Unwritten

This Is Your Home: Billy Driscoll

Sunshine flares off the corner of his laptop not shrouded by the parasol. It blanks out Brendan's eyes behind his oversized glasses. Billy wonders if they're functional or only a nerd-chic accessory. He's so busy wondering, he forgets to listen to the boy. The aviators which are a part of his own tool-chic shift hide his unattentiveness, but an obnoxious slurp up of milk through a wacky straw during the middle of his explanation betrays it. Brendan stops cold. The awkwardness of it makes Billy painfully aware. He tumbles the sand below him across his toes, stirs his beverage with the flower-print origami umbrella bobbing in it, and leans back in the lattice black chair. Finally, he nods, playing it off like he's exuberant. "Yeah, that sounds interesting," he interrupts the soothing waves.

"Oh, thanks," Brendan bites out. "Whatever, man, thanks for taking the time out of your day to hear me out," he grabs the arms of his matching seat and pushes up to leave.

"Woah, woah, hold up, Goose. The deal was we'd help each other out. Quid pro quo, yeah? We still gotta quo, bro!"

Brendan cringes at that, but slumps back down. "Go on then. I'll be the bigger man."

"Thank you," Billy slurps up some milk, "I appreciate that." The two men nod at each other, both with at least some degree of cattiness and irony. Finally, Billy looks down at his screen and squints at the words on the pixelated page. "Well," he wheezes, pronouncing it long like 'wheel', "I've got these really vibrant characters, and I can, like, hear them in the silence. I guess you could say they speak to me. And the setting I've got is almost a character itself. Whenever I think of it, I think of a palm tree engulfed in flames. That one image just comes really strongly to me. So I'm comfortable with those aspects. The problem is, I don't know what to have them doing at the start, so I definitely don't know what happens at the end, or really the rest of the freaking book. Right now, what I have is sorta like a collection of stories. Kinda like Aesop's Fables, but, like, subversive in a way that completely turns the format on its head."

"That's interesting. How do you differentiate between being just another guy doing the same thing again, and instead something different?"

A frown casts over Billy's face; he silently belches into a fist and swallows the remaining gas down, then falters into levity. "Honestly, and I'm being honest here, you just gotta scream it down their throats and pray to god they catch on. Like, take your book - you probably think there is a large portion of this world who wouldn't be caught dead reading that. Wrong. Say it's subversive, and they'll all lap it up. I'm being serious. Get someone like that sociopath, Murdoch, to say something at least tangentially about your stuff with the word 'scathing' in it and then you just put 'Scathing'," he pauses before drawing a dash in the air under his former flourish, "'Rupert Murdoch', right on the front cover, all big and such, and I swear to god, those morons will think it's the cleverest thing ever written. Satire, they'll call it. And it won't even be because they're morons, that's just a coincidence. Seriously, if that story isn't flying off the shelves over at - what's it called - Westboro, then you're doing something terribly wrong."

Someone shouts from down the shore. The duo deep in conversation whips around to see blonde hair and sand flying into the saline breeze. It's Ida. "Finally," she laments, clear out of breath, "I was beginning to think everybody was missing."

Billy slaps Brendan on the shoulder to corral him into the conversation, "We were actually noticing the same thing. Goose says he's lonely, and I know this makes me sound like a psycho, but I kinda like the elbow room."

"Doesn't it worry you guys at all that people are just... poof?' she flicks her hands out like little explosions. "Are your White Russians and sunny beaches that enthralling that you're just gonna sit and watch it happen?"