Molly Bit: A Novel - Hardcover

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Dan Bevacqua was born in New Jersey and grew up in Vermont. He earned his MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. His short stories have been published in The Literary Review, Electric Literature, and The Best American Mystery Stories. He lives in Western Massachusetts. Molly Bit is his first novel.

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Chapter 1

1

EVERYBODY WANTED TO BE FAMOUS. The screenwriters, the directors, the musicians, the poets, the playwrights, the comedians: they all wanted fame, but the actors wanted it most of all. They wanted fame so bad it pained them in their hearts when they tried to fall asleep at night. It was like the thought of not getting famous killed them, or like the way they longed for it was a sort of murder, but of themselves, and if they didn’t get famous, they might die right there in their beds.

It was that kind of school.

Molly took the elevator down to the dining hall. She’d only ten minutes earlier broken up with her high school boyfriend, Luke, over the phone. She felt bad about this, but not as bad as she had been feeling. She’d slept with other people, but in no practical universe could you call this cheating. She was nineteen. It was a question of experience, of whether or not she would make good on a promise to herself to chop off the old, dead parts and come out new, to burn them off, if need be, like she was a house fire. Hers was a deep sensation. Some afternoons, light would fall on her through a window in the library, a single ray through a single pane that found her as she lifted her head up from a book. The light was God or the future. The same was true for certain odd or even numbers, or for the experience of déjà vu: these were signs, messages designed to inform her she was among the chosen. She could not help but feel this way.

In the elevator, she glanced up at the numbers going 5, 4, 3, 2. Beside the read-out, up near the ceiling, someone had graffitied in black Magic Marker Mmmmm… Molly Bit.

“That’s hot,” Rosanna Archer said. “That’s good advertising.”

“Good advertising for what?” Molly asked.

“For you,” Rosanna said. “For your sexy actress life.”

They were seated across from each other at a booth in the dining hall. Rosanna was from LA. She was six feet tall with long, wavy hair the color of a crow. Out the window, snowy gusts of ice and fog screamed down Tremont Street. It hadn’t snowed in four days. It was only the wind. It was psychotic in that part of the city. It plucked snow and trash and lost gloves and hats from off the tops of drifts and whipped the mess around. Molly watched a baby-less stroller cartwheel across the street and slam into the front door of O’Malley’s.

“What the hell am I doing here?” Rosanna asked.

“Seriously,” Molly said. “Why aren’t we in California?”

“Everything is better in California,” Rosanna said. “Waking up is better in California. Going to bed is better in California. The parties are better. The drugs. The weather. The people. It’s all better. You have to come visit me over break. We’ll get wasted on the beach. Do you realize how totally incredible that would be? How totally awesome?”

“I know,” Molly said. But she didn’t know. She’d never been to California. She’d been to two places: Vermont, where she was from, and now Boston. This was the sum total. There was no possible way she could afford a trip to California.

“It’s gonna be the best,” Rosanna said.

All of Molly’s friends were rich. All of them. They were so rich they didn’t even know. Rosanna’s parents were in advertising, but not the marketing or the creative sides. They did something else. Something with the money. They lived in the Palisades, wherever that was, and kept another home in Malibu. Molly’s father was a soil tester. He drove around Vermont and dug holes in the ground for a living. Her stepfather paid for her tuition. The rest, her living money, was student loans.

“Thanks for the swipe.”

“No problem. I’ve got a ton of meals left on my card,” Rosanna said. “We should give them out to the homeless later. I wanna feed that guy with the frog voice. ‘Spare any change?’ Or that dude who rides his tricycle down Newbury Street. I think he’s sort of cute. I like the way he rings his little bell.”

Half the students had gone home for winter break already. The dining hall felt empty, but that was only in comparison to the usual mob scene. There were dorms on Arlington and Beacon, but everybody ate on Boylston, in Molly’s building. She saw Greg Watson reading by himself at one of the long tables. She gave him a small wave, but he was the nervous type, and he pretended like he hadn’t seen her.

“Why are you saying hi to that guy?” Rosanna asked. “He’s bald.”

“He’s nice. He’s my friend.”

“Are you sleeping with him?”

“No. I’m not,” Molly said. “We’re in Short Story together. He’s a writer. He’s good.”

Her own stories were terrible, Molly knew. All of her protagonists were small-town girls let loose in the big city. Nothing would happen to them for pages and pages, and then they’d cry. In workshop, Greg said her dialogue was good.

“Who would do that?” Rosanna asked. “Why would someone write something they knew was never going to make any money? People are starving to death out there, and this guy’s writing short stories. It makes me sick.”

Rosanna wanted to be a producer. Or she was, Molly guessed. In Rosanna’s life, and in the way she spoke of it, the present and the future had achieved a unified chronology. She was who she would be: powerful, demanding, impatient.

“Where is Eric?” Rosanna asked, forking a gelatinous wobble of scrambled egg into her mouth. “That’s what I’d like to know.”

“He called me at four in the morning,” Molly said.

“How did he sound?”

“Stimulated,” Molly said. “He kept referring to himself as a ‘coke genius.’ He said it like a hundred times.”

Greg stood up from his table. Out of the corner of her eye, Molly saw him look in her direction. She didn’t look back. A seriousness had overtaken her.

“He said he was close to being done with the edit.”

“How close?”

“Close-close. Like done.”

“I despise him,” Rosanna said. “I’m finished with Eric. If it wasn’t for the festival tonight I’d never talk to him again.”

There were an endless number of short film festivals at the college. The New Voices, The Senior Showcase, The Gay and Lesbian, The Underground, The Experimental, The Comedy, The For Women Only, The African American, The East Asian, The Documentary, The Jewish Diaspora, The Left of Center. Eric and Rosanna’s submission was for The New Horizons Short Film Festival. The NHSFF was considered to be the most prestigious film festival on campus by virtue of it having an actual “Best Of” category. Eric was the film’s director, Rosanna its producer, and Molly its star.

“If he screws me on this, I’m gonna screw him back,” Rosanna said. “And not the way you do.”

This was a low blow. Molly and Eric had slept together numerous times, yes, but she felt gross about it, and because she felt gross about it, she didn’t think Rosanna, or anyone, should mention it at all. Instead, her friends should pretend like it...