Adam Cole stared at his reflection in the shiny mirrored elevator walls.
He was sweating through the only good jacket he owned.
“You can do this.
You’re going to sell this script,” he whispered to himself, trying hard to believe it.
But honestly, his heart was pounding out of his chest like a drum.
The meeting was a total disaster.
It lasted exactly eleven minutes.
The fancy Hollywood executive was polite, but Adam could tell he didn’t care at all.
“The script is good, but we just can’t take a risk on something like this right now,” the man in the suit said, checking his watch.
Adam felt a huge lump form in his throat.
He just nodded and packed up his stuff.
When he walked out of the glass office, he looked back and saw the executive laughing at his phone.
He’s probably laughing at my stupid ideas, Adam thought sadly.
He felt like a complete loser.
Standing outside on Wilshire Boulevard, the sun was blinding.
Adam felt a heavy weight on his shoulders.
He was thirty-one years old, completely broke, and four months behind on rent.
His landlord was super mad at him and threatened to kick him out.
All he did with his life was edit boring, ninety-second movie trailers for other people, while his own dreams slowly died inside a desk drawer.
He couldn’t go home.
He needed a drink really bad.
He stumbled into a random, dark bar and ordered drink after drink.
The alcohol burned his throat but it helped numb the awful pain of rejection.
After a while, he started rambling to the bartender about his favorite horror movie.
He talked passionately about the camera angles and how he would fix the ending if he was the director.
The bartender totally ignored him, but Adam just kept drinking until the room started spinning and everything went completely black.
Splash!
Adam woke up with a giant gasp.
The grass underneath him was freezing and wet.
Ch-ch-ch!
A lawn sprinkler was spraying him right in the face.
“Hey, man, get up!
You’re gonna get soaked!” a loud voice yelled.
Adam groaned and rubbed his pounding head.
A young guy with a backpack was staring at him with a worried look on his face.
“Are you okay?
You look like you saw a ghost or something,” the guy said.
“Where am I?” Adam mumbled.
His brain felt like total mush.
The guy laughed like Adam had just told a funny joke.
“USC, bro!
Where you’ve been living for the last two years.
Do you want me to walk you to the campus doctor?”
Adam’s eyes widened in pure shock.
USC?
He hadn’t been to this college in ten years!
He had dropped out when he was twenty-one because he ran out of money!
He quickly looked down at his hands.
They weren’t wrinkled and tired from years of editing.
They were smooth.
They were young!
“What’s the date?!” Adam demanded, his voice shaking.
The guy’s smile completely vanished.
“Uh, it’s Tuesday.
The eighteenth,” he said, looking a little scared.
“Adam, man, you’re really freaking me out.”
Adam.
Not “Adam the failed writer.” Just Adam.
And this guy—who Adam suddenly realized was named Marcus, his old college roommate—was talking to him like it was ten years in the past!
For the next few days, Adam walked around like a zombie.
He kept expecting to wake up in his crappy, smelly apartment, but he didn’t.
He was really stuck in the past.
It was like living in a crazy sci-fi movie.
He felt so confused and scared, and Marcus kept asking him if he was okay because he was acting so weird.
Adam just lied and said he was stressed about finals.
To find out the truth, he snuck into the library on the fourth night and got on a clunky old computer.
His hands were shaking.
He typed in the name of the horror movie he had been talking about at the bar.
He pressed Enter and held his breath.
No results found.
Adam gasped out loud in the quiet library.
The movie didn’t exist!
The famous director didn’t exist!
Even the big movie studio that was supposed to make it had gone completely bankrupt in this universe!
He fell back into his chair, his mind racing a million miles an hour.
He realized something absolutely incredible.
If these famous movies didn’t exist in this world, that meant he was the only person alive who knew about them!
He wasn’t a thirty-one-year-old failure anymore.
He was a twenty-one-year-old kid with a brain full of future blockbuster hits!
It was like a miracle.
The next day, Marcus sat across from him in the cafeteria, eating a plate of gross, rubbery eggs.
“You’ve been super weird all week, bro,” Marcus said, looking at him closely.
“I can’t tell if it’s a good weird or a bad weird.”
Adam looked up.
For the first time in years, he felt a warm fire of hope burning inside his chest.
He wasn’t sad anymore.
“I think it’s good,” Adam said, smiling a real, genuine smile.
Marcus raised an eyebrow.
“Oh yeah?
Did you finally pick an idea for our thesis film?”
Adam thought about the script in his head.
He knew every single scene, every single line of dialogue, and exactly how to make it perfect.
“Yeah,” Adam said excitedly, his eyes shining with pure determination.
“I’m going to make a movie called Saw.”