CUT TO YOU

Avery POV I have a plan for everything. Senior year schedule — planned. College applications — drafted, revised, and saved in three separate folders because I once heard a story about someone losing their entire common app essay the night before the deadline and I refuse to become that story. My film concept — planned since sophomore year, refined seventeen times, currently living in a color-coded binder that my best friend Jade calls "the scariest thing she's ever seen" and I call "being prepared." The shot list for the Westfield Senior Film Project? Planned, printed, and laminated. Yes. Laminated. Judge me if you want. My shot list has survived a water bottle incident, a cafeteria tray collision, and Jade's general existence. The lamination was necessary. It's 6:43 in the morning on the first day of senior year and I'm sitting at my desk in yesterday's hoodie, shot list in hand, going over it for the fourteenth time this week. Not because I don't know it. I know it. I could recite it backwards in my sleep. I'm going over it because there's something about holding the plan that makes everything feel like it's already done. Like I'm already there — standing in front of the National Youth Film Showcase with my film on the screen and my future clicking into place exactly the way I always imagined. That's the goal. That's been the goal since I was fifteen years old and figured out that the thing I loved most in the world — the thing that made me feel most like myself — was standing behind a camera and making something true out of nothing. The Westfield Senior Film Project is my way in. One short film. One national showcase submission. One shot. Mine. My phone buzzes on the desk and I already know who it is before I look. Jade: avery chen i know you're already working Jade: it's 6am Jade: the birds aren't even up yet Jade: PUT THE SHOT LIST DOWN I look at the shot list in my hand. I look at my phone. Me: I'm not working. Jade: that was the fastest response you've ever sent me which means you were literally holding your phone waiting to lie Jade: okay fine whatever I give up Jade: just tell me you're excited Jade: not organized-excited. not prepared-excited. ACTUALLY excited I set the shot list down on my desk, next to the storyboard printouts and the location reference photos and the color palette document that I spent three hours perfecting last Tuesday. My eyes go up to the wall above my desk — forty-three photographs, pinned in careful rows. Every one of them taken by me. Every one of them meaning something I've never said out loud to anyone. The first one is in the top left corner. A backyard lawn chair, early morning, empty. I took that one when I was twelve. The morning after my dad left. I didn't plan to — I just woke up to a house so quiet it felt like something physical pressing on my chest, and I didn't know what to do with my hands, so I picked up the disposable camera my aunt had given me for Christmas and I walked outside and I photographed the empty chair like somehow the camera could hold what I couldn't. Nobody knows that's what that photo is. Nobody knows what any of them are, really. That's the thing about photographs — they hold whatever you put in them and they never tell. This film is going to be the first time I tell. Not out loud. On screen, where it's safer. Where I can control exactly how much of it people see and frame it the way I need it to be framed and make it mean something bigger than just — a twelve-year-old girl in a backyard missing someone who decided to leave. That's the plan. Me: I'm excited. Jade: YEAH YOU ARE Jade: okay get ready we're going to be late Jade: also can you do my hair before first period Jade: also I lost my phone charger again Jade: I'm at 14% Me: Jade. Jade: I KNOW Me: I have an extra charger in my bag. Jade: you are the love of my life and I mean that Jade: see you in 20 I put my phone down and look at the shot list one more time. Then I fold it carefully — not the laminated copy, that one stays home, this is copy number three — and slide it into the front pocket of my bag. Senior year. This is it. Westfield High in September smells like floor wax and somebody's new sneakers and the specific kind of anticipation that only exists on first days — like the whole building is holding its breath, waiting to see what kind of year this is going to be. I love it. I know that's maybe not the coolest thing to admit but I genuinely love this school. I love the way the morning light comes through the east hallway windows at exactly 7:52 and hits the trophy case. I love the film lab with its perpetually squeaky door and the editing bays that smell faintly of old equipment and ambition. I love the courtyard where Jade and I have eaten lunch on the same bench for three years running. I love what this place has given me — the equipment, the classes, Mr. Okafor who told me in ninth grade that I had a genuine eye and then proceeded to push me harder than any teacher ever had. I love what I'm going to make here this year. What I am significantly less enthusiastic about is navigating the first-day hallway chaos with twenty minutes until homeroom and Jade texting me a string of emojis that apparently communicate her current location but are genuinely unreadable as a map. "AVERY." Marcus appears out of the crowd like he was placed there specifically for my convenience — which, honestly, is very on-brand for Marcus, who has the supernatural ability to show up exactly when needed. He's got his camera bag over one shoulder and a coffee in each hand and he's already grinning. "Day one," he says, handing me one of the coffees. "How are we feeling?" "Prepared," I say. "Obviously. How are we feeling feeling?" "Ready." He gives me a look. Marcus has known me since eighth grade. He knows the difference between my I'm fine voice and my I'm actually fine voice and he deploys this knowledge with ruthless accuracy. "The announcement is Friday," he says. "Film project partnerships. You nervous?" "No." "You sure?" "I have a plan, Marcus." "You always have a plan." He falls into step beside me. "That's not what I asked." Before I can answer — and I had a very good answer prepared — the crowd shifts and I catch a glimpse across the hallway. A group of guys near the lockers, someone in the middle of a story that's making everyone around him lean in and laugh. I can't hear it from here. I don't need to. The energy is self-evident. Caleb Rivera. I know him the way you know someone you've existed near for three years without ever really intersecting — by reputation, by the secondhand stories, by the drama showcase piece last spring that apparently made half the school cry and the other half laugh and somehow did both at the same time even though I wasn't there to see it. By the way teachers say his name like it means something. He's laughing at something now — his own story, probably — and the whole group laughs with him and it's the easiest thing in the world, watching him. Like he was built for exactly this. For rooms full of people, for being the warm center of everything. I look away. "I'm not nervous," I tell Marcus. "I know what I want and I know how to get it. Friday is just the starting gun." Marcus sips his coffee. "Sure," he says pleasantly. I choose to take that as agreement. Jade finds me at my locker forty seconds later, phone at eleven percent despite leaving home at fourteen — a mystery she describes as "the universe punishing her" — and launches immediately into a detailed account of her summer that she somehow hasn't finished telling me despite the fact that we talked every single day of it. This is one of my favorite things about Jade. She never runs out of things to say. In a life that I keep very carefully controlled and very carefully quiet, Jade has always been the volume. "—and THEN," she's saying, leaning against the next locker while I organize my books, "he actually had the nerve to—" "Jade." "—show up at the party with—" "Jade." "—her, of all people, so obviously I—" She stops. Looks at me. "What?" "You're at nine percent." She looks at her phone. Back at me. "How." "Charger. Front pocket of my bag." She dives for my bag with the desperation of someone whose lifeline is literally draining. I watch her plug in and feel the particular satisfaction of being the person who planned for this exact moment. "You know what your problem is?" Jade says, cable finally secure, leaning back against the locker with a dramatic exhale. "I have a feeling you're going to tell me." "You plan so far ahead that life doesn't get a chance to surprise you." She tilts her head. "When was the last time something happened that wasn't on the shot list?" I open my mouth. Close it. I think about Friday. About the partnership announcement. About the film and the forty-three photographs and the plan that I have held onto so tightly for so long that sometimes I forget there's a hand underneath it. "Something's going to happen this year," Jade says, and she says it lightly, easily, like it's nothing. "Something that isn't on any of your lists. I can feel it." "That's not a feeling," I tell her. "That's superstition." She grins. "Same thing." The bell rings. The hallway surges around us — bodies and noise and the particular chaos of a first day finding its rhythm. I shoulder my bag, shot list copy number three in the front pocket, coffee in hand, plan intact. Something's going to happen that isn't on my list. I almost smile. Jade doesn't know me as well as she thinks. I have seventeen backup plans.