1
The final bell of the university school year rang, and Natasha Grover needed the sunburnt freshmen lingering in her ‘Heroes and Villains’ English seminar to immediately disperse.
Her best friend’s glare hovered impatiently against a back wall. Tash knew better than to leave Biscayne Coastal College’s chair of Women’s Studies hanging – especially in the minutes before trying to bribe her. Janelle and her wife, Denise, were key to Tash surviving dinner tonight.
Sorry! Tash mouthed anxiously at Janelle through a cloud of students. Outside, jags of lightning split the South Florida sky.
A blue-tipped faux-hawk stepped into Tash’s field of vision.
‘Professor Grover?’ The student clutched a hardback copy of Tash’s novel,The Colony, to the peeling skin above her tank top. She thrust the book forward, over Tash’s desk. ‘Will you sign this? I knew I couldn’t geek out while we were still being graded, but I love your book. I’m so excited it’s being made into a series.’
Tash paused her frantic sweeping up of class notes and rearranged her panicked features into something she hoped appeared composed. She very intentionally keptThe Colony out of her classroom in order to avoid a conflict of interest. Without a completed master’s degree, Tash’s adjunct standing within the English department was more of a tenuous sway.
However.
On the inside of this girl’s wrist, next to a straggle of string-bracelet knots, the wordsMother Beast were inked in a magenta gothic font.
Janelle arrived at Tash’s side, and Tash saw her spotThe Colony fandom tattoo, also.
Janelle smiled placidly at the student. She offered the girl her pen. She murmured sideways at Tash: ‘Your message said “emergency.” I just canceled a meeting. Where’s the fire?’
In response, Tash handed Janelle her phone, where the proverbial fire raged in Tash’s voicemail. And in her email. And in her texts. Earlier that day, it had raged directly in Tash’s ear, as her agent, responsible for negotiatingThe Colony’s film rights, shouted words like ‘breach’ and ‘non-compliance,’ followed by a litany of increasingly appalling consequences.
Tash pushed the thoughts momentarily away and returned to the student, scribbling a practiced signature on the book’s title page, adding a scrawled#sisterhood and a clenched fist.
Still, the girl remained. ‘Professor Grover, to me,The Colony is canon. It means so much as a new model for female myth.’ Her eyes glistened. ‘When Noab throws her baby into the ocean…’ Chipped nail polish rested against her heart.
Just like the tattoo, ‘new model for myth’ came from the book clubs, and at any other time, Tash would have felt sincerely humbled. She would have slowed down for a chat. On the press tour, a publishing intern showed her a pie chart: The novel resonated deeply with progressive females and childless women aged fourteen to thirty-two. Each of these connections blew Tash away, as she’d dredged her own emotional narrative to flesh out the book’s themes.
But tonight those themes were on the chopping block. The new director ofThe Colony’s streaming adaptation stood far outside its demographic. He had Tash backed into a legal corner, adamant about script revisions he deemed necessary and she deemed vile.
Janelle read all about it, her eyes wide on Tash’s phone.
The student, however, kept on – oblivious to the backstage drama and unaware of Tash’s desperation to flee. ‘Noab is heroic.You’re heroic for writing her, Professor Grover.’ The girl said it just as her attention snagged on a bit of sun-bleached muscle lazily exiting the lecture hall. ‘Although I could probably never hack it on a dystopian island where the XY chromosome is banned.’ She sighed apologetically. ‘I like boys. I can’t help it. It seems too hard to give them up.’
Tash gently maneuvered the student toward the door and flipped the lights off. She glanced at Janelle, still knee-deep in Tash’s mess of Hollywood texts. Right now, a world without men sounded pretty great.
It sounded better than the unexpected cult status of the little book she’d written. It sounded better than the evening ahead with a director who wanted to squeeze her heroine i
