Chapter 160: the first draft

Chapter 160 — The First Draft

Roxanne had claimed a table at the back of the library with her notebook on one side and her laptop on the other, and for most of an hour she had accomplished almost nothing. Adrian’s photographs sat in a folder on the screen, Maya’s sketches were fanned across the table, and her notes from the last meeting filled three pages. She had everything except a first sentence. The opening she wrote about a girl standing at the gates with a heavy heart sounded like a movie trailer, so she deleted it. The second described an ordinary morning so flatly that she nearly bored herself, and the third explained the whole reason for leaving before the character had taken a single step. All three disappeared with a tap of the backspace key.

Nora dropped her bag into the next chair and peered at the screen. "You look like you’re losing a fight with that thing. What are you working on?" Roxanne explained the project and the story about a student leaving the academy, then admitted she couldn’t find the right way in. Nora thought about it for a moment. "What’s the first thing your character notices when she wakes up?"

"Her alarm?" Roxanne said. "That’s depressing," Nora said, and Roxanne shrugged and said it was realistic. "Realistic doesn’t have to mean boring. Start with an ordinary moment instead of explaining why she’s leaving. Readers can work out the why later."

Roxanne turned to a fresh page and started building the girl instead of the opening. She had spent three years at the academy and was leaving because an opportunity had come up somewhere else. Nobody had expelled her or pushed her out, and nothing had gone wrong, which made the whole thing harder to write because there was no villain to point at. Roxanne first considered making her afraid of forgetting her friends, but the idea felt thin the moment she wrote it down.

Nora read the page upside down and tapped the margin. "What if she’s excited and sad at the same time? She wants to go, and she still misses it before she’s even left." Roxanne looked at the line she had just written, then at Nora, and felt something loosen. A girl who could be happy about a new beginning without pretending the old one meant nothing was someone she wanted to write about, and within ten minutes she had a paragraph she didn’t delete.

Later that afternoon she posted the opening to the group chat and waited, drumming her fingers on the table. Adrian replied first. He liked the writing, he said, but the mood didn’t match his first photograph, and he thought the story should begin with something more visual and less reflective. Roxanne typed back that the story was supposed to have emotional depth and not just describe pretty places. Adrian suggested opening with an action instead, and when she pushed back he said readers ought to understand the story without leaning on explanations. Roxanne reminded him that photographs could suggest things but couldn’t replace the written narrative.

"You want every photograph to explain something," Roxanne wrote. Adrian answered that she wanted every sentence to explain the photograph. "Maybe because words are part of the project," she typed. "I’m aware," he wrote back. "I’m carrying a camera, not a decorative plant." Roxanne was working out a reply when Maya cut in and told them both to take a breath.

Maya’s next message proposed that they stop asking the opening to carry the entire story. She suggested beginning with the protagonist packing a suitcase, with the photographs appearing as memories while the girl decided what to take with her. Adrian admitted the idea gave him plenty to work with visually, and Roxanne could see how it would give the story movement without a long explanation. They agreed to test it with a short scene, and twenty minutes later the three of them were crowded around her table in the library, with Roxanne writing a new paragraph while Maya sketched a suitcase beside an open window.

They worked for another hour. Adrian chose the archway as the girl’s first memory, and Maya drew her standing beneath it with a suitcase at her feet. Roxanne wrote the scene where the girl pauses before leaving and remembers how nervous she had been on her first day, afraid of getting lost and of being noticed. She wanted to leave, but she didn’t want to pretend she had never belonged here, and Roxanne let that tension sit in the sentences without spelling it out.

When Adrian read the passage, he suggested moving the archway photograph to a spot after the second paragraph, so the reader would meet the girl before meeting the place. Roxanne opened her mouth to defend the original order, then closed it and thought about it. He was right, since the image landed harder once the reader already cared about the girl, and she told him so. Adrian looked so surprised that Maya laughed. By the time the light outside had turned amber they had a rough opening that all three of them liked.

Back in her dorm, Roxanne saved the draft in two places before setting the laptop on her bed. Isla looked up from her desk and asked how the project was going. "We argued over almost every creative decision," Roxanne said. "It went well, though." Isla grinned and said at least they were passionate about something other than academy gossip, and Roxanne laughed and opened the draft again.

She read the opening quietly, line by line, and realized partway through that she hadn’t thought about her own past relationship once while writing it. The girl with the suitcase had her own history and her own reasons, and none of them belonged to Roxanne. The thought was surprisingly refreshing, like opening a window in a room she hadn’t known was stuffy.

She was about to close the laptop when the group chat lit up. Adrian had sent another photograph, this one taken in the academy’s old library corridor, with a figure visible in the background behind a pillar. Roxanne zoomed in until the pixels began to blur. It was a student standing alone with a suitcase beside her.

"Who is that?" she typed. "I don’t know," Adrian replied. "She was there when I took the picture." Roxanne zoomed in once more on the girl’s face, and the longer she looked, the less it felt like an accident that Adrian’s camera had caught her. A moment later Maya wrote, "Wait. Isn’t that the girl who transferred out last semester?" Roxanne looked at the photograph again, and the story they had been inventing suddenly had a real question attached to it.