Next Door Hater (Love Under Lockdown)

I’d lost count of how many I’d for sure gotten right, but my performance was impressive enough for her go give me permission to take the class right then and there. Called the department chair and registrar’s office herself.

“Right, still story-boarding,” I announced into the depths of the camera’s unblinking eye.

Despite the humiliation involved, I held up my crudely drawn storyboards to show my work. Something the professor always insisted on. Unsurprisingly for a film course.

I could only hope my classmates would take the idea of intention over execution, especially at the beginning, to heart. I knew college was meant to be different than high school. The teachers didn’t get after you for missing class for a start. You were paying to be there so what you did was your own prerogative.

Still, I must have used the word ‘rough’ in references to my storyboards at least three times. Just to make sure I dove the point home, through the living room, and out the kitchen door. Subtlety was not my strong suit, though this was in no way a handicap when it came to filmmaking.

I rapidly found myself getting close to the end of my update, though the progress of my process, without spilling a single bean in terms of my overall plot. Stealing among novelists was fairly rare. Not least because a sort of honor among creatives, rooted at least partly in economics.

If your ideas and vision are the main things you have, it would take a real asshole to try and take it away from you. Film, however, is much more lucrative and therefore morally bankrupt. Scruples tend to have an inverse relationship to income.

I tried to write novels too, of course. Lord knows I’d read enough of them and had a good basis in craft. Even if my first love was films; one developed when I was very young, my daddy taking me to the multiplex as soon as I was old enough to see over the seats.

He was a low-budget director while in life. Despite their lack of funding, his work tended to be well regarded. The lack of budget and his ways of working around it became a big part of the charm. My interest only grew stronger when he died, our shared love of all things movies feeling like a connection between us, even from beyond the veil.

The literature was my mother’s influence. My grandmother had been a brilliant novelist back in the day, writing for the pulps and lit. journals alike, under her initials so no one would cotton to the fact she was a woman. It was the 1980s after all and things could be quite different then.

She wasn’t alone of course, female authors both before her, P.D. James, and after, J.K. Rowling, pulled the same tactic. Worked like a charm too, the money grandma brought in keeping the family in food and shoes between grandpa’s stints of seasonal work.

When it came to choosing a major, things had mostly come down to practicality. English was the subject in which I had the grades and skills to get and then carry a full scholarship at the school of my choice.

A ritzy liberal arts college upstate, notorious for being more difficult to get into than a bank vault. It wasn’t a matter of snobbery, so much as a need to escape. I’d never considered myself particularly money-obsessed, but most people wouldn’t consider themselves oxygen-obsessed, until it is suddenly taken away.

Things had been okay with Mom and Daddy working together, but when he died, things took a Wile E. Coyote style plummet off a cliff. Mom did what she could, but it had become abundantly clear that the only way out was to go to university. There weren’t many options open to English graduates, but they were still better than for someone whose education ended at a high-school diploma.

Not only was my major chosen before application, I was already at least on a Master’s track if not a doctorate. I knew it was weird for a 17-year-old to have a “10-Year Plan,” but there I was, already a year into it. The first step in the journey of a thousand miles.

“Hey bookworm, what’cha up to?”

I glanced up and flashed a smile at my roommate as she entered before turning back to the camera. “Brenda Smirnoff, everybody.”

“Not a nickname, either,” Brenda pointed out, leaning down and winking at my webcam.

“Roommate and best friend of circumstance for the last semester,” I explained to my would-be audience.

“Thanks, babe, love you too.”

“I’ll get back to you later,” I said, killing the webcam.

The chair squeaked spiritedly as I fully turned to face the new arrival, decked out in full party gear, making her look even more stunning than she usually did.

“Wow.”

“What? Do I have something on my face?”

“No, you’re perfect,” I said without a second thought.