What You Make Of It

“So, it’s about this girl, right? She’s had a tough life, tougher than most people in her entire town have had. She grew up with a family that abused her, had to learn how to steal food just so she could eat, and was surrounded by teachers and adults who just didn’t care about her. She grows up, moves away, and even changes her name so no one from her town would find her. She’s got a completely clean slate, and things start looking up for her for a time.” I glance around the meeting room, hoping my pitch is still being received well. Everyone looks pretty focused on me, so I continue.

“She gets a job, she goes to college, she manages to get a place with roommates who adore her. One month, the budget is a little tight, and she signs up to be a volunteer test subject for some scientists. Nothing much happens from her perspective during the tests, but after she gets paid for being a volunteer, she starts having these horrible nightmares that feel so real to her. They’re dreams of what could have happened if she hadn’t left her hometown.”

The eyes around the room are laser focused on me, and I take a deep breath to steady myself.

“Every few nights it’s a slightly different chain of events, and she realizes that she’s looking into different timelines of herself. Most things she went through are the exact same because those events were out of her control, but once she gets a bit of autonomy, that’s when everything branches off. Sometimes she stays at home and becomes essentially a live-in servant for her parents and siblings, other times she marries early to escape her family, only to land in a worse one. A lot of times, she commits suicide. This starts messing with her waking life, because she’s realizing that she’s the one who was best off. She’s the best possible outcome of her life so far.”

I heard a couple sniffles as I began to rifle through my notes, I chanced a glance upwards, and there was not a dry eye in sight. Good, I wanted this to be relatable.

“She tries to power through, but eventually she goes and talks to a therapist about these dreams. The therapist tells her to try lucid dreaming, to see if she can control the dreams, and she tries, but nothing works, and she gives up on the therapist. Until one night, she has a dream about her life. All the way up to present day, and she wakes up and goes about her day. Something bad happens that day, like a car crash, or one of her friends die, it’s just awful and terrible to experience and is incredibly painful to go through. Then she wakes up. That same day, and she manages to change her life for the better. It gives her hope, that while she might be the only one to make it out of her childhood home, and if she really is the best off out of all those other timelines, then she’s going to make it count.”

“And she does, every night, she dreams of something going wrong, and the next day, she tries to fix it. It works so well, that she ends up saving the lives of most people in her life at some point, either by keeping them from getting into cars to avoid crashes, or by asking them to stay over for dinner to keep them from getting attacked. She remembers things she studied in the dream for her college, so she passes all her classes, even while working full-time at this point. She gets so precise in what she wants to do and how she wants her life to look, and she claws her way to the top. She has a home that is already paid for, with no problems, a beautiful view outside, her previous roommates are now her neighbors, who still adore her and come over for meals and celebrations, she’s got the best car, the best electronics, and a nice stack of cash for emergencies and vacations. She’s not obscenely rich, and she’s no celebrity, but she doesn’t care about things like that. All she ever wanted was to feel loved and safe, with food on the table.”

I smile, this is it, the home stretch. I’m pretty sure I’ve already sold this show several times over, but every good story needs a bit of a challenge before it ends.

“And then she loses her ability. She freaks out for a bit until she realizes that with as far as she’s gotten, it doesn’t matter, and she can still enjoy her life, just without having premonitive dreams anymore. The end, good ending, close the book, you would think, right? Wrong, she gets a letter in the mail saying pretty much all of her blood family is dead, which she doesn’t really care about, except for her nephew from her youngest blood sibling. He’s around ten, and CPS doesn’t know what to do with him because he won’t speak, like, at all. And because this lady is his last living relative, they’re sending him over to live with her until they figure out what to do with him. Cause he’s the only one who knows what happened to the family. The details are confidential, so the letter doesn’t say, but she does some digging and finds out that they all died around the same time of some unknown cause that made them start vomiting blood, and after a period of time in quarantine, her nephew was cleared of any illnesses and released to the nearest social worker. So now she has to kind of reorganize her life around this kid, she’s been done with her studies for awhile, and her job isn’t too intensive that she needs to work overtime very often anymore, but she’s still nervous because she hasn’t even thought of her blood family for at least a decade now. So this small, malnourished, dirty kid comes into her life, and the rest of the series is them going through different struggles, him with adjusting to a new lifestyle, and her re-working through old memories while making sure her nephew doesn’t feel abandoned and neglected. It deals a lot with mutual trauma, and how abused kids sometimes don’t adjust well to more lavish environments because they think it’s a trick, and it really gets into the dynamic of these two characters who come from the same background, and one who is trying to give a better chance than she had to what she is projecting a bit as her younger self.”

I finish off with a flourish, and answer a few questions, shake everyone’s hand, and say I’ll contact them in a few days to discuss in further detail the specifics. I head out, where a car is waiting for me. I get in.

“So, how’d it go, love?” My uncle asks as we pull away.

I grin, wide and toothy and very excited. “It went great! I’ve got a deal, and they’re gonna ask me about casting and stuff in a few days!” I bounce my leg, trying to get out some of my jitters.

He gives me a soft smile, and says “How about we get ice cream to celebrate?”

I shake my head, “Nope, we get into an accident on the way to the shop. Can we go to that fancy milkshake place instead?” He laughs, a kind, soothing sound.

“Anything you want kiddo. Honestly I’m surprised at you, you’re doing much better with that ability than I ever did. How’d you get them to take the pitch without them realizing you were talking about yourself?”

“I just switched us around, so I’m you and you’re me.” He chuckles and ruffles my hair, something I would have flinched away from not even a month ago. “Smart kid. Never would have thought of that.”