THE GIFT
Eva despised Mondays, like many other boys and girls her age. At least this was her last year before going into the Great Beyond, where there was no higher power forcing her to get in a desk five days a week.
Um, you’re about to get radical genetic alterations that will transform you into a physical and mental superwoman. Why do you even care about graduation at this point? For that matter, why did you even bother going back to school?
She was in her frowning t-shirt and skirt,
While the image on the shirt may be frowning, the shirt itself is not. Does Eva own another shirt? Or is this like Lilith and her red jacket that she wears day in and day out and no one comments?
I wonder if Connor believes that characters in books wear the same outfit every day, like cartoon characters.
looking out the window from her seat in her English class. It was still raining.
I’m sorry, I’m afraid you’ve confused L.A. for some other place. A place with weather.
The room was silent, and the teacher, Mr. Yorkin, was sitting back, enjoying the latest issue of Hustler.
Hustler is a title and should be underlined or italicized. Moreover, who still buys paper porn? Come on, Yorkin, don’t you have a smartphone?
This is what you get when teachers hit middle age and pop Viagra, Eva thought. They don’t know when to keep it in. Looking at the clock, she noted that it was a minute from dismissal.
This last sentence adds little and breaks up paragraph structure. Delete.
Yorkin’s breathing had become labored, and when the bell finally rang, he slipped into unconsciousness. It was his last hurrah, and the coroner wouldn’t come for another five hours. The way he was sitting, with his barely-dripping penis sticking out of his fly, his mouth and eyes wide open, Eva could tell that he was out of it. It was the last time she saw him.
Welp, that just happened. Let’s explore it.
This is plainly meant to tie in with all the other decay and misery in this school, but again, it’s far too over the top to be anything but black comedy. For real: a teacher starts jacking it in front of a large group of teenagers, and none of them even react? It’s a hard call to say how many out of a group of, say, thirty, would scream in disgust, how many would bolt out the door and find someone in charge, and how many would whip out their phones and record it.
Hey, you know how to get this aura of danger and sexual creepiness in a completely realistic way that happens every day somewhere in a school in America? Have Yorkin perve on one of the female students. It doesn’t have to be Eva (though that would help). Even if it’s just leering, it would be gross and creepy and it would be something that could deeply affect your protag.
She stepped out of the class and into the crowd of kids, and noticed that the lenses of her glasses were dirty. Eva could still see out of them, but she could also see the world around her as what it was. Dirty, out of balance. It was moments like these where she was truly out of place, out of body, out of mind. Nonetheless, she began to walk towards her locker.
“What does it feel like to be alone?”
I hate crowds so much, Eva thought. I always have. They’re unavoidable, though. Her chicken legs shifted with haste in an effort to avoid being late for the next bell. Finally reaching her locker with her English textbook in hand, Eva dialed the combination on the locker. When she opened it she found, to her bewilderment, an apple.
…the fuck?
Eva Elliot was no stranger to the bizarreness of existence. The last few years in particular formed a menagerie of it. However, discovering an apple in her locker was a true oddity.
Finding an apple in your locker is way stranger than watching your mother commit suicide, being offered heroin by your school nurse, being interviewed by a serial killer, being selected for genetic modification surgery, and watching a teacher jerk off and die in front of two dozen students.
She didn’t particularly care for apples; she was more of a blueberry and grape girl.
I realize you are trying to establish that Eva didn't put this apple there because she doesn't even like apples, but that was pretty clear from her surprise at finding it to begin with. Delete this sentence, please. It is useless and distracting.
Also inside the locker was a folded piece of torn out notebook paper. Eva grabbed it and opened it up.
EVER CONSIDERED TRYING SOMETHING NEW?
K.K.
The initials and the message above it were neatly written, and certainly done with a Sharpie.
Do I have to start taking Sharpie-shots too?
There was no doubt in her mind; this was a gift from Klaus the Killer.
I can understand why she might jump to that conclusion--it's got his initials on it--but that only opens up a whole new can of worms, like how the guy you last saw in a high-security basement even got this to you. My first assumption would be that someone knows you're up for Catharsis and is trying to psych you out, which under the circumstances is a whole lot more ominous.
Eva looked around as a surge of anxiety flickered throughout her. Why would he give me an apple? In fact, how’d he know the combination? How could anyone?
That would make the psych-out premise even more ominous, because you know who typically has the combination to all student lockers? School officials. Several of whom have already been established not to like Eva.
But for real, school lockers are hardly Fort Knox. Those locks are notoriously flimsy if you know what you're doing. Literally anyone could have planted this apple.
I love that it hasn't even crossed Eva's mind that it might be anyone but Krieger. For someone so "cynical," she's such a trusting soul.
Looking down at the apple in her hand, she then realized that it was no ordinary fruit. She gulped and scratched her shoulder with her cheek as she bit her lip. So this is the vector for the retrovirus.
Remember when I told you that biology is not my field and that I wasn’t going to get into why the whole retrovirus thing was a dumb idea because I’d just be talking out of my ass? I take it back, because I know what happens when someone ingests material containing a virus.
THE VIRUS DIES.
There are some exceptions, of course—if Eva has a sore in her mouth, for example, it might infect her that way; certain infectious prions can survive digestion which is why something like Mad Cow Disease is so dangerous—but to be perfectly crude, it’s why not many people get AIDS from a blowjob. Stomach acids kill viruses.
But even if we suppose that Evil Gene Co. has developed some sort of magical virus resistant to gastric acid, it is ridiculous to assume they’d choose to administer this highly complicated (and no doubt expensive) gene-modding retrovirus outside of a lab or hospital. You’d want to control every aspect of that process to make sure nothing went wrong. You can’t control the dosage this way: if all the retrovirus she needs is in one bite, she’ll OD if she eats the whole thing; if she needs to eat the whole thing, she might only take one bite. What if she just threw the whole thing away? Thousands of dollars of expensive modified DNA rotting in a high school trash can.
]And most importantly, why are you doing this in such a public manner when it’s supposed to be a secret project, especially in light of what’s about to happen?
Fuck it. We all know why Connor chose the apple. It’s SYMBOLISM. Eva = Eve, apple, knowledge, good and evil, blah blah blah.
Evangeline Elliot, you’re at the intersection between the present and the future, and the wheel is right in front of you. Jesus. What if isn’t a retrovirus? What if he poisoned it? I might die the second I swallow a chunk.
And yet she’s eating it anyway.
The guy’s a psycho, for crying out loud! There’s no telling what he’s capable of! But then again, my drunk-ass dad is playing a role in all of this. He really wants to help me; he said it himself. If I get sick from this…
The crowd was beginning to dwindle in size. Time was running out. It was now or never.
Without a word, Eva took a bite of the apple.
More of this “without a word” nonsense. It’s especially glaring here, since she can’t exactly talk while eating an apple.
###
Brian Hicks had his eyes trained on the door to the class. All the seats were occupied save for one: Eva’s. The students had yet to get settled down, and the air was thick with conversation. Brian was silent. Suddenly, he saw a figure through the looking glass of the door, moving without grace.
Looking glasses are opaque. However this may be Connor's weird-ass way of saying "the glass through which people look into the classroom."
He heard the knob turning. Then it came to a stop. Then, the knob turned once more, and the door was violently yanked open, hitting the column next to it.
More of the screenplay language Connor is fond of. This just isn't the sort of visual that works in a novel.
The figure revealed itself: it was Eva.
Make up your mind, Story. If the glass really was a mirrored "looking glass" door, then Brian wouldn't have been able to see anything on the other side of it. If it was just normal glass, he would have seen her clearly and there wouldn't be this big reveal. I think Connor might have been going for "frosted glass," which is a common enough thing for doors and through which Eva's shape would have been just visible.
The students and the teacher of the class were speechless. The room had become a void.
I'm going to use my smart-people logic and assume "void" is meant to refer to the absolute silence upon Eva's entry, but "void" typically implies an empty space, not a silent one. Here it gives the impression that the class went silent because the entire room just vanished, leaving them suspended in an endless expanse of nothing stretching in all directions for eternity, a la The Matrix.
What's up with this "the teacher of the class" language? Stop using all these needlessly descriptive phrases! This isn't NaNoWriMo and you don't have to pad your word count.
“Eva?” Brian asked.
Eva was a statue, her feet glued to the ground. She was paler than she had ever been; her skin, coupled with the emaciation, gave her an almost nightmarish look.
We’ve talked about this use of “almost.” It’s lazy writing. Seriously, go back through anything you’ve ever written right now and ask yourself very seriously if every “almost” actually serves a purpose.
Also I fail to understand how this is any different from how Eva looks all the time.
She began, very slowly, to walk into the classroom. Mr. Bosley, the teacher of the class,
Again with that phrase! Look, we inferred by the text referring to him as "Mr. Bosley." For fuck's sake, this is the second time I've had to say this: when a character walks into a classroom where there's one adult, and the narration refers to that one adult as Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. Something, your audience has the brains to figure out that that's the teacher.
Guys, does Connor just think that none of us have heard of high school? Is that what this is about?
asked Eva if she was alright. She was dead silent as she took a seat right next to Brian.
Brian noticed that Eva had gulped.
Eva's gulped when she's nervous before but I'm not sure how it's significant now. Not sure how Brian noticed it, either. It's not one of those deal-breaking wtf details this story is so fond of, but it's a little off.
Her skull shifted towards him, eyes fixed on his. “Are you sure nothing’s wrong?” he asked.
Eva’s lips moved very little, and he could hear the heavy-breathing.
No hyphen.
“c-c-commme… cloh-sir…”
Brian bobbed his head forward.
Ugh, that's filthy grammar. And a stupid image to boot. If he leaned closer, just say so. You know who bobs their heads? Chickens.
“Mom’s here,” Eva said.
Brian felt Eva’s hand grasp the back of his head, and she turned it towards the whiteboard at the front of the class.
Oh boy, it's the Whiteboard of Existential Angst again! SYMBOLISM.
Her grasping the back of his head and turning it is weird, but it's supposed to be a weird scene so I'm not going to bitch about it. I will bitch about the mild case of Bella Swan Syndrome Brian's developed. He only noticed her hand on the back of his head when he felt it? He didn't, y'know, see her move?
Just say "Eva's hand grasped the back of his head." There is no reason to put the emotive distance of "he felt" in a sentence containing an easily-described action.
Bit of an unclear antecedent in "she turned it." In this case, she's turning Brian's head, but "head" is part of a prepositional phrase, so it seems as if the only nouns "it" could apply to are "hand" and "back." Since it makes no sense to say "she turned the back toward the board," the sentence reads "she turned her hand toward the board." The "Brian felt" confuses the matter still further, which is why it's all-round tidier and more preferable to leave it out.
Eva extended her bony arm out, and pointed.
No need for a comma there.
“No one’s there, Eva. Your mother’s not there.”
Eva turned Brian’s head back to her and said, “SHE ISN’T SUPPOSED TO BE.” She then made a gurgling noise, and all of a sudden,
STOP USING THAT PHRASE.
blood rushed out of her mouth like Niagara Falls.
NOPE. NO ONE WILL SUSPECT A THING.
Also “like Niagara Falls” is such a trite, lazy cliché.
Students exclaimed in shock, and some screamed. Brian’s face and shirt got the worst of it.
Holy fuck, this is bad, this is bad, this is bad
I’ve been saying this since Chapter One.
Brian was speechless as the floor at his feet was stained with blood.
More weird, awkward sentence structure! This story is killing me! Again, it’s something I’ve complained about before: while on the surface that sentence looks okay, it’s misdirecting. “Blood stained the floor” is an okay detail on its own, but coming from Brian’s POV, it makes it seem that he’s chosen to focus on the blood on the floor rather than on the woman producing the blood, which is what most people would be looking at.
It’s a very subtle distinction and I sound as if I’m nitpicking, but it’s very important to realize that whatever your character chooses to look at is what your reader will assume to be the most interesting and important thing in the scene. If your character is trapped in a burning building and you pause to say “In the hall mirror, he saw the reflection of the flames surrounding him”, that might be a very pretty and interesting image, but it’s not exactly what we need to be focused on right now.
Eva doubled over and hit the floor. Brian shouted, “Bosley! Call 911, dammit!”
WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO, KIDDO? BE A HERO? DON’T BE A PUSSY!
Reese! Don’t!
SHUT UP, BITCH!
It was Brian the little boy who helped his mother off the rug of his living room, and it was Brian, the school journalist who survived his father’s testosterone-induced rampages and a fierce custody battle, that picked Eva off the tiled floor of the class. It’s funny how life tosses reminders of the past right into your face. This wasn’t the first time he had a woman’s blood on him.
This might have more poignancy if we knew who the fuck Brian was.
No, really. Eva’s passed all of three dozen words with him, and most of those words weren’t even relevant to the situation at that time. Did we even figure out if he was black or not? Now we're finding out this character had some tragic childhood and that rescuing Eva has some parallels with him rescuing his mother as a child. That's a lot to throw at us, considering there was zero build-up to that.
We're going to find out in a couple of chapters that Brian is Connor's direct self-insert character. Brian's even working on a novel that is an analogue of Redesigning Eva. Naturally when Connor's self-insert winds up in the same story as Molly Ringwald's expy, the self-insert is going to be the hero.
“Can you walk? Eva!” She didn’t respond; instead her bloody lips were forming small and indecipherable movements. Her eyes rolled back into her head, but there was still life in the skeleton.
Brian struggled to move fast with Eva in his arms as he made it out into the hallway.
NO. WHAT ARE YOU DOING? PUT HER DOWN.
She just vomited a geyser of blood. A normal person would assume that means she’s bleeding internally. You turn her head to make sure she doesn’t choke on her own blood and then you call the paramedics. Unless there’s an even more immediate danger like the roof’s about to cave in or the building’s on fire, you don’t go dragging her around!
He was muttering under his labored breath, “Don’t die on me.”
At the end of the hall, another teacher turned the corner, and shrieked at Brian and Eva.
“This girl’s fuckin’ dying… I need help carrying her!” Brian lumbered toward the lady, who, without question, slung Eva’s left arm over her shoulder.
OH HOLY JESUS, NO. STOP TRYING TO FORCE HER TO WALK.
The three made their way to the main office.
Are there no emergency phones in this school? The students have already been said to have cellphones. Surely the teachers would too. Even if the main office had the only phone in the building, did you have to drag Eva to it? LEAVE. HER. ON. THE FLOOR. DO YOU WANT HER TO—wait, I see what you did there. By all means, keep dragging her around. “I don’t know what happened, officer. We were taking her to get help when she just stopped breathing!”
The lady at the desk paid little attention, instead perusing a newspaper. Brian let the teacher hold Eva, and he began unbuttoning his shirt. You’ve got to get people’s attention somehow, he thought. Without a word, he removed his shirt and tossed it across the desk, blanketing the lady’s face.
I just want to point out that this was Brian’s first instinct—it’s not like he called repeatedly for help, was ignored, and then resorted to throwing something at the woman to make her pay attention. No. He leapt immediately to the conclusion that the best and indeed only way to make the receptionist look up was to carefully unbutton his shirt, take it off, and throw it at her.
I am fascinated by this sequence. I can’t even imagine what inspires something like this. Either Connor was just bound and determined to get Brian’s shirt off and didn’t care what it took to make it happen, or he was mentally groping for a grand dramatic gesture and this was the best he could do. All I can say is that this better not culminate in a scene three chapters from now where Eva’s fantasizing about his chest.
“What the hell?” she exclaimed, and then she saw the blood. Then she saw Brian shirtless. Then she saw the teacher holding the shell of a girl in her arms.
Brian's chest is so awe-inspiring that she actually failed to notice an unconscious, bleeding student.
“Call 911!” the teacher cried.
The door behind them opened. “No need,” a voice said.
Both turned around to see a paramedic, relatively young and tall for his job,
He’s an EMT, not a jockey. EMTs tend to run young anyway. Your paramedic might be tall and young, but I fail to see why this is unusual "for his job."
holding the door open with one rubber-gloved hand. There were a couple of others beyond the door and looking in, setting up a stretcher. “Bosley called you, didn’t he?” Brian asked, catching his breath.
No response. Instead, the young and tall paramedic used his foot to put down the doorstopper and stepped in so the other paramedics could walk through. “Thank God you’re here!” the teacher holding Eva said.
Paragraph break for dialogue, please. Then a new paragraph.
Again, there was no response. The paramedics were like a single, well-oiled machine, performing their tasks almost automatically and unfettered. Brian, standing shirtless and blood-soaked by the main desk,
Yep. This image is why Connor wanted the shirt gone: so that his self-insert could stand around being all blood-soaked and buff.
watched in silence as this girl was put on the stretcher, barely alive. They strapped her in, and were ready to go as quickly as they had arrived. This was not normal.
How did Brian come to that conclusion? They're EMTs and this girl's bleeding out of her mouth. You just said she was barely alive. Getting her to the hospital as quickly as possible is exactly what they should be doing. There is no reason for Brian to suspect this, except that he has to be suspicious for plot reasons.
They wheeled her out into the main hall, slightly rusted wheels squeaking as they turned. Brian made a brisk walk after the paramedics. They were headed for the main entrance.
“Who are you? What’s this all about?”
This also pisses me off. Brian can't just attempt to follow the stretcher because he's concerned about Eva. No, it has to be because he realizes something strange is going on, because as Connor's self-insert, he has to be smarter and more perceptive than anyone else.
He was right behind them now.
“Answer me, motherf--”
Suddenly, Brian felt a severe shock at his nape, and he collapsed hard on the tiled floor.
“kids these days!” A chuckle.
Capitalize "kids."
Eva…
As the surge throughout his body was beginning to fade, Brian looked up to see a man in a nice suit standing above him with a flashy PR smile and graying hair.
“Hope we don’t see each other again,” the sharp-dressed man sneered.
So first someone went through all the trouble of getting a fake ambulance and fake EMTs to whisk Eva away without suspicion. Then the CEO of Prometheus or whatever Jordache is comes out in his suit and tie, face completely exposed, looking twelve feet tall and obvious, to taze and kick a kid for no clear reason.
Schools have security cameras. Students have smartphones. Enjoy being all over the internet tonight.
Connor, if you try to explain that away as Jordache (and by extension Prometheus) being too rich and powerful to get caught, I will end you. And if this constant use of "sharp-dressed man" is a reference to the ZZ Top song, I will doubly end you.
Before Brian could respond, Jonathan Jordache kicked him in the ribs and walked off.
I know why Connor did this. He has to establish Jordache as not only slimy, but evil. Unfortunately, he's only established Jordache as stupid and the Prometheus Company itself as wildly incompetent. It's a characterization problem: obviously, if you're going to have a villain, he's got to do villainous things, but he must also be clever enough to get away with it.
If you absolutely had to have Jordache involved with this in any way, why not having him waiting in the ambulance? You could even include the scene with Brian: Brian follows Eva to the ambulance, sees this strange and inappropriately dressed man (that we the readers recognize as Jordache, though Brian does not) and before Brian can ask what's going on, he gets tazed. It's not much better, but it makes a fraction more sense.
I've been bitching since the beginning that the plot just can't seem to get itself moving forward. Now I wish I'd kept my mouth shut, because this chapter's trying oh-so-earnestly to get this plot point moving but chooses all the wrong ways to do it. This doesn't feel like a slick, well-organized corporation; it feels like a comedy caper. Again, Connor is more interested in style than substance, and he isn't clever enough to pull off either. Every attempted plot point makes no sense and could be easily foiled or picked apart. It's as if Connor doesn't even care how ridiculous it is. He's a creative genius, after all, so all his decisions are brilliant and people are so enthralled by the story that they won't question it--kinda like how we weren't supposed to notice or question it when the story turn into Silence of the Lambs for a couple of chapters.
And this isn't even getting into the dark, edgy, transgressive death of Mr. Yorkin. I have no idea what to even make of that. It's grossness for grossness' sake and it comes at the expense of getting us, however clumsily, to the real point of this chapter, which is Eva going in for Catharsis. I don't know why it didn't get put into one of the earlier school chapters when we were establishing what a shithole this place really is. It wouldn't have played any better there but it would have made marginally more sense.
