Page 29 of Bad Words

“What? You read what?”

“Your story. The Selina Chan fanfic.”

“Oh.” I frowned. “It’s not fanfic.”

“True. Hatefic? Anyway, I read it.” He snapped his head back like a baby bird about to feed and yowled out a laugh. “It’s so aggro. It might be my favorite thing you’ve written.”

“It—wait, really?”

“Yeah. There’s this snap to it, you know? Reminds me of the stuff you wrote in undergrad.”

“Hang on. You didn’t also read—I mean—” I set down the mail. “This morning, did you read—?”

“Read what?” He mopped his dripping brow with a palmful of apron, clueless.

He hadn’t read Selina Chan’s response. He’d arrived independently at her conclusion, that my joke story had a sense of energy and lucidity that neither of my actual books had exhibited.

“What’s wrong?” he said. “It was supposed to be fun to read, right?”

“Yes. Yeah.” I tried to resurrect my smile. “Sorry, just—it’s hot in here.”

He studied me.

“That’s burning,” I said, pointing.

“Oh, shit.” Arthur spun back around. I took the opportunity to jog down the hall, calling out something about hanging up my coat.

I shut my bedroom door and pressed my forehead against the exposed brick wall.

So much for gaining the upper hand. All I’d done by writing this story was learn three crucial facts. First, that apparently everyone from Arthur to The Paris Review preferred my writing when it was driven by hard-eyed loathing, slammed onto the page with a total disregard for things like beauty and civility. Second, that Selina Chan, cold and lethal though she might have been, was perfectly willing to write something positive—if she thought I deserved it. And third: that counter to everything I’d believed, I could impress her, or at the least surprise her.

Pressing my forehead harder into the brick, my neck hot, my hands pushing deep into my pockets, I told myself that this meant absolutely nothing to me.

As all-consuming as the feud had become, Bill was right: It had given High and Dry an undeniable sense of momentum. Reviews had begun to trickle in. Grant Kim at the L.A. Times had written a rave that should have had me buzzing, but it left me frustrated instead. “Bombastic and celebratory,” he’d said. “Ebullient, bighearted, adventurous.” And Steve Elgin at NPR, calling the book a “dark fairy tale,” “whimsical,” “fantastical” … Somehow, they didn’t satisfy me.

Grant Kim and Steve Elgin had loved my book, but they’d read a different book than the one I’d meant to write.

The book I’d wanted to write had been the one Selina Chan described in City Magazine.

The morning of Grant Kim’s review, I called Bill. “What if she’s right?”

“Parker. What?”

“What if Selina Chan is right, and High and Dry is an abject failure of a book.”

“It’s not an abject fai— Parker, it’s a hell of a book, because you’re a hell of a writer.”

“Good writers can write bad books,” I rasped out. “Happens all the time.”

“Look. Where is this coming from?”

“The City review. No one else … I mean, Bill, she described exactly what I wanted to do with it. She—”

I turned face down on my bed. The silence that followed was mortifying for us both. I muttered an apology to Bill and hung up, crawling back across the bed to my laptop.

Rereading her LitHub interview, I could hear her smooth, contemptuous voice sliding through the air. I know what he wants: sympathy, not serious readership. So confident, so arrogant, as though she knew me better than I knew myself.

I tried to focus on the good: that High and Dry wasn’t getting a critical drubbing; that, according to an email from Lauren’s assistant, the book had already gone into a second printing. The best sign of all came early in the month, when I received an invitation from Kristen Keough—Coronation’s director of publicity—to speak on a panel at the Wiseman Foundation Literary Festival. Kristen had handled the launch for These Extraordinary Times, but High and Dry had been assigned to a publicity assistant named Amanda, who had never contacted me and who I suspected didn’t exist.