Unscripted - Nicole Kronzer Page 0,31
home, my coach, Jenn, says there’s a time for the editor, but only after the writer has had free reign. Press on, I reminded myself, you can revise later.
MAN 1
I haven’t seen this many birds since we went to the bird-feeder convention.
MAN 2
Holy cow! Is that a dead body?
MAN 1
A dead body? Like a dead bird body? There weren’t any of them at the bird-feeder convention. What are we going to do? Do you have a shoebox? We could bury it . . .
MAN 2
No! A human body!
MAN 1
That’s not going to fit in a shoebox.
I sighed and ran my pen off the paper. The bird-feeder convention maybe had potential. But where was this going? What was the point of the scene?
I tore the page out and stuffed it into my bag.
What was a funny kind of dead body? Who could be dead, and we’d be okay with it? I could hear Jenn saying, “Punch up, not down.” She means it’s funny to make fun of people more powerful than you—not less.
With that in mind, I flipped my notebook to a fresh page and made a list:
Funny Dead Bodies:
1. Not actual dead bodies—just bodies you think are dead and then when they wake up and everyone else freaks out, they’re calm and are named Jeff or something.
2. Super-mean substitute teachers . . . Eh. Usually mean substitute teachers are just mean because kids are mean first. Though sometimes they’re straight-up jerks. Still. Still feels like punching down.
3. Hitler? That’s punching up. Or other things Nazi-adjacent? . . . But what are decades-old Nazi bodies doing undecomposed in the woods?
I shook my head, dropped the notebook and pen, and stood up to stretch. I paced around a little, shaking out my hands. Maybe there was something wrong with the premise. Dead body . . . What was funny about dead bodies? Suddenly, I imagined my biological father and Will’s biological mother scowling at my abandoned list on the ground.
“Come on, Zelda,” I muttered, rolling my eyes at my overly dramatic daydream. “It’s a comedy sketch. It’s not real life.” I whirled around, pointed at my notebook, and proclaimed, “Okay, you. Let’s do this. No messing around this time.”
I settled back against the tree again as I propped the notebook on my knees.
Tap-tap-tap. Maybe I should just write a palate cleanser. Something non-dead-body-related.
Tap-tap-tap. Or maybe I can push the boundaries of the premise.
Setting: Mount Rushmore, modern day. We hear “Hail to the Chief” play as a group of politicians walk and wave.
Okay. Presidents. What’s unexpected for a president? I chewed on my lip.
POLITICIAN 1
Thank you! Thank you! It’s so great to see so many of you here today at Mount Rushmore, where we’ve carved dead presidents’ faces into sacred Native American rock face and called it a national park! Please put your hands together for the next president of the United States, Moose MacPhearson!
I threw down my notebook.
I needed to talk to some sane people. I particularly needed to talk to my parents, but they were hiking.
Will was sane and here. He’d be sympathetic to my flailing in the deep end of the hypermasculine pool that was Varsity. But after he warned me about flirting with Ben, I worried he wasn’t going to be interested in helping me figure out what Ben’s mixed signals meant. Still. . . . Maybe I could just tell Will about the weird dude teammate stuff and omit the weird Ben stuff. Where was JV rehearsing? The Main Lodge?
I reached for my cell to text Will and ask him where he was, but quickly remembered that the Rocky freaking Mountains were a freaking cell phone tower dead zone.
Sighing, I tucked my pen behind my ear and slipped my notebook in my bag. Make active choices. It was time to find Will, and the Main Lodge seemed like a good enough place to start looking.
Retracing my steps, I turned down the path that would eventually cross in front of the Main Lodge. As I neared the edge of the woods, someone shouted, “Watch out for the Bludger!” I smiled at the Harry Potter reference, and when I emerged from the trees, 150 guys—probably the Skill-Building teams—were playing the nonflying version of Quidditch in the field in front of the Lodge. There were like eight games going on simultaneously. It felt like everyone was laughing.
My stomach twisted in envy as I watched a short blond guy dressed all in yellow leap over the fence. He must be the human