“Really?” he says as he takes it. To Mae, it feels like handing over a tiny piece of herself.
Be gentle,she wants to say, but she doesn’t, because she’s tougher than that.
The film is eighteen minutes long, and Mae can’t bear to sit there while he watches, so she walks along the edge of the muddy river until it’s time to circle back again. Garrett’s head is still bent over the phone, but he looks up when she sits beside him, his expression hard to read.
“Well?” she asks, sounding much too casual.
“Technically speaking,” he says, “I think it’s brilliant.”
Mae frowns at him. “Meaning?”
“You’re an awesome filmmaker,” he says, his face serious. “I don’t know how you managed some of those camera angles. And that transition near the end? You’re really, really talented, and this is really, really impressive.”
She can feel the next word coming as surely as if he’d already spoken it. “But?”
“You want me to be honest?”
“I do,” Mae says, her mouth dry.
Garrett’s forehead creases. “Well, it’s just…it’s kind of impersonal.”
“Impersonal?” she repeats, caught off guard. She’d been prepared for a thousand other criticisms. Butimpersonaldefinitely wasn’t one of them.
Of all the films she’s ever made, this one is closest to her own life. Someone else did the acting—a girl from school who’d been the star of every play and was eager to use it for her audition reel—but the rest of it was Mae, her story laid out for anyone who wanted to see.
“It’s about a girl with two dads who lives in the Hudson Valley,” she says to Garrett, an edge to her voice. “What could be more personal than that?”
“I know it’saboutyou,” he says. “That’s really obvious. The problem is that it doesn’tfeellike you.”
“Well,” she says stiffly, “maybe you don’t actually know me.”
Garrett looks surprised. “Maybe I don’t. But that’s not really my fault, is it?”
Mae almost wants to laugh, but it gets stuck in her throat. Nobody has ever accused her of being mysterious before. In fact, she’s never had a problem speaking her mind. When she was eight, she showed up at a town hall held by her congressman and gave an impassioned speech in defense of gay marriage. When it was finally legalized in the state of New York, she sent him a postcard that readNo thanks to you.Once, she broke up a fight between two boys on the street and ended up with a black eye of her own. And every so often, she likes to wander into the comments section of her favorite film channel and write impassioned rebuttals to all the idiots who feel threatened by female remakes of their childhood favorites.
She is not exactly a wallflower.
Garrett squints at her, trying to figure out his next move. “Come on, Mae. We both know you’re not the best at—”
“What?” she demands.
He hesitates, then shrugs. “Letting people in.”
“That’s not true.”
“See?” he says. “If you can’t even allow yourself to be introspective in this conversation, how are you ever gonna do it in your films?”
There’s a hint of arrogance in his face as he says this, and for a second, Mae can see what her dads have been talking about all summer. But then his expression softens again, and he reaches for her hand, and she steels herself for whatever he’s going to say next, which is probably that she really shouldn’t be steeling herself against anything at all.
“You’re obviously super talented. But the difference between a good film and a great one has nothing to do with jump cuts and cool techniques. It’s about showing people who you are.”
Mae opens her mouth to argue with this, but he hurries on.
“We both know you have a lot to say,” he tells her, offering a smile even as she untangles her hand from his. “You just have to get out of your own way and actually say it.”
“I did,” she says.
Garrett shakes his head. “You didn’t. Not yet.”
