Natalie Walsh

Assignment III - opening scene CHAPTER ONE After the first few days, there was talk. A hum buzzed over the town, wrought with gossip and early-summer humidity. By Friday, though, the murmurs grew into outright anxiety, red and blue lights illuminating the clapboard of the Anderson-Vieira house like an ominous disco ball. Kids were forced to spend the weekend locked in their rooms, hearing the door click shut at seven-thirty. Eyes shifted at the country club, powder blue button-downs standing at the buffet like a police line-up. Everyone wondered where she was, speculating she had become a groupie of an indie rock band I had never heard of or left to party in Los Angeles with older men and models. Someone in the cafeteria even suggested she fled White Oaks with a boyfriend and joined the circus. But deep down, what all the girls truly wanted to know was which one of our all-American marble-teethed boys did we have to fear. And if anyone had asked me, I would have said all of them. But this story starts well before Frankie’s face stared back from the front page of the newspaper. Before they drained the pond behind school and lawyers started to bill everyone by the hour. And before I was the only one to know the real real truth. Back when we were caught in the perpetual purgatory between endings and the rest of our lives. When Frankie was still just a girl and I an open wound. But I thought this story needed context, so just know that memory lives in the body, never the mind, and drawing out what happened from the curve of my jaw tends to leave out the important parts. “Come on,” nimble bones around wrist. She yanked me forward with surprising strength. The path was laden with a dense quiet, the sun beating down on our cotton backs. Her voice quickened with lopsided desperation. My bag weighed cumbersomely on my shoulder, shoes and exposed skin layered in gravel dust. But I did not speak. It was never a good idea to comment upon Frankie’s feelings. The path’s mouth spit us out at the edge of the field. Angular bodies gathered in a circle, slipping into shoulder pads and helmets. Glances out the edges of eyes followed our girlish figures. Frankie slipped through a gap between two boys, darting toward a thick-limbed man at the circle's center. I would soon learn him to be Coach Price, the senior history teacher. He was in the middle of lecturing on sportsmanship expectations. “Excuse me, Coach,” she bounced on the balls of her feet. “Frankie,” I uttered softly in a futile attempt to halt her interruption. All eyes settled annoyedly on us, boys with varsity muscle and itching to show them off. They scratched at us with their gazes. I hovered behind the boys behind Frankie, hoping to loiter there and shrink in size. Coach Price huffed down at her. “I’m Frankie,” she continued, “And that’s Madison. We signed up to be the team managers.” Boys tapped feet. Eyes rolled. Sometimes, I thought her confidence made her ignorant. “I’ll be with you girls in a minute,” he gestured with a stiff hand to all of the idle boys. Children playing pretend soldiers, ready to be given orders. When his instructions ceased with a sharp clap, all of the newly minted comrades dispersed about the field, clutching at their sticks. A duffle bag thudded on the astroturf behind me. Trey bent down over it. “Luffkin,” Coach Price bellowed. “Sorry, Coach. Mr. Pillari—” He spoke in a voice of subordination I had not heard before. “Just hurry up and get out there.” When Coach strutted down the field, Trey looked up at me as he pawed through his bag. “What are you doing here?” “Managing,” I looked over at Frankie, who was engrossed in the athletic fanfare she didn’t understand. “Lucky me, I get to see you every day after school,” he grinned underneath his waffled helmet mask as he ran onto the field. Another wide-eyed member of the platoon. Frankie gave me a sly, approving smirk. We stood with crossed arms, weight on our left hips, watching the players in wait for our own instructions. Did that make us, then, also a kind of soldier? Eventually, Coach Price split from the field’s action and made his way toward us. “Frankie, was it?” She straightened with a profuse nod of the head. Thick hair swooshed over her back. “You’re Christian’s sister?” His countenance flickered with the usual confusion people tried to conceal, as if they simply couldn’t understand why she was so tan. “Great kid. I kept hoping he would try out for my football team.” Frankie’s smile stuck artificially to her face, resigned to the familiar praise of her step-brother. “And you are?” “Madison.” “Alright, girls, what I’m going to need from you is to write up the rosters and note all the goals and assists of each player during practices and games. Uniforms and medic bags. Sound good? Don’t worry about the equipment and the water coolers. The boys get those. They’re heavy.” Frankie metamorphosed into a sun ray, beaming. As he ambled away, I leaned in with a whisper, “What’s an assist?” Her shoulders rose and fell into a shrug. “This is going to be so fun,” she professed, eyeing the players. “Is it just me, or did Trey get hotter?” When my mother arrived to pick me up, we were already trudging to the parking lot. My legs prickled with flecks of astroturf and stomach grumbled. Our wrists caught the eager sunlight, glittering in the way that made us feel like we belonged. We were enveloped into the folds of tradition, there with our Cartier love bracelets, the ones we got for our sixteenth birthdays. A strip of gold around bone was a badge of honor. All we had to do then was burn our hair into a bendless shape and buy the kind of bras with lace they all said the boys liked. After that, we would be just the same as the older girls. I hoped that our badges of platinum and diamond and gold could be stitched to the chest cavity. So that they would become part of us. That then we were safe on the sandal-trodden path. But all we did was look the part. My insides had coagulated at an off-temperature, and soon, unbeknownst to me, Frankie’s would become different too. I slid into the familiar whipped cream seats of my mother’s Lexus. “Hey, Mrs. Delmar,” with a jump, Frankie hurled her head through the open window, torso stretching over my legs. The metals stopped shimmering, and then we were just who we were. “Frankie! How was the first day of practice?” “Good. I don’t really get what the big deal is about throwing a ball into a net with a stick, but the guys look good doing it.” “That’s what matters, right? I think you’ll get yourselves three boyfriends each by the end of the season.” “That's the real goal,” Frankie dipped her chin with an affected whisper and raise of the brow. “Three? Okay, mother.” “It wouldn’t be the end of the world, Madison, to have a boyfriend.” “Yeah, Madie,” Frankie nodded conspiratorily, “listen to your mother.” She shuffled out of the window and ambled lackadaisically to the sidewalk, waiting for one of her own, kin or hired, to collect her.

1: THE ACT OF STORY STATEMENT Overcome her trauma with men and find her best friend. 2: THE ANTAGONIST PLOTS THE POINT The primary antagonist in Madison’s story is her best friend, Frankie—an enigmatic and reckless character who deliberately pushes Madison beyond the bounds of her comfort zone, coaxing her into encounters that stir a deep fear of boys and urge her toward teenage hedonism. When Frankie abruptly withdraws from their friendship, Madison is left unmoored, her absence a wound that festers in silence. Then, after Frankie disappears, her shadow lingers, consuming Madison’s world as she retraces her friend’s illicit and intimidating path in a desperate search for answers. Thus, even in her missingness, Frankie’s overwhelming presence remains a complicated, often antagonistic, force. A secondary antagonist emerges in Dylan, a fellow high school student and varsity lacrosse player whose cruel harassment resurfaces the buried traumas Madison has long sought to shove to the bottom of her consciousness. Through her encounters with him as lacrosse team manager, she is forced to confront the specters of her past—ones that continue to distort her present with a quiet, debilitating fear. 3: CONJURING YOUR BREAKOUT TITLE A Bite from the Grapefruit Sun In the Sun Washed Silence Gentle Voices Speaking 4: DECIDING YOUR GENRE AND APPROACHING COMPARABLES The dark exploration of coming-of-age possesses similarities in tone and narrative to The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. Although the gender of the narrators is inverted, both my novel and The Virgin Suicides explore the fragile, electrifying, and, at times, terrifying experience of girlhood. Also, both center around the rumor, secrecy, and isolation of the female characters within their small town. They teeter on the threshold of Young Adult fiction, centering around teens, but the core of their stories are heavy with mature content. Further, the thematic mistrust of memory and examination of female vulnerability is akin to Animal by Lisa Taddeo. Taddeo’s probing of the violence that inheres in the men who colonize femininity and the after-effects of trauma are very much in alignment with the essence of “A Bite from the Grapefruit Sun.” Animal also has a complicated narrator whose wavering reliability shows similarities to Madison. 5: CORE WOUND AND THE PRIMARY CONFLICT After her best friend disappears, introverted Madison Delmar is thrust into a search through the tantalizing yet menacing world of boys and privilege, forcing her to confront the traumas she’s long tried to bury. 6: OTHER MATTERS OF CONFLICT: TWO MORE LEVELS Internal conflict: After a sexual assault that Madison cannot accept happened, nevertheless finding herself grappling with its constant visceral after effects, she hides in her friendship with Frankie and her school work. But, after one fateful night, Frankie metamorphoses into someone unrecognizable—she begins partying with older boys, having sex, and even biting back the baby blue pills she gets from her new drug-dealing boyfriend. She no longer has any interest in her friendship with Madison. Madison is left drowning alone in her anxieties, every man a spectre of her repressed fears, and the shadow of the one who forced himself where he did not belong haunts her room, unable to sleep, caught in an endless routine of paranoid insomnia. In her quest for answers as to why Frankie changed, and then, pressingly, where she has disappeared to, Madison must face her past and current traumas, caught in a web woven by the boys whose baby-blue button-downs overlay their violence. A scene that triggers the protagonist: She ventures to a rave, caught in the cacophonic throng of party-goers, to confront Frankie’s drug dealer. Through this encounter, she hopes to further uncover what happened to her best friend. His slippery hands roam around her body. She must wrestle with the flooding onslaught of memories that rattle inside her, on a collision course with her fears in the pursuit of the truth. He is an embodiment of her worst nightmare, an unsatiated man who grabs hold of her like her limbs belong to him. Men from her past are superimposed onto him, and, still, she stands her ground, able to fend off the trauma responses long enough to get answers. Second conflict: Madison exists within a world of inescapable masculine threat—an eerie presence that slinks beneath the pressed linen and rumble of laughter on manicured lawns. Dylan’s cruel, unrelenting tongue becomes a daily torment, and Madison discovers that the few boys she trusted harbor devastating secrets. In White Oaks, a coastal enclave polished to a mirror sheen, violence against girls is not punished but concealed. The town’s pristine veneer depends on secrecy: the pretty boys continue to smile with marble teeth, no one asking why the girls have bite marks. As Madison searches for Frankie, she begins peeling back this facade. Safety is a lie, sisterhood a fragile thing under siege. In a world designed to protect its sons, the cost of being a girl is borne in bruises, silences, and vanishing acts. A scene that triggers the protagonist: A scene exemplifying such is after Frankie’s strangled body is eventually found, the town’s society still finds itself—after an appropriate mourning period, of course—at the country club. The button-down boys devour their plates clean, men wash their hands three times in the bathroom, and the women clutch their necklaces, speaking in corners with soft voices. It couldn’t have been someone from White Oaks. The men here don’t do that sort of thing. Madison shrouds herself in her ritualized silence. Is she the only one who sees behind their good-boy acts, or are all the women merely pretending their sons don’t have arms like baseball bats? 7: THE INCREDIBLE IMPORTANCE OF SETTING In this Southern California town nestled on the coast of the Pacific, wealth and ennui seemingly wrap its inhabitants in safety. Nothing bad happens in a place where the ocean endlessly reflects the pastel sunshine—or so they think. But the falacy cracks, splinters, and eventually outright shatters the further Madison ventures into the social circles of White Oaks. Still, she cannot escape its clutches, the mentality of perfectionism ingrained. As much as Madison is repelled by her town, is she a product of it. She looks the part of the beautiful, together girl, but can’t feel it. The setting reflects this; on the precipice of the renewal of summer, the idyllic landscape juxtaposes the dark realities beneath the surface. Sometimes the environment is a friend—the sunshine swaddling Madison in warmth. Other times, an ominous foreboding—the ocean’s current, obscured in the flat darkness, sways ambiguously. The indulgent parties, where boys’ hands linger beyond their bounds, sand stuck between toes when liquor makes limbs limp, Jeeps going too fast over hot asphalt, is teenagerdom in a nutshell, but something is wrong. And, in the pool, when the dusk blankets the splashing water, eyes looking into one another suspiciously, no one can be trusted. White Oaks also augments the experience of growing up as a girl. With exposed flesh and a need to be more socially advanced than the next, it is a race for adulthood. In this wealthy town where teenagers try to behave well beyond their years, it poses a direct threat to Madison’s emotional well-being and the sensitive self-preservation she futilely tries to maintain.