Chapter 4: I Won't
Two days passed with no word from Sunset Pictures.
Jason didn't sit around waiting. He applied to two other places, got a callback on one, and went in for an interview. He passed — but the pay was insulting and the role was basically glorified script coverage. He thanked them, declined politely, and kept looking.
By Thursday evening he'd exhausted the job boards without finding anything worth pursuing. He closed his laptop and decided he'd hit the Writers Guild job fair in person tomorrow.
He stretched, noticed it was already dark outside, and realized the school had quietly come alive around him. Cars pulling up to the curb. Small voices in the courtyard below.
The evening kids had arrived.
Jason had been grabbing food out the past few days, but tonight he felt like cooking. He put together a simple pasta and a salad, ate at his desk, then wandered downstairs and out into the courtyard to walk off dinner.
Little Red Wagon's courtyard was bigger than it looked from the street — a generous rectangle with old trees planted along the edges, their roots buckling the pavement in places. Two mature sycamores flanked the main path, and near the back wall a pair of magnolias spread wide enough to shade half the yard. Two three-story red brick buildings faced each other across the space. Only one was in use now — the first floor for kids' activities, the second for nap rooms and staff offices, the third occupied by Jason and, beyond his room, storage.
The second building stood empty. Before the conversion, both had been full. Now thirty kids rattled around in space that used to hold a hundred and fifty.
Jason was thinking about that — about what his grandparents had been picturing when they made the change — when a small figure came barreling out of the shadows with her head down and walked directly into his legs.
The collision knocked her flat on her back.
"Ow!"
Jason crouched down immediately. "Hey — you okay?"
A small, indignant voice fired back: "That really hurt!"
He helped her up. She was a little girl, maybe four or five, small even for her age — thin wrists, a pointed chin, enormous dark eyes that were currently aimed at him like accusations. She was wearing a faded red tracksuit, the cuffs frayed at the edges like something had been chewing on them. Her hair was cut short, just below the ears, sticking up slightly on one side.
She was also now standing in a pile of sand. A small red plastic bucket lay overturned on Jason's foot. She'd apparently been hauling it somewhere at full speed when she'd made contact with his shins.
He looked at her. She looked at him.
Then her eyes went wide.
"It's you. You're the Bad Guy!"
Jason: "…"
She turned and bolted, leaving the bucket completely, sprinting toward the security booth like he was going to chase her.
Jason stood there in the spilled sand and watched her go.
So. He was the Bad Guy. He'd been given worse nicknames, technically, but not by anyone this small.
At the security booth, Earl was eating a bag of pretzels and watching the evening news on a small portable TV when Maya arrived at a dead sprint and grabbed the edge of his window.
"Bad news, bad news," she announced breathlessly. "There's a bad guy on the property."
Earl didn't look up from his pretzels. "What kind of bad guy?"
Maya pointed into the courtyard with great urgency. "That one. The Bad Guy from the other day. He's never here and now he keeps showing up. He's going to do something to the kids — you have to stop him!"
Earl looked over. He could see Jason standing under the courtyard light, brushing sand off his shoes.
"That's not a bad guy," Earl said. "That's the owner."
Maya stared. "Owner?"
"The owner. Everything here is his."
Maya was quiet for several seconds, apparently running this through some internal logic system and finding it deeply unsatisfactory.
"He's still bad," she said finally, with great certainty. "He bumped into me super hard just now. I think he might be a little weird."
Earl pressed his lips together to keep from smiling. He'd learned quickly, once Maya started her evening drop-offs a few months ago, that she had opinions about everything and enough vocabulary to share all of them. She'd also taken it upon herself to have long conversations with him every evening, which he'd come to genuinely look forward to, even if they occasionally put him in difficult positions.
"I wouldn't let the owner hear you call him weird," he said carefully.
Maya was not deterred. The Bad Guy — and she was very clear about why he was the Bad Guy — had stopped her from chasing after Lily. If he hadn't grabbed her, she would have caught up. She was sure of it.
She reached into the pocket of her tracksuit, pulled out her water gun, and held it out to Earl handle-first.
"Here. You take it. Go get him."
Earl looked at the water gun. He looked at Maya.
"Why don't you go?"
Maya's expression shifted to one of complete disbelief, like he'd said something no decent adult should ever say.
"I'm little," she said, with enormous dignity. "When I'm big, I'll get him myself. Right now you have to do it."
Earl gently pushed the water gun back toward her. "The owner already went inside, look."
Maya swung around. The courtyard light was empty. She scanned left and right, then made a small sound of displeasure.
"He runs fast for a bad guy."
She holstered the water gun — an actual holstering motion, hand on hip — and fixed Earl with a serious look.
"Don't let him in tomorrow. And if he tries to come in anyway, you squirt him."
"I'll take that under advisement," Earl said, in a tone that meant absolutely not.
"Grandpa Earl."
"Go back to class, Maya. Ms. Liu's gonna wonder where you went."
"Ms. Liu is texting her boyfriend. She doesn't even notice."
Earl raised an eyebrow. She noticed everything.
He aimed her small shoulders toward the building and gave a gentle push. "Go. Before I tell Ms. Liu you said that."
Maya grumbled but went.
As she walked back across the courtyard she was already formulating a new plan. Ms. Liu was clearly the better option anyway — she'd seen Ms. Liu absolutely read her boyfriend over the phone just last week. That was real firepower. Earl was too soft.
Jason, unaware that he was the subject of an ongoing tactical discussion, had gone back upstairs, turned on the TV for half an hour, turned it off, and opened his laptop.
He pulled up a streaming service and started searching through its catalog methodically — not for entertainment, but as research. He needed to understand the landscape of this world's film industry: what had been made, what worked, what the ceiling looked like, where the gaps were.
To write for an industry, you had to consume it obsessively. Every working screenwriter Jason had ever respected said the same thing: the reading and watching never stopped. You couldn't speak the language if you hadn't heard it ten thousand times.
He couldn't find a single feature with a score above ninety. He settled on one rated eighty-six, watched it straight through, and typed up two pages of notes before it was even ten o'clock.
Then he went downstairs.
The activity room on the first floor was warm and noisy in the way only a room full of small children can be — a specific kind of cheerful chaos, everyone doing something different and all of it loud. Some kids were curled up on beanbags with picture books. A group near the window was building something ambitious out of foam blocks. Near the center of the room, Ms. Liu — early twenties, ponytail, patient expression — had gotten a small cluster of kids into an improvised dance circle.
Jason leaned in the doorway and watched.
He spotted the little girl from his first evening — the one whose dad had dropped her off in the DoorDash jacket, the one who hadn't wanted to let go. She was in the dance circle now, fully committed, arms going.
Then he saw Maya.
She was at the edge of the dance group, watching her friend with bright, animated eyes, mouth moving as she narrated something to herself — and then she turned, saw Jason in the doorway, and her entire face changed. The brightness snapped off. Her chin went up. She crossed her arms.
The expression was approximately: I know what you did and I haven't forgiven you.
Jason kept his face neutral.
Ms. Liu noticed Jason and smiled in his direction. Then her gaze swept back to the group and landed on Maya.
"Maya — you're up. Show us what you've got."
Maya's eyes went wide. She shot a glance at Jason.
Ms. Liu, misreading the hesitation, gave her an encouraging smile. "Come on — girls gotta be bold, right? Don't be shy."
Maya pulled herself up to her full height, which was not very much height, crossed her arms tighter, tilted her chin toward the ceiling, and stared at the wall.
"I won't."