Page 15 of When I Picture You
“You know I’m not!” Kadijah yelled, as Renee slammed the office door.
Squirreled away inside the office, Renee did not work on the schedule. Instead, she spun slowly in the stained desk chair and let her mind drift to last night. Well,lettingher mind drift wasn’t exactly right. Her mind had been solidly shipwrecked since she’d woken up to the sound of Lola showering and snuck out of the hotel room.
She should have said goodbye, thank you, something,anythinginstead of slinking away. Renee had her fair share of experience with casual hookups and one-night stands—a little more than her fair share, actually. She was perfectly capable of handling the morning after. But Lola was different. Renee had realized whose bed she was in andpanicked. In the moment, it seemed right to spare them any awkward small talk about how the evidently closeted, Spotify-sweetheartLola Gray had just spent the night absolutely railing her burnout ex-neighbor. They had the NDA, after all.
An early-morning drive home and hot shower later, Renee realized that maybe leavinghadn’tbeen especially kind. Lola had treated her to an amazing night, gotten her off so many times that Renee had lost track. Now Renee couldn’t even thank her, because they hadn’t exchanged numbers.
Renee was struck all over again that Lola liked to top. Liked ita lot.Femmes could always surprise you, but most women Renee had been with took turns giving and receiving. Maybe Lola needed time to feel comfortable enough to receive—or maybe she didn’t like to receive at all. Renee’s skin warmed as she contemplated what made Lola moan, exploring with her fingers all the places Lola liked to be touched. What her face looked like as she came. Next time—
Renee scrubbed a hand over her face. There was nonext time. They hadn’t exchanged numbers because there was no need to. Anyway, Renee didn’t donext times, and Lola lived in a different world, practically on another planet.
Which was for the best. Lola’s career and their history aside, Renee wouldn’t have broken her no-second-dates streak for someone so romantic, so worried about what others thought. Kadijah and Zane might make fun of Renee for being single, but at least she didn’t waste her time.
Plus, how was she supposed to get her thesis project together if she let herself get hung up on girls?
Renee, a little dizzy now, stopped spinning. When her shift ended, she’d get to work on her thesis. She was not going to look up pictures of Lola, and definitely not masturbate to those pictures—not that she had had a specific plan to do that, but it wasn’t going to happen. No, she was going to go through her meager list of shitty ideas and pick one to move forward with.
It was time to refocus. She wasn’t going to let Lola Gray be the only success story from Fellows High School’s class of 2015.
Thus resolved, she pulled up her email on her phone—and her stomach dropped straight to the floor.
Renee—
The registration deadline for the next semester is upon us, and with it, the official end of your leave. To remain enrolled, you must register for next semester. Your final graduation requirement is the thesis project, for which you must complete a two-semester independent study with a faculty mentor. If you have not registered and paid tuition and fees by August 1, you will be terminated from the program.
Let’s avoid that. The paperwork will be a nightmare.
Be in touch if questions
- D
Dragan Kapic
Professor of Documentary Filmmaking
Dean, Documentary Film Program, New York Institute of Film
Buzzy white noise flooded Renee’s ears—as if her hearing had paused to allow her body to focus on the prospect of throwing up. Renee strongly felt that no email should be more powerful than her esophageal sphincter, but she barely managed to make it out of the office and to the trash can before yakking.
“Are youthathungover?” Kadijah thrust a roll of paper towels at Renee. “I can handle things here if you want to bounce.”
“It’s not a hangover,” Renee managed, although physically, she was hung over the trash can. “I got an email from the program. It’s my last chance to go back and … and that’s it. I can’t do it.”
“Come on,” Kadijah said. “If it’s the money, you’ll figure something out.”
Renee blew her nose and was rewarded with a coffee-flavored burning.
Kadijah was right to assume money was the problem. The MFA was the most expensive gamble Renee had ever taken. The first two years of tuition ran over $150,000—and that didn’t cover the cost of living in New York. While other students had scholarships or trust funds, Renee had relied on loans that she’d probably never manage to repay and, in emergencies, her mother’s generosity. Tuition in the final thesis year was significantly cheaper, but Renee was already in so much debt it barely mattered.
All that debt, just to discover that she couldn’t hack it.
Directing documentaries had been Renee’s dream. She’d started in high school, filming on her phone, then scrimped and saved to buy her own camera. She’d been the star of her small college’s film studies program. A prestigious MFA program like the one at the New York Institute of Film was a long shot—especially after her first application was rejected—but she wanted to learn to make films from the best. When she got in, she’d been elated, but that joy had dimmed only a few hours into orientation. Her cohort of seven students included a woman who’d already won an international prize for her short documentary on survivors of the Darfur conflict, and a guy whose grandmother was an Old Hollywood actress. They’d gone to schools like USC and NYU, and kept asking her where Kalamazoo College was, even though Kalamazoo was in the name.
Renee tried to prove herself. The first year, they spent more time critiquing films and digesting film theory than making anything.Renee quickly learned that vicious criticism was both rewarded and came easily to her, but her classmates didn’t hold back in tearing into Renee’s proposed projects any more than she did theirs.
And it wasn’t just the students—the professors gave feedback like they were hunting for sport, and nothing satisfied like a kill shot. While the other students easily connected with the faculty, Renee was never able to tell which professors wanted her to push back against their words and which expected her to thank them for their brutal insights.
As they said in the program, “Everyonewantsto make films. Not everyonecan.” The words swam in Renee’s head like her own personal hymn, the evil lullaby that whispered her to sleep, the alarm that woke her in the morning. She found herself tearing apart every idea she had before it was even fully formed, all of her work conducted in a panicked, last-minute frenzy, her stomach on fire at every screening.
