When I put my hand on the doorknob, I caught a raised voice from inside. My mom—not angry, but stricken. “It’s not just the tuition and debt. We wouldn’t be able to afford to see our daughter, Dan!”
I settled back on my heels, stunned. I knew my mom wasn’t thrilled that Way-Out-of-State was my Plan A, but I genuinely hadn’t expected this level of strife.
“We couldn’t fly out there on a whim,” my dad reasoned. “But in an emergency …”
I shook my head, sure that my mom’s chin was quivering at the mention of an emergency. Rookie move, Dad.
“She’s never even been to LA,” my mom said. “I’ve never been to LA.”
I needed to de-escalate, so I stamped my feet, as if just arriving home, noisily.
“Heyyy.” I opened the door and pretended to look surprised that they were both right there at the kitchen table, papers spanning its surface. My dad was pointing at two different pages like a cartographer charting a course.
“Hey,” my mom said, straightening. Her eyes flicked to the kitchen clock, not nearly as subtly as she probably intended. The cinema’s last showing was a little earlier than usual tonight.
I stood there, tuxedo jacket held at my side. “Everything okay?”
“’Course.” My dad’s voice was clear. Confident. And he wasn’t necessarily lying, in his own mind. My dad viewed most problems as challenges, obstacles on the way to greater good. But I knew the thin-pressed line of my mom’s lips.
“Is this college stuff?”
My mom started stacking the nearest papers. “Yep. Boring parent to-do list. Forms due in October.”
I examined her through squinted eyes. My mom was not a “yep” person. She said “yes”—maybe a “yeah” here or there if she was feeling tense.
Even if I hadn’t overheard them, I’d have smelled the money stress like a trail of smoke. When you grow up with occasional income dips—a lag in freelance work, layoffs at the paper—you sense the tension long before you witness the fire. My parents’ work had stabilized, as far as I could tell, in the past few years. My mom primarily wrote for and edited a parenting magazine, and my dad was at the city paper. But most of my life, their bickering had spiked highest around finances.
“So, honey,” my mom said to me, all false cheer, “I was reading online today that there are some very good screen-writing master’s programs. Lots of people go that route!”
“Right …” But I could also get my screen-writing degree in only four years of undergrad. Why would I tack on more time and debt?
“You could still get a more versatile English degree in-state, like you planned. And if you still want to pursue screen writing then, you can move on to grad school!”
If. I nodded slowly, not because I agreed but because I heard her loud and clear. I’d changed the plan on her last night, and she didn’t like it one bit. Fine—I’d rather know where she stood.
“Katie,” my dad said, quiet.
“Well, she could!”
“Or,” my dad said, “she could pursue it now, full on. You read what her professors said.”
I flushed, taken aback. I’d shared copies of two glowing recommendations to prove I might have a future in this. I hadn’t necessarily expected them to be referenced.
“No, I know,” my mom said. “Just a thought!”
For the first time since I was little, I walked upstairs feeling entirely sure my parents would have a whisper-fight in my wake. Because of me.
“Hey,” I said, nudging my sister’s half-open door. Cameron’s room was eternally messy, more clothes on her floor than in her closet. She looked up at me from behind her laptop. “You happen to overhear anything downstairs?”
“Not really.” Cam believed wholeheartedly in my parents’ togetherness because she didn’t remember the pre-divorce years as well as I did. Sometimes it felt like the three-year age gap between us made for two different childhoods under the same roof. “They were just discussing your college stuff from different points of view.”
So, bickering. “Was dance good?”
“Mm-hmm,” she said, eyes already back on her baking show, and I shut the door behind me.
I stripped off my work uniform, the smell of stale popcorn clinging to every fiber, and I keeled onto my bed, straight as a felled tree. Before this past spring, I would have called my grandmother for reassurance—waiting to hear her voice from a few miles away in her retirement community.
When I hauled myself up, it was only to read the sole finished piece in my writing portfolio. To remind myself why all this was worth it—why it had to be this way.
Why Screen Writing?
500-word maximum
My grandmother, for all her efficiency and no-nonsense worldview, loved watching television. Sometimes I think her recollection of The Wizard of Oz airing on TV in the 1950s was the first love story I ever heard. For most of my childhood, I hopscotched around my parents’ disagreements and, eventually, between their houses when they split. Through it all, I loved TV; I loved Lucy. And I loved sitting beside my grandmother. She taught me about Madelyn Pugh, who had GIRL WRITER on the back of a director’s chair on set. She was a girl and a writer. But she was also a writer of girls—Lucille Ball’s character, specifically—and she had lived in Indianapolis, like me.
Shortly after I turned fifteen, the boy I’d been dating over the summer drowned in a freak accident. I spent days—weeks—in my room, curled around my laptop and desperate not to be alone in my mind. The television shows I watched in those days seeped in—fused with who I am. Eventually, I began to wonder, Why do I like this particular show so much? What makes it good? Why am I invested? Those questions became Google searches and script reading and every podcast that has ever featured a writers’ room.
My grandmother died last spring, right after I found out I’d gotten into NYU’s summer screen-writing program. I had the nerve to go, in part, because I was reeling again. Grief-stricken and desperate for distraction. Hoping to honor her.
I found more than that. I found my TV-writing spark could be easily fanned to fire—by professors, by classmates, by critique. By the sketch comedy class I hated but grew from, by the late-night debates with my bright, weird, interesting classmates.
Screen writing is my path because it’s my passion, the creative space I come home to. But it’s also a love story. The first act: my childhood with TV as a reprieve from hurt. In the second act, I learned to harness my pain to create. The story needs a third act, and in it, I plan to become one of the people who makes TV—for little girls whose parents are splitting up, for teenagers shocked by heartache, for anyone who needs to live in another world for a while.
I’ve been a grateful inhabitant. I’m ready to be a builder.
Things would be so much easier if the essay were an exaggeration. But I really felt this way—clear-eyed and certain.
I switched over to my e-mail, hoping for something from Max in Sicily, his last excursion before heading across the Atlantic. We’d texted and video-chatted all summer, but when the other person was asleep and we couldn’t wait, we e-mailed. I was glad for the documentation, snippets of who we were, how we were. Thirty-five hours, two minutes, and counting.