This show of unbelievable support catches me way off guard. “You’d do that? Spend your own free time reading my work?”
“Of course I would!” She crams another peanut butter cup in her mouth, tossing the paper in the overflowing trash can behind her. It’s full of empty candy wrappers and soda cans. Obviously she is just as nutrition-conscious as me, which is precisely not at all. “I know how talented you are through working with you on school plays. You have me in stitches with your clever ad libs and witty improv.”
I blush fiercely. Again. “Thank you. It irritates the living hell out of most people.”
“Well, most people aren’t budding comic writers in the making. Have you given much thought to what you’d like to do after leaving school? College? Internships? If you wanted to do both, USC is incredible for screenwriting – Spielberg is an alum – and you could intern during spring break and summer vacation while you’re in LA. Best of both worlds.”
I fidget with the zipper on the fake leather jacket I picked up at a thrift store last fall. This is the part I dread: coming clean about my financial situation. For the second time this afternoon. It shouldn’t be a big deal, and in day-to-day life it doesn’t bother me that much, but now that it’s actually having an impact on my future decisions, it’s kind of uncomfortable to discuss.
But like I say, Mrs Crannon is good people. So I tell her the truth. “Actually, I’m not sure I can afford college. I figured I’d just get a job here to support me and my grandma, and write in my spare time. Film a few shorts if I can scrape together the cash.”
She frowns. The sound of her computer putting itself to sleep whirs through the quiet room. Even technology has zero interest in school after the final bell. “Have you looked into loans? For college, I mean.” Figures that’d be her next question.
“Kind of. But the idea of being in that much debt scares the crap out of me. Especially with no parents to fall back on.”
She rolls up the purple sleeves of her wild tunic, revealing a set of black rosary beads triple tied around her wrist. Another peanut butter cup bites the dust. She’s plowing through them with such velocity I can only be impressed. If consuming chocolate was an Olympic sport, Crannon would be on the podium for sure. She’s practically Simone Biles at this point.
“I get it,” she says, in a way that entirely suggests she doesn’t get it at all. “I do. But you have to think of it as an investment. In yourself, in your future. It’s so cliché, and I know you’ll have already heard it all with Rosenqvist, but you’re young, you’re bright, you’re ambitious. You have to go for it.”
I nod, but I feel a little deflated. It always leaves me feeling kinda empty when people preach “follow your dreams” to those with “do what you gotta do” kind of lives, even though I know their hearts are in the right place. Maybe being reckless and risk-taking is an option for them, but for me it just isn’t.
Mrs Crannon senses the shift in mood, even though I try my best to hide it from her. Showing vulnerability is about as appealing to me as sticking my face into a bucket of mealworms. But she picks up on it nonetheless.
Wiping a smear of chocolate from the corner of her mouth, she says, “I’ll help you in whatever way I can, Izzy. Dig out old contacts, keep an eye out for paid internships, recommend some places to submit your work to while you’re still a high-school student. USC would be great, but traditional college education isn’t the only way into the industry.” She smiles at me, and I can’t help but smile back. “We’ll figure it out. I promise.”
When I leave twenty minutes later, stuffed full of Reese’s and silently praying Mrs Crannon actually enjoys my screenplay after all that hyperbolic encouragement, I realize that I don’t just like her in a Stockholm Syndrome way. I like her in a human way.
So I do have a heart. Who knew?
7.58 p.m.
“And so, it transpires, I do in fact possess an organ of the cardiovascular variety,” I finish, triumphant.
I’m chilling at the diner with Ajita and Danny, my two best friends in the world. We have a mutual love of nachos and making fun of everything.
Martha’s Diner is super old school, with neon signs and jukeboxes and booths and checkered tiles. It’s massively overpriced and you have to take out a small mortgage to afford a burger, but their fries have been cooked at least eighteen times and are thus the most delicious substance on earth. Honestly, you should’ve seen the hype all over town when Martha’s opened. Largely from those people who post Marilyn Monroe quotes on social media and go on about how much they wish they were born in the 1950s. Like, calm down. We still have milkshakes and racism.
Incidentally, Martha’s is also where my grandmother Betty begrudgingly moonlights as a pancake chef. I mean, it’s not exactly moonlighting when it’s her only job. But it sounds more glamorous if you say it that way. In reality she works twelve-hour shifts on bunion-riddled feet and is in almost constant pain because of it, but there’s just no way she can afford to retire. That’s why I can’t go to college. Not just because of the tuition fees, but because I need to stay in my hometown and work my damn ass off to give her the rest she deserves after so many years of hard graft. It’s my turn to support her for once.
Anyway, I’ve just filled my pals in on my chat with Mrs Crannon, and explained how I’m not as dead in the soul department as previously thought.
“Interesting hypothesis, but I reject it unequivocally,” Ajita replies, tucking a lock of black hair behind her ear and slurping her candy apple milkshake. The henna on her hands is beginning to fade after her cousin’s wedding last month. “I mean, it’s pretty off-brand for you to care about people. In fact, short of an alien parasite feasting on your brain, I’m not convinced you have the capacity to like more than three individuals at any given time, and those slots are already filled by me, Danny and Betty.”
“Valid point,” I concede. Smelling burnt pancake batter, I peer past the server station into the massive chrome kitchen, trying to see if Betty’s knocking around. There’s no sign of her. She’s probably swigging from her hip flask out back while telling dirty jokes to the naive dishwasher. [To clarify, the dishwasher is a person. Not an appliance. My grandma may be nuts, but even she doesn’t engage kitchenware in conversation.]
“That’s cool of Crannon to read your script, though,” Danny says, stirring his salted-caramel banana milkshake with three jumbo straws. He’s wearing a grubby Pokémon T-shirt I got him for his twelfth birthday, which still fits due to his scarily low BMI. “She didn’t have to do that.”
I nod enthusiastically. “Right? And she was so complimentary. She even likes it when I spontaneously ad lib during rehearsals. I did attempt to show some self-awareness and reference the fact it renders most people homicidal, but she was adamant. She genuinely likes my banter.”
“Clearly the woman needs to be sectioned under the mental health act,” Ajita points out helpfully. I flick a blob of whipped cream at her face. It lands on her nose and she licks it off with her freakishly long tongue. She’s Nepali and about three feet tall, but her tongue is like that of a St Bernard. If I spilled my entire milkshake on the floor, for example, she could just vacuum it right up with her tongue without even bending down. It’s truly remarkable.
“Well, I think Izzy’s funny,” Danny mumbles, disappearing under his unruly platform of matted hair.
Aghast, Ajita and I exchange looks. Danny has literally never complimented me at any point in his life. Even when I was five years old and my parents had just died, ours was a friendship built on good-natured antagonism.
“To look at?” Ajita suggests, mentally flailing for an explanation.