Page 1 of The Dirty Version

The final bell of the university school year rang, and Natasha Grover needed the sunburnt freshmen lingering in her “Heroes and Villains” English seminar to immediately disperse.

Her best friend’s glare hovered impatiently against a back wall. Tash knew better than to leave Biscayne Coastal College’s chair of Women’s Studies hanging—especially in the minutes before trying to bribe her. Janelle and her wife, Denise, were key to Tash surviving dinner tonight.

Sorry! Tash mouthed anxiously at Janelle through a cloud of students. Outside, jags of lightning split the South Florida sky.

A blue-tipped faux-hawk stepped into Tash’s field of vision.

“Professor Grover?” The student clutched a hardback copy of Tash’s novel, The Colony , to the peeling skin above her tank top.

She thrust the book forward, over Tash’s desk.

“Will you sign this? I knew I couldn’t geek out while we were still being graded, but I love your book.

I’m so excited it’s being made into a series. ”

Tash paused her frantic sweeping up of class notes and rearranged her panicked features into something she hoped appeared composed.

She very intentionally kept The Colony out of her classroom in order to avoid a conflict of interest. Without a completed master’s degree, Tash’s adjunct standing within the English department was more of a tenuous sway.

However.

On the inside of this girl’s wrist, next to a straggle of string-bracelet knots, the words Mother Beast were inked in a magenta gothic font.

Janelle arrived at Tash’s side, and Tash saw her also spot The Colony fandom tattoo.

Janelle smiled placidly at the student. She offered the girl her pen. She murmured sideways at Tash: “Your message said ‘emergency.’ I just canceled a meeting. Where’s the fire?”

In response, Tash handed Janelle her phone, where the proverbial fire raged in Tash’s voicemail.

And in her email. And in her texts. Earlier that day, it had raged directly in Tash’s ear, as her agent, responsible for negotiating The Colony ’s film rights, shouted words like “breach” and “noncompliance,” followed by a litany of increasingly appalling consequences.

Tash pushed the thoughts momentarily away and returned to the student, scribbling a practiced signature on the book’s title page, adding a scrawled #sisterhood and a clenched fist.

Still, the girl remained. “Professor Grover, to me, The Colony is canon. It means so much as a new model for female myth.” Her eyes glistened. “When Noab throws her baby into the ocean...” Chipped nail polish rested against her heart.

Just like the tattoo, “new model for myth” came from the book clubs, and at any other time, Tash would have felt sincerely humbled.

She would have slowed down for a chat. On the press tour, a publishing intern showed her a pie chart: The novel resonated deeply with progressive females and childless women aged fourteen to thirty-two.

Each of these connections blew Tash away, as she’d dredged her own emotional narrative to flesh out the book’s themes.

But tonight those themes were on the chopping block. The new director of The Colony ’s streaming adaptation stood far outside its demographic. He had Tash backed into a legal corner, adamant about script revisions he deemed necessary and she deemed vile.

Janelle read all about it, her eyes wide on Tash’s phone.

The student, however, kept on—oblivious to the backstage drama and unaware of Tash’s desperation to flee.

“Noab is heroic. You’re heroic for writing her, Professor Grover.

” The girl said it just as her attention snagged on a bit of sun-bleached muscle lazily exiting the lecture hall.

“Although I could probably never hack it on a dystopian island where the XY chromosome is banned.” She sighed apologetically.

“I like boys. I can’t help it. It seems too hard to give them up. ”

Tash gently maneuvered the student toward the door and flipped the lights off. She glanced at Janelle, still knee-deep in Tash’s mess of Hollywood texts. Right now, a world without men sounded pretty great.

It sounded better than the unexpected cult status of the little book she’d written.

It sounded better than the evening ahead with a director who wanted to squeeze her heroine into a push-up bra.

Better than the threats from her equally douchey film agent, who’d chewed Tash out for being unprofessional and evasive.

Because Tash liked boys, too—but she’d tired of the collateral damage men inflicted.

She exited into the hallway, half-hearting a jaded, parting smile in the girl’s direction. “Nah. Giving men up is easier than you think.”

* * *

The wing of Janelle’s signature caftan fluttered sveltely as Tash rushed her, full tilt, through Biscayne Coastal’s storm-rattled palms.

Janelle still had one ear pressed to Tash’s voicemail. “Are you serious?” She turned on Tash with giant eyes. “You’ve been avoiding the movie studio for a month ?”

In Tash’s defense, since The Colony had published, its film option had been traded twice.

Two other showrunners had come and gone, delivering the series’ scripts into the paws of a director Tash would never have originally selected.

She’d hoped if she waited long enough, The Colony would be traded again.

It had not; in fact, the Braverman Productions team moved forward quickly.

Now they wanted Tash to expand certain scenes into naked and steamy set pieces completely incongruent with the novel’s spirit and Tash’s vision for it on the screen.

While her book had sex—and parts of it were very sexy—it was rendered through a female lens.

The progressive film studio Tash initially sold her rights to had guaranteed her a cerebral, non-tawdry approach.

But Braverman Productions made no such promises, and Ram Braverman had bikini-carwash-orgy sensibilities.

Without the resources to legally refuse his cinematic pimping of her radically feminist tome, Tash had instead ducked the studio’s emails. And their phone calls. And the messengered package they’d sent her overnight.

All while still consuming every bit of internet reaction to The Colony ’s preproduction press. The book’s fans cheered the series’ casting almost as much as they denounced news of its new director. Quite mistakenly, they believed Tash had influence over those details.

In truth, Tash had such little clout, Braverman’s “unnamed sources” commented to trade publications in her name. Janelle had warned Tash off the internet forums for exactly this reason—Tash cared too much, and her skin was too thin. She internalized the noise.

Unfortunately, South Florida’s iconic Sweetwater Film Festival had brought Ram Braverman to town to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Big Gun , his first big-budget feature.

To Tash, the movie and its many sequels played like mash-ups of car-chase shoot-outs and chauvinist schlock.

Braverman’s splendid depiction of two-thrust intercourse betrayed a sexual illiteracy that had, in Tash’s opinion, misinformed an entire generation of teenage masturbation.

This was an opinion her film agent aggressively reminded her not to express.

Especially not this evening, at the dinner with Ram she’d been commanded to attend.

Rather, Tash was expected to bridge the “confusion” about her tardiness in responding to the production team’s requests.

Her agent warned her to patch things up: “Smile and nod. Nod and smile. Do not do anything else, Tash. If you piss these people off again, the Braverman legal department will take your intellectual property and defile it in a way you won’t enjoy. ”

Janelle’s expression fell as they reached Biscayne Coastal’s covered parking lot. She shoved the phone at Tash. “How could you not tell me this was happening?”

Tash shrugged the shoulders of her charcoal cardigan, yanking it off and tossing it into the backseat of her car.

She unclipped her wavy russet hair from its low bun, shedding her teaching persona and returning to her unarmored self—a powerless debut author who hadn’t told a soul about the Hollywood movie studio’s plan to make her skankify the only creative triumph of her adult life.

It mortified and paralyzed her; it would undermine everything the book was meant to be about.

“I was hoping it would go away somehow.” Lame but true.

“Can you and Denise please come with me tonight? We’ll pretend Denise is my plus-one—I could really use her advice—and the three of us can get there early and have a drink together?

” Tash gave her best friend pleading eyes.

“I’m spinning out. It’s a big ask, I know. I’ll pay your babysitter extra.”

Even though Denise’s lawyering focused exclusively on real estate, and the finer points of intellectual property contracts lay beyond her daily realm, Tash itched for the backup.

Also, and perhaps most importantly, by the transitive property of Janelle, Denise’s legal advice was free.

Because Tash might have talked a big game in her fearless female-warrior-island fiction—but in real life, the thought of facing the dinner solo made her want to hide under her bed.

Her no-name, underdog, probably-fluke, one-book success story would not survive Braverman’s blockbuster treatment.

He barely gave his female characters clothing, let alone dialogue; they existed just to jiggle strategically and cheer on their male leads.

And Tash knew Braverman would strip her work and take her voice also. The Colony was next on his menu. Tash sensed him coming to the table hungry, sharpening his knife.