Page 30 of Bad Words

Now I was back on Kristen’s radar. I know this is short notice, her email said, but the festival is at the Arnie Roe Convention Center in the Meatpacking District next weekend. Let me know if you can make it!

Apparently, I had a functioning team again. Maybe even a real marketing plan. An hour later, Kristen had sent me a schedule with the panel’s information—The Future of the Novel, South Stage—and the stall where I’d be signing advance copies of High and Dry.

I invited Arthur, but he had a letter-writing campaign uptown that afternoon, so I arrived alone around 3 PM, my exhibitor badge clipped to my jacket. The spine of the convention center arced gently above me, banks of LED lights zigzagging southward for half a block as a dull roar of sound echoed through the labyrinth of stalls. On the map in my hand, the space looked like a suburban neighborhood, but in the flesh it was a crush of bodies and bulging backpacks and, everywhere, phones—phones extended for selfies, phones aimed at displays, phones glinting under the harsh light.

I ambled by the first row of stalls, where the Center for Fiction was handing out pamphlets about a new writing course, The New Yorker had a roulette wheel involving its ubiquitous tote bags, and the booksellers—McNally Jackson and Greenlight—were being swarmed by attendees who’d trouped over from a nearby stage. I gave the crowds a wide berth. The unfamiliar names interested me more at lit fests and conventions. Every so often, lost in the sea of exhibitors, you’d stumble across something like a hyperlocal press that only published erotic fiction about Santa Claus, staffed by one wide-eyed, beaming person who wanted nothing more in life than to discuss their microscopic niche. I passed a stall for an indie press proudly displaying its inaugural hardback, then a graphic novelist who’d booked out a sliver of space and bedecked it with vinyl stickers of iguanas.

As I approached Coronation’s booths, a nearby group of women glanced at me. I kept walking, the back of my neck warm. Only around a fifth of people in publishing were men, and even fewer were straight or under forty. I was never as conscious of being single as when I went to events like this. Sometimes it felt like a trap, like if I spent too much time talking with any of these good-looking, well-read women, people would think I’d come here on the prowl. Even the idea was embarrassing.

I checked my map and made a final turn. At a brightly colored kids’ booth, youth librarians with pin-studded lanyards were exclaiming over a fantasy blockbuster, and just ahead stood a romance imprint, Flutter, where a line had formed for T-shirts that read I . Halfway down the row, I reached Coronation’s booth.

“Parker!” said Kristen, breathlessly surfacing from a cardboard box full of High and Dry advance copies. She was a fidgety, round-shouldered woman whose hunched posture always made her look like she was falling bodily into whatever activity she was doing. “Good, you’re early.”

“Try to be.”

“Yes! I remember from the last go-around.” For an awkward moment we faced each other across the displays for next year’s spring titles. I didn’t blame Kristen for anything that had happened with These Extraordinary Times, but it was uncomfortable to see her again, like running into your ex-girlfriend in a grocery store.

She edged around the stall’s front counter. “So, your panel is on the South Stage—just past those curtains over there. Walk with me.”

We fell into step, the blue velvet drapes growing ahead. “Feeling ready?” she asked.

“Yeah. A little nervous, I guess. I haven’t done an event since the whole feud thing started.”

“About that. I wanted to warn you that they might ask about it.”

“Really? But it doesn’t have anything to do with the Future of the Novel.”

Kristen puffed out a breath that made her cheeks balloon outward. “Right, but…” We reached the blue curtains, and I caught a glimpse of a sectioned-off area where a hundred-odd chairs faced a modular stage.

“Look, Parker,” she said. “We got some last-minute news. There have been a … a couple of changes with the panel, and—”

I pulled the curtain back, and she broke off midsentence.

“Kristen,” I said.

For once in my life, I wasn’t the earliest person to an event. Selina Chan, wearing a slim green dress and high-top sneakers, was helping a volunteer set the chairs into place onstage.

I let the curtain fall and revolved on the spot, horrified, to face Kristen.

She held up her hands. “Hey. Stay calm.”

A strangled noise made its way from my throat. Stay calm? Selina Chan had probably been preparing all week to decimate me, to make some ironclad case that my books represented a danger to the Future of the Novel, while I wandered in blissful ignorance through my life, assuming I was going to have a normal conversation with another author, not someone who wanted to drain my blood from my veins like one of those dystopian torturers from Mad Max: Fury Road.

The audience was starting to take their seats. In fact, I realized, as I stuck my head through the curtain again, a long line had formed. They knew. They’d all known.

I withdrew before anyone could see me and stripped off my coat. The exhibition hall was freezing, but sweat had begun to roll down my spine, and I assumed it wouldn’t stop until four thirty, when this panel was at its end and I could go back to my apartment to drown myself in the bathtub.

“Parker, it’s going to be fine,” said Kristen.

“Is it?”

“I talked to the organizer. They’re not planning to do anything inflammatory.”

“Right. Sure. Good.”

“Listen”—she checked her phone—“I need to get back to the booth. I’ll see you there for the signing, okay? You’ll be great.”

I couldn’t do anything but nod.