Manuscript

There was a girl and there was a boy. The girl was younger than the boy, a little sister. There was a sense of freedom around the house where they lived, because it was June, mid-June, and the warming air reminded one of the end of school, the golden days flowing into each other freely, and as the school days took up less of the working day the schoolchildren began to transition into living lives outside of the prime hours in the middle of the day consumed by school; in any case, the girl took her school duties less seriously at this time of the year, arriving there each day but spending the majority of her hours there sitting idly in classrooms, half-listening and happy in her idleness. She was graduating middle school that year, and, in the laxness typical of their lives, she was unsure, in the hazy days of early summer, whether she would go to high school in the fall. She suspected, in the back of her mind where the winter’s urgency lay dormant, that she would, but she did not much care now. She was fourteen, just too young to get a job but old enough to appreciate her fast-dwindling freedom and to savor it nearly too much.

She came home from school at three, in the prime of the afternoon, with the evening still in her command, and played her flute leisurely before the old piano, whose keys, loose with age and collecting the grime of so many hands, she would occasionally, meditatively, strike, before her lack of skill or training made itself obvious in her inability to connect the proper notes; she stumbled from the middle C, the only note she knew for sure, to now an F, now a G. Occasionally she lamented the contrast between her playing and that of her brother, but for the most part the interlude was enough to bring her back to life, and she would pick up her flute from where it had fallen, braced between her legs and the keyboard.

It was on such a day that her brother came home from the store where he worked weekends and after his high school classes finished. He carried nothing but a small stack of paper and wore a shirt, pants and boots. He came in the open front door to find his little sister sitting at the kitchen table reading a beat-up book and half-threw the stack on the table across from her. Immediately she looked, the slap of the paper on the wood waking her up.

“Is that it?” Her brother nodded. “What did they give you?”

He sat down at the other chair, in front of his stack of papers—a manuscript—and flipped it across to her. She accepted it, leaving the book without consideration by her elbow, and began to read it. When her eyes crossed the red number at the top, scrawled indifferently across the words by some careless teacher, correcting the last papers of the year, she frowned. But she didn’t say anything, and proceeded to reread the paper; in the time before it was due, in late May, she had read it and reread it more times than had been necessary, and in her sisterly eyes in was nearly perfect. She reread it now as objectively as she could and still pronounced it the best it could be.

The grade was a 64, the comment was “outlandish. run-on sentences”.

She looked up quizzically into her older brother’s face, and what she saw there surprised her. A faint smile was playing itself across his face, as indifferent as the scrawled 64 which had so wounded its recipient’s editor. “You don’t care they think it’s crap? They nearly failed you!”

He shrugged. “It was an assignment. I don’t give a—and watch your grammar, that was a plural…”

“To hell with grammar! That thing’s the best damn thing I think I’ve ever read!”

“Mind your language. That’s an exaggeration.”

“You don’t care that they don’t care about it? I know you cared about the writing!”

“The fact that they don’t care about it changes nothing. Its reception in the world, perhaps. Remember The Fountainhead. My writing still exists; all I need is something to write with and something to write on. It’s a very primal thing. Count myself lucky. At least you and me,” he leaned across the table to touch her forehead, wrinkled with consternation, “we know what’s important. Right? As long as we know that it’s all right.”

The girl shook her head. “You make no sense.”

Her brother grinned and stood up, removing the manuscript gently from her hands. “I’ll send it off to some periodical. Changes are it’s only the first page messed up. Chancily isn’t a wordy grader. So I’ll retype the first page, hide the grade I got from my high school English teacher. It’s all right.” He left the room, and his little sister marveled at his apparent disinterest. But the careful observer would see, upon careful reading of the manuscript, that its pages had been flipped through by its author, that the absence of comments had been duly noted, and the observer who didn’t know him better would say that either he was entirely cold and unfeeling or that he was putting on a very well disguised show—he had, after all, worked so hard every evening on its twenty pages, hunched over the typewriter in the corner, unable at times to restrain the urge that drove him to write, breaking his personal vow that he would never type so loud as to wake his little sister upstairs so many times; he had poured passion into the manuscript in careful doses so that the entire thing was coated in a rosy, brilliant glow. But those who knew him knew as he knew himself knew that what he told his sister had been the absolute truth.