Mae claps a hand over her eyes as she presses Play, but the moment the film begins, she can’t help peeking through her fingers. There’s the familiar swell of music, then the black screen with the words mae day productions scrawled across it, and then—
She punches at the keyboard of her computer, and the window disappears.
Clearly, this is ridiculous. She’s probably watched the film a thousand times, and she’s not even sure that’s an exaggeration. Just a couple of months ago, she’d been practically gleeful about it, filled with a fizzy lightness when she imagined all the praise that would be coming her way. Most of all, she was certain the members of the admissions committee at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts would see its brilliance. How could they not?
All her life, people have been telling Mae she has talent. She was nine when she made her first short (a stop-motion film about a muffin named Steve who falls in love with a bagel named Bruno), ten when she started hanging around the high school’s A.V. club in the afternoons (too overzealous to realize that her mockumentary about the older kids wouldn’t get a warm reception), and eleven when she got her first real camera—a beautiful Canon DSLR with a 35-millimeter lens and 1.8 f-stop—for her birthday (after threatening to hock all her possessions to pay for one).
So far, she’s gotten by on passion and determination and an unwillingness to take no for an answer, drafting friends as actors, talking her way into shooting locations, and watching YouTube tutorials for new tricks. Now she was supposed to graduate into the big leagues, finally getting a real education at the best filmmaking school in the world, which is the only thing she’s ever really wanted.
It just never occurred to her they might not want her back.
She sets her jaw and faces down the screen again. She hasn’t been able to bring herself to watch since the letter came, the one informing her that she’d been accepted to the university—just not to the film program. But she knows it’s time. If she’s ever going to have a shot at transferring, she’ll have to make another audition film. And if she’s going to do that, she’ll have to figure out what went wrong with the first one. She doesn’t mind learning from her mistakes; in fact, she’s desperate to. She just hates the idea that what once seemed so shiny and impressive will now inevitably look different to her: a bruising collection of flaws and mistakes that will surely hurt even more than the rejection.
Still, she grits her teeth and presses Play. But as the first image appears—a time-lapse shot of clouds on one of those perfect spring days in the Hudson Valley, the sky so blue it almost looks like a special effect—there’s a knock at the door.
Mae half turns, pushing her glasses up on her nose. “Yeah?”
“Want to come down and help me with dinner?” Dad asks, poking his head in. “Not with anything important, obviously, since none of us are quite over the Great Mashed Potato Incident of last Tuesday. But you can always do something menial, like grating cheese, or…” He pauses, noticing her computer, where the screen is still frozen on the clouds. “Ooh,” he says, walking over. “I love this part.”
“It’s not…,” Mae says, quickly shutting the laptop. “I’m not…”
But it’s too late. He’s already sitting down on the edge of her bed, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, ready to watch. Right then, with the late-day sun coming through the window, the resemblance between them is clear. They’re both short, with matching freckles and light brown hair and fair skin. Even their reading glasses have the same prescription.
When Mae was born, her dads did a coin toss to decide whose last name she would get. They’d already agreed to keep the bigger question—which one of them was her biological father—a mystery. But as she got older, it started to become pretty obvious whose swimmers had won the race. Her other dad—Pop—is tall and broad-shouldered and athletic, with jet-black hair and deep blue eyes, about as different from Mae as can be. “Well,” he always says when she trips over her own feet or struggles to reach a high shelf, “at least I won the damn coin toss.”
Dad claps his hands. “Come on,” he says a little too cheerfully. He’s still wearing his signature tweed blazer, though all he had today was a faculty meeting. “Let’s roll tape.”
Mae shakes her head. “I think I need to do this alone.”
“Right,” he says. “Sure. But just to make a counterargument—”
“Here we go.”
“—you’ve been trying to do it on your own all summer, and clearly that hasn’t worked. So maybe it would help if you had some moral support.”
She considers this for a moment, then swivels back around and opens the laptop again. The clouds, almost imperceptibly, start to shift into shapes: a rabbit and a guitar and a wave. Mae leans forward and stops the video again. “Nope. Sorry. Can’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” she says, “I love it. Or at least I did.”
“Okay, let’s say it’s horrible.”
“What?”
“Maybe,” he says, “it’s the worst thing anyone’s ever made. Maybe it’s a colossal failure of a piece of art. A disaster on every imaginable level.”
She blinks at him. “Is this supposed to be a pep talk?”
“Just stick with me,” he says. “I’m getting there.”
“Okay, so…maybe it sucks. If it didn’t, I would’ve been one of the four percent of people accepted to the program. But I wasn’t, and now I don’t know if I can stand to watch it again through their eyes.”
“Aha,” he says. “That’s just it. Do you know how often my students scoff at the paintings I show them in class? Professor Weber, you do realize that’s just a red square, right? I could do that in my sleep. But the thing is, those kids are being jackasses.”
Mae laughs. “Are you trying to say that the admissions people at USC are jackasses too?”
“He’s trying to say that art is subjective,” says Pop, who has appeared in the doorway, still wearing his suit and tie from the gallery. “Just because they didn’t love your film doesn’t mean it’s not great. And just because they had a different opinion about it doesn’t mean you have to change yours.”
“Actually,” Dad says with a grin, “I was gonna say the thing about jackasses. But his was better.”
Pop shakes his head, but he’s still looking at Mae. “You were really proud of that film,” he says with a smile. “I guess I don’t see why that has to be any different now.”
She glances back at her computer. “Garrett’s always saying—”
They both let out strangled groans.
“Garrett,” Dad says, rolling his eyes so hard that Mae worries they might get stuck like that. She knows he’s mostly teasing; they act the same with any boy she brings home. But Garrett’s flashy red car and swanky Park Avenue address haven’t helped matters.
Pop pushes off the doorframe and walks over to sit beside Dad on the bed, their shoulders touching. “Hasn’t he gone back to the city yet?”
Mae had met Garrett at the start of summer, when they were the only two people at an art house screening of Cinema Paradiso. She’d seen it a million times, of course; it was her grandmother’s favorite. And though it was a bit sappy for Mae’s taste, Nana was in the hospital at the time, and something about sitting in the darkened theater and watching the flickering screen felt almost reverential, the closest thing she had to a prayer.
Afterward, she discovered Garrett waiting for her in the lobby, as if they’d planned to meet there. With his square jaw and blond hair, he looked like he should be anywhere else on a Saturday night: at a party or a baseball game or possibly even a movie premiere. Instead he was holding a half-empty bucket of popcorn in the crook of one arm, and he lifted his eyebrows expectantly. “So? What did you think?”