Deleted Scene: The Prologue That Got Away
16 Apr
Welcome to my new feature, Deleted Scene, in which I blog about a scene that I deleted from my YA novel, Promise Me Something.
In some cases, these deleted scenes were cut for good reason–many were so bad they made me laugh or cringe or want to hide under a rock in embarrassment. But the deleted scene that follows was cut for a different reason altogether: my editor thought it gave away too much. The truth is, when she raised this little seemingly innocuous question in her editorial letter, I had one of those clutch-your-chest-heart-attack moments. I did NOT want to get rid of the prologue. It was my favorite part of the whole book–the one part that I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt was good because I had combed over it and polished it so many times over so many years. In fact, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I wrote the first line of this book when I was in high school. Not even a senior in high school. A sophomore. I know. I’ve been writing this book for a long time.
So when my editor suggested we cut the prologue, or at least drastically reduce it to a single paragraph, I did a lot of soul-searching. How many times had I told my own editing clients that they needed to “kill their darlings” or “drown their puppies” or “strangle their babies” or any number of other horrifically violent metaphors about cutting out their most precious images, metaphors, and paragraphs? How many times had I explained to other people that often a prologue is like scaffolding? You need it there to build the house, but once the house is finished, you can take the scaffolding down. In fact, you have to, to admire the house.
In the end, I tore town my scaffolding. My editor was right–it revealed too much, too soon. But if you don’t mind some (very slight) spoilers, go ahead and read on. I’d love to hear what you think.
Deleted Scene:
The night Olive Barton lay down on the tracks at Talmadge Hill, I got my first kiss. I was fourteen, wearing sticky drugstore lip-gloss that smelled like a creamsicle, and it was freezing inside the movie theater. Sugar-drunk off cherry soda and peppermint patties, I had no idea that, a mile away, a train was gliding like a ghost to swallow a girl.
Olive Barton was not the kind of teenager my father warned me about. She wore pleated skirts to school and had a small, pale face with a hawk nose. The boys in homeroom called her Miss Florida, after the flattest, skinniest state in the country, and the girls teased her about her glasses—a plain, wire-rimmed pair through which she quietly judged them. After the fact, somebody pointed out that Florida had beautiful beaches and all the boys said it was a shame Olive never knew that was what they meant.
By then, they were already re-writing her. People said: Remember how pretty she was? How kind? When the obituary ran in the Belltown Beacon, cheerleaders sobbed in the hallways. The boys who hot-glued Petri dishes to her pants in fourth grade walked around in a daze. Nobody called her “Olive Garden” anymore.
Me? I didn’t cry that day, though I’d known Olive better than most. I couldn’t stop thinking about Levi—about our lips colliding simultaneously with the train—and about “Disappearing,” the anonymous poem published in the lit mag. When Mr. Duncan came on the loudspeaker to announce the date of Olive‘s memorial service, he said, “She was a different kind of girl, too good for this world.” But all day long, I couldn‘t shake the feeling he was wrong.
I didn’t know then what Olive had planned—nobody did. A different kind of memorial service, definitely. And a different kind of disappearing altogether.
