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McNIGHTMARE
Ticktock.
Gray skies rumble with the threat of rain, cedar trees shuddering against the wind. Coffee is my first priority, and Two Birds One Scone is on my way to school. I’ve been working there since I turned sixteen, when my parents made it clear there was no way we could afford out-of-state tuition. While I’ve spent my entire life in Seattle, I always wanted to leave for college if I could. Scholarships will cover most of my first semester at a small liberal arts school in Boston called Emerson. My Two Birds money will cover everything else.
The café is decorated like an aviary, plastic ravens and hawks watching you from every angle. They’re famous not for their scones but for their cinnamon rolls, which are about the size of a small baby, slathered with cream cheese icing, and served warm.
Mercedes, a recent Seattle U grad who works mornings so she can play in her all-female Van Halen cover band, Anne Halen, at night, waves at me from behind the counter.
“Hey, hey,” she says in her too-chipper-before-seven-a.m. voice, already reaching for a compostable cup. “Hazelnut latte with extra whip?”
“You’re wonderful. Thank you.” Two Birds is small, a staff of about eight with two working per shift. Mercedes is my favorite, mainly because she plays better music than anyone else.
My phone buzzes while I’m waiting, Mercedes humming along to Heart’s Greatest Hits. I’m positive it’s McNair—but it’s something much more exciting.
Delilah Park’s book signing has been on my calendar for months, but in the midst of my last-day-of-school-isms, I somehow forgot that tonight I am going to meet my favorite author. I even stashed a few paperbacks in my bag earlier this week. Delilah Park writes romances with feminist heroines and shy, sweet heroes. I devoured These Guarded Hearts and Lay It on Me and Sweet as Sugar Lake, for which she won the country’s highest romance-novel award when she was twenty.
Delilah Park is the person who makes me think my journal scribbles could be something someday. But going to a book signing where the books being signed are romance novels means admitting I am someone who loves romance novels, which I stopped doing after that fateful ninth-grade essay contest.
And maybe admitting I am someone who is writing a romance novel too.
Here is my dilemma: my passion is, at best, someone else’s guilty pleasure. Most of the world takes any opportunity to belittle this thing that centers women in a way most other media doesn’t. Romance novels are a punch line, despite being a million-dollar industry. Even my parents can’t find respect for them. My mom has called them “trash” more than once, and my dad tried to take a box of them to Goodwill last year, simply because I’d run out of space on my bookshelf and he thought I wouldn’t miss them. Fortunately, I caught him on his way out the door.
These days, I have to hide most of my reading. I started writing my novel in secret, assuming I’d tell my parents at some point. But I’m a few chapters from the end, and they still don’t know.
“The finest hazelnut latte in all of Seattle,” Mercedes says as she presents it to me. The light catches the six piercings in her face, none of which I could pull off. “You working today?”
I shake my head. “Last day of school.”
She holds a hand to her heart in mock nostalgia. “Ah, school. I remember it fondly. Or, at the ve
ry least, I remember what the bleachers looked like when I was behind them sneaking joints with my friends.”
Mercedes won’t charge me, but I drop a dollar bill into the tip jar anyway. I pass the kitchen as I leave, calling out a quick hello/goodbye to Colleen, the owner and head baker.
The traffic lights are out all along Forty-Fifth, making every intersection a four-way stop. School starts at 7:05. I’ll be cutting it close, a fact that delights McNair, based on how often he’s lighting up my phone. While I’m stopped, I voice-text Kirby and Mara to let them know I’m stuck in traffic, and I sing along with my rainy-day soundtrack: the Smiths, always the Smiths. I have a new-wave-obsessed aunt who plays them nonstop when we spend Hanukkahs and Passovers at her house down in Portland. Nothing goes better with gloomy weather than Morrissey’s lyrics.
I wonder how they’ll sound in Boston, beating against my eardrums as I stroll through a snow-dusted campus in a peacoat, my hair tucked into a knit hat.
The red SUV in front of me inches forward. I inch forward. Tonight unfolds in my mind. I glide into the bookstore, head held high, none of that shoulder-scrunching my mom is always scolding me about. When I approach Delilah at the signing table, we trade compliments about each other’s dresses, and I tell her how her books changed my life. By the end of our conversation, she finds me brimming with so much talent, she asks if she can mentor me.
I don’t realize the car in front of me has slammed on its brakes until I’m crashing into it, hot coffee splashing down the front of my dress.
“Oh, shit.” I take a few deep breaths after recovering from the shock of being thrown backward, trying to process what happened when my brain is stuck at an exclusive authors-only after-party Delilah invited me to. The harsh metal-on-metal sound is ringing in my ears, and cars behind me are honking. I’m a good driver! I want to tell them. I’ve never been in an accident, and I always go the speed limit. Maybe I can’t parallel park, but despite present evidence to the contrary, I am a good driver. “Shit, shit, shit.”
The honking continues. The SUV’s driver sticks an arm out the window and motions me to follow them onto a residential street, so I do.
I fumble with my seat belt, coffee dripping down my chest and pooling in my lap. The driver stalks toward the back of his car, and the knot of dread in my stomach tightens.
I rear-ended the boy who dumped me a week before prom.
“I am so sorry,” I say as I stumble out of my car, and then, because I didn’t recognize it: “Um. Did you get a new car?”
Spencer Sugiyama scowls at me. “Last week.”
I inspect Spencer inspecting the damage. With longish black hair obscuring half his face, he kneels next to his car, which is barely scratched. Mine has a mangled front bumper and a bent license plate. It’s a used Honda Accord, gray and completely uninteresting, with an odd interior smell I’ve never been able to get rid of. But it’s mine, paid for in full with my Two Birds One Scone money last summer.
“What the hell, Rowan?” Spencer, a second-chair clarinetist I partnered with on a history project earlier this year, used to look at me like I had all the answers. Like he was awed by me. Now his dark eyes seem filled with a mix of frustration—and relief, maybe, that we’re no longer together. It gives me a surge of pleasure that he never got first chair. (And oh yes, he tried.)
