aura that only a thirteen-year-old with headphones dangling around his neck can exude. “Why are you yelling?”
Hayal doesn’t stop walking as she turns around, claps her hands in front of his face.
“I’m going to art school! Ha!”
Two seconds later she’s on the stairs, speeding past the other doors and speed-dialing Tien.
C’mon, pick up.
It rings two, three times, then it clicks.
“What’s wrong?”
Neither of them are phone call people.
“Guess what,” Hayal says.
There’s a moment of static silence, as if Tien is actually trying to guess.
Finally: “No!”
“Yes!”
“Oh, fuck.” Tien laughs, first a little, then a lot. “Oh shit! Wait, hold on, I’m coming over.”
“No! I’m coming over already, you stay where you are!”
“Let’s meet in the middle.”
The park’s rusty with fall and the onset of evening. Between the people lying in the grass, catching the last scraps of light, Hayal sees Tien jogging her way. She’s not hard to spot in her all-black. Her shoulder-length hair is up in a ponytail, she’s wearing her glasses instead of contacts.
“You fucking –” is the first thing Tien says when she’s within shouting distance. “You fucking artist, you!”
There’s the tightest possible hug, and when they separate, Tien takes Hayal’s face in both hands and kisses her, again.
6 -Local Bassist Tien Thanh Le Demonstrates German Efficiency by Causing Two Crises at Once
The bus smells almost like new car. Hayal traces the randomized pattern on the seat in front of her. She knows her shoulders are up to her ears, and she knows that must be terrible for her already wonky posture, but she’s going to cut herself some slack because, after all, she’s out here, in public. She sits in the window seat and Kiwi by the aisle. If he hadn’t managed to push his parents’ visit back, chances are Hayal wouldn’t have come either.
“Okay, but,” Kiwi sends a text and sets his phone down on his leg, “how come? Since when have you two been talking again?”
“Literally only the two days. She really just went ‘hey, Hayal, how’s it going? I wanna talk to you, so how about Friday’ and I was like –” She looks at Kiwi with the most shaken-to-the-core expression she can muster.
Because the silence had been broken, she had wondered if they’d go back to sending good morning and good night texts now, but Tien hasn’t messaged her since. Hayal also hasn’t messaged Tien.
“How do you feel about that?” Kiwi asks.
Hayal leans her head back against the seat and stretches her legs under the one in front of her. “I don’t know.” She eyes the lifeless fluorescent lamp on the ceiling of the bus. “I’ve been missing her.”
There’s a beat of silence, then another one while Kiwi checks his phone.
“Hope this doesn’t get messy,” he says. “Even if you two get back together, Julia’s in her room now, so-”
“Hw- Wha- Now, hold on, now, mister. You’re kinda skipping several – kinda skipping the whole staircase here. We’re not trying to get back together.”
“Okay,” says Kiwi, with special emphasis on the ‘o’. He passes his phone from one hand to the other. “So, what is it, then? A ‘we should stay friends’ thing?”
Hayal gives him a Look.
“See, this is important to me because I love you both.”
“I genuinely don’t have a clue.”
“But, I mean, you…” Kiwi fizzles out at the sight of Hayal’s index finger raised towards his face. “Yeah?”
“You know, you can keep prying,” she says, a twitch in the corner of her mouth, “but I will pry back.”
“I’m like ninety percent sure there isn’t a single thing about my personal life I haven’t told you at some point.”
“Mh-hm.” Hayal glances at Kiwi’s phone. “Like whatever is going on between you and Oskar.”
Kiwi shoves the phone in his pocket and folds his hands. “Fine.”
Another bus stop, five minutes of walking, and a few jabs at a lack of punctuality later, Hayal finds herself holding a camera and filming Divine Discontent starting the same song over and over. That’s something she’s volunteered to do, not just because she’d hate to sit on her ass and watch while everyone else is trying to create something, but also because she’d like it to seem as if Tien wasn’t the only reason for her being here.
The aesthetic dissonance between the four members is only more potent with the thick jackets everyone’s wearing. Yet Divine Discontent come together to deliver the world’s most concentrated and also only interpretation of post-progressive pseudoglam queercore – a genre that Hayal had trouble visualizing up until right this moment.
She’s got to admit, they are leaving an impression.
It’s mindboggling how Oskar’s able to sing his heart right out, even though he knows people can hear and see him – and how Kiwi plays as though they couldn’t. Either the bass is more prominent in this song than in others, or you only really notice the bass when you begin to notice the bassist. In her heavy leather jacket and fingerless gloves, Tien works through the strings. In this moment, she radiates such an unfair amount of confidence that in the rare case of Tien messing up her chords, Hayal is more inclined to believe that something is wrong with her own ears. Mona’s awkwardness around people that aren’t part of her little in-circle falls away completely and Hayal hopes for a drum solo in the other half of the song, because the vision of her unrestrained drumming is just delightful.
The problem is, Divine Discontent has yet to get to the other half of the song. The second verse is as far as they get before someone – usually Kiwi – overwhelmingly Kiwi – calls for a redo.
Every time the music stops and the band take a couple of seconds to refocus – and for Kiwi to brief everyone on an alternate version of the lyrics he’d like them to try – Hayal carefully sets the camera on an old workbench that she herself would not dare sit on, squats down, and burrows her hands in the pockets of her parka. The shack is cold as hell and her back hurts from standing – something that she, come to think of it, hasn’t done a lot in the recent past.
“Ready?” Kiwi asks into the room. Hayal picks the camera back up and aims. After three nods from his bandmates – and one from Hayal – Kiwi begins to pluck the intro from his guitar strings.
Since Oskar’s the only vocalist but all members of Divine Discontent have tried their hands at songwriting, they’ve made it a habit to establish a personal signature by giving the intro of a song to whoever wrote the bulk of it. This means, to his mild distress, that two thirds of Divine Discontent’s songs start with Kiwi’s guitar.
Upside down, but I try standing my ground/ An hour, a decade, to speak out loud are the first lines Oskar sings, his voice the cue for the other instruments to kick in. The plan is to record two versions, one with a spoken bridge to the last chorus, and one without. As last time, however, the second instance of And now I’m glad I wasted my childhood/ Because now if I wanted to I could/ Live twice as fast and skip all the dull parts is the farthest they’ve come before Kiwi stops playing the guitar to rub his hands over his face and groan. One after the other, the instruments fall away.
Hayal stops recording.
“What now?” asks Tien.
“I can’t deal with the – it’s still –” Kiwi gestures, as he tends to, in shapes that make no sense to anyone but him. “Ew.”
Tien sighs, twice as long as someone would normally sigh.
“No worries,” says Oskar. “How about five everyone?”
“Ten,” says Kiwi.
“Even better.” Oskar pulls a bag of loose tobacco from his pocket and taps it onto a sheet of rolling paper.
“Uh-huh. I see you,” says Kiwi. He leans his guitar against the wall and wipes at his forehead.
Oskar gives him a grin, already heading towards the door. “Voice maintenance. What can I do?”
A clang of sheet metal announces the door dropping shut. Mona stretches, shakes her arms, stands up, and stretches again. Hayal and Tien stand idly.
“So, how is it?” asks Mona slowly. She cracks her fingers, first cupping her right hand with her left, then her left hand with her right.
Tien grimaces at the sound. “How is what,” she asks.
“Hayal’s here so you can have a conversation, right?” Her eyes dart from Tien to Hayal.
“Ten minutes might just be enough for a conversation,” Kiwi says, “and I have a feeling the break might stretch a little.”
Mona nods thoughtfully. “Might just stretch a bit.”
“I’m never telling you anything ever again.” Slowly, Tien turns to Hayal, her lips approaching a smile. “Wanna go and have a conversation?”
Hayal follows Tien out into the yard, leaving behind Kiwi and Mona’s discussion about whether ‘live twice as fast’ is pretentious or not, past Oskar who gives them a thumbs-up and is met with an affectionate middle finger.
They find themselves stopping and standing behind the workshop; the yellow motion sensor light drowns out the blue hour and Hayal can see the air she breathes. She leans against the sheet metal wall, her hands in her pockets. Tien stands in front of her, her hands in her pockets as well.
No one says a thing.
“’Suuup,” says Hayal, as blatantly embarrassing as possible – ‘cause if you do it intentionally you can’t do it accidentally.
“Yeah, shit.” Tien says. “I forgot what I wanted to say.”
Hayal debates whether she should grin at Tien. She’d like to.
“Alright, it’s back. Be prepared.”
“Preparing.”
Tien brings up her hands, thumbs in line with her fingers, and jolts them back down in a parallel motion. “I saw you on Wednesday,” she says.
Hayal nods.
“And it kinda pulled the rug out from under my feet how much I –” she stops and squints at the air, “– miss… your presence? In my life?”
Hayal blinks. “Holy shit.”
“Look, listen,” there’s a lopsided grin on Tien’s face, “as sappy as it is, gotta let it out.”
“Okay,” Hayal says. “Okay, okay. Okay. Let me think.” She breathes in, out. “I miss your presence, too. I really do. I mean, you’re pretty much the coolest person I know.”
Tien smiles. She says: “How are you doing right now?”
“Mentally?”
“Yeah.”
Hayal chews at the inside of her cheek. “Okay. I’d like to say I’m doing okay. I’m a bit behind on commissions which is, you know, stressful, but – I’m doing okay.”
Tien’s smile more and more turns into a diagonal line.
“What about you?” Hayal asks, something she hadn’t done enough in the past. “How are you?”
“Been better,” says Tien. “Worse, too. Spent a lot of time at my mom’s house lately, that’s as close to vacation as I’m gonna get.”
“Cool,” Hayal says. She smiles. There’s so much more she wants to say, but more could lead to more still.
With her boot Tien flattens the frozen grass before she looks back up at Hayal. “When I said I miss your presence – I don’t know if that’s weird – I’m not saying that we need to be together again. I mean, not that that’s impossible…”
“Do you want to be back together?”
“Don’t know. You?”
“Don’t know.”
A beat of silence.
“When I say I miss you,” says Tien. “What I mean is I miss you. I miss talking to you and seeing you and sitting in cafés talking for hours about whatever shit is on our minds, you feel?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“And,” says Tien. “We don’t need to get back together. We don’t need to be together to be together, right?”
“So, you’re asking a year later if we wanna stay friends?” Hayal asks.
“I guess, yeah. Because I wanna spend time with you and I like you.”
“I like you and want to spend time with you, too.”
“Cool.”
“Cool.” As is her first reflex when a conversation flattens, Hayal reaches for the phone in her pocket and finds two new emails. She stuffs it back quickly. “Do you feel like sitting in a café and talking for hours about whatever in the near future? I feel like I need to get out more.”
“Sure,” Tien says, and that feels nice.
There’s a mechanical buzzing in the air and just when Hayal glances up to the motion sensor lamp, Tien pulls her own phone from her jacket. Her face lights up as she checks the screen. “Oh shit, I need to look at that real quick.”
She turns away from Hayal, hunched over her phone and reads with wide open eyes. Hayal resists the urge to look over her shoulder.
Tien keeps standing there, frozen like that even after the light of her screen stops illuminating her face.
“What happened?”
Tien turns around with a grin on her face that seems to get wider by the second. “Let’s go back inside.” She takes Hayal’s hand and draws her back towards the front of the workshop. “There’s news.”
***
Kiwi stands between Oskar and Mona, huddled around Tien’s phone screen as she holds it up to them, arm fully stretched. The brightness is turned all the way up and makes Kiwi squint. What glares back at them is an email correspondence. Subject: “A question” sent by Tien Thanh Le, “Re: A question” answered by Michael Grünberg, Event Manager. Kiwi’s still frozen solid as Oskar high-fives Tien’s free hand. Mona gapes, switching back and forth between looking at Tien and looking at the phone. “You need to give me a pinkie promise that this is not a prank.”
“Read it again, if you have to.” Tien grins, ear to ear. “No prank. It’s real, black on white.”
Mona gasps. In lieu of her own hands being enough, she clutches Tien’s hands to her chest and bounces up and down, squealing in delight. (Tien neither bounces or squeals with her – can’t risk her hard-ass punk cred.)
Kiwi stands there stock-still, fingers frozen in the middle of reaching for the phone, which has since traveled from Tien to Oskar and from Oskar to Hayal. “Wait. No, wait. What? What? What is this?”
“It’s exactly what it looks like,” Tien says. Kiwi can’t recall the last time he’s seen her so giddy. “The opening act at Tristan’s dropped out, so we’re up.”
“Tristan’s?”
“It’s a bar.”
“Opening act?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Us?”
“Opening act.” Tien nods. “Us. You can repeat the rest of the sentence as well if that’s what it takes.”
“You’re kidding, right? You’re joking.”
“Dead serious,” says Tien.
Kiwi takes a step back, a step to the side, and one to the other. Cranes his neck to look at Oskar. At Mona. Hayal, too. No one else seems as alarmed as he is. He opens and closes his mouth like a fish. “When did this–” He gets the phone from Hayal. He reads over the email again. Looks up, looks down. Up again. “Who is this, even?”
“Tristan’s event manager. I’ve been scouting for places we might have a chance in,” says Tien, her voice aims for calm and confident, specifically cause Kiwi is neither. “I’ve been sending emails and requests for a while now.”
“And, and,” says Kiwi, “and you didn’t say anything? Anything at all?”
“I may have forgotten to mention it.”
“You can’t just sign us up for a concert!” Each of Kiwi’s sentences comes out a different pitch than the one before. “We can’t even get through the entirety of ‘Now’!”
“It’s not a concert,” Oskar chimes in. “Makes you think too big and intimidating. It’s a small gig at a niche club, that’s all. It’s LGBT-friendly, too. Mona’s been there before.”
“They have pretty decent non-alcoholic options,” supplies Mona.
Kiwi turns around to Oskar, mouth forming a couple of soundless shapes before finding his voice. “Were you in on this?”
“I was in on this.”
Kiwi turns to Mona. She gives him an apologetic smile.
“No.”
“I wasn’t at first, if that helps.”
Kiwi takes another step back, unable to close his mouth, and gestures helplessly at all three of his bandmates. “What the fuck?”
Hayal, sucking air in through her teeth, withdraws to fiddle with the camera.
“Why am I–” Kiwi swallows down a voice crack, potentially several. “Why am I the only one who didn’t know about this?”
“It’s not like we all actively conspired against you. Tien just told me at some point,” Oskar says, “Mona figured her out eventually.”
“But you didn’t tell me?” Kiwi’s voice climbs the octaves and remains adamantly on the verge of a shriek. “None of you?”
Tien and Oskar exchange a few negotiating glances – a ‘you do it – no, you’ type deal – Mona investigates the wall with a tight mouth.
Oskar sighs, resigned to his fate. “We figured,” he says, “it would stress you out.”
“AND IT IS NOT DOING THAT RIGHT NOW?”
“Okay,” Oskar says. “Okay. Breathe, Kiwi.”
Kiwi, all red in the face, does not do that. “And it’s so soon, too! There’s no way we would have time to – Do we even have a set? Do we have enough songs?”
“We’ll do covers in between original ones,” says Tien. “I’ve thought about this.”
“You’ve thought about this!?” Kiwi whirls around, points at Tien, points at himself. “Maybe you should’ve thought about involving me in the decision-making process!”
Hayal murmurs to the camera: “He’s got a point.”
Kiwi clutches his feverish forehead, finally breathes, or at least forces his chest to rise and fall. “No,” he announces, “No, no, no. No bar. No gig. We’re not doing this.”
Tien, Oskar, and Mona look at each other and the temperature in the frigid shack drops further. On their faces, in order: Stoicism, patience, and uncertainty. What is not there is compromise.
“Okay, well,” says Kiwi. “I’m not doing this.”
He snatches his guitar from its resting place against the wall, its case from the floor, and squats down to get one into the other as fast as humanly possible.
“Kiwi, come on,” says someone – Oskar – but Kiwi shrugs it off in his rush to pick up his jacket, shoulder the guitar case, and make it to the door. There’s another bargaining “Kiwi!” before the metal door slams shut and the sound reverberates across the yard.
***
Kiwi speed-walks past the fences of afternoon suburbia. Part of his brain registers that he’s still wearing an outfit he put on under the assumption that he wasn’t gonna be alone in public, part of his brain registers that he’s freezing his ass off because he didn’t actually put the jacket on, but most of it is preoccupied with the fact that his bandmates collectively backstabbed him. That’s what they did, so he wasn’t wrong to storm off. No reason to feel bad about it. He doesn’t owe them to stay and listen to their excuses, he doesn’t owe them shit.
About halfway to the bus stop, hasty footsteps catch up with him. Kiwi considers walking faster, but that’d mean he’d end up sprinting and that’s just not attainable with a guitar case on your back. He turns around, sees Hayal, and is immediately stung by guilt.
“You’re really just gonna leave me like that?” Hayal pants. As soon as she comes to a stop, she braces her hands against her knees. “With my ex and two people I sort-of-know-but-not-super-well? That’s cold.”
“Sorry,” Kiwi catches his breath. “Really. I just – What?” He points his jacket back in the direction of the practice shed. “Did you hear this? Did you see this? Please tell me what I think happened actually happened and I didn’t just overreact.”
“You didn’t overreact. I think.”
“I can’t with this.” He takes a step towards Hayal then a step back. “I’m leaving. I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to cut your time with Tien short. Sorry.”
“It’s okay, we said our pieces.”
“Yeah?” Kiwi’s already walking backwards down the sidewalk.
“Yeah.”
The two of them continue at a pace that allows Kiwi to hand Hayal the guitar case for a second to slip on his jacket. He’s still shaking his head when he drops onto the plastic bus shelter bench. Hayal sits down next to him and buries her hands in her parka.
“Should be here in like five minutes,” he says to the time display on his phone’s lock screen. With finally a second to rest, he leans his head back against the glass wall. And because it is a glass wall, Kiwi has no problem spotting Oskar jog down the street once he turns his head to the left.
“Careful, you’re in throwing range,” Kiwi says, back on his feet, his phone raised, as Oskar approaches the bus stop.
“I come in peace,” says Oskar, voice calm as a Sunday morning. He’s not wearing a jacket either. “Lower your weapon and hear me out.”
Kiwi doesn’t change his stance; his phone remains in the air.
“Look, Kiwi, we love you, but we need to put ourselves out there at some point and so far you’ve kept stalling and dodging every opportunity.”
“So you decide to just go behind my back? What kind of friends do that?”
“Not the most graceful maneuver for sure.” Oskar concedes. “But–”
“But? You’re really going to but me right now?”
“You don’t come out of your shell unless you get a little push.”
“Push,” says Kiwi. “That’s not a push, that’s betrayal.”
“You don’t come out of your shell unless you get a little betrayal, then.”
Kiwi jolts his arm back, ready to chuck.
Oskar raises his hands.
“So, Tristan’s, right. It’s small. It’s niche. Relatively non-threatening. That’s why Mona suggested it to Tien in the first place.” He tilts his head gently. “It’s a real place that actual people go to. YouTube’s not doing anything for us, so we have to take actual steps. This is an actual step. People would actually see us, hear us.”
“I think,” says Kiwi, “I’m gonna throw up.”
“Look–”
“No.”
“This whole thing was definitely sneaky and lowkey unfair–”
“Highkey unfair.”
“–and highkey unfair, but two weeks from now, when we’ve had our gig, and we’re standing on a little stage and a couple of people are cheering because they liked what we did, then it’s gonna be okay. Promise.”
“Well! Look!” Kiwi gestures very intensely at nothing in particular. “Two weeks from now! I’ll be neck-deep in my history didactics exam!”
“On a Saturday?”
Kiwi opens his mouth and closes it a couple of times. “Monday. But I need that weekend to cram.”
“You’ve still got two weeks.”
“And there are still two more exams and an essay! I’m busy!”
“Tien didn’t know that it was gonna be so soon when she messaged that event manager guy. I’m pretty sure she didn’t even expect a reply. But here we are. We have that chance now, even though it’s shitty how we got there.”
“I don’t know how to tell you that you should’ve considered this before organizing a gig without the whole band’s knowledge.”
“I mean I didn’t really organize anything–”
“Plural you.”
“Right.” Oskar takes a breath, decelerates the conversation. “Look, I’m sorry.”
Kiwi watches him, waits. “But?”
“No but. I am sorry.”
Kiwi crosses his arms.
“Is this really only about your exams, though?”
“Well, no, there’s also the whole ‘I’m super fucking mad’ aspect and–” He resets himself, takes a breath, then overenunciates every word. “I’m just not going to embarrass myself like this.”
Oskar furrows his brow.
“I don’t know if that’s a concept that you can grasp, though. Embarrassment.”
“Sure is. That’s why we didn’t tell you.”
“I’m going to throw up.” Kiwi steps back and leans against the shelter wall. “And what’s more, I’ll throw up directly, specifically, on you.”
“Boys,” says Hayal.
Kiwi and Oskar turn their heads.
She points at the corner of the street that’s currently being rounded by a familiar bus with a familiar number on display.
“Thank god.” Kiwi picks up his guitar and fishes for his ticket, which turns out to be redundant when the driver opens the doors in the back as well. One person gets off. Hayal gets on, waits.
“Alright,” says Oskar, hands in the pockets of his sweatpants. “Call me when you’re ready to talk.”
“You’ll need to find someone else for the gig.” For a moment, Kiwi lingers with one foot still on the pavement. “I really, genuinely, have exams. I can’t.”
“Don’t worry about it right now.” Oskar raises his voice to reach past the closing doors. “The 26th is still two weeks and a day away. You’ve got time!”
Kiwi doesn’t respond. Air hisses as the bus lifts its sideways tilt back up and the engine shakes the floor below him. He watches Oskar turn around and saunter back towards his grandparents’ house, hands still in his pockets, before the bus turns out of the street and he loses sight.
“Kiwi,” says Hayal. She nods towards a free seat to her right and Kiwi plops down next to her.
He hoists his backpack onto his lap and starts rummaging through it. “Is it okay if I-”
“Sure.”
Kiwi pulls his headphones over his ears. For the rest of the bus ride, he closes his eyes and listens to the music.
