First 5 Pages November Workshop - Leath Rev 2

Name: Ashley Leath
Genre: Young Adult Contemporary
Title: Anna By Any Other Name

Anna MacIntosh spent her mornings wrangling with two things: her tangled head of curls, and the truth about her real name. At least the curls could be scorched into submission with her flat iron. The truth? Not so much. 
 
All families had secrets, Anna assumed. Some ended up splattered all over the nightly news. Some were tiny things—except to the people who nursed them. Because that’s what this felt like to Anna. Like a little entity inside her heart, constantly needing to be cared for and looked after. It was exhausting.
 
It wandered into her mind in the most inconvenient times too. Like tonight, while she sat on a deteriorating log beside her best friend Dan, burrowing the toes of her shoes into the sand as the chilly waves of the Pacific swirled into themselves a short distance away.
  
“Marshmallow, milady?” Dan held a bag of jumbo marshmallows aloft in his hands, like a trophy. His floppy brown hair fell over his eyebrows, unkept and wind-tossed and so exceptionally Dan-like that she had the urge to run her hands through it.
 
She grinned and sat up straight. “Why absolutely, good sir.”
 
Anna had managed to keep the existence of her MIA biological father a secret from everyone except Dan, who had stumbled upon her one day in the fifth grade as she stood in front of a steamed-up window in an empty classroom. She’d spelled out the words in the one place safe enough to do so, where every trace of them would vanish without evidence. Her real name, written in steam.
 
It wasn’t the best outcome, sharing a secret with Daniel “The Thunderbolt” Thunderberg, what with his tendency to rev with excitement and spew information like Coke from his nose. But what could she do? Threats of eternal servitude only went so far. She had to trust him.
 
“You ready?” Dan asked.
 
He tossed a marshmallow into the air and Anna leaned back, catching it between her teeth. She bowed as everyone around the bonfire clapped for her.
 
Steve Lu tipped his s’more in her direction. “Best present of the night, Anna.” They’d all pitched in with different foods for Steve’s birthday party tonight. The s’mores had been Anna’s contribution. “My mom is going to be so jealous. This is way better than ice-cream cake.”
 
“I don’t know if I’d want the same birthday as someone else in my family,” said Mabry, draping her legs over her boyfriend Conner’s lap.
 
“I don’t mind.” Steve brushed graham cracker crumbs from his plaid shirt. “Did I tell you guys what my dad did for her? He framed a sheet of paper he’d saved from when they were in college together. She’d doodled her first name with his last name across the top of her Calculus notes. She cried when she unwrapped it.”
 
“That’s so sweet,” said Anna. Across the fire, Jarred rolled his eyes, and her smile faded.
 
“I always wondered why girls write their names like that.” Dan stretched out his long legs, crossing his ankles. The wind shifted, and everyone squinted as the smoke from the bonfire billowed into their faces.
 

Mabry twirled a finger around Conner’s ear. “It’s not just a name. It’s like...a daydream or something. Right, Anna?”
 
The five of them peered at her, and Anna’s mouth went dry. Attention was fine in small doses, but Anna couldn’t stand the panicky feeling that washed over her when a group of people turned their eyes on her.
  
“I don’t know,” Anna began. “I guess—”
 
“It’s because girls are ruled by their emotions.” Jarred stabbed his finger into the center of his glasses as he hiked them up his nose. “Guys think with their—”
 
“Dicks?” asked Anna.
 
Jarred gritted his teeth as everyone howled with laughter.
  
Mabry fell off Conner’s legs into the sand, her hands grabbing her stomach. “Oh my God, Anna,” she gasped. “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say anything like that.”
 
“That wasn’t what I was going to say,” said Jarred, dragging a hand through his sandy blond hair. Jarred was cute enough to date whoever he wanted, but his looks were washed dull by his attitude.
 
“We know what you were going to say.” Dan fished a marshmallow from the bag and threaded it onto a stick. “Guys think with their brains, girls think with their emotions, blah, blah, your usual sexist grossness. Have a s’more, Jarred.”
  
“Give one to Anna,” said Conner. “So she can get the taste of that word out of her mouth.”
 
Cursing was a norm for everyone else. The guys had embraced it first, in middle school, as if it were a new flavor of Doritos. So wrong, but so good. Mabry followed soon after, leaving Anna behind, per usual.
 
Dan offered her the stick, but Anna shook her head. “Should’ve known,” he said with a shrug, hovering the marshmallow over the fire.
 
“Known what?” asked Steve. Behind him, the horizon sucked down the last remnants of sunlight, turning the sky ombré shades of blue.
  
“Anna wouldn’t eat something off a stick—”
 
“Wait, wait.” Conner raised his hands in the air. “There’s something there. Hold on. I’ll think of it.”
 
Anna blushed. “You’re all ruled by your dirty minds.”
 
“Fine, then. Whose name would you write on your notebook?” demanded Jarred.
 
Anna exchanged a covert glance with Dan. “I wouldn’t write anything,” she mumbled, heat flaring up her cheeks. “Talk to Mabry about that.”
 
Mabry popped a piece of chocolate into her mouth. “Everybody knows whose name I write.”
 
“I know whose name Anna would write.” Dan bit off a wad of blistered marshmallow and began to chew.
 
Anna’s breath caught. He wouldn’t. He’d promised. She swallowed the sip of Coke in her mouth and tried her best to send telepathic shock waves in his direction.
  
“It’s really all-American too,” Dan continued, his mouth half-open as he chewed.
 
Oh my gosh.
 
“I saw her do it once.”
 
Her heartbeat stuttered. Please, Dan. This isn’t funny anymore. Stop!
 
“A-N-N-A—”
  
She clapped her hand over his mouth with more force than she’d meant, and he slipped from the log and tumbled backward into the sand. Everyone went still. For a second he looked straight at her, the hurt visible in his eyes. A wedge of guilt stabbed into her chest.
 
She flew down the beach before anyone could say a word.
 
#
 
The lapping of the waves masked his footsteps, so she didn’t hear him approach until he was already there. Anna smeared her tears onto her cheeks with her palms, hoping it was too dark away from the fire for him to see her freckles, which would show now that’s she’d sobbed away all her makeup.
 
“I brought you your Coke.” He tapped the can against her shoulder.
 
Anna set it between her legs and wiped her hands on her pants. She’d rolled the cuffs of her jeans up a few times, but not far enough to keep sand from collecting in the folds. “Thanks.”
 
Dan fell onto the sand beside her with a sigh. “You hurt my feelings back there, Banana.”
 
Anna sniffled and wiped her face again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you fall or hurt your feelings, but how do you think I felt?”
 
“I know how you felt.”
 
“No, you don’t.”
 
A few feet away, the tide withdrew a little more each second, pulling itself into the darkness.
 
“I know what you thought I was going to say, and it wasn’t that. I was just going to make a crack about you and me.” He pulled a pair of thin-rimmed glasses from his pocket and put them on. Dan had been struck by lightning as a kid, and ever since, his left eyelid sagged down when he got upset. Like a puppy fighting sleep. “That really sucks. I thought you trusted me.”