Charlize willed her body into a pillar of composure as she watched her fellow Cosmos read over her latest script. Inside, she boiled with painful anticipation. She wished she could enter cryosleep, like she did on the flight to her new home when she was fourteen, and awaken with the bandages of opinion ready to be torn off.
She looked down the line of readers, all seated comfortably on the colorful bean bags for which Bradbury School’s drama studio was famous. They stood out against the black floor and walls like ships in the vacuum of deep space.
Homura read with his trusty deck of cards in one hand, rotating the metal cases thoughtfully between his fingers. While his dark blue jacket and jeans were typical for most students, his round glasses made him seem like a wizard’s apprentice studying a spell scroll.
Sammy read from behind a curtain of shoulder-length dark hair as elegant and flowing as her tall, thin frame. She sat in a neat, folded posture that would fool anyone other than her fellow Cosmos that she couldn’t easily bend or twist into almost any shape she liked.
Levi’s freckled face kept changing as he read - he went from focused to strict to seeming ready to burst with rage in only a few pages. Charlize rationalized that he was letting his budding character come alive through his face, rather than teeming with anger at her latest dribble.
It was good; Charlize knew it was good. She never gave anyone anything that she didn’t like. However, there was always that part of her - that little, petty, self-obsessed author squatting in the darkest corner of her imagination - that always came out for a walk whenever it was time for her work to meet others’ perspectives.
She wished Kyla were here; she never felt like this around Kyla.
Finally, the flick of each final page rang out louder than the crash from last week.
“Thoughts?” Charlize asked, keeping her voice steady.
“It’s great,” Levi said, returning to his usual roguish smile. “I’ve wanted to play a villain for a long time.”
“I’ve already got lots of ideas for the meteor shower sequence,” Homura said, flipping back to page nineteen; Charlize knew exactly which part he meant.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“I think it’s one of your best,” Sammy said, her smile a beam of light from behind her dark hair.
Charlize felt both relieved and disappointed. Somehow, after all her hoping, it now seemed that it would’ve been more impressive to have had some truly piercing criticism and come out stronger for it.
“Okay,” she said. “Then we’d best set a day for auditions for the three open parts.”
“Usual day?” Levi asked. “I can draw up some posters tonight.”
His fellow Cosmos all agreed.
“Monday it is, then.”
“Maybe we’ll have some new members,” Sammy said. “A few fresh faces to keep the rest of us from getting boring.”
“Speak for yourself,” Homura said, casually popping the Ace of Spades out of his deck as if launching a cork off of a champagne bottle.
With that, the Cosmos dispersed for the night, returning to their homes in the Residential District just around the corner from Bradbury School. For Charlize, that meant that it was time for homework.
She despised homework. She always put in her best effort and got it done on time, but were it not for the dangling threat of falling behind and having to spend any longer in school than she had to, she’d gladly launch it all into space. Even the work she thought she’d enjoy like book reports were tedious. She’d written stories; although nothing that had yet seen publication outside of the school magazine that she doubted more than five people read, which included her mother. Still, she doubted that there was anything a Social Studies class could teach her that she couldn’t just as well pick up by doing what she wanted to do anyway.
Roddenberry was supposed to be a fresh start for humanity; a chance to try everything all over again with the benefit of hindsight from several millenia’s worth of mistakes on Earth. But Charlize thought that there were some things which nobody could ever get right even if they kept starting again on every world from here to Pluto. One of those things was school being little more than an occasionally helpful time vampire.
She reclined in her office chair, letting out a weary huff as she glanced at her nearly-finished report. She was sure she could come up with two more sentences about the ending of Death of a Salesman in the few minutes before class tomorrow. By then, she’d likely be able to come up with something better than how ironic it was that she was trapped behind a desk to study a story about someone who didn’t want to be trapped behind a desk.
She looked at the Earth globe at the corner of her desk. The last time she’d seen the real thing was from out of the window of a spaceship; it had been about as big then. She reached out, spinning until she found the continent of Africa. She traced her finger down its Southern half until she found two words at its lower corner that fit the width of her fingernail: Cape Town.
Those two words had once been her whole world. She could still shut her eyes and walk to her school, to her favorite seaside writing spots and book shops. Yet, even with a whole new planet to call home, her world felt incomplete.
She squinted at the two words and tried to picture Kyla there, as if she could ever fit in such a microscopic world.