“Ruben can take you anywhere you want to go,” Brody said, seemingly unbothered. “Do you have a place in mind?”
INT. MONTAGE—DAY
The summer season is ending. The ice cream shop is closing for the year. The boardwalk is quiet. Seasons change. So do Poppy and Arlo. Poppy has become distant. She has missed calls and text messages from him. She sees him walking alone one day while she drives home. She wants to call his name. She doesn’t.
POPPY (V.O.)
Some people don’t ghost you. They haunt you.
Chapter Fifty-Five
I ♥ Ramen was my mom’s favorite place for us to be—as she called it—alone together.
It had opened in the shopping center near our house when I was in middle school. Mom and I always bypassed the booths and tables, opting instead for the little bar meant for single diners. We would each bring a book or a magazine and sit in silence while we waited for our food. Alone. Together. Ruby was baffled by the experience and always tried to start up a conversation, missing the point entirely.
Tilly, the older woman who owned the restaurant with her husband and their two daughters, sat at the hostess stand wiping her dry-erase seating chart. “Where’s your mother?” she asked without even bothering to say hello.
The same soft, rehearsed expression I’d grown accustomed to using when I broke the news about Mom settled on my face. “She passed away earlier this year.”
Tilly nodded slowly, her usual frown growing deeper. The staff here had known Mom was sick since it was one of the only places we still made an effort to go to toward the end and they always went out of their way to make sure she was as comfortable as possible.
“You know, any time she finished a book, she always left it for me to read,” Tilly said. “Sometimes, she’d highlight passages and write in the margins too.”
“She did?” I asked. I vaguely recalled Mom talking to Tilly about her books, but I hadn’t realized she’d passed them along to her as well.
Tilly nodded and pointed to a shelf full of dilapidated paperbacks behind the counter. “My daughter Sue always said that your mom’s notes and highlights were like reading a book with a friend. I let solo diners borrow from the shelf if they want.”
“She would have loved that,” I told her.
Tilly led me to the usual spot where Mom and I sat. The last two seats at the end of the bar nearest the wall.
I ordered a milk tea and a bowl of ramen with extra fish cakes and then I took out the script and began to read.
At first, I started with a pen in my hand, but after it took me fifteen minutes to read the first two pages, I forced myself to put it away and just read. The itch to change every little word and piece of punctuation was intolerable. I had to sit on my hands at one point.
My food came and I slowly ate my ramen as I continued, thankful for something to occupy my hands and hoping to find a spark of inspiration.
The script was... fine. It was an unmarked file, so all of the notes and edits I’d made over the years were gone, but I didn’t need them to guide me. Because with each passing page, I felt more and more distanced fromThe Wunderkind. And not just the script itself, but the person who wrote it. It was the same feeling I would get in middle school or high school when I found a relic from a long-lost hobby or interest and felt embarrassed for even liking the thing in the first place. It was like rediscovering your toys and realizing that they were only ever just overpriced chunks of plastic.
I was wholly disconnected as I bit down on my lower lip, my brain doubling over a very shitty metaphor about pigeons and doves.
My phone lit up with a text from Brody.
Brody:
How’s it going? Like falling in love all over again?
My fingers hovered over the screen as I contemplated my response. I was only forty pages into the hundred-and-two-page script.
Of course Brody loved the script. Now, seeing it with new eyes for the first time, I could plainly see thatThe Wunderkindwas about him after all. It was about us. And it was written by the girl he met in college. The girl who made him feel like he could do anything.
The screenplay was from the girl’s point of view. Poppy. And yet every page lived in service of her love interest—an overgrown Peter Pan who had once felt whimsical to me... but now...
It all came down to this: I wasn’t twenty-one anymore. I wasn’t the girl who was so obsessed with the feeling of being in Brody’s orbit that I had to write about it. I remembered those emotions, of course. But twenty-one felt like a universe away. Hell, I wasn’t even the same Vera I was ten months ago. And just reminiscing felt like taking ten steps backward.
At the time, this story was the quirky fantasy version of falling in love that I’d told myself. The version that twenty-one-year-old me had romanticized. This wasn’t a story I knew how to tell anymore. It didn’t feel true anymore.
Behind me, the bell above the door rang and Tilly greeted the incoming diner.
