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Now my concentration was really shot to hell, and all thoughts of cleaning flew out the window. I paced the living room floor, well, what I could see of it, for a few minutes, my mind spinning over and over the idea of a wedding, and a step-father who probably wasn’t even my age yet. Mom had said he was in his twenties, but that was a pretty wide gap. He looked like he was at least 25, and it’d be a relief if he was older than my own 27 years.

And where the hell had he come from, anyway? I’d talked to Mom nearly every day for as long as I could remember, and not once did Garret enter the conversation. I’d heard about other men, all older, all fat and balding, with money to burn, but she’d never been serious about them. Granted, Garret apparently had money from a very substantial inheritance and a high powered job that Mom couldn’t remember the name of, but he wasn’t her usual type. He was more beautiful than she was, and Mom hated men who were better looking, or better dressed, than her. Garret just didn’t make sense, he just didn’t fit.

I went into my office and sat down at my computer, at that taunting cursor that I’d left flashing for a few days now. I hadn’t heard back from Georgie yet about my latest pages, and I wasn’t about to push her. When pressured for a response, her common answer was, “It’s dreadful, so dreadful I couldn’t even get through it. Do it better.” That meant she hadn’t had time to really read the work yet, and as punishment for calling her on it, she was making me re-write it, whether the pages needed a re-write or not. I’d spent the first year of our relationship scrambling to re-write what she didn’t like, or hadn’t read, until Olivia clued me in and I ended up re-submitting what I’d already written. She never knew the difference, and usually raved about the “new” pages, not realizing it was all the same work.

I was hoping she wouldn’t ask for a re-write on what I’d submitted to her. Writing those pages had been hard enough, but I feared I’d just give up all together if she asked for better. And now, with my mom’s looming disaster on the horizon, and my impending embarrassment in front of her snotty friends going hand-in-hand with that, I really couldn’t get my head around my latest book. I kept getting horrible mental images of myself in some frilly pink nightmare that was a throw-back from a 1980’s John Hughes movie, with too much skin showing and not enough material to hide in. I felt the shame and horror begin to burn, low in my stomach, and before long it had risen to my face in the form of a furious blush that made me feel almost fevered.

I pushed away from my computer desk and went to my bookshelf, searching for something, anything, that would distract me from thinking about whatever terror my mother would force upon me. As I searched the shelves, my fingers reached up to absent-mindedly stroke over my scarred flesh, as though seeking comfort from the very thing that would humiliate me and make the object of scorn and ridicule. I could barely feel my own fingertips as they traced the all-too-familiar patterns the fire from the accident had left on me. Some spots were hard, and stuck up in small ridges, as though the skin had been forced together and was still rebelling, even after the wound had healed. Other parts were smooth, like the skin on a baby’s tummy, like satin, and always cool to the touch. The skin in those areas was almost paper-white, where the pigment had died and left a scar that looked like freshly fallen snow. This made the ridged areas look even uglier, made them seem worse than they were, and made me cringe even more. I quickly tugged the neck of my sweater up as much as possible.

That afternoon was spent immersed in one of my favourite books, Frankenstein, one I’d read repeatedly in the hospital after my accident. I found it easy to look away from my own problems when I read about Frankenstein’s monster and his rejection by the family he idolized. He knew my pain, and felt it more strongly than I did, because he didn’t have a job that he loved or a family he tolerated. He was alone and had no one, all because of how he looked. Somehow that put my situation into perspective, though it reminded me why I didn’t open up to the rest of the world. There was too much hate and prejudice, even in the monster’s fictional world, for someone who was different, who wasn’t physically perfect, to be accepted and treated with the respect that person deserved. It only took me a couple of hours to finish the book, and when I did, I was in tears.

After a restless night, filled with horrible dreams of hideous monsters wearing ugly dresses, and a room full of laughing people, all pointing at me, I was relieved to be awoken by the shrill sound of the telephone next to my head. I had to blink away the dreams for a few seconds before I realized that light was shining through my window, and though it wasn’t time for my alarm to go off, it was still morning, which meant I could get up and escape the horrors that waited for me in my nightmares.

“Hello?” I said, not even bothering with professionalism. Before nine o’clock, all bets were off, and whoever was calling could just take what they got.

“Peyton, did you get my e-mail last night?” Olivia sounded almost frantic, and she was clearly out of breath. “Please tell me you did.”

“No, I didn’t,” I said, reaching up to rub my eyes. “I’ve told you repeatedly that I rarely check my e-mail. What’s going on?”

“Shit,” she spat, and I could hear her lighting a cigarette. After a long drag off it, she seemed somewhat less frantic. “The studio needs a re-write on the last half of the script by this afternoon, or else there could be serious problems. The other writers are refusing to do it, because they don’t want to have to deal with your notes, so it’s up to you.”

“But that’s at least 50 pages,” I said, panic rushing through me. I sat up in bed and threw the covers off me. “And what do you mean they don’t want to deal with my notes?”

“They think you’re being a bit picky is all,” Olivia said, with a bit of hesitation in her voice. “You’ve had so many problems with the dialogue they’re using, they feel you want too much. If they don’t stop bitching, the studio could pull your script approval.”

I sighed. I knew I was being particular about the script, but it was my first book, my baby, as it were, and I didn’t want some hack writers going to town with it and giving the actors corny dialogue that pulled focus from the plot of the story. I hadn’t hesitated in telling them that, either, which apparently they were taking issue with.

“Did you e-mail the current draft to me?” I asked, already heading into my office to check my computer. “Have they done any re-writes since my last set of notes?”

“You should have it already, yes, and no, they haven’t touched it,” Olivia said, puffing on her cigarette again. “Marcus Johnson told them not to do anything to it, to let you sort it out on your own. He wants a working draft by four o’clock.”

“My time or his?” I asked as I scrolled through the obligatory spam to find Olivia’s e-mail. “There’s eight hours between where I am and where he is, remember?”

“He has a meeting at five o’clock his time,” she said, and I could hear her flipping papers around. “So I’m guessing he means an hour beforehand. That buys you a bit more time, but not much. I’ve already talked to Georgie and convinced her to put your notes session with her off until tomorrow. She was ready to call you this morning and have at you about your new pages. She’s not happy.”

“Why am I not surprised?” I said, skimming over Olivia’s e-mail, which detailed the pages that needed attention. “I can’t think about that now, if this has to be done by tonight.”

“Can you handle it?”

“It shouldn’t be too hard,” I said, looking over my own notes in the text of the script. “I’m just making the changes I wanted to make, right? My main complaint was the dialogue, so if I just lift that right from the original book, I’ll be done in no time.”

“Just keep in mind that whatever sounds good on the page may not sound as good coming out of someone’s mouth on-screen,” Olivia pointed out. I wanted to slap her.

“My dialogue is just fine,” I snapped, now paying full attention to the conversation. “If it wouldn’t sound right being said out loud, I wouldn’t have written it, now would I?”

“Okay, calm down, I wasn’t trying to insult your writing,” she said in her ‘you’re-being-a-spazz-so-you-need-to-chill-out’ voice. “I’m just saying it may not be as easy as you think. Call me if you have any problems, okay?”

“Fine, but there won’t be any problems,” I said, probably a little more forcefully than was necessary, before hanging up the phone. I shook my head as I went to my bookshelf and grabbed my hardback copy of After Midnight, then went back to my desk and got to work.