April 3, Nine Days to Austin Film Festival
Dawn woke up and checked on her dad but had otherwise not left her bed for the last three days. Someone or something invisible was sitting on her chest. She couldn’t get up. She couldn’t answer the dozens of texts Edie and Georgia had sent.
She was disappearing into herself like an expansive and endless hole. Her heart hurt, the thought of her failure with the documentary pounding in her chest.
Dawn held herself as if she was holding somebody she loved. She had to do it when she got like this, inconsolable from the unfairness of her life. It started in eighth grade. The night of her middle school’s Valentine’s dance. Annie Jones had spit on her when she’d asked her to dance. It was the worst thing that had happened to Dawn at that point in her life. She ran home, dumb green dress grasped tight in her fists. She just kept running until her house appeared before her, some safe place she could cry out to no one that the world was unfair. She looked at herself in the mirror and wrapped both arms around her that night. It felt nice. Usually, as she brought her arms up around her thin shoulders, she pretended that she was two people. One wanting body, and one giving body.
The days passed as Dawn watched Sex and the City from the very beginning for the third time in her life. She watched every season in order and hated it and loved it, too.
Somewhere between two and three in the morning, Dawn forced herself to look at the old emails she’d been avoiding for a few days.
Among the mess of coupons and subscriptions to film and poetry newsletters, Dawn saw her worst nightmare.
URGENT—Austin Film Festival
She didn’t want to open it. She let her mouse hover over the trash can icon. But she didn’t usually like avoiding disappointment. She opened it.
Dear Dawn Salcedo,
This is an update regarding THE QUEER GIRL IS GOING TO BE OKAY. The Documentary Student Films deadline was March 31st. Please send the film and a biography as soon as possible or your position will be forfeited and your film disqualified from competition. We look forward to your final submission.
Thank You,
Austin Film Festival Committee
Dawn shut her laptop with a flourish and closed her eyes until the blue glow of her screen disappeared into black behind her eyelids. She was too tired to care. It didn’t even matter anymore. She would not be the best filmmaker or the best writer or the best anything. She would stay home and take care of her father and be just okay at that. She might even end up being good if she worked at it.
Dawn tried convincing herself out of her lifelong dream. College was dumb anyway, she thought. It wasn’t hers anymore. It belonged to somebody else. Somebody with talent and money and a lusciously boring family.
She couldn’t even make the one film that meant something to her. And what did that make her? Not an artist, not a friend. She wasn’t some hero of queer representation; she was tired.
She couldn’t even begin to name all the things that wanted to harm her.
She touched her ribs one by one trying to imagine how small she had become in such little time. Her sadness had shrunk her. She felt like a tiny bug soon to be crushed beneath the foot of the world. She must be at least the size of those dark glass-backed beetles that crawled all across the kitchen linoleum in the summer, she figured.
If she could just origami fold herself up into something miniscule, soon she’d disappear and not have to do anything or help anybody or have to look anyone in the eye as she disappointed them for the third or fourth time.
She began to imagine it, floating away, forgetting her father, forgetting any man who didn’t love her, really, gone. She’d float to some cliffside and call Edie and Georgia from a payphone by the sea. She’d repair bicycles and forget she even liked learning and movies and kisses that stung like cheap, stolen wine.
She opened up her laptop again.
Another old email popped up.
Dear Dawn,
I sent a few texts but never heard back, so I thought I’d email? I hope it’s okay your friends told me about your doc not getting finished. Let me know if there’s anything I can do. Not even just about the doc. Anything.
Yours,
Collin
Yours, Collin? What did he want? What did this boy want? Dawn wanted to cry just thinking about all the things men in her life had taken from her. She let herself feel pathetic and weak and incapable. She sunk into it and nursed the bad feelings like a fresh bruise.
She stared at the screen and typed out a message.
Thank you. For everything.
Dawn
No truly, no yours, just Dawn. She closed her computer and let the world happen without her.
All week, Dawn had slept until it didn’t make sense to anymore. She hadn’t heard again from the film festival and accepted that she was out of the running for good. Edie and Georgia had left her messages and she tried to text them back but couldn’t muster both communicating with them and focusing on taking care of her dad.
Finally, Dawn pulled on blue sweatpants and a crumpled shirt from beneath her bed. She swung open her closet door behind all her clothes to reveal, hidden in the back, the glittering black dress.
It hung on a too-small bent plastic hanger. Dawn reached up and slid both arms off the hanger in a slow, somber motion. Above her head on the shelf sat the white shopping bag, still taut and filled with the wrapping paper and receipt.
The soft fabric felt nice laid across her arms as she began to fold it. She didn’t cry or even think. The dress went back into the bag in a neat rectangle. Dawn checked on her father then walked to the corner to wait forty-five minutes to board a bus to the Galleria.
She kept her head down and tried not to mind the bumps the bus driver seemed to be intentionally hitting every three seconds. She didn’t have her phone and decided to look out the window as it began to rain. She tried to listen closely to the sound the city made when it was filling up with water.
Small rivers swishing down storm drains, the bus’s incessant screeching as it approached puddles—she wanted to hear every note. When she exited the bus, she paused to listen to cars inching down Westheimer, a woman yelling at her dog named Sunny, the small trees rustling their new, barely green leaves. She wanted to know and remember it all, fall in love with it. This is where she would spend the next few years. Maybe forever. She belonged to the city and she was trying to let it belong to her too.
The saleswoman was kind to her despite the dress getting a little bit of rain on it. She brushed her hand over the dress’s pleats as she squinted at Dawn’s receipt over a pair of honey yellow–rimmed glasses.
“It should process in three to five days, and the amount will be returned in full to your account.”
“Okay, thanks.” It came out in a scratch, so she cleared her throat and repeated herself. She hadn’t heard the sound of her own voice in days.
Dawn left with no dress and enough money to start working on a plan to get her dad some home care. She started thinking about what she could do while she saved up for college, maybe community college classes.
She straightened her back as she stepped back onto the bus. The bus driver removed his dark blue cap to scratch his head for a moment then turned to her.
“It’s coming down today, huh?”
Dawn didn’t know if it was a question directed at her or the world, so she smiled and began to walk towards the seat directly behind him. Her sweatpants were itchy and soaked through in small patches from the rain.
“But it doesn’t matter,” he echoed, again to no one in particular. “It’s going to be a great day today.”
Dawn looked out the window. “Absolutely.”