CHAPTER 1

FADE IN … was typed on a blank document on a computer screen. The cursor blinked like a bleary-eyed cave dweller, just come up to the Earth’s surface for his or her first glimpse at the sun.

And blinked.

There was a sigh from Charlie Heralds, a handsome but shaggy and unshaven early twenty-something, as he sat at his computer in his small cluttered apartment. His Animaniacs comforter, worn from age and no longer zany to the max, was apathetically draped across the bed in his small bedroom that doubled as an office. He had been shuttered in trying to write. He had tried writing in his living room/kitchenette, but always found a distraction or some excuse not to sit in front of his old, white laptop. He would spot a drip where he had spilled his coffee earlier, or a single crystal of amber-colored raw sugar from said coffee, on his faux granite countertop, and be compelled to take a rag to it. Or, he’d get caught up in his bathroom/closet (he had a habit of hanging up his button-down shirts on the shower curtain tension rod to dry to save money on the complex’s coin-op dryer), sitting on the toilet well after he had finished, reading a dog-eared Calvin and Hobbes anthology. Or, the refrigerator’s whir would begin to sound like a refrigerator-whir rendition of “Hollaback Girl” and he would surrender, giving up all hope for productivity.

Writing had been hard as of late for Charlie, but he guessed it always had been a tough slog. He hoarded notebooks in high school, wishing he had something to fill their pages. He’d buy a new black-and-white composition book, or a nice journal, or a pack of five pocket-sized notebooks, and then do nothing with them except stare at them and feel guilty. There was that brief period though, a couple of summers ago, when he had written in a mad dash, completing a full-length feature screenplay in mere days. But he had been inspired then, for what felt like the first time.

His phone alarm buzzed, and the screen read: Go to work or call to quit. Charlie weighed the options, sighed again, and reached for his khakis and his dark blue polo shirt with the Popcorn Movies logo on the breast—a deranged, bug-eyed bucket of popcorn with a mad grin, inexplicably grasping a smaller, non-anthropomorphic bucket of popcorn in hand. The shirt was size L, for the Large amount of shame he felt while wearing it. Popcorn Movies was a large movie rental chain most well known for their ridiculous, yet somehow popular, one hundred rentals for $100 promotion. Charlie had worked there for a couple of years and hated it. But he lied to himself that at least he could watch all the movies he wanted, which would be good research for his future filmmaking career. After all, Quentin Tarantino worked in a movie rental spot, and so had Adam Brody.

He needed to save money for his eventual journey west. He had roughly calculated what it would cost to live for a couple of months in Los Angeles while he got on his feet. He was nowhere close to his savings goal, only pulling enough hours to pay his monthly bills and buy a couple of bottles of cheap red wine on the weekends. The number he had set for himself to save was etched in his mind as a not-so-friendly reminder of his inadequacy. He guessed he could move back in with his parents, but he’d rather wear a T-shirt that said I GIVE UP and a hat that said LOOK DOWN AT MY SHIRT.

Charlie pulled into the Popcorn Movies parking lot in his hand-me-down Isuzu. He looked up at the store’s marquee. The O, P, and C of the backlit sign were out, making the sign proclaim, simply, PORN MOVIES. His hand moved towards the ignition to turn the car off but stopped before his fingers hit the keychain. Instead, he popped that sonofagun into drive and mashed the gas pedal with both feet. He drove straight into the mostly glass front of the store with a satisfying crash.

Just kidding—wishful thinking. In real life, he turned off the car and trudged into the store like a good little worker bee.

• • •

Roheed Mahaad had grown as much facial hair as he could, which wasn’t a ton, to hide his babyish face. He was in his late teens, but looked years younger. He had grown a couple of inches in the past handful of years and his chest had broadened, but the softness in his eyes remained. He had cut the shaggy black hair that aged him down even younger and replaced the former curls with a hip new cut. He stood in the boardroom of a sunny glass office building in the Bay Area. He was in the heart of the tech world, near the city whose name could not be shortened without sounding insufferable—San Fran, Frisco, Sandy Franny. Usually, the kind of room he was in would have a long wooden table with fancy leather chairs, and the men who sat in said chairs would be stuffy white fifty-somethings in expensive but ill-fitting suits. However, this boardroom was inhabited by cool, multiracial, and non-gender-specific twenty-somethings in cardigans and hoodies and beat-up New Balances and fresh Nikes and moderately broken in Sauconys, chillaxin’ on bean bag chairs or behind rolling standing desks.

Roheed was pitching an app to the room. He held up his smartphone, and as he used his finger to scroll and swipe through the various menus and features of the application, a projector displayed his actions on a screen behind him in real time.

“With this app, you can find someone who has a skill or service that you need, and in turn, you provide something they need. This provides an equal, almost symbiotic relationship with the person,” Roheed said. There were slight nods of understanding from the room. A barefoot dude with prematurely grey hair made a finger tent in front of his mouth and furrowed his brow.

Roheed continued, “So, say, oh, for example someone needs to learn how to swim to compete in the Tri-County Relay Race to impress the girl of their dreams, and another person secretly lives in the guard house of a community swim and racquet club and needs their secret to be kept but knows how to teach swimming lessons.” The creatives in the room were beginning to smell what Roheed was cooking.

“One person learns to swim and one person continues to live in secret. They both win!”

The head nerd of the company smiled. “That’s an oddly specific example.”

Roheed shrugged. “Or you could use it if you needed a cup of flour and someone else needed a unicycle, whatever.”

“What do you call the app?” a guy with a man-bun and high-waters asked from the back of the room.

“I call it . . .” Roheed smiled. “‘High Dive.’”

A stylized image of the Yellow County Community Swim and Racquet Club’s original high diving board came up on the projection with a savvy High Dive logo emblazoned on it. The room clapped. The head nerd walked from behind his standing desk, shook Roheed’s hand, and pulled Roheed in for a bro hug.

• • •

After another soul-sucking shift of standing behind an outdated computer cash register system, checking out movies for old people, high people, and high old people, Charlie drove home in his ’90s-era car that his mom, the lovely Hilda Heralds, finally let him buy from her. He arrived at his apartment and hung his messenger bag on the coat rack by its strap, right next to an old trench coat with the dress shirt collar and cuffs sewn onto it.

His mail was on the floor after being dropped through the slot earlier that day by the mailperson. Charlie didn’t quite understand why the mail slot was a thing; there was a different, better invention—the mailbox. It seemed pretty stupid and a little bit sad to Charlie that his mail just had to free-fall from a simple hole cut in a door to lie in wait on the floor until one returned home, opened the door, and treaded over the waiting mail, potentially ripping or crumpling an envelope or disturbing a packet of coupons. But there were bigger fish to fry, Charlie supposed, and that reminded him that he was hungry and he had a big fish thawing in the refrigerator.

He headed towards the kitchen, stepping with care over his bills and credit card offers, when a particular piece of mail piqued his peepers.

• • •

Across the nation, after being ushered by the head nerd through the ultra-modern tech office where he had just presented, and Segwaying through the lush quad crawling with hipster geeks to his rented electric, self-driving, and self-parking smart car, Roheed arrived back at the house where he was renting a room.

The house was huge and a revolving door of app developers and start-up hopefuls and coders and the like rented rooms there month-to-month. Some went back to their hometowns to become addicted to video games and energy drinks after their perceived failure in the tech town; some moved on to buy even bigger houses than the one where Roheed was staying.

A cute, nerdy girl whose thumbs poked out of the cuffs of her American Apparel sweatshirt walked by sipping coffee and looking at her phone. Roheed smiled at her as a hello, but she didn’t notice.

“You’ve got mail,” she said, not looking up from her phone or even stuttering in her swift steps. Roheed checked his phone, confused. “You mean like old school mail?

“Yes, hashtag snail mail,” she said. Roheed was intrigued.

Roheed and Charlie discovered the contents of the light blue, hand-addressed envelope at the same time, three thousand miles apart. The envelope said “Poole” in the upper left-hand corner, with a Yellow County address underneath. They each opened the envelope to discover a wedding invitation to Jonathan Poole and Chris “The Diving Broad” Partee’s wedding.

Roheed was elated. He grinned broadly, already making a mental checklist of things to do to prepare for the sojourn back to Yellow County for the nuptials of his good friends. His mind was giddy as he thought, I’m going back to Yellow County!

Charlie was less enthused. He tried to think of excuses as to why he wouldn’t be able to go to an in-town wedding for a friend who he looked up to in a weird way, a guy who he had worked with during a very pivotal summer of his life. Jonathan had really done him a solid by posing as his internship mentor to his dad. But Charlie wanted to spare himself the embarrassment of having to explain to the other guests why he hadn’t made it out of Yellow County. I can’t believe I’m still in Yellow County, Charlie thought as he removed that big fish from his refrigerator for dinner.