Chloe the First

He half-ran, half-walked back to his dorm room with the beginnings of the Best Idea He’d Ever Had forming in his brain. It would be a movie unlike any other. None of this Garden State bull shit that got Zach Braff laughed out of town, and it wouldn’t be like that mumbly bumbly Lena Dunham movie either. No, this was going to really strike home for those of his generation, a movie they’d be talking about for ages, something to go in the canon. “See, here,” future film professors would say, “He was only nineteen when he penned his first opus. Just watching the opening scene reminds me of the first time I felt someone really understood what it was like to be a young person at the crux of humanity and adulthood…” Sure, something like that. 

It took him a weekend to race through the first draft. No need for significant plotting or outlining, no, he knew what this story would be. His roommate may have come and gone from their room, but he didn’t notice or care. With the strains of alt-pop-folk music thrumming through his head phones, he went from FADE IN to FADE OUT, pleased with what he wrought.   

The following week, when his friends asked where he’d been that weekend, how he’d missed Jeremy black out and run through campus naked, he responded that he’d been… busy. He wanted to play coy, not be a dick about it, and only let them know once he’d made it into Sundance. He could see it now…. 

He’d be up on the stage, sitting in a director’s folding chair as hundreds of unmistakably jealous eyes bored holes into him. He’d share a secret smile with those eyes, “I did something you’ll never do.” But he’d be modest as he answered the moderator — someone like Scorsese or a famous film critic or someone, he hadn’t decided yet — the moderator’s questions. 

“I really just wanted to tell the story of a young kid fresh from a small town, eager to make his dreams come true." 

“And do his dreams come true?" 

Slight smirk. “I guess it’s up to you as the audience to decide.” Uproarus applause. 

Every night, he’d go home and tweak his script; it was in really good shape for a first draft, so it didn’t need much noodling. Each line of dialogue sounded like him, like what he wanted to say. And man, that second act speech by the love interest — of course he gave her lines, he wasn’t a caveman — when she tries to convince the main character that only by finishing his novel will he fulfill his destiny. Damn. You can’t make this stuff up. Except he did. 

He waited a month to show it to anyone. He’d teased his project to his friends, not so much that they’d get annoyed with him, but enough that they were clamoring to read it. He’d also emailed the head MFA Screenwriting professor and requested a meeting. It was all very legit.   

On the day of his meeting, he sent his friends manila envelopes with his script printed and bradded. It cost a small fortune at the dorm printer, but it was worth it. this shit would be sitting in museums one day and his friends would tell their children stories of reading the first draft of what became the Defining Movie of a Generation. 

Walking to Professor Burke’s office, he quelled his nerves with thoughts of what Burke would say — “Great Scott!” maybe if he was trying to be cute, or more likely, “Damn, I really haven’t seen work like this from an undergraduate, let alone a freshman! Let’s see what we can do about early admission into the MFA program for you…” Maybe Burke would insist he submit it to contests or festivals. Maybe he’d get an agent! Can you imagine?! Going to meetings with Spielberg and JJ Abrams and Tarantino fighting over his script. And it would all start here, today. 

He marched up to Burke’s door, one last manila envelope under his arm. Knocking expectantly, he couldn’t help but hum a little nondescript tune, bouncing on his toes and tapping his fingers. “Come in.”   

He sat down across from Burke, eyeing the professor’s office piled high with marked up scripts and books on movies and screenwriting. Posters hung haphazardly behind the bespectacled and crisp older woman, who had yet to look away from her computer screen. Burke’s chair was at a higher angle and it was a struggle to look her in the eye. 

“Hi Professor Burke, I’m the student who contacted you a few days ago about meeting?" 

“Are you in my class?”   

“Well no, but I — see I wrote this script, and I thought with your expertise and experience you could —" 

“God dammit. You’re the fifteenth fucking freshman dick flicker I’ve had in my office this semester. Did you print up your script? Christ.” Burke held out her hand. “Let’s see it." 

He tentatively passes the manila envelope over, trying to remember what his dad told him about looking tough in the face of the enemy. “It’s a coming-of-age dramedy about a —" 

“Shut up.” Burke scanned the first few pages. Flipped to the middle. 

“It actually should be read all the way through before skipping around —" 

Burke just looked at him. Reading, “Your words are what you have to give the world, Foster. They are what make you you. And to think that you would just take them away from the rest of us like that, well, I don’t want to know the man to do such a disservice to the entirety of humanity forever.” He smiled a little as she read the line. It was good.

Burke took off her glasses as she set the script down. “Kid, I’m gonna give you a valuable piece of advice and I want you to listen because in your lily white life no one has probably ever told you this: You are one of many. Take whatever ‘many’ means to you and multiply it by ten thousand. Every little prick with a keyboard thinks that he’s the guy, and I’ll tell you what, only one of those guys is the guy, and that guy might even be a chick. So toss this out, don’t show it to anyone, and spend a few years realizing how vastly unimportant you are. Then write something, if you still have something to say. But don’t just write shit because you like the sound of your own voice." 

They sat there a minute in silence, at an impasse. Burke gestured to the door as she went back to whatever she’d been doing. 

Outside, he walked in silence, out the building, across the street, up the hill, in his dorm, up the elevator, down the hall, into his room, to his bed. 

“What does she know, she’s just a professor." 

It was a Thursday night and she had two parties to attend.   

The first was a work function; an invite from the receptionist at the company, someone she gabbed to when the work had grown boring and her coffee stale. It was a rather intimate gathering considering the size of her company, and something that she felt might be beneficial to her career to attend. Those who were once employed at the firm and who had moved on to slightly brighter paths were bound to be there, and who was she kidding, she knew she needed to make more connections. 

The second was an alumni event; an invite on Facebook from a guy she once made out with on a camping trip, and who had recently begun texting her when he realized they had both moved to the same city post-grad. It was to celebrate the impending rivalry game for their alma mater, in a bar packed with former students who all moved to the same city for the same reason. Her roommate would be attending, she was told, and there was sure to be people she hadn’t seen in a while. 

Both offered their advantages and disadvantages. 

The work function was sure to have free food and interesting conversation with people who had already begun making something of themselves.

The alumni event would have beer and boys her own age. She was a young professional. She was a single girl. 

They met in art school. He had a certain knack for drawing hands and she always got stumped on the knuckles. She was pretty sure she was going to cave and go to law school anyway, maybe represent artists at a New York agency and trick herself into thinking that it had been her dream all along. 

They had a group of mutual friends, artsy kids who discussed the merits of Klimt over Degas, or how the lyrics of the latest St. Vincent album had inspired the latest turn in their thesis installments. it was fun to be young and cool, smoking outside clubs in the part of town her mom made her promise never to visit.

Their Instagram feeds were plastered with slightly overblown shots, hands holding fancy cocktails and PBRs, girls in hats looking off-camera. They claimed to rarely check in on Facebook, that it was more for their moms’ sanity than theirs. Twitter was a place to expound on gun violence and the glass ceiling. Tumblr kept them sane, they said, and LinkedIn wasn’t for art kids. They were connected because it was part of being part of the world, and a way to prove that they stood out.

One night at a club, she noticed him standing slightly apart, his roommate hitting on hers. He didn’t realize she was talking to him at first, but once they started, it was clear there was something there. They laughed at the one kid who was hitting on the Christian girl, and how the foreign kid was struggling with the cigarette machine. they talked about their professors and their projects, not digging deep, but deeper than they would’ve with anyone else there.   

It wasn’t surprising then, when he ended up in her bed that night. Her roommate ended up going home alone — a boyfriend back home will do that to a girl — and found the remnants of him after he had made his 6am escape. Do you think you’ll see him again, the roommate asked. She shrugged. She wasn’t entirely sure if she needed to. 

But of course she did. She never learned her lesson, did she? The minute she decided she was content to let it be what it was, was the minute she knew she wanted him again and more. 

That’s about the time he first snap chatted.   

She friend requested him. He followed her Instagram. His twitter was outdated, but she followed it. He secretly found her private tumblr. She read his blog. 

Soon, he was over several nights a week. It was casual, she told her roommate, but to her it really wasn’t. She’d spend hours scrolling through his posts, his pictures, trying to figure out if he’d hidden any clues there just for her to find. There seemed to be a few. A song lyric from something she’d played him, a reference to a joke they shared. She showed them to her roommate — these have to be about me right? The roommate hedged.   

Despite the access his various profiles afforded her, she never was quite able to figure out how he felt. Sure, he snap chatted her, but it was one that ended up in his story. He wouldn’t respond to her texts, but would like her Instagram pictures. She’d give him the cold shoulder for a few days, going out just for the pictures that would let him know what he was missing. But then he’d come over to watch movies and she’d defrost, starting the process over again. 

After a few months, she got a job in New York. They didn’t really talk about it, but it sputtered out, as these things do. Despite his assurances he’d probably end up out there too, he didn’t seem to be in any rush. She waited for a while until she realized what a sad cliche she had become. She re-downloaded tinder and decided she was over him. 

She stopped watching his snap stories and unfollowed him on Instagram. They stayed Facebook friends because they were never really dating and she didn’t want to look petty. She still read his blog, but no one ever had to know about that. 

Twenty years after faking his own death and going into hiding, a much grayer Tupac Shakur revealed himself to the public. He had spent the majority of his break working on “the most influential rap record the world had ever seen,” and it was set to drop at a world-ending party.

The invitations went out.  Beyoncé and Jay-Z would be there, the supermodels both old and new, and tributes to all who had fallen in Tupac’s two-decade time-out. Kim and Kanye’s official statement was that they couldn’t find a babysitter for baby North, but it soon became clear their invitation was never sent (Tupac had called Kanye out in People magazine stating that “Ye is a good dude, but man I wasn’t too cold in my ‘grave’ when he started calling himself the king.”).

The party was phenomenal, like Elton John’s New Year’s but with fewer gay people, though Elton himself was in attendance. Liquor flowed and beats were dropped. Every major artist took his or her turn on stage to honor the star’s return to his place in the earthly sky.  Eminem brought back “the Real Slim Shady” but adjusted his lyrics for the occasion. Kendrick Lamar, Li’l Wayne, Snoop, the gang was all there. (Not the real gang, the metaphorical one). Some old faces showed up – Notorious B.I.G, Dr. Dre who took a break from making headphones, and Nas.  New faces were honored to be included – Drake had to keep stuffing bagel bites in his mouth to keep from repeating how “indubitably honored to have been shown the respect to be included in such a memorable event.”

Moby kept the table warm while Mary J. sang a tribute to Tupac and his fellow fallen stars, regardless of the fact that Tupac wasn’t really dead. Tupac didn’t mind, and thought it was kind of cool.  Somehow Taylor Swift got into the party, and sang a ballad she had written as if he were her former lover. Tupac also did not mind this.

As the crowd got drunker, Tupac got more nervous but also a little excited. He kept tapping his feet and shaking out his arms, a superstar’s Hokey Pokey. His time was coming and he was ready.

Tupac took the stage. He swaggered up the stairs, stood in the middle, and held his microphone as if it were a religious talisman to pray over. The sweat beaded under his purple bandana. His gold chain rattled with each rapid heartbeat.

The crowd grew silent. This is it, they thought. This is it, Tupac thought. This is it, Kanye thought as he pretended to know what was happening.

Tupac looked up at the crowd. The cheers grew, Lady Gaga letting out a little yodel in a sad attempt to attract more attention. Tupac took a deep breath and smiled: “This is a little rap I’ve been working on for the past two decades, and I hope y’all like it.” More cheers until the music started. Then silence.

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