Parallel

1
    HERE
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2009
(the day before my eighteenth birthday)
    I hesitate, then point my gun at him and pull the trigger. There is a moment of sweet, precious silence. Then:
    “Cut!”
    I sigh, lowering the gun. Everyone springs into action. Again.
    I close my eyes, silently reminding myself that I’m loving every minute of this. Then apologize to myself for the lie.
    “Abby?”
    Our director, Alain Bourneau, a man with the ego of Narcissus and the temper of Zeus, is standing so close I can feel his minty breath on my face. I force a smile and open my eyes. His reconstructed nose is millimeters from mine.
    “Everything okay?”
    “Oh, yeah,” I say, bobbing my head enthusiastically. “Everything’s great. Just going over the scene in my mind.” I tap my left temple for emphasis. “The mental picture helps me focus.” The only mental picture I have in my head right now is the bacon cheeseburger I plan to order from room service tonight (extra pickles, mustard, no ketchup). But if Alain thinks I’m giving him less than 100 percent, he’ll send me to craft services for a “Power Pick-Me-Up,” a brownish-green concoction that tastes like chalk and makes my pee smell like cayenne pepper.
    Alain gives my shoulder a squeeze. “Atta girl. Now, let’s do it exactly the same way again. Only hotter.”
    Right. Of course. We’re talking about a scene that involves my shooting an overweight man in the head while he stands in his kitchen making a bologna sandwich. I can see how that could be hotter .
    My life has officially become unrecognizable.
    When I was in kindergarten, my mom decided that I was a child prodigy. The fact that she couldn’t readily identify my prodigious talent did nothing to diminish her certainty that I had one. Four months and twenty-two developmental assessment tests later, she was no closer to pinpointing my supposed genius, but she’d learned something about her daughter that made her exceedingly proud: It appeared that I, Abigail Hannah Barnes, possessed a “strong sense of self.”
    I have no idea how a five-year-old can demonstrate the strength of her self-concept with a number two pencil and a Scantron sheet, but I apparently did, twenty-two times over.
    Until a year ago, I would’ve agreed with that assessment. I did know who I was. What I liked (writing and running), what I was good at (English and history), what I wanted to become (a journalist). So I stuck to the things that came easily to me and steered clear of everything else (in particular, anything that might require hand-eye coordination or the use of a scalpel). This proved a very effective strategy for success. By the time senior year rolled around, I was the editor in chief of my high school newspaper, the captain of the cross-country team, and on pace to graduate in the top 5 percent of my class. My plan—part of the Plan, the one that has informed every scholastic decision I’ve made since seventh grade, the year I decided I wanted to be a journalist—was to apply early admission to the journalism school at Northwestern, then coast through spring semester.
    The centerpiece of this strategy was my fall course load: a perfectly crafted combination of AP classes and total fluff electives with legit-sounding names. Everything was proceeding according to plan until:
    “Abby, Ms. DeWitt wants to see you. There’s some sort of issue with your schedule.”
    The first day of senior year. I was sitting in homeroom, debating birthday dinner options while I waited for the parking lottery to start.
    “An issue?”
    “That’s all I know.” Mrs. Gorin, my homeroom teacher, was waving a little slip of pink paper. “Could you just take care of it, please?”
    “What about the parking—”
    “You can meet us in the auditorium.” She gave the pink slip an impatient shake. I grabbed my bag and headed for the door, praying that this “issue” wouldn’t take longer than five minutes. If I wasn’t in the auditorium when they drew my name, they’d give my parking space to someone else, and I’d spend senior year in the no-man’s-land of the annex lot.
    Four and a half minutes later, I was sitting in the guidance counselor’s office, staring at a very short list of electives. Apparently, Mr. Simmons, the man who created and taught the excessively easy History of Music, had suddenly decided to cancel his class, forcing me to pick another elective for fifth period. I know this might not sound like a big