5 · The Story Layer

It’s 6:10 on a Tuesday in March, five years from now. The house is dark except for the lamp over my desk. My sketchbook is open to page 214, and the pencil is moving before I’m fully awake.

Thirty minutes, every morning. Nobody asked me to do this. Nobody grades it. Most people I know don’t even know the sketchbooks exist. There are eleven of them on the shelf now.

Today I’m drawing my little brother’s hands from a photo. I get the thumb wrong twice and erase it twice. At 6:40 the timer goes off. I close the book, even though I want to keep going, because I have to be at work by 7:30.

It costs me some things. I leave game nights early because I know I’ll be up at six. I said no to a weekend trip with friends last summer. Some mornings I would honestly rather sleep.

But I know something about myself now. When I tell myself I’ll do something, I do it. Page 214 proves it. Tomorrow will be page 215.

It’s 5 years from now. Every other Saturday, Jonah and three friends fix up bikes in his grandpa’s old garage and give them away. Abby does wheels. Marco does brakes. Ty does the paperwork nobody else will touch. Jonah finds the parts and keeps everyone fed, mostly grilled cheese. He can’t true a wheel to save his life, so the shop wouldn’t exist without the other three. Last spring, when Marco’s mom was in the hospital, the rest of them covered his Saturdays for two months and never brought it up. They’ve given away 140 bikes. It costs Jonah most of his weekends and a lot of bread. Abby says she keeps coming because Jonah drove her to every shift at her first job when her car died. He doesn’t remember doing it.

It’s 5 years from now. Lena has the keys to the bakery. She opens at 5:30, counts the drawer, and writes the number on the clipboard in pen, the way she always does. Four years ago, at her first job, $300 went missing from a register she had worked, and the manager decided it was her. She couldn’t prove it wasn’t. A coworker told her to say she’d seen someone else near the till. She hadn’t, so she didn’t say it. She lost the job, and the reference with it, and her next six applications went nowhere. Her mom still gets angry about it. Lena mostly doesn’t. The manager never changed his mind, and she counts the drawer right every morning anyway. Mrs. Ortiz, who owns the bakery, gave her the keys after three months. She said Lena was the only one who ever wrote the number in pen.

It’s 5 years from now. Ana teaches seventh-grade science in Provo, and on Tuesdays her class takes something apart: a flower, a frog, an old radio. For as long as she can remember, everyone, Ana included, said she would be a doctor. Her grandma announced it at a family reunion. Then she spent a summer volunteering at a hospital and found out she didn’t want that life. The part she loved was explaining things to the patients’ kids in the waiting room. She could have kept quiet and kept going. Instead she told her parents at dinner, which took three tries to get out. Her dad didn’t say much for a week. Her grandma still asks when she’s going back to medical school. Yesterday a girl in third period asked if a frog’s heart really looks like that, and Ana said, “Come see.”