Page 33 of The Dirty Version

“I think for me, it’s the natural cruelty of Florida.

” Her nerves constricted—a pit in her stomach and a tightness in her throat.

She sensed Leo’s animosity daring her to say the wrong thing.

“There’s a beautiful hostility to the Florida environment that seethes inside the land.

Fruit that can maim you, for example—Florida grows the original poison apple. ”

The audience tittered. Tash forced a grin. Red ON AIR plaques fluttered their extraneous-noise scolding in the library footlights.

“It’s called the manchineel.” She tried to relax into her local knowledge. “It’s a green beach apple on a gorgeous tree, and eating it will kill you. Touching even just the bark will make you blind.”

As she spoke, Tash locked on the top of Janelle’s head, aware meeting her eyes would be too much; her best friend’s mahogany whorls, however, were an ideal focus.

Tash continued. “I think the ‘emotional terrain’ of Florida has to include the water, too. Our swamps, obviously—but also the way the ocean tempts us with its beauty and then threatens to drown us. It’s flash floods and rain that rips your roof off.

There’s a deeply wronged feminine power in the Florida environment daring us to give it a reason to unleash its might.

It scares me, honestly. But it’s also awe-inspiring. ”

Janelle raised two thumbs-ups over her head again.

“That’s on-brand.” Leo said it flatly into his microphone.

It might have been another dig, but Tash didn’t try to decode it; she’d managed one question deftly. She gave herself a trophy while Leo busied questions at the other guests.

To the doomsday-cult memoirist, he posed:

“Kris, as I mentioned, Florida was our country’s last contiguous, physical frontier.

Its wetlands proved nearly impossible to, quote-unquote, tame.

Can you talk a bit about the generational, atmospheric traumas that resulted from this beating into a submission?

In end-times religion, say, or apocalyptic communities. ”

To the water-margin poet:

“Alette, your latest collection draws on a little-known ‘Saltwater Railroad,’ which sailed escaped slaves from Florida to the majority-Black, British-controlled Bahamas, in the period before the American Civil War. Can you talk a bit about the folkloric echoes of that journey and how you weave their politics into your verse?”

Tash was sure Leo was running down the clock, sure he’d planned to ice her out of the remaining conversation—and perhaps that was okay. Perhaps a single high note was a good way to skirt his firing squad. But no. To Tash, Leo finally asked:

“Natasha.” His voice booming into the microphone. “The idea of tokenism strikes me as something you might want to address.”

Once again, Leo had set aside his binder. His eyes speared her; he was not reading from a prompt. The pit in Tash’s stomach clenched. This was far worse than being ignored.

“Alette vocalized a suspicion that the bound and printed versions of her poems are often used to signal anti-racism—in essence, people buy her book to use it as a prop. The paper manifestation of her collection becomes alibi for an entrenched class.”

Tash braced in her wingback. Her mind puzzled over what “tokenism” in her book’s case might imply. She considered cultural appropriation, or a comment about her dropout credentials.

“In the same way, the commercial spread of your book invites readers into a kind of dangerous McFeminism, don’t you think?” Leo’s accent danced, clearly delighted with himself over the phrasing.

Tash had forgotten his tendency to “Mc” things—in two letters, he could turn her into dust. Still, she forced herself to deny it, whatever it was he was suggesting. Carefully: “No, actually. I don’t.”

“Really.” Leo only cocked his head. “Well, I’d be happy to explain it to you.” As he all but cracked his knuckles; as he all but bent his knees and took a practice swing.

He leaned into the microphone. “ The Colony benefited from sensationalized press, yes?” He peered at Tash, dropping the formality he’d used with the other guests. “Pop-culture reportage characterized the work as radical because a maternal protagonist murders her child at the end.”

He made no apologies for this spoiler.

“But your mother character is not really controversial. She’s a copycat dark sibling to the conventional Earth Mother, whom we all regularly embrace.

The plot of your novel never deviates from standard romantic tragedy—packaging the climactic non-scandal in a familiar chew-and-swallow pill.

” He shrugged arrogantly. “Hence the McFeminism. Hence the token.” Conceit bloomed in his features.

“Your book pretends an adjacence to radicalism, but it isn’t radical at all. There’s no originality in its writing.”

Tash blinked, tasting the room’s silence. The mic hovering by her forehead began emitting an electric buzz. She didn’t dare glance at Janelle.

“And on the flip side of this tokenism, there lies commodity.”

Leo was actually continuing to riff. It transported Tash back to his lectures, back to their bedroom—to the mistakes she’d made at twenty-four. To the mistake she’d made now, by thinking she could manage this podcast. By provoking him before it had even started.

“And then, of course, whatever shreds of integrity the work purported to have are lost when it’s synthesized for the screen.

Your book is being made for television—that postmodern cliché.

A cultural product cosmetically enhanced.

” He gripped the mic rig. “A desacralized replica. An empty frame, which once flattered itself by boasting it was art.”

Tash stunned, shaken by his tirade. She scanned the horizon beyond Leo’s armchair, beyond the audience’s vision, searching for someone from the podcast staff to dart him with a tranquilizer; someone who registered the deviation from his usual, collected tone.

But all she found beside the dimly lit soundboard was Olga Horvat—standing laced to her child, staring triumphantly at Tash.

Meanwhile, the shards of Leo’s takedown glittered everywhere they’d landed—in Tash’s hair, down the front of her dress, strewn across her lap.

She picked up one of the fragments—“Desacralized replica,” he’d said—turning its edges over with shaky fingers. When her eyes could focus, she saw the words for their distorted froth. She registered the evidence that Leo had not only read her book but all its reportage, too.

“Hold on.” Tash banged her lips against the microphone’s cold metal crosshatch, grasping to recover. “I’m hardly the first person to sell the film rights to a novel.”

But Leo preempted her rally. “True. But you might be the first person to predicate a novel on radical feminist ideals, then sell it to an entertainment-conglomerate superstore.” He paused, paws together, snidely savoring his kill.

“Specifically, to its most mainstream, most sexist male director. A man best known for close-ups of girls in hot tubs and action pyrotechnics—”

His mic cut.

Only Tash and the two other guest authors heard Leo spit “Ram Braverman”—as, blessedly, someone on the podcast staff realized the onslaught had gone too far.

One after another, in a hesitant, confused game of visual telephone, the corded sideline techs lowered their red ON AIR plaques. Leo twisted gruffly in his wingback, failing to comprehend the sudden loss of his voice booming across the room. He banged frustratedly at his switched-off output.

A senior producer crept over, whispering in Leo’s ear.

The skin once graced by luxuriant muttonchops mottled a deep red. Leo elbowed at his recording-rig halo. “Goddammit, Derek! Turn me back on!” He moved to get out of his chair.

Before he could leap all the way up, the producer threw his arm over Leo’s shoulders, bustling him off toward the greenroom.

A tech scuttled in front of the glass display case. “We’ve got a glitch, folks!” Suggesting the podcast’s recording equipment, and not its esteemed host, had just melted down. “Let’s take five while the engineers reset.”

Library ushers unsealed the corridor to the museum’s main hall. The front row of audience began to stretch. Tash’s view to Janelle was blocked off.

Tash sat, still in shock, reverb addling her inner ears.

She’d come hoping to distance herself from Braverman, hoping to position herself back on a high ground—but Leo had smacked her with the Hollywood association.

He’d guessed where she’d be tender, and his allegations were correct.

Radical ideals sold to a superstore—Tash had seen the result already, in Episode Nine’s unresolved mess.

She turned to the soundboards, sickened and spinning, needing to disintegrate. She fixed on a large steel rectangle inset in the library’s wallpapered damask—an emergency exit. The path toward it was littered with cabling obstacles, but otherwise abandoned.

Tash did not deliberate; Leo Rousseau could go McFuck himself.

She snatched up her handbag hastily, held her breath, and, with two hands, shoved through a heavy, levered warning on the steel door, triggering a skull-puncturing alarm.

The exit spit her to the bright scrub of the museum’s exterior landscape, where her heels sank into industrial crabgrass, the emergency bleat still roaring.

Tash tripped. She yanked off her shoes. She fled from the lanyard-wearing faces watching her curiously from the exit. From the gorgeous library where Leo Rousseau had just labeled her a sellout and a fraud.

She trembled in the sun, fumbling for her phone, texting Janelle, finding the minivan; then hiding in its shade, awash in the overwhelming relief Caleb hadn’t made it to the taping.

“Tell me that didn’t just happen.” Tash monotoned to Janelle when she finally arrived and unlocked the car. Tash closed her eyes against the hot plate of the passenger-side window, absorbing the scent of sun-seared dashboard.

“Which part?” Janelle maximized the air vents, turning down the kiddie tunes competing with the still-bellowing alarm.

“My discovery that you used to have a taste for reverse-cancel-culture gasbags?” She wrenched over the console to buckle Tash in, like one of her kids.

“I bet that guy made you call him Jacques Derrida while he jerked off to a desacralized replica of his ballsack.” She put the car into reverse.

“If I’m right, you’re paying for drinks. ”

Tash would have loved to laugh. Instead, she looped on a mental replay of Leo’s sneer. Janelle piloted the minivan until the museum sirens had faded; then she pulled into a strip mall, idling the car in front of a tanning salon.

She shifted in her seat, facing Tash head-on. “Hey. Listen. The only person who looked bad back there was that asshole of a host.”

Tash shook her head in shame. “He called me a fraud.” In case her best friend had missed it. “He called me a sellout. On tape. It’ll end up on the fan forums. No one understands Braverman wasn’t my choice—”

“Nope.” Janelle put her hand up. “Enough about the online twatter—that stuff is out of your control. You are not a sellout.”

“I am.” Tash stated the logic flatly: “I’m helping the studio with scene direction that undermines my message. There are all kinds of changes—it’s exactly what Leo was talking about.”

“Fuck Leo!” Vehemently. “Honestly, who even is that guy? Tash, all you’re doing is avoiding a breach of contract. That’s kind of a fundamental thing.”

That her readers would never know about.

Tash’s humiliation mingled with an existential disappointment. “You know what my last press event was? Before this? That panel for Off-Center Arts. Do you remember? The entire place was women.”

Janelle nodded. “I remember.”

“Girls came up afterward and cried, right? It felt meaningful. That’s what I wanted for today. I wanted to talk to Leo and feel proud about how far I’ve come—I wanted to be smarter than I was in grad school.” Flaggingly. “But I just looked compromised.”

Janelle reached awkwardly across the center console to grab both of Tash’s shoulders. “Babe, your ex-boyfriend is a misogynistic hack. He took potshots at you because he felt threatened. You are not a sellout—you are a legend, and you wrote an important book.”

“Based on your ideas.” Tash’s long-standing insecurity.

“Based on our ideas. Are you kidding?” Janelle poked her, hard.

“You know where my ideas go? I take them to an occasional academic conference. They circulate at our crappy, sweet little school. Meanwhile, you put our ideas in a book that’s reached more people than I could ever imagine.

You think ‘mass-market’ is an insult—I know you—but I’m telling you, it’s praise.

That guy has three basement trolls for listeners, and you’re about to have a TV show.

You have eclipsed him, and he can’t stand it.

Creating art that people actually read and watch doesn’t make you lowbrow, Tash. It makes you relevant.”

No more pep talk—Janelle had reached her limit.

She put the minivan in gear and turned her kids’ music up again.

“I’m going to let you feel bad for yourself for exactly three songs while I process my extreme feelings about the men you used to date.

But then we’re finished. We will expunge this from our memory because it isn’t worth it. Onward.”

Tash pulled the lever to lay her seat flat, wishing it could be that quick to forget.