#WritingCommunity – Nicanor Abbott

Mason Hall. Three.

The woman who came to retrieve Cara was neither as deferential as Penny nor as icy as Ms. Carrington. In fact, with her mass of black hair held back with a white bandanna and her faded sweatshirt and denims, Beatrice Thurmond looked too laid back, too chill to be a supervisor. She gave Cara a warm smile.

“You look like your Mom. And you got a touch of your Pappy in you.”

“You knew Pappy?”

She nodded as she ushered Cara through the double doors. “Your Mom and I grew up together. She didn’t say?”

“She said I had an opportunity that I shouldn’t waste.”

Bea laughed. “That’s your Gran speaking. Audrey was always torn between those two. Loved her Daddy, but feared her Mama more.”

“Sounds about right,” Cara said.

They passed through the great room, where Ms. Carrington dealt with a fussy-looking old man in a bathrobe. Mr. White waited at the foot of the stairs; he gave Cara a slight nod and a smile, which she returned.

When Bea opened the door to the administrative wing, she took note of the scene unfolding in the great room.

“Did you come in with Mr. White?” She asked.

“You know him, too?”

“He’s a regular,” Bea said as they walked.

“Ms. Carrington doesn’t seem to like him.”

“Mm hm. Which brings us to rule number one about working in Mason Hall. What Ms. Carrington says goes.” Bea opened a door and led Cara into a plush looking office with strong wood furniture. But something didn’t feel quite right.

A pair of leather wingbacks had been placed opposite the heavy desk. The two women sat there.

“It’s a real nice office.”

“Carrington does like to make sure she has the best.”

“Oh.” Cara surveyed the room again and realized what felt so wrong. There wasn’t a single photograph or personal effect anywhere. No knick-knacks. Generic paintings of landscapes. Not even a plant or a vase of flowers.

“But it doesn’t feel very friendly.”

Bea pursed her lips. “Make sure you don’t say that in front of her.”

“Huh?”

“Be deferential. Better yet, in Ms. Carrington’s presence, a smile and nod do better than a word. Got that?” Bea was suddenly stern, all traces of friendliness gone.

“I feel like I’m about to be fired.” Cara stared at her pumps. “Which is strange because I haven’t even been hired.”

Bea sighed. “This isn’t how I wanted to bring you on board.”

“No?”

“Nothing about this is standard, Cara. I would have interviewed you on my own, in the staff room, the way I interviewed the other folks on Housekeeping. Carrington leaves well enough alone when it comes to us. Be seen and not heard. Report problems promptly. Can you do that?”

“Of course I can.”

“I know it. Audrey wouldn’t have raised a fool, I don’t think. Not with parents like hers.”

“So why are we meeting here?”

“At a guess, I would say it was because you walked in with Mr. White. So now I’m going to ask you to do something very important.”

Cara examined the leather chair arm and nodded. “Uh huh.”

“No matter what Mr. White said or did—“

“He didn’t say or do anything.”

“No matter what Mr. White said or did, he only said good morning and sheltered you from the rain. Got that?”

Bea had a look of determination that reminded Cara of her mother, or of Gran.

“Well that’s easy enough. That’s all he did.”

“Good.”

The conversation turned casual then, as if Bea had turned a switch from formal to casual. Even when Ms. Carrington arrived wearing that same slippery smile she gave Mr. White, Bea remained casual. Quiet, yet casual.

Mason Hall. Two.

Days like this made Cynthia want to scream. The pounding rain. The flooded inbox. A leak in the west wing. Supply delays. State inspectors. Staffing issues. Mrs. Grant’s vendetta against Mrs. Cornelius. Mr. Oliver camped out in the great room. A dozen other residents with twice as many needs and complaints. And God forbid …

She glanced out the window. “Christ,” she said and picked up the phone. “White’s at the door, along with a girl. Hold them.”

The person on the other end spoke briefly.

“I don’t care. Just keep them there.”

Mr. Oliver, still in his pajamas and bathrobe, climbed from his usual leather chair and shuffled toward her as she strode across the room. He waved at her, mouth already moving.

“Ms. Carrington, I—“

She held up a red-taloned finger. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” she replied.

He backed off. “Oh, oh. Okay.”

Like the rest of the great room, the doors to the foyer were dark wood and brass. Heavy. She pushed one open and slipped inside, She pulled her blond hair behind her ear and adjusted her glasses as she approached the pair.

“Mr. White. Good to see you again.” She reached out her hand.

He watched her hand as she approached, like it was something dangerous. Then took it quickly, stopping her short. “Ms. Carrington,” he said.

“I assume you’re here to visit with Mr. Mason?”

“That’s correct. I left my umbrella in the rack, as usual.”

“May I take your coat?” She motioned to the small, empty coat rack.

Mr. White still wore his rain-spattered topcoat. “I’ll keep that with me, thank you.”

She smiled thinly. “Then let me escort you upstairs.”

“I know the way.”

“Just the same,” she said. “It would be my pleasure.” Cara didn’t think Mr White was nearly as friendly with Ms. Carrington as he had been with her.

Carrington turned to the attendant behind the glass, a mousy woman who seemed to shrink even further away.

“Penny, I’m going to escort Mr. White to Mr. Mason’s quarters. Would you please have Bea come to escort Miss Baker to my office.”

Penny picked up the phone—Cara assumed she was dialing Bea, as Mr. White and Miss Carrington disappeared through the doors.

Mason Hall. One.

“If you had only listened to Granny, you could be off to college, too,” Audrey chided as gently as she could.

“If I wanted a degree in nursing or teaching or business, yeah.”

“Those are perfectly respectable careers.” Audrey pushed the pantsuit into her daughter’s hands.

Cara groused. “But they’re not me. I want to be on stage. I want to sing. Dance—”

“Sleep on a grate in Center City.”

“Mom!”

“I never said you couldn’t sing and dance and get on stage.”

“Granny did.”

“Mm-hm. Because she don’t want you sleeping on that grate. And neither do I. You need a fallback.”

“And scrubbing old people toilets in Mason Hall is a fallback?”

“Until you find something better. And maybe it’s enough. But I can’t have you melting into my sofa with no job, no career, no hope. So until you make a plan, Mason Hall it is.”

Audrey had given her daughter a week after graduation to enjoy her newfound freedom, then snatched it away with a word from her sometimes-friend Beatrice. Cara’s classmates had gone to Temple or CCP, but her friends—what few she kept up with—had mostly entered a desperate post-pandemic workforce where jobs were plenty but living wages scarce. A few of them had already made the arrest columns in the Inquirer or the Daily News. One was already in his grave.

“You can’t do an interview dressed like a hobo,” Audrey insisted.

“It’s ragamuffin,” Cara corrected acidly. “Check with Granny.”

“Your grandmother just wants what’s best for you.”

She looked away so that her rolling eyeballs wouldn’t cause a fight. She was already treading on dangerous ground. “It’s just a part-time job. Housekeeping.”

“It’s still a job,” Audrey insisted. “At Mason Hall.”

“My jeans are fine for Mason Hall.” Some part of her had given up, willing to fulfill the ragamuffin description.

Audrey hauled her only child to the bedroom. “No. Beatrice says you could be a shoo-in for this. You leave nothing to chance.”

Now as she sat in the car, she found a new worry. “The torrential rain is going to dash Audrey Baker’s hopes,” Cara muttered.

Sheets of water battered the windshield, smearing her view. The red bricks and black shutters of Mason Hall, a mansion-turned-assisted living facility, were geometric splotches of color masked behind white and bright green streaks of young summer birch trees. The scene ebbed and flowed with the downpour.

Cara could not have felt more out of place, dressed in her mother’s second-hand navy pantsuit and battered pumps the color of mud. Well, that might actually be mud, thought Cara, as she reached down and brushed at her leg. It was a dash from their row home across the puddles to the ’83 Chrysler Malibu Audrey had inherited from her late father and that Cara, in turn, had come to own.

“Pappy’s car. Mama’s clothes. You really are a wreck.” She twisted around, searching the back seat for an umbrella. The jacket was tight where she wanted it loose; loose where she wanted it tight. No umbrella.

A shadow filled her driver’s side window. A rap on the glass. She turned to see the smiling face of an old man under an oversized red and white umbrella. She rolled the window down slightly.

“Can I help you?”

“Saw you pull in,” he said. “I’m guessing you’re short an umbrella?”

“Yeah.”

There was a twinkle in his eye. His hair was close cropped and gray. He smelled strongly of aftershave. His tie was wide and his topcoat old. He reminded her of pappy. “May I escort you inside?”

“Thank you,” she said and rolled up the window. He stepped back so she could exit, and together they braved the weather.

Watcher

I always click the button that locks the door until my Subaru beeps. It beeps twice, and sometimes, if the mood is just right, I keep hitting the button as I sing “Tainted Love”, the timing and rhythm perfect, as if we are singing together. And that’s what I’m doing as I cross the desolate wet parking lot toward the shabby four-story hotel.

This rust belt town is grim, on its knees, leather work gloves resting on a scratched yellow hardhat, exhausted and panting, trying to get to its feet. The hotel–part of a low budget chain–has seen better days. There are desperately-needed renovations going on inside, and a dumpster the size of a big-rig trailer and several construction vehicles are parked at the darkened end of the lot. Not all the lamps work, and why bother? The interstate with its high halogens sits right there on the other side of a steel and concrete barricade. That’s enough.

My clients asked where I was staying. When I told them, they shuddered. “That’s kind of a halfway house,” they said. “The addicts and homeless often end up there.” I did not offer that once, in another life, I had helped run a little house church, and the men from the halfway house next door had been regular attendees. The men laughingly called me pastor, and I laughed along, because I might be the worst candidate to shepherd any flock anywhere. Ever. People with problems are not the problem; systems that exacerbate problems are.

The car beeps along merrily when I notice him–the shadow of a hooded figure, a man in a rain poncho of some kind–looking down at me, hands pressed against the glass of a third floor guest room window. No discernible features. only darkness where his expressions should live.

The song dies on my lips. In my hesitation, the imagination my steelworker father so often condemned as overactive revs into high gear. Scream. Psycho. The Shining.

I take three more steps and pause between two puddles, my eyes never leaving that darkness where his face must be.

He doesn’t move.

I began calculations, eyeing the structure. Distance to the lobby. Distance to my room adjacent to the second floor stairs. Time it takes to climb those stairs with my briefcase, wearing my slick-soled dress shoes. Distance from his room to the same stairs. Probability that he would correctly guess I had parked closer to the side where my room was located so that I could see it from my window.

I keep watching, my neck craning until I enter the building, until he disappears from sight. The lobby is tiny, brightly lit, and the young woman at the counter has headphones on. She nods as I pass. Once I round the corner, I scurry down the hall to the stairwell closest to my room. On the second floor landing, I hear the fire door open on three. I slip into the hall, run my card key through the slider on my door, and breathe a sigh of relief when it is closed, bolted, and chained. Just my imagination. Yeah.

A shower and a change of clothes later, I settle at the desk to complete the day’s paperwork. That’s when I hear the fire door, followed by a whistle. It’s the tune I had been singing not an hour earlier. The whistler stands just outside my door. I see the shadow of their feet through the crack. There is no peephole. I switch off the light. The whistler leaves the way he came.

I spend the next several hours watching my car through a little opening in the drapes. My room is dark. No one can see me. Just me in the chair and the car and the mostly empty, half-darkened, puddle-ravaged lot. My accursed overactive imagination and the lamps of the interstate. The scattered showers that come and go. An occasional car or truck headed up the mountain, away from the town. A figure–a man in a ball cap and hoodie–walked by my Subaru earlier, during one of the lulls in the rain. Paused in front of it but didn’t touch it. Was he the same person I saw in that window? I don’t know–probably not–but the longer I sit, the more uneasy I get, the more I wonder if I’m somehow part of the problem. No. It’s just my imagination. It must be.

WIP Snippet: The Woods

Hi readers: Just for fun, I’ve scratched out this little piece. Not sure if it’s the intro to a current Work-in-Progress or the beginning of a story in its own right. Hope you enjoy it.

PS. This photo–like all photos and art on this site–is one of mine.

I often think the best days of my life were spent in the woods. Tromping soft detritus-littered trails by the run—run, yes, for it was too small to be a creek. Turning over rocks on a still summer day to find salamanders or crayfish in slow water. Listening to the rattle of browning leaves already past the fiery tones of autumn, waiting for the first crisp wind to cast them down in a cascade. Plucking cicada husks from birch bark. The blue of shale poking out from striated dirt. Chewing honeysuckle or sassafras. Petrichor and rotting stumps. Searching for the feathers behind whistles and twits with my hereditarily bad eyesight.

It was heaven, even when we had to leave it for chores or homework.

But the woods are sacred on an archetypal level, that space where we grew, explored, adventured, and discovered a world larger than our father’s crumbling farmhouse. Shadows moved in the dark of the woods at night, and hoots and howls evoked more from the imagination than owls and wolves. Baba Yaga, the Erlking, the Gingerbread Witch. The woods—our woods—could be where they waited.

Of course not. That’s silly.

The county history book tells of a woman who was slaughtered by the indigenous tribes in the mid-1700s, perhaps right there in the woods behind our house. I have wondered if more than once we played in her shadow—the natives left her hanging in the trees. Despite my love of the woods, the story reinforced a simple fact: woods are dangerous. That knowledge, and the details of the old tale, and my tendency to believe in the things we can’t explain, made me sometimes reluctant to look up.

A Visit to October Country

Well. If you read my last post, you’ll know that I’m now shopping a novel manuscript that I thought I had completed two years ago, but then got enough similar feedback that I decided to re-teach myself the fundamentals and hire an editor so that I could revise it properly.

Now that the shopping–and praying, hoping, begging, and negotiating with any of several greater and lesser deities–is underway, I am turning my attention to my next projects. Yes, plural. I can’t remember if it was something I read of Neil Gaiman’s, or something he said at his talk in Boston earlier this year, but I have this sense that he keeps two projects on the fire at any time. So here are are mine:

First, know that I have three other manuscripts in various states of outline and draft. One is a bit of an unconventional superhero story. The second is a supernatural horror and adventure tale. Both are interesting, and I’ll get around to them yet, but my priority novel project is a science fiction novel on a far away planet in the distant future. There is a global environmental disaster, a certain penchant for tradition, and a crashed battleship engaged in a war unrelated to the planetary inhabitants. There are three sisters, a brother, and whole lot of squabbling. And there’s a city, and a nunnery, and a cave in the mountains. And a great deal of mis- and non-communication. We’ll see how they combine together.

But while I’m working on that, I’ll also be working on a collection of short stories. See, it goes like this:

As I was searching for agents, one of them expressed a desire on her website to find the next Ray Bradbury’s October Country–a collection of macabre short stories that illustrate both Bradbury’s fantastic prose and, unfortunately, a 1950s mindset that doesn’t fare well in light of a modern understanding of human diversity. Human condition? Yes. Human diversity? No.

Now, this is not my first experience with October Country. Several years ago, I was actually in a stage production based on some of his more accessible tales, and on opening night he called us from his home in Los Angeles to wish us well and to break a leg.

So here I am, reading this agent’s website, reminiscing on the past, and thinking about my own pile of short story efforts that could use some crafting and rethinking. And I thought, well, why not? So I purchased a copy of the book and have been alternating between reading stories and crafting my own tales built from little kernels of idea stuck between the teeth of his prose. It’s really a joy to me, because I love his prose, and he, along with Ursula LeGuin and Neil Gaiman, command the style of prose I would most like to emulate.

So here, to celebrate my embarkation on my next writing journey, is the opening to his collection, a piece that we used to open our own play.

October Country

. . . that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain. . . .”

Before I slip off to the Dreaming this evening, I did think I would answer a question you might have on your mind: what will Nic do if the agent doesn’t accept his collection? Well, easily enough–I’ll shop it elsewhere. And yes, I’m trying to land the individual pieces in literary journals as I write them.

Two Years Ago…

Two years ago this month, I shopped my manuscript to a handful of agents. By handful, I mean six. Two of them I had been in touch with via the Boston Writing Workshop. They both had the same response to my manuscript: “Loved the premise, but the writing isn’t what I’m looking for.”

I spent all of about fifteen minutes pondering what that meant and poring over my manuscript. Very quickly, it became apparent that I depending on some words more than others, that I wasn’t letting the reader immerse in the scenes, and that my turns of phrase were at times awkward.

It would have been easy to give up. I read Twitter often enough to know that others have felt the same way, and for lesser hurdles. But what drives me is the story, so I took steps to fix the issue.

First, I took a break from the book to study my writing more, and to study the writing of others. I used LeGuin’s Steering the Craft to work through my way with words. I’ll probably do it again this winter.

Second, I read—voraciously. For the first time in a while. I read all of the EarthSea Cycle. Radio Silence. The Temperature of Me and You. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Running with Scissors. The Stationery Shop. The entire 12 graphic novel set of Sandman. Parts of Lives of Girls and Women. Possessing the Secret of Joy. The Things They Carried. The stack of books by the bed is no smaller than it was before. I read like I was a thirsty man in the desert, desperately searching not just for story, but for words. Rebecca Wells’ reliance on scent. LeGuin’s exercise in warm colors. Munro’s description of a country road. I don’t know that we remember every word in a story. We remember the feelings words evoke, and that’s part of the challenge of writing: Did you get the precise words to capture the exact feeling?

The third thing I did was hire a former colleague as my editor. She did a no-holds-barred analysis of my manuscript, questioning anything that she either could not follow that did not ring true. She held up the mirror … no. She held up the magnifying glass, and made me look closely. In the process, she made me a better writer.

So why am I saying all this? No, I did not find an agent. Not yet. But I did begin shopping my manuscript again this weekend. I will shop it to more than a half dozen this time. There is no guarantee I will succeed, but there are always other options for sharing a story. And that’s where my allegiance lies: to telling a good story that people will want to read. In the meantime, I’m on to the next project, because … well, there’s always more to write, isn’t there?

Day 8: Olongapo City

This was the day I had waited years for. For the first time, we would see for ourselves the place where my mother and father met, the place where our grandmother—Nanay—had lived for perhaps 30 years.

Our second cousin—Gigi—greeted us in the parking lot of a strip mall on the edge of town. First we get a massage, she insisted, so we had massages and jasmine tea in the flickering candlelight and low-lit lamps of a second floor suite. The incense was sweet, the literature on homeopathic remedies and eastern medicine piled high on the coffee and end tables, on the register counter.

We toured the city. The bars and clubs of Rizal and Magsaysay Drives were long gone, especially after the Filipinos voted to take back Subic Bay Naval base from the Americans. It’s now an industrial and tourist zone—the military buildings of Old Cabalan have been converted to hotels and casinos, not all of which survived the global Pandemic of 2020. We stayed on Waterfront Rd., in the presidential suite of the hotel. When Gigi wants something …

Gigi was Nanay’s favorite. She was a young girl when Nanay was in her prime. They went to restaurants and movies together, and Nanay really gave her everything. Well, Gigi grew up right there in Olongapo. She told us stories: Nanay would ask if she wanted to see a movie. “Yes,” Gigi would say. Then Nanay would finish her solitaire game and away they would go. “Or when her tenants would fight with their neighbors or friends, Nanay would threaten to throw a pot of boiling water on them if they didn’t stop.”

When Nanay came to us she was highly private, trapped in a white man’s world dominated by my father, and only escaped it when the older man who hired her as his housekeeper proposed. We were ancillary to Nanay. Only after our parents divorced did we start to learn anything about her, and then it was limited.

The Subic Bay waterfront monuments are dedicated to soldiers who had been POWs, slaughtered by friendly Allied troops who sank Japanese military vessels regardless, and often without knowing, who was actually on board. There is the worker’s monument, and the monument honoring the twelve senators who voted out the Americans. A mile down the road was the dock where ships like the USS America, my father’s carrier, would dock. From there, he would get a jeepney at the Spanish Gate, and from there to Mom’s Club or the Whiskey A-Go-Go. Mom’s Club—the place where my mother was a cashier and my father decided he would like to go short time with her—is long gone.

We took Gordon Ave. around the perimeter of the city, through East Bajac Bajac. I wondered where pinatubo was.

“You’re on it,” Gigi said. “It’s a long slope from the volcano to the sea.”

Nanay’s house was a string of three apartments where her female tenants lived with a sari-sari at the end. She lived in a shack behind them. The whole place is gone, and a restaurant stands where Nanay grew vegetables and herbs and fruit to sell in her sari-sari. Lost to history is the room where my mother fed my father “the old fish heads and rice” soup, as he called it years later.

Even White Rock Beach—where they used to walk together, before my father ignored the U.S. Navy and then the local magistrate, both of whom warned him against marriage— was no longer accessible to the public. Every last vestige of Nanay’s, mom’s, dad’s places were lost to us.

Except the Spanish Gate, where a young man who thought he had all the answers boarded the jeepney that changed his life in October, 1968.

The Spanish Gate, Olongapo City, Philippines

Day 6: Honda Bay

Mom hated the lakes and rivers that we loved as children.

“They’re shitty,” she insisted. “That’s a dirty, muddy river. Don’t go in there.”

Once while camping, she evaluated the lake. “It’s freezing! And you can’t see a thing if a fish swim up and bite your pecker. The damn thing is a shitty green.” To this day, I remain uncertain if the green was the water or her predicted outcome for a bitten penis.

All this from the woman who taught us that the tidal canal separating Subic Bay Naval Station from Olongapo City was colloquially known as the Shit River. We simply never understood her vehement disgust and refusal to step into the waters of our home state, especially when we didn’t have anything that sounded as horrific as the Shit River.

Once she described the beaches of her childhood and teenaged years, perhaps hoping we would understand. “We have a white sand, and the water is clear. You can see to the bottom, and all the fish, and the lobster that will bite your toe. Our beaches are clean, and the water is warm.”

It was one thing for mom to say it, and another to see it in pictures. But for someone who has never experienced the soft white sand and endless blue sky and sea and the warm clear water of the Visayas, or Palawan, not even a picture does it justice. (Note that I call it white because she did. I have been on the white coral sand of the Florida Keys; it is hard, scratchy, unforgiving, and not a blessed thing like the sand of Honda Bay, Palawan). So here is a photograph from the trip, and I share it knowing that no matter how beautiful it may look to you, it was ten times more beautiful when I stood there.

The clear water around Starfish Island, Honda Bay, Puerto Princesa, Palawan, Philippines

I can only guess that my mother or grandmother visited Palawan. Mom was raised in Quezon City and spent her time between Manila and Olongapo. I know she visited a couple beaches in central and southern Luzon. Nanay crossed the islands on her own at twelve years old, from an island near Surigao del Norte to Manila to Olongapo. No doubt she grew up seeing this kind of scene. But for those of us who knew them, fought with them, loved them, mourned them, and now remember them, this was as close as we will ever get to knowing what Mom so clearly treasured.

We spent the day island hopping on the Trishia Mae, a banca large enough to hold not only our party of nine but another party of four and three crew members: Capt. Roy, Jody, and John Lee. First they took us to Starfish Island, where we swam around the net-protected area and tried snorkeling a little, though none of us in our group were so brave as to venture out past the drop off.

While we swam and searched for starfish among the rocks and coral remnants, our guide, Jake, prepared a picnic lunch: Sisig, shrimp, cucumber, bitter melon and shrimp paste, whole tilapia, and fresh pineapple. I did not know how much I loved pineapple, but I think this was the day when I became certain of two things: first, I love pineapple; second, until I went to the PI, I had never eaten a properly ripened pineapple. No candy is as sweet.

From Starfish Island, we traveled to Luli Island, where I found myself feeding bread to a school of black fish with hints of vertical stripes. Again, we stayed among the rocky patches where the coral had died—the thriving reef areas were not accessible to those of us on the boat tours, which is a good thing, given how delicate a reef ecosystem is and how quickly people have destroyed them through careless interaction.

By the time we reached Cowrie Island, I opted to remain in the shade of a thatched pavilion, one of many beneath a grove of palms. I had worked myself into the worst case of sunburn I’d had since childhood, but it was well worth it. Back on Palawan, dark clouds had rolled over the mountains.

By the time I took this photo, we were already on the Trishia Mae headed back to port. Nearly all the bancas loaded and left together in an effort to beat the weather—a flotilla of blue and white, confident boatmen, sure in their lives on the sea, returning skittish tourists to the city.

I won’t ever fully understand my mother or grandmother. When I was young, I didn’t listen. Neither of them could explain what it was like to live immersed in this tropical world. But I laughed as I reflected on the fact that none of my appendages had been bitten that day. I finally think I understood them a little bit more. Why Mom wouldn’t go in the water in the states. Why Nanay, even as her health deteriorated, still dreamed of going home to the PI. I can’t regret not sharing with them; they were both dead and gone long before I had the means and incentive to make the trip. But with our vacation nearing its end, we had one more stop to make, to a place where I hoped I might discover the most about who my people were: Olongapo City. The place Mom and Nanay had called home.

A Flip in Dialogue Changes a Character

So I was a fan of Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper before it became a Netflix show and a cultural phenomenon. Like many other LGBTQ people, this is one of those stories I wish I had when I was a kid, along with Saenz’s Aristotle and Dante books and the Young Avengers. Since the Netflix release, I have re-read the comic and watched the show a few times, and I noticed a particularly jarring moment that keeps jumping out at me. Note that if you have seen the show but not read the comic, there will be spoilers here.

The scene takes place the morning after Harry Greene’s birthday party, when Charlie and Nick are interrupted by Charlie’s mom, Jane Spring. The dialogue in the comic and the graphic novels is as follows:

Jane: Nick I didn’t know you were coming over?

Nick: Um, Er, Yes.

Charlie: He’s just picking up a jumper he left here last week.

Jane: You could have at least changed out of your PJs, Charlie. Don’t forget we’re going to Grandma’s later.

She leaves them in the foyer.

In the Netflix adaptation, Oseman has flipped Jane’s last two lines of dialogue and altered the verb tense:

Charlie: He’s just picking up a jumper he left here last week

Charlie’s Mom: Right. Um, well don’t forget we’re going to Grandma’s this morning, Charlie. You could at least change out of your pajamas.

In the comic description, the change out of the PJs suggests a set of norms for how to appear when a friend comes to call, announced or otherwise. But in the program, Jane seems to temporarily put up with Nick’s presence, reminding Charlie that there are other priorities and he should be prepared for them. She knows something is up, but chooses to gloss over it for the time being.

This change in dialogue and the tone in which the actress (Georgina Rich) delivers them suggests a higher level of antagonism toward Charlie and Nick than appears initially in the comics. Of course Charlie and Jane do come into conflict later (and I can empathize, recalling all the conflicts I had with my mom on the road to acceptance and mutual respect). But this flip keeps chewing on my sensibilities as a reader and writer. I suspect it’s Oseman laying a firmer foundation for the dramatic tension to come in seasons 2 and 3 (and which follow in the comic). She has done this in other parts of the TV script as well, where the medium requires a greater build than what she provided in the original comics.

I am eager to see if my concerns about Jane Spring being a greater antagonist toward Charlie will be played out in the show, and I am amused by how just this little flip in dialogue has changed the way I perceive her, from overprotective parent in the comics to borderline disdainful of her son on TV.