You don’t want to talk a bit?”
“You look like you want to sleep.”
She does—that’s clear enough to her. Even now, she feels the world around her strobe a bit, going black then back to light again as her eyes flutter shut and snap open. She presses her fingers to her eyelids. Truth is, she should talk to Max, should tell him about their father, about the phone call, about the actual reason she’s here. She’ll have to tell him, she knows—and what’s more, she sort of wants to. They may not be terribly close, Max and Kelly, but that doesn’t mean they don’t share a father, and just that little bit makes her feel like the two of them are tethered at the ankles by the world’s longest rubber band, and no matter how far away from each other they drift, they will eventually snap back into place. She wants to talk to him, yes, even if it scares her a bit, even if she’s unsure how he will react. And really, she suspects he wants to talk to her too; why else would he have told her so much about Evelyn with so little prompting?
“I have tomorrow off,” he says, half under his breath. “Early in the morning. Penelope. Okay?”
“Yes.”
“Early.”
She rolls her eyes and nods. Yes, yes, she knows.
“Okay,” he says, then stands there for a minute.
She squints. “Good night?” she says with hesitation, as though an acting coach feeding him his next line.
“Okay,” he says again. “Sleep well.”
It sounds like a friendly wish, sure—so why, when Max turns to look at his sister one last time, do his eyes narrow like two coins lying flat, viewed from the side? And then he leaves her, heading upstairs to his room, the stairs sounding so creaky that she worries his footsteps will one day bring them down.
She turns off the light—rather, a desk lamp Max put on the floor next to her—and tries to get comfortable on the futon. First, she tries her back. Then she tries her side. How the fuck did Mom sleep on this thing? Of course, booze, yes—but what would Max have to drink around here? Probably nothing. Besides, it’ll be fine, she knows; if she can stay still for a minute or so, she’ll fall asleep. It’ll be easy. Yes, easy.
In the darkness, she pulls the sleeping bag over her ears but can’t avoid the sound—Jesus, she hears it right now, she swears she does—of another house centipede, or maybe the same one, or maybe something else, scurrying on the floor across the room. She feels like a kid at some dreadful (that word again), forced sleepover—one to make an unloved youngster happy for an evening. But then, what the hell is this exactly, a sleepover poised to last God knows how many nights? And which of them, Max or Kelly, is the unloved youngster?
On the fabric next to her ear, she hears something like a finger dragging across the surface; then something hits her face, her forehead, wobbling there for a second before dismounting. She sits up and reaches for the lamp, her hand walloping it, knocking it to the floor, where the overturned light casts grotesque shadows on all the walls. Off the futon, she picks up the lamp and uses it as a flashlight, pointing it at the floor, trying to find what crawled on her. She felt something—no doubt about it. But she finds nothing.
So she sets the lamp back down and untangles herself from the sleeping bag. Earlier, she saw the centipede hustle toward the corner, right? It rustled something there—the stack of papers, probably. She looks down at this stack, at the top page: The Glazen Shelves, Draft 61. Then a date, just from this past summer. She picks it up. Held together by a paper fastener, the document feels thick. She flips to the last page, number eighty-nine. He’s still working on this, all these years later? She opens to a spot at random:
INT. COFFEE SHOP - EVENING
Max and Evelyn sit across from each other. Max looks tired, his eye blackened, bulging. He has his hand out on the table, begging Evelyn to take it. But she doesn’t—not yet. Instead, she stares at him, hair fallen in front of her eyes. Still wearing her scarf and her summer dress from the event, she looks beautiful. Under the table, her legs are slightly exposed—pale, hairless, and lovely.
EVELYN
So you were coming here all this time?
MAX
Yes.
EVELYN
Why?
MAX
I didn’t know where else to go. I didn’t know where to find you.
BEAT. Evelyn stares at him, sniffs slightly.
EVELYN
Well, hear I am.
It seems to be a big moment in the film, but Kelly struggles to forgive the typo. Say what you will about Max’s artistic drive, but he was never too careful—he never paid attention in school. Kelly knew little about The Glazen Shelves, but she knew it well enough to know that it was never explicitly about Max himself. But now, after a decade of working on it, it almost seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy: Max has turned into the central character, a man romantically battered and pursuing his love.
Stacked here, there are probably ten more drafts of The Glazen Shelves, judging from the height of the pile. She bends to return the copy she holds to its place—and then, snakelike, the house centipede reemerges, slithering out from behind the pages, its body a mess of legs and fur. Kelly drops the screenplay on the floor and jumps back. Fuck this. She’s not sleeping down here. No way to treat your sister.
Darkness crowds the peak of the staircase, but Kelly knows Max isn’t asleep yet; she can hear noises up there, the sound of him muttering. So she climbs and, at the top, looks to her right: her old room, the door shut. As a teenager, she never hung anything on this surface, but seeing it now, she kind of wishes she had. This face, blank, that her brother and her mom saw each day when coming up here for whatever reason: Shouldn’t she have found a little something more to tell them about herself? She can’t resist squeaking the floor and getting closer to her old door, against which she presses her ear, listening. When Mom or Max used to do this—assuming they did this from time to time—what did they hear? Dinosaur Jr.? Snickering phone conversations with Penelope? Muffled tears into a pillow because, with Mom always drunk or away, and Max’s eyes on a screen all day, Kelly so often felt alone? (On these occasions, she has to confess, she always hoped somebody was listening in; she always sort of loved the feeling of misery, but only when she imagined somebody being right there, ready to stop it.) Despite Max’s warning, she wraps her hand around the doorknob and tries to turn it—but as her brother said, locked.
To her left, Max’s bedroom door rests open a crack. She peeks inside. Nothing on the walls and no furniture, except for a nightstand, a bed—upon which Max lies—and a bureau in the corner, holding the same boxy television with a built-in VHS player that he had as a teenager. More books and paper stacks clutter the corners on the floor—additional screenplays, maybe. In bed, Max stares ahead at the screen, the light flickering on his face. But the television is muted; instead, Max fills the room with his own voice, which sounds formal, a few decibels lower than usual: “Now, Mr. Enright, The Glazen Shelves premiered at Cannes in May to amazing reviews. Now you’re only thirty, so—”
“I’m actually twenty-nine,” Max says back to himself, in his normal tone.
“Even more impressive!” Max responds, formal and deep-voiced again.
In high school, Max often used to talk to himself: one of his favorite things to do was to “give interviews”—Mom always used to say, “Leave the guy alone, he’s giving an interview”—in which he would play Maxwell Enright, the great filmmaker, sitting down with an interviewer, whom he also played, and answering questions about his latest film. Kelly would lurk outside his bedroom door and listen—sometimes with Penelope, the two of them tittering, hands over mouths. But today, she feels creepy standing here, eavesdropping. As soon as she puts her palm against his door, planning to push it open the rest of the way and take the plunge into Max’s space, she hears him say,