Everybody Here Was Someone Else Before

Emerson St. James stepped off a bus in New York in a five-sizes-too-big "directed by David Fincher" sweatshirt draped over her sunburned shoulders, and a backpack crammed full of sentimental articles of clothing, a handful of essentials, and three thousand dollars rolled up in a 1989 tour t-shirt.

She hadn’t showered in three days, since staying a night at a this-is-where-you-get-murdered motel in Montana.

The summer rain was a relief on her bare legs and peeling nose. A guy in a jerga shoved harshly past her shoulder, and if he offered any apology, it was drowned out by the soundtrack of Tick Tick… Boom! raging repeatedly through her headphones at a volume that would certainly render her deaf before she turned twenty five.

Who needs Spotify Wrapped when you only listen to one album for an entire year?

There were still four hours before her first of many appointments with potential future-housemates. She had planned to get a hotel and catch up on sleep beforehand, but a missed greyhound out of Chicago had put her way behind schedule. Instead, she bought a day pass at Planet Fitness to shower and change, then caught the next bus to the Lower East Side.

The rain was a constant drizzle, light enough that the droplets seemed to float instead of fall, suspended like a cloud and making everyone’s hair frizzy and clothes damp, but not heavy enough to justify carrying an umbrella.

She was meeting someone named Stephen Elliot at a cafe called The Bean. She ordered a black coffee and two scones, then immediately scarfed down one of the scones so it would only look like she had ordered one.

He was ten minutes late, and came blustering through the glass doors wearing a scarf and flannel with a newsboys cap, and black-rimmed nerd glasses like he’d just stepped out of 2012. She tried not to judge, but oh my god.

Emerson pretended to be on her phone so he had to approach her first.

He ordered, and and while he was waiting for his name to be called, he walked hesitantly over to her table, leaning sideways with a grimace, “Are you Emerson?”

She stood up, feigning surprise, “Hi! That’s me. Stephen?”

“Stevie,” he shook her hand. “Thank god, that was gonna be so awkward if you weren’t you.” The barista called his order, and he sidestepped towards the counter, still nervously energetic, “I’m just gonna– Let me grab my drink, one– one sec.”

“Sure, yeah.”

“Sorry.”

“No problem.” Emerson waited until his back was to her to cry softly to her remaining scone, “Oh my god I’m going to be homeless.”

Her face brightened immediately when he turned around and came back to set his drink down across from her. He pulled off his coat and scarf and hat and tossed the heap of clothes into the booth before sitting down. “So,” he said, shaking both hands through his hat-hair so it bounced back into place, successfully making it look like he’d stuck a fork in a toaster, “how was your commute?”

“Fine.” Emerson had neglected to tell him that she had just traveled from the west coast, and not, in fact, a fellow New Yorker.

“Cool,” he drummed his fingers over the edge of the table. “So,” he started again, holding up his phone to show her a list he had made in his notes, “I made a list of questions that will hopefully determine that you’re not a serial killer. Question number one: Are you a serial killer?”

Emerson almost real-laughed, but they were still strangers, and she was stressed and tired, so it came out as a weak through-the-nose chuckle. “If I was, I wouldn’t have given you my real name. And if I was giving you a fake name, I would not have picked something as pretentious as Emerson St. James.”

“It is incredibly pretentious. Do you drink coffee with creamer, or milk and sugar?”

“Black.” She popped the lid off her paper cup to prove it.

“Great. That was a dealbreaker.”

He highlighted and deleted the first two questions off his list, which Emerson decided to take as a good sign that he wasn’t saving the list for another potential-roommate interview. That or he was an idiot.

“Also,” he pressed his palms together and pointed them both at her in gratitude, “thank you for not comparing black coffee to your soul, or anything else. I’m so fucking sick of that joke.”

“That’s… passionate,” Em set down her paper lid on a napkin, trying to strategize when to take another bite of her scone without having to awkwardly chew and swallow mid-conversation. “Especially coming from someone who looks like they’re still in their Tumblr era.”

“Ouch. That hurt. Moving past it. I was a barista for eight years. I’ve heard every coffee joke ever made and none of them are funny.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” he snorted. “Are you allergic to cats? Because I have one, he is a demon, and his name is Onion.”

Emerson dodged the question, “I like cats.”

(She was allergic, but not severely, and she did like cats.)

“What’s your enneagram?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“The most important one! Aside from living with a serial killer, I have to make sure you’re not going to contaminate my home with a terrible personality.”

“Five,” she said.

“Seven.”

“How regularly do you clean your bathroom?”

“Monthly, ish?” He cringed, “How often are you supposed to?”

“I don’t know. Are you in a relationship?”

“My boyfriend dumped me yesterday, thank you so much for asking,” he said cheerfully. “He said I’m emotionally unavailable, which, to be fair, is probably true. So,” Stevie smiled and shrugged in a way that made him seem suddenly very small, “nope.”

“Jeez, I’m sorry.”

He shrugged again, and said to the window instead of her, “Happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time, right? Isn’t that the romance of being in your twenties and living in the city?”

Stevie was twenty four (she knew because she had diligently stalked his Instagram all the way back to 2015) two years older than Em. They would have gone to high school together.

He looked back at her to prompt her response, and Emerson knew she would look back on this exact moment as the one in which she decided they would be friends, and she would throat-punch anyone who ever hurt him again.

“Do you believe in magic?” He asked when she didn’t say anything.

Emerson grinned uncomfortably, unable to tell whether he was serious.

“This is a very important question, Emerson St. James,” he said with an ominous smile. “New York will kill you in a month if you don’t have anything to believe in.”

“I could be persuaded,” she decided.

Stevie Elliot grinned pleasantly, “Wanna see the place?”

—

The East Side skyline rose and fell like the pulse of a heartbeat on a hospital monitor. The towering architecture and constant movement of the city made Emerson feel like she had come home for the first time. A strange thing to feel in a place she had never been – but she thought most people had seen enough of New York in romantic films or action movies, that you couldn’t feel a little bit like you’d been there before, in a dream or another life.

The glamour of the city was still enchanting, which Stevie promised would wear off almost immediately after missing her first subway, getting bumped into on the street, or carrying laundry up eleven flights of stairs.

“Wanna see the place?” had turned into an afternoon tour of the neighborhood, a second round of coffee, and plans for Em to move in over the weekend.

The moment her name was on the lease, she started job searching, and by September, nabbed a position at the eccentric coffee shop where Stevie had worked before teaching.

In October, she started writing again.

Stevie’s apartment was wedged in the corner of the building, and from the kitchen table she could see the endless, glittering city lights. Stevie Elliot was a decent flatmate, but she would have put up with a lot less for this view.

She also wasn’t certain if “flatmate” was the appropriate term, but it made her feel more like they were a Sherlock and Watson duo, rather than two people who couldn’t afford an apartment on only one income.

It had taken months of research from her college dorm in the pacific northwest to track down someone looking for a roommate on the high-rise of a fantastically expensive city.

Every few evenings, Stevie and Emerson ate dinner together and fit together little puzzle pieces of each other’s lives. Over vegan lasagna and Chardonnay, Stevie told Em about his Montessori students; the four year old who cried when he found out his forehead had wrinkles, the little girl who used his coffee to paint a picture with a leaf on the sidewalk, and the redhead who once asked if his acne was spiders on his face.

Thursday night they made gyros, and Emerson finally told Stevie she was writing a book. She had never told anyone about it before, outside of her family, who actively pleaded with her to stop embarrassing them with her erratic ambitions.

The week of thanksgiving, Stevie made sushi bowls and ranted about his journalist ex-boyfriend. (Thanksgiving would have been their third anniversary.)

Over two pints of Ben & Jerry’s, Emerson confessed that she had moved from the west coast to get away from her dad. She had drained her savings account that was meant to get her through one more year of college, left her phone in her room with a note to her mom, and got on a flight out of Portland with a dismally small list of potential non-murdery roommates.

“I knew it,” he pointed an accusatory spoon at her. “I wondered when you were gonna let me in on that little secret.”

“You did not know it."

“Please, I’ve stalked your entire family on facebook,” he scoffed. “Your dad is…" He started to laugh, then didn’t, sincere when he said instead, "I would have run from him, too.”

Halfway through December, Emerson came home from spending six hours in a library and only three hundred words to show for it. She tore off her scarf and hat and threw them on the floor with a yell, spitting frayed ends of hair out of her face, “Fuck my life!”

“No!” Stevie shouted from the sofa, “You’re not allowed to have a bad day on the same day as me! I was miserable first! Try again tomorrow!”

“I don’t care about your–” Emerson stopped in the entryway. He was wearing his glasses, which was the only part of him she could see under a mound of blankets he had pulled from his bed onto the couch. A bottle of pinot noir was sitting on the coffee table to accompany the book in his hands. “Are you…” Emerson leaned closer to see the tiny letters, “Are you reading a Bible?”

“I do this quite often, actually, but your lazy ass is still in bed,” he flipped the old leather cover shut. “But it’s Jesus-Season, and I had a shit day. I had to call CPS twice.” He shimmied out of the blankets to reach for the pinot noir, taking a long swallow straight from the bottle before offering to Em, “What’s up? You look like how I feel.”

“Dammit,” Emerson slouched onto the sofa and took the bottle and a drink. “I spent forty minutes in the elevator so you wouldn’t know I was crying.” She gave him back the pinot noir, “God I hate that, it tastes like cough syrup.”

“Fuck my life kind of gave you away.”

“I called my mom today.”

“Oh, shit.” He sat up and set the book aside, “How’d it go?”

“Fine. Normal. She asked if I was okay and I told her yeah, and that I had a really nice roommate who eats an obscene amount of potatoes.”

“They’re the most versatile vegetable,” he insisted. “How do you feel?”

“I miss her a lot.”

“Wanna talk about it?”

“No.”

“Wanna wallow in blankets and eat a shit ton of pasta and ice cream and watch The Office?”

“That one. Yes.”

—

February 1st, Emerson walked out of the Chatham Square Library with a printed copy of a finished rough draft.

February 2nd, Stevie demanded to read it.

February 10th, Stevie came screaming out of his room. “I’M IN LOVE WITH HIM. EMERSON. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE.”

Emerson pulled off her headphones and looked up from the table when he appeared wild-eyed in the living room.

“I’m in love. I swear to God, Em, if you kill him off, I’ll kick you out. Do not fucking test me.”

Emerson grinned.

She had a fan.

That night they were up until 3 am talking about the second draft, and working out the plotholes and character development.

Emerson wasn’t certain if it was the third glass of rosé, or the overwhelming exhilaration of talking about her characters to another human being for the first time, that made her sigh out loud into her sweatshirt sleeve, “I dropped out of college to write this, and this is the first time in my life I haven’t felt like a lunatic for having this story in my head.”

“You never told me you were a college dropout,” Stevie’s cheeks were as pink as the bubbles in his glass, lying on the carpet across from her amid a hundred scattered and scribbled-on pages. “What were you going to school for?”

“Music,” Em generalized with a shrug. Her head was light, but not dizzy; like being on a park swing a little too long and forgetting for a second what gravity feels like. “Music is easy,” she said. “Music is... magic. Chords have feelings, and colors, and all of them are beautiful. But words are…” she pulled her cardigan off the couch and put it back on, “Words are stupid. Why are there so many of them?”

“Why do you want to write?” Stevie asked, flipping repetitively through a clean stack of unmarked pages.

“I have to,” Emerson leaned back on the sofa cushions, widening her eyes to focus them again after the sudden motion. “I have to clear my head of these stories or I’ll explode. I just don’t know how to put the same feelings into words like I know how to put in music. How do you put a bunch of letters in a random order and make people feel things? Music is easy, all you have to do is stay in the right key.”

“I think a few people might disagree with you there,” Stevie pointed out.

“I can’t make the words on paper feel alive like they are in my head,” Emerson sat up and blew a breath through pursed lips, “Life is stupid when you suck at what you’re passionate about.”

“You don’t suck,” Stevie sat up. “This book is… Well, it’s a rough draft, but it’s a fantastic rough draft. It’s your first try, don’t beat yourself up, babe.”

Emerson smiled, tipping her glass towards him before taking a drink, “I’m glad to have you as my number one, and only, fan.”

Emerson had learned over the past few months that Stevie was a perceptive person, and ‘emotionally unavailable’ was a generally apt statement. His conversation was often thoughtful in content, but disengaged from emotion. He typically kept quiet and out of her personal life, but tonight, the bubbly wine had apparently made them both feel a little less cautious.

“Do you want to write books because it’s your passion?” Stevie asked, sitting up and crossing his legs, “Or because you’ve had your heart set on it so long that you’ll feel like a failure if you don’t?”

Emerson rolled her head to the side and looked out the window to avoid his pointed gaze, “I want to do this. I have to.”

“What are you trying to prove?”

“That I can!” She sat up, disgusted by the burning behind her eyes that she couldn’t identify as shame or tears. “I went to school to get my dad off my fucking back, and I pursued a career in music to make my mom happy. This book is for me. It’s something I did on my own, without anyone’s help.”

“Hey.”

“You have helped, I’m sorry. Thank you.”

“Why not write as a hobby and finish your degree here in New York? You like music. You practically seduced me into letting you bring that monstrous piano into our very small living room.”

“I might have tried that if I thought it would work.”

He gave her a scrutinizing look, then softly pressed, “Why is it so important that the world sees it if it’s just for you?”

“I want my name on something,” Emerson said, hiccuping, not sure if it was from tears or rosé. “I want my name on something that will last longer than I will.”

“Stop watching Andrew Garfield movies, you always have an existential crisis afterwards.” He poured the last of the wine into his glass, “Do you think that having your name on something immortal means you matter? You don’t have to create something to prove you deserve to be alive, Em.”

“These characters saved me,” she said. “I want people to know how important they are. I want my name on the book that a thirteen year old girl picks up in a library twenty years after I’m dead, and I want her to be brave and loud and bold, because Elles is brave and loud and obnoxious as fuck. I want my name on the book that an eleven year old kid reads because his sister made him, and I want him to know that it’s okay to be scared and it’s okay to cry, because Erso is a king, and even kings are allowed to cry when they’re afraid.”

She hiccuped again, this time certain it was from the lump in her throat and the tears that burned her face, “And I want my name on the book that I wish I could have read at fifteen, when I believed my life didn’t matter, and I want to be the reason one person knows that not every story has to have a point, or a moral, or a purpose – because Peregrine’s stories matter, and half of them are about nothing, but they are loved and he loves telling them.”

“Hey,” he reached over and slapped her knee with the back of his knuckles, “then maybe that one person whose mind you change is you, and that’s okay. Peregrine Pavelous– what’s his name?”

“Peregrine Avellerius Caldevyn.”

“Peregrine Avellerius Caldevyn did not walk the realms between worlds to pull Erso Vallesía back from death just so you could give up after one draft.”

“It’s not about the draft.” Emerson pushed her hands through her hair to pull her bangs off her face, taking in a deep breath with her arms over her head.

“I know it’s not about the draft,” he said. “Take this phone,” he picked up her cell phone and slapped it into her hand, “you call your father, and you say ‘Dad, fuck you’ and hang up. Then you call your mom and tell her where you are; hell, invite her to come visit! Let her read your book! And then you take all my notes and her notes and your notes, and you sit your ass down and write another draft, and another, and another, until it’s the story you wanted to tell. Then, you network, babe. You go to conventions, and retreats, and you schedule readings, you go to books signings and meet other writers, and you send your best pitch to every damn literary agent alive, and if no one wants to represent you, then I’ll start a fucking publishing company myself. You didn’t get this far to quit, Emerson ‘whatever-your-middle-name-is’ St. James.”

“You quoted my book,” Emerson wiped her nose on her sleeve and laughed through another pathetic, embarrassing sob.

“I did, but I actually don’t know what your middle name is.”

“I’m glad you were the first person I met here,” she said as he handed her a box of tissues from the end table.

He looked a little bit appalled by the mess that she had spiraled quickly into, but he was nice enough not to say it out loud. “I know,” he said. “And, you have to dedicate this book to me now.”

Emerson laughed, “I know.”

He looked at her for a long minute, as though this were the exact moment in which he decided they were real friends, and he would throat-punch anyone who doubted her.

“What are you gonna do?” He said when she looked composed enough to answer.

“I’m gonna call my dad and say ‘fuck you’.”

“And?”

“I’m gonna write the next draft.”

“You got it, baby.”