The Hell Back Home

The scene opens on an empty rooftop in a residential area.

Enter Lucie.

Since she was sixteen, Lucie had sat on rooftops in her small hometown in Michigan, watching the sun go down and cursing the town. Sometimes she was alone on her own roof, but others she had company and made company on other buildings.

Now that she was older, she had genuine reason to curse. She lived in one of the apartments her parents owned, since her going-nowhere job couldn’t support her on her own. Most of her friends were going to college elsewhere and had joined other social circles. There was only so much one could do when one was born and grew up in the same small town.

Nothing was going the way she had envisioned it.

But Lucie had big dreams. She just could never make any of them happen for herself. Not in Michigan.

She quit her job. She dropped out. She took some of her savings and bought a train ticket. The night before she was destined to depart, her bedroom door opened while she was packing.

Enter Dave.

“What the fuck?” he asked, staring at the half-full suitcase. “You’re leaving?”

“Yes, Dave,” she replied stalwartly, continuing the fold her clothes. “I’m moving to Los Angeles and becoming a screen writer. Just as I have always said I would.”

Dave stepped forward and stopped her hands. “Lu, you can’t just up and leave. What about everything you have here? Your whole life?”

Lucie tore her hands away and glared at her best friend. “Don’t tell me what I can’t do, and don’t try and stop me! My mind is made up!” She glanced sullenly at her things. “This is the only thing I’ve ever done on my own.” She turned back to Dave with tears in her eyes and desperation on her tongue. “I'm so sick of making lists of things I never finish. I just want to accomplish something…”

He took in her crumbled expression, how badly she thought she needed this. So he gave her a long, tight hug. Then he helped her packed.

Exit Lucie.

Flash forward a year and a half later, Los Angeles, California.

Lucie got a tiny studio apartment a bus ride or two out of Hollywood and applied to several positions at coffee shops and restaurants, just to be on the safe side, before settling in and churning out scripts. For the first few months with no positive reply from networks and movie companies, she remained positive. LA was a vicious system, she had heard.

But as the months passed, she was still working at Starbucks making grumpy people coffee at six in the morning and the only thing she heard from shows and movies was, “The ending has no closure. It’s like the story’s not finished.” A year went by, with nothing to show but a new hairstyle and hipper clothes to fit in.

One of her coworkers owned a flat in a ritzier neighbourhood than she had even seen and threw a party, to which he invited all the people he worked with. Lucie did her makeup pristinely and spent hours putting together an outfit. It all went to waste, however, since about half an hour into the party, she had been mocked and snubbed so many times she couldn’t take it.

Lucie exited to the balcony “for some air”, but there people were clouding up the air with their cigarettes. So, she climbed up the fire escape to the roof and sat with her fancy mixed drink as the sun went down.

It was in that moment that she realized nothing was different. She was unhappy with how her life was, she couldn’t make anything happen, she lived in a shitty place, she worked a shitty job. She was sitting on the roof watching the sunset. The sun still set the exact same way as back home.

The only difference was that Lucie lost herself in the big city lights and everything that mattered most to her. She’d left her family, the house in which she’d grown up, her friends…

Dave. She missed Dave. Hadn’t heard from him in weeks.

Lucie gave her two weeks notice at the coffee shop and moved out of the studio apartment at the end of the month. She took a train out of LA across the Midwest, back to Michigan.

Exit Lucie again.

Her parents had retired and moved to Florida, leaving their only daughter their house. It seemed big and empty without anyone else. Her friends who had been in the area had graduated and gone off to work. They’d painted over the huge wall of graffiti that all the teenagers took turns adding. They’d paved over the baseball field and put in a strip mall.

Nothing was the same. It wasn’t the home that Lucie had remembered, not the hell that she’d told all her new friends in LA about.

When she came home from work—now assistant manager of one of the retail shops in the strip mall—a few days after she’d come back, there was a message on the machine. She scrambled back into the living room, knocking over a chair, when she heard Dave’s voice.

“I finally find your number and address and your landlord tells me you’ve moved back home,” he said with a touch of wry humour. But his voice turned sad. “I don’t get it, Lu. I thought… I thought this was what you wanted… I’m in LA right now. Wish I’d caught you. You could see how great the band’s doing. I guess it’ll have to wait.” Dave’s voice paused. “Love you, Lucie.”

The message ended and Lucie stood staring at the machine for a long time. Tears were rolling down her cheeks, but she didn’t notice. She had an idea for a screenplay. One with an ending.

Fade to black.