Lakewood

Ned Tarrant is a 40 year old community college teacher who hates his job and his life. He is stuck in a rut. But he receives life-changing news that calls back to the live he lived 20 years before.

Lakewood

Alex Race

I drive by the idyllic looking campus every morning. Well, weekday mornings anyways. Weekend mornings my BAC is usually still too high to drive. But come Monday, I plop myself in my 1999 Ford Explorer and make the twenty minute commute which brings me past Yuppie Central, more officially known as Decker University. There’s this big stunning glass building right in the middle of the campus, you can’t miss it. It was built back in 1993 by a guy with a really French sounding name that I can’t remember at the moment. The Daily Decker named it the best piece of architecture in a 100 mile radius, ten years running. I always put the visor down and look away when I drive by because Jacques le Architecte didn’t think about how the sun would glance off his building and hit me square in the eyes. I wonder if the architect was blind. Stevie Wonder is blind and he can play the piano.

The campus that I called home waited about seven miles further down the road in the wrong direction. Driving my commute was like watching the evolution of man in reverse. You start with beautiful townhouses and wondrous plazas filled with high-end shops and overpriced coffee and a Salvation Army so the yuppies could absolve themselves of their white guilt every once in a while. Then the cracks start to appear. First it’s just a house that has had the same “CAUTION: FUMIGATION” sign out front for the last three years. Then it’s the grimy liquor stores with ever increasing griminess the longer you drive, and ever increasing late night hours as well. This was a smart design choice, considering the further you drove down this road to Hell, the later you had the inclination to drink until you forgot where you were. I wonder if Pierre la Buildere had thought of that design choice, too. Eventually you’re at a point where you stop at a red light and realize you forgot to lock the doors and this puts you in a brief panic.

Then you arrive at Lakewood Community College. There is neither a lake nor woods anywhere in sight for at least fifty miles.

When good-for-nothings decide too late in life that they should probably get around to obtaining an education, they end up in my classroom. Twenty percent of my students have been to prison. Sixty percent have a family back home. An alarming cast of characters, to be sure. So what’s that say about the guy teaching them? If a forty year old attending community college is a tragedy, a forty year old employed by a community college would put the Greeks to shame.

And much like the Greeks, I enjoy a bit of excess from time to time. By “excess” I mean copious amounts of alcohol, and by “time to time,” I mean every Friday and Saturday night. I actually have my name and picture up on the wall at Peggy’s Bar (no “and Grille” here, we ain’t talking that fancy). Apparently I have the largest unbroken chain of weekly visits there. The previous record was 73 weeks. Hurrah for me. Remember those grimy liquor stores I told you about? Imagine that you’ve gone as far down that street as possible until you’ve gotten to the dirtiest, most suspect liquor store at the very end. I’m talking broken windows, three weapons kept behind the register, and at least two bums standing outside begging for change because subtlety is a dead art. Peggy’s is that liquor store’s bar cousin who lives on the other side of town.

The way Decker is set up, you basically have Rich White Kids U. in the middle, with all its surrounding yuppie attractions, and then you have this big road that stretches away from it in both directions. I’ve already enlightened you as to what one direction looks like. But if you go far enough in the other direction, you get pretty similar results. Yeah, the baddest parts of town share a single road that leads them both to Decker University. No one else seems to appreciate the irony. Anyways, if you drive about ten minutes in that other direction, you eventually arrive at my neighborhood. A few blocks from my apartment, you find Peggy’s. Every Friday and Saturday night I drive on over, take my usual stool at the bar, and drink some kind of beer which tastes like it was extracted from the liver of a recently deceased alcoholic. Around 2am, I’d call a cab to take me back home, I’d stumble through the door and up to my apartment, and finally I’d collapse onto my bed, if I made it that far. The living room floor wasn’t so bad for sleeping. Dogs and cats sleep on living room floors. You don’t hear them complaining. On the following Saturday or Sunday afternoon, I’d roll myself out of bed and walk the several blocks back to Peggy’s to pick up my car. This routine hasn’t exactly helped my weight or my blood pressure, but it’s something. Gym memberships are for yuppies anyways. I really only had one rule when it came to my drinking habits, and that was to never drink on nights when I had to teach the next morning.

It was a Sunday night in the middle of March when I finally broke my rule. I’d like to say it’s because I had received some celebratory news which warranted a drink, but really it’s because I had locked my room key in my apartment. I called my landlord when I realized my stupid mistake.

“Hey, Benny, it’s Ned Tarrant. I locked myself out.”

“Hey hey, Ned!” He sounded drunk. “Shut up, I’ll get ya your $100. You wait right there.”

“Uh, Benny?”

“Sorry Ned, I have some, uh, company.” I could smell the alcohol through the phone. And the sweat. “I’ll be back around 3am, I’ll let you in then.”

He hung up. The telephone equivalent of slamming the door. I didn’t bother calling him back. It was around 9:30pm then and I had nowhere to go. I finally made up my mind and decided one Sunday night drinking couldn’t be all that bad. I, for some reason, assumed that I would be able to control myself. Oops. I certainly wasn’t going to want to walk back to my car on a Monday morning, so I eschewed my usual routine and just walked the few blocks to Peggy’s. I was there by 10. When I walked in, I was surprised to see the same regulars that were here on my usual drinking nights. In my imagination, the bar was a completely different place on Sundays, so this was somewhat disappointing. John, the bartender, shouted ,“Well look what the cat dragged in on a Sunday night!” One patron piped in with “Ah John, you know a cat couldn’t drag his fat a*s around anywhere!” Then the patron leaned over and coughed up some vomit onto the bar like a cat coughs up a hairball. I took my usual seat next to this other middle aged loser guy who I’d been having drunk conversations with for the past couple months or so. He had told me his name back when I first met him, but I didn’t remember it, and I was too embarrassed to ask again all this time later. He never addressed me by name either, so I assume he had the same problem. Just two anonymous guys spouting some verbal diarrhea at each other until one or both of us blacked out. Those were the days.

On this particular Sunday night, Anonymous Drunk Guy (or, ADG for short) had a serious look on his face and he didn’t seem so talkative. I tried to make light conversation.

“I’ve been thinking about going up to homeless guys who say they need some change and handing them Obama bumper stickers.”

ADG didn’t respond.

“Get it?”

“Where would you get the bumper stickers?” he replied, suddenly.

“Well s**t, I didn’t think this all the way through. This calls for a drink.”

“You say anything calls for a drink.” This wasn’t playful, by the way. His tone was quite serious.

“Jeez buddy,” I said, before taking a quick swig from my bottle. “Everything good with the missus? Or should I say mister?” I laughed uproariously at my own joke and belched loudly.

ADG looked at his glass for a couple seconds in silence. Then he pushed it back with a look of disgust. I was worried I had accidentally found myself in the middle of a midlife crisis.

“Why’d you have to start coming on Sundays, Ned?” he barked at me suddenly. “You’re gonna let it seep into the rest of your life too?”

I was in stunned silence now, and the drunkenness sweeping through my body wasn’t exactly helping me come up with the right response. The most I could manage was a slurred “Huh?” which wasn’t a fully formed sentence so much as it was a Neanderthalic grunt. ADG sort of grunted back at me and hopped off his stool. He grabbed me by the collar of my shirt, barely missing some forgotten ketchup stain with his fingers, and looked me right in the eyes as he pulled me in.

“Ask yourself: Is this enough?”

He strutted out of Peggy’s like an action hero walks away from an explosion. I kept waiting for Ashton Kutcher to pop out from the bathroom to tell me that I’d just gotten PUNK’D, but instead a smelly dirty bum popped out of the bathroom and half-collapsed onto the wall. I never saw ADG again.

The rest of the night was a blur. I probably threw up in the bushes behind Peggy’s. I knew better than to throw up in the toilets here. They clog easily. John the bartender probably told some racist jokes. I probably hit on and got rejected by someone ten years younger than me. I probably asked someone if they knew a guy that could get me some Xanax. I don’t know, the nights kind of start to run together after a while. Eventually, I apparently called a cab, and I must have met Benny at some point to grab my keys. I have no memory of this, but I ended up passed out in my own bed with pajamas on and everything. Drunk me had gotten quite proficient at the whole nightly routine.

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The next morning, my alarm might as well have been a full symphonic orchestra sitting on my night table. I groggily slapped my radio a few times to shut up the blaring music (I’M WALKING ON SUNSHINE, WOAHHH-OHH-OHHHH) and pulled myself out of bed. And I do mean pulled. My head felt heavier than one of those cartoon anvils, so I grabbed onto the bed post and used the full weight of my belly to prop myself up. Rays of sun poured through the window and punched me in the face.

There’s this Greek myth about this guy, Sisyphus. He pissed off the gods and had to push a rock up a hill forever. That was his punishment. My punishment would be pretending that I enjoyed teaching while standing in front of a bunch of glossy-eyed middle aged folks. Now imagine that Sisyphus had to do his task while sporting a massive hangover. This was the predicament I now found myself in. I debated between taking a cold shower and getting ten extra minutes of rest. Such is the struggle of man. I took too long weighing the pros and cons of each, so I ended up getting neither.

I resigned myself to a crappy day and took the next minute to slowly lower myself out of my bed. I looked at the Leaning Tower of Laundry that sat in the corner of my bedroom, and decided that wearing the same underwear two days in a row isn’t really all that bad anyways. I threw on some clothes that sat in various piles around my apartment, gave myself the good ol’ Italian shower, and I was out the door. I watched two kids on bikes roll by, presumably on their way to school. They looked like they were happy to be going there. Stupid kids.

I made the endless journey to my driveway and leaned on my car for a few nauseous seconds. Oh, fun fact about my car: the front doors are broken. So I have to get in through one of the back doors, and then climb over to the driver’s seat. I imagine that to an outsider, this would look something like a whale trying to fit through a straw, except that whales are graceful creatures. The theme song of this routine would be Benny Hill music. You get the idea. Once I’d forced my way into the front-

S**t. I had forgotten my keys in the house.

I’ll skip the 2-3 pages that it would take to chronicle the events that brought me to my keys and back to the car. I’ll just cut to the part where I’m sitting back in the driver’s seat, sweating and panting and holding my forehead.

I turned the key in the ignition, backed out of my driveway, and made the twenty minute drive to Lakewood, where I pulled into the faculty lot. I climbed out of the back seat while some nearby students looked at me with derision. Ah well, they’re the ones that are going to have a degree from Lakewood Community College for the rest of their lives. They should mock me now while they still have a sense of humor and a soul. I walked towards the building where my office resided like an upper class Victorian lady would walk through a swamp. I walked in and past the dean’s office. I gave him a perfunctory nod. He didn’t bother nodding back. It’s generally understood by the faculty here that such pleasantries are not necessary. It was always fun watching a plucky new hire show up and try to make small talk for the first two weeks. Eventually, they’d stop bothering because they always came around to our defeated attitude within the first month.

I walked into my office and shut the door behind me so that it made a loud thud which reverberated through the hallway, and my skull. I plopped down at my desk and thought I would have a good thirty minutes to just sit and let the waves of my headache crash into me until they were gone.

And then immediately my cell phone rang. Goddamnit.

I looked at my phone, not really expecting to answer it, but it was from an unknown number. I had the numbers of my bank and gas company and cable company and electric company all saved, so I knew it wasn’t from them. An unknown call meant possible excitement. So sure, I thought, let’s see what this crappy Monday morning has to offer.

I picked up the phone and said “Hello?”

I honestly don’t remember much of the ensuing conversation. By the end of the one minute phone call, my hangover was gone, just like that. Someone should call the makers of ibuprofen and tell them there’s a better natural remedy for hangover migraines.

In my memory, the call went something like this: “It’s mom..... your father....... parole......”

I imagined that I had never gotten out of bed. I imagined waking up from one of those weird vivid dreams you have when alcohol has rendered you pretty much unconscious. I imagined just living another s****y Monday with a bad stomachache and occasional pangs of regret.

And at some point I screamed. It was loud enough that the dean politely knocked on my door one minute later. I imagine that he was sitting in his office nervously wondering if he should just ignore the scream, before working up the courage to actually confront one of his staff. I pulled open the door and saw his anxious face looking up at me. I don’t know exactly what kind of face I was making, but it reflected in the way he regarded me.

“Hey, uh, Ned. Just, uh, thought I’d check in and-”

“I’m not feeling well today. I’ll have to cancel my classes.”

I slammed the door. The door equivalent of hanging up the telephone. I heard him mutter some tacit acceptance and walk back to his office. I almost screamed again, but this time the scream caught in my throat. I could practically taste it.

It tasted like him.

And a little bit like last night’s vomit.

But mostly like him. Maybe when all is said and done, the two tastes are the same.

I thought about leaving the building through the hallway, but that would mean interacting with people, and there was a chance the dean would have worked up enough of a nerve to speak to me further. So instead, I just opened the window in my office and climbed out that way. Some more kids were looking at me with derision. I guess I’m just the Clown of Climbing here at Lakewood. But I didn’t really care. I had somewhere to be.

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I’m nineteen years old and thin. I’m attending Decker University. I’m going to be a criminal psychologist. My dad is a drunk. Manipulative and mean, but never really abusive. I feel luckier than some. I’m living in an apartment with some friends on campus. I can see the construction in the distance from my window. They say it’s going to be the centerpiece of the campus, a magnificent modern glass building to commemorate the university’s 75th anniversary. I’m looking out my window at their progress. The bottom half of the tower looks to be almost completed. I imagine how high it will stretch a year from now. I wonder if I’ll be able to see my reflection at the top on a clear day. The phone in my apartment rings. It’s mom. Her voice is shaking.

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I hadn’t spoken to my mother in some twenty years when she called me in my office. I don’t think I would have even known it was her if she hadn’t identified herself. I wasn’t sure how she had gotten my number, but too many angry thoughts were racing through my head to give that one much attention. I was so mad that I almost ran a red light, slamming on my brakes at the last second to avoid hitting a car that was cruising through the intersection. Boy that would have been some cruel irony.

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Three dead. Two children and a dad. The mom’s in critical condition. She’s not expected to make it through the night. A small mercy, I think. How could he do this to us?

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I think about this a lot, actually. How I’d rather be the one that gets hit by the car than the one behind the wheel. Death is instantaneous. But shame, punishment, guilt. Those linger until ol’ Cloak and Scythe himself shows up to drag you away years later. Or you beat him to the punch and do it yourself if it nags at you long enough, I suppose. My father should have taken this second option long ago. Should have done it before the trial. Would have saved the taxpayers a lot of money. Hell, he could have asked me to help. Could have been like Old Yeller. “Yes, Mama. But he was my dad. I’ll do it.”

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I walk into my kitchen and my mother is crying and the first thing I do is yell at her. I mean every word that I say and she knows it and it hurts her and I’m glad. I imagine that my rage carries my voice through the air, through the breeze that connects one side of the city to the other, making its way through the door of the booking station and infiltrating his ears like special ops forces. The sound waves bounce into his brain and he immediately hears and understands every word that I’m saying to her and he knows that they are meant for him and he cries. I can taste his tears with my every word. My mother’s tears are invisible to me now. I look over by the sink and I can see his empty glass, I can see the last remnants of the bourbon that sticks to the bottom. My mother is shaking as I walk over to the glass and I pick it up and I throw it onto the ground and it breaks and the remnants drip out and I smile. But tears are corrupting my smile. I walk out of the house. I am totally calm. I only see my mother again two more times. I don’t see my father at all. I can't-.

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I swerved into the lot at the police station and parked in a way that my car took up two spots. I thought wryly that a parking ticket is pretty much guaranteed here, but somehow the thought didn’t tickle my sarcastic side the way that it normally would. I made the long walk to the visitor’s entrance. I tried to mentally prepare myself for the moment when I would look at his face for the first time since before that long-ago phone call, but I knew that nothing would really prepare me. I just hoped that I wouldn’t start crying. I didn’t want to look weak. I paused outside the entrance before stepping inside onto the linoleum. The prison smelled like a prison. Use your imagination. I walked up to the main desk where a female security guard eyed me coolly.

“Can I help you?”

“Is it visiting hours?”

“Yeah. Who you here to see?”

The name caught in my throat for just a moment. I don’t think she noticed.

“Robert Tarrant.”
She picked up a desk phone and spoke into it for a couple of minutes. I didn’t hear a word of the conversation. I looked around the room and my eyes landed on a large bulletin board covered in names and faces. “WANTED,” it said at the top. I WANTED to get out of there, har har har. The security guard hung up the phone and pointed me in the right direction. The whole drive here, I’d never even considered the possibility that he might just refuse to see me. But he had given them permission. He was allowing me to see him. I didn't know what to make of that.

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I’m in my advisor’s office in a back hallway in one of Decker University’s many well-respected libraries. The sounds of quiet studying echo through my ears. He’s telling me that the university has given me ample warnings that I have refused to heed. I try to stammer out an excuse, the same one I’ve been giving for the past several months. But he doesn’t want to hear it. Decker University has a very strict grade policy, he says. We expect greatness out of our students, he says. We are willing to accommodate for... extenuating circumstances, he says. But the time for excuses has run out, he says. They’re thoughtful enough to grant me my associate’s degree. Sympathy for the devil. I move out of my college apartment. My friends offer to help me move, they offer to lend me money while I figure out what I’m going to do. I move out in the middle of the night while they sleep so as not to be bothered. I move into the first s****y apartment I can find. I take the first s****y job I can find. I don’t leave either for twenty years.

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I got frisked by a male guard and whisked through a metal detector. Luckily, they trusted me enough to not check each of my individual fat rolls for contraband. Then I was led into the visitors’ room.

He stood up when he saw me enter. His face was expressionless. He gestured at the seat across from him at the table, and sat back down. When I got closer to him, I could more fully appreciate every detail of his aged face and body. I regarded the scars and stooped posture and cracked lips and yellow teeth. A couple of teeth were missing, whether from fighting or rotting I couldn’t be sure. He had had a rough time in prison. The thought actually brought a smile to my face.

In a raspy voice, the first thing he said to me after twenty years was, “You’ve gotten fat.”

That wiped the smile away as quickly as it had come. Twenty years later, and he still had that effect on me. I couldn’t have been more disgusted with myself in that moment. I sat down across from him and eyed him for a few silent seconds.

I finally broke the silence with, “Do they serve alcohol in prison?”

“No.”

“Good.”

He blinked once, but did nothing more to betray what he was thinking. You really can’t imagine what it’s like to have a certain memory of how a person looks, only to have the memory cleaned away by two decades of aging. Half my life. But he still looked like my father, underneath the scraggly facial hair and the wrinkles that had become squatters on his flushed face.

“You never visited.”

“Has anyone?” His face actually contorted into an involuntary frown when I said this. He had betrayed his emotions. Now I had the upper hand for sure. Yet his frown tugged at me like a nagging child, and this made me feel like the scales had once again tipped in his favor. The conversation was proceeding like a chess match between archenemies.

I didn't give him time to answer my question. “You have no right to leave this place, not even temporarily. You belong here, caged like an animal until nature runs its course and removes your burden from the world.” I sped through this short monologue, practically spitting it out at him. I had practiced it.

He just looked at me, refusing to betray his emotions a second time. I wanted to read his mind. I wanted to know what he was thinking of me. He sucked his lips and said, “You’ve been waiting a long time to tell me that. I know it and you know it. Your mother probably knows it too, God rest her soul.”

I gave him a quizzical look. “You make it sound like she died.”

“She did to me.”

I almost punched him at that moment. But that would have been his checkmate for sure, so instead I just scratched my wrist, as if a sudden itch had developed. The more I scratched it, the more that it actually began to itch. A small rash began to develop there. “You act as if you gave her a choice.”

“We all have our choices to make. I made mine. Have you made yours?”

Now he was trying to sound like Morpheus. I laughed out loud at his pretentious inquiry. His hand was lying on the table, and I grabbed it suddenly. Not in a violent way, such that it would alert one of the many guards that stood around the borders of the room, but just firm enough so that he could not pull away from my grasp. The chess match was over. The arm wrestling match had begun.

“Yes, fath- Robert.” His eyebrow raised at this. “I’ve made my choice. My choice is freedom. My choice is an apartment that I call home and a job that pays me money and a world where I buy things with cash or credit, not with cigarettes. And I call a cab. Every. Time.” I kept eye contact with him the whole time. I had honestly hoped that he would be weak enough to look away, but his resolve was strong, and he accepted my words with a nod. He squinted as he did this. He calmly reached down and lifted my hand from his, never breaking eye contact. I didn’t resist as he tucked my hand away.

“You think I’m the same man I was twenty years ago, Ned? Are you?”

I was sick of his questions. “I’m sick of your questions.” I wasn’t feeling creative. We were practically whispering by now. The screaming match that I had envisioned had not come to fruition.

“Well, I’m all out of answers. I’ve been giving answers for the last twenty years. To myself, to God, to the journalists that visit my cell every once in a while when they’re all out of news to report. To the victims and their families. More than anyone else, to them.”

His eyes became wet and tears rained slowly down his red, bearded, old face. I don’t know how exactly to describe it, but for just one moment he reminded me of Santa Claus, perhaps crying because Christmas had been ruined by the Grinch. The resemblance startled me and shook some tears out of my own eye sockets. The table accepted our salty emotions like a good friend offering a shoulder to cry on. There was a moment where I thought that I should lean in and embrace him, but the moment passed and did not return. I’m not sure he would have welcomed it anyways.

He sniffled and finally broke eye contact. I didn’t feel victorious. “What do you do, Ned?” I tilted my head, confused. “For a living? What’s your job?”

“I teach community college.”

He laughed. I hadn’t seen him smile in over twenty years. Not even since long before the accident. “You hate it.”

“I’m not a f*****g book you can read.”

“True. I have read many a book in my long wait here, and you don’t look quite like one of those.” He smiled again. He was enjoying himself. He paused for a second before continuing. “But I know that tone. You’re worried that you’ve been as much a prisoner as I have, and you’re ashamed that I know that about you. You don’t like feeling vulnerable. You never have.”

I snorted. “It’s been half a lifetime. What I used to be is nothing now.”

His random response to this hit me like a freight train carrying a sack of bricks. “It’s never too late to go back to school.”

I didn’t have a reply. I wanted to say something sarcastic, but I just felt tired. I thought back to Anonymous Drunk Guy pushing the glass away from him. I imagined that he had pushed the glass all the way off the bar and that it had shattered on the floor.

Remnants of bourbon...

He saw my hesitation. He looked like he didn’t know what to say either. And so we just stared at each other for another couple of minutes. I was enjoying the silence. It allowed me to collect my thoughts. I appreciated that he permitted the silence. I grabbed his hand again, less firmly now.

But still we didn’t say a word to each other. I had gotten to visiting hours late, so it wasn’t much longer before the guards announced to the room that we should all piss off, more politely than that of course. I stood up and shook my father’s hand. My father who had been locked away for twenty years. I had always awaited the news of his death with excited anticipation. I had planned on never seeing him again, not even making the time to attend his funeral when that blessed day came. Now I had no plans. I felt empty and whole at the same time. I reflected that neither of us had won the arm wrestling match. We hadn’t even moved our hands from their starting positions.

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I swerved into the parking lot that sits behind the library at Decker University. It was the late afternoon now, and clouds had covered the sun in such a way that its rays just barely peeked through a small opening in the sky. I didn’t believe in signs or miracles or any of that malarkey. I just appreciated the light for what it was. I looked out my windshield directly at the stunning glass building that sat in the middle of campus. It was as tall as the Tower of Babel. I was speechless. No pun intended. The hole in the sky adjusted a bit so that the rays of sun glanced off the building and entered my pupils without bothering to knock. I let the brightness and the heat extend through my body, all 250 pounds of flesh and bone. I felt like sand on the beach at high noon. The tide grew bigger and washed over me and I drowned in it. Out on the dock, a father and mother held their young son as he laughed and laughed and pulled at his fishing line. His father said to be careful, there could be a giant shark at the other end of the line! But the boy just laughed and didn’t really believe him. The waves shimmered in the summer breeze.

I looked at the library building once more. I paused and sighed and climbed over the middle of my car to the back seat. I pushed the door open and stepped out into the cool March air. And decisively, I began to walk towards the library. I didn't know if I would make it halfway before I turned around, feeling like a fool, but I took the first few steps and let them lead into the next few steps and so on, and I didn’t think about it much more than that.

Author's Note

This is the first story I have completed all the way through. It is 16 pages double spaced. All feedback is obviously welcome, but here are some specific questions I have if you'd like to answer them:

1) Is it funny? I know humor is a subjective thing, but I'm trying to be funny at a lot of places, especially in the first half, and I'm hoping it didn't fall flat too much.
2) Does Ned's sarcasm become overwhelming? Is it qualified a bit after the darker turn in the middle?
3) Are the flashbacks done effectively? Or could those be done in a better way?
4) In the second to last paragraph, do you like the sudden image of the family on the dock at the beach? Or does this just come out of nowhere and confuse you?
5) Do you have a good sense of what Decker looks like, and the type of environment that exists at Lakewood? So just general setting development criticism would be really helpful for me.
6) Is the story too long? Do you see any parts that could be cut out without losing much of the overall story?
7) Did any lines or paragraphs confuse you? One thing I'll definitely be working on is making the writing as clear as possible for the reader. It's hard to remember that you don't know what I'm thinking when I write something.