Cultivation Commentary – Chapter 2: “a little longer”

NOTE: Full spoilers for the book contained below.

Essie took another bite of her breadstick and rested her chin on her hands.

Here is the worst Cultivation factoid I can think of: THE MYSTERY GRAPE. For some reason, in the initial drafts of chapter 2 when the Marsh family eats at the pizza restaurant, it read that “Essie popped a grape into her mouth.” I guess I wrote that line and forgot about it, because when I did my final edit for the novel it threw me for a loop. I don’t know where this grape came from. Pizza restaurants don’t serve grapes. Unless maybe they’re fine Italian, which this restaurant is not supposed to be. I switched it out for a breadstick. The grape was only mentioned in one place and the reason for its existence shall forever remain a mystery.

Here are a few other factoids, less nonsensical than that one. Timeline factoids!

Maxine was born to Leo and Becky Marsh on July 5th, 2002.

Julia was born to Essie and Mr. Perez on May 13th, 2005.

Essie divorced Mr. Perez in mid 2010.

Leo met Essie and started dating her in late 2015.

Leo married Essie in mid 2016. Julia was 11 and Maxine was 13.

Cultivation takes place on a weekend in mid October, 2021. And considering there’s no mention of online classes, I suppose it’s an alternate timeline in which the COVID-19 pandemic never happened, or was dealt with relatively quickly. (Hmmm…)

Maxine was paler than the rest of the family—she got it from Becky, her late mother—and was wearing a head of hair that Leonard had never seen before: cropped neatly to chin level and bleached a very light blonde, almost white.

I drew up an initial drawing for Maxine on my phone like I did for the rest of the Marsh family, but it was even less helpful than those ones. I never attempted to redraw it and kept it around for some reason.

Leo’s eyes flitted up to Curtis behind Max and he met the young man’s lively, smirking gaze. After an instant of meeting stares, however, he changed his mind: it wasn’t lively. The smirk was a dead thing hung loosely over a real face Curtis didn’t want the family to see. Leonard couldn’t help but drop his high-effort smile in response, lowering his brow. The boy stopped rolling his head and instead held it steady with military sturdiness and eyes that spoke something. Something strange.

He wasn’t sure exactly what Curtis’s game was, but he was almost certain it had something to do with controlling his daughter—sexually, most likely (at the very least).

This was the first of the misdirection attempts; drawing suspicion away from Maxine by making other people seem more suspicious. Hopefully it worked, or at least prolonged the mystery of Maxine’s morality a little longer.

“Oh, Max…I gotta ask. Have you seen Phil?” Julia asked.
“Phil?”
“Phil Jensen, my friend from school?” She bit her lip.
“Oh, yeah! Yeah. No, I remember him. I have seen him around.” She squinted her eyes and pursed her lips. “I think I heard he was out of town for work. It might have been summer sales or something. I can’t remember.”

Maxine had to improvise here.

She nodded. “Yes. Our daughter…oh, she’s doing so well.”
He laughed softly, almost inaudibly. “Yeah. She is.”
There it was. Essie could read discomfort on Leonard’s face like it was a billboard. “Something…wrong?” she said quietly.
“No, it’s just…” He sighed and stared up at the ceiling again. “Hard to process.”

The fact that Leonard feels odd about Maxine is a probably a red flag for the reader that she’s not a good guy nor a victim. Ultimately, I guess that undermines the surprise of her true self being revealed halfway through the book.

But I think I’m alright with that. The mystery of whether she’s an innocent victim or a psychopath cultist is not the sole driving force in the novel, and if I’d tried to hide it any more I think the revelation likely would have bordered on unrealistic.

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