1st 5 Pages January Workshop- Evenson

Name: Emma Evenson 

Genre: Young adult contemporary 

Title: Tourist Attractions of the Upper Midwest 

Friday, March 16th, 2012 

According to the Mayan calendar, the world will end a few months from now, which is pretty much fine by me. 

I’d be fine with it ending right this second. 

I clear my throat and stare out at the rest of my public speaking class. 

I’m not sure what the point of public speaking is. No adult I know has a job that involves public speaking, unless you count teachers or that one manager at Arby’s who really gets off on using the intercom to remind us that the refills aren’t free. And somehow I think that even without specialized training I could cope with yelling at my sister and her friends over an intercom. 

Parker, in his perennially unhelpful way, told me to “picture them in their underwear.” But the first person I make eye contact with— which is to say, the first person who isn’t actively texting, coloring in their nails with a Sharpie, or sleeping— is Rachel Reichert. Rachel might literally be the last person in the world I want to picture naked, because in addition to being a girl, it’s really easy for me to picture her naked. 

It’s not entirely her fault. 

When your best friend is basically a nymphomaniac, seeing his girlfriend naked is kind of an occupational hazard. It’s made even worse by the fact that Parker seems to view any empty room as a personal challenge, like the universe is daring him to have sex in as many places as he possibly can. I’ve walked in on them four times in the year they’ve been dating. 

Every one of those times happened in one of the vacant summer cabins out by French Lake. The whole reason I started breaking into those stupid cabins with Parker was so I could get away from my mother and her revolving door of nightmare boyfriends, and then Parker had to go and turn them into his personal collection of sex lairs. Now it seems like I can’t walk into a single cabin without finding a used condom on the floor. 

Despite my best efforts, an image of Rachel in a hot-pink bra flashes through my mind. I gag internally. Some asshole coughs in an exaggerated way, like 'when is this going to start.'

Picturing people naked is a slippery fucking slope. 

I glance down at my notes. I can barely read my own handwriting. 

“Cloning is a good idea…” 

In my first version of this so-called “persuasive speech,” I ended that sentence with “because it would be incredibly cool to have a clone,” but then I rehearsed it for my sister and Evie looked at me like I was the dumbest person who ever lived. She crossed it out and wrote, “because of the new frontiers it opens up in science.” 

Admittedly, that sounded way better. 

Parker, on the other hand, thought my topic was dumb as shit. “You’re a twin,” he’d pointed out. “You’re basically a clone. Who cares?” 

There were so many things wrong with that that I could barely come up with a place to start, although the fact that Evie is a girl seemed like a pretty obvious one. 

Our teacher gave us this impassioned little speech about how the persuasive speech unit is our opportunity to ‘show the class what we really care about,’ like the idea of showing a bunch of half-asleep people that I mostly hate what I ‘really care about’ is appealing in any way. So instead I went out of my way to choose the topic I cared about the least, which was cloning. 

I stumble through the first few notecards, which are mostly about that one sheep that everyone likes so much. I know that I’m reading so fast people can probably barely understand what I’m saying, but I want it to be over. 

The only person who’s really paying attention is Rachel, and when I meet her eyes she flashes me an exaggerated grin and waggles her hands in a double thumbs-up. 

She’s doing an impression of my mother’s boyfriend, which unfortunately causes me to break into laughter in the middle of a sentence about how cloned animals die when they’re really young. And it’s not just one of those normal snort-laughs that you can recover from easily-- it’s like this totally maniacal, full-blown laugh that makes me seem like a psychopath that tortures animals for fun. 

My teacher frowns and taps her watch. 

Rachel’s face contorts with silent laughter. 

I probably should be annoyed, but I’m not. It’s nice of her to pay attention, especially since Rachel’s speech was really freaking cool. She talked about online surveillance and she started by sharing screenshots of embarrassing things people in our class had posted to their social media profiles in middle school. Granted, she only got about a minute into her speech before the teacher made her stop, but it made an impression. 

Evie deleted her Instagram the next day. 

“So-cloning-isn’t-just-a-thing-that-happens-in-sci-fi-movies—” 

“Time,” my teacher calls, clapping her hands and standing up just as the bell rings. Everyone in the class leaps out of their seats like they’ve been sitting in electric chairs. 

All the tension melts out of my shoulders. My speech is over. It’s now officially spring break. I guess I can handle waiting a few more months for the world to end. 

# 

Rachel corners me in the hallway. “Sorry,” she says, her expression stuck in some no-man’s-land halfway between embarrassment and amusement, “I didn’t actually mean to make you lose it in the middle of your speech.” 

“No big deal. Now everyone will think that I find animal death funny. Which should definitely help my reputation.” 

Rachel smirks. “You don’t have that bad of a reputation,” she says, which would sound charitable coming from almost anyone else. But Rachel is dating my best friend, so her bar is pretty low. 

Underground, more like. 

“Thanks,” I deadpan. 

Rachel coughs and fiddles with the ends of her hair. “So, uh, I’m moving,” she says. 

And I know it’s horrible, but the first thing I feel when she says that is a wave of jealousy. 

Not concern about whether she wants to move, or how this is going to impact Parker. Or how it will impact Evie, who is Rachel’s best friend. 

I just wish that I was the one leaving Clintonville. 

“That sucks,” I say, shifting my backpack onto my other shoulder. “When?” 

She glances down the hallway, like she’s watching for someone. “Today. Like, now. And, uh, I haven’t really mentioned this to Parker.” 

I blink. “You what?” 

And just like that, my spring break is shot to hell.