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My group chat starts lighting up again, and while I know we have work to do, I’m relieved we’re okay.
KIRBY
hello from the other siiiiiide
MARA
Kirby. WHY.
KIRBY
But Neil is silent. I’m about to lose my nerve completely when he exits a small brick building across the square.
“Where the hell were you?” I ask, aware I sound like a parent furious their child has come home after curfew.
All around us, parents haul their kids toward the zoo exit.
He gives me an odd look. “I was in the bathroom. I whispered to you in the exhibit. I told you that you should go to your thing and text me when you’re done.”
“I didn’t hear. I was—worried,” I say, stilted, because it sounds so ridiculous. “We have to stick together. I thought you’d—” I break off, suddenly embarrassed by my reaction.
“Abandoned you?” he asks, but he doesn’t say it meanly.
“Well… yeah,” I concede. “Or that you’d been killed.”
“I wouldn’t abandon you. I swear.” He clears his throat, looks at his watch. “Shit, it’s almost eight thirty.”
“Yeah. I know.” The anger I forgot in my panic that he was gone makes its way back to the surface. I picture stacks and stacks of Scandal at Sunset, all waiting to be signed. I bet no one there feels guilty about buying them. I bet they don’t turn the covers over to make sure no one else can see them as they leave the store.
“Can you show up late?” His eyes are large behind his glasses. Hopeful.
At this point, it’s too late for late. “No thanks. I don’t need to draw more attention to myself.” Even as I say this, there’s a tiny part of me that relaxes at the idea of missing the signing. No anxiety over figuring out where to sit or what to say to her. The opposite of FOMO. I’m not entirely happy with this tiny part of me, but still—it’s there. “I shouldn’t have taken that edible. I completely lost track of time in the exhibit.” That must be what’s messing with my brain too.
“Well, it would be great if you told me what it is so I can at least attempt a helpful suggestion.”
“It’s a book signing,” I say with a sigh, trying to make that tiny relaxed part even smaller. It’s easier to be upset with him, so I focus on that instead. “My favorite author, Delilah Park, is—was—doing a book signing, and thanks to Henry ‘it’ll just mellow you out’ Quinlan and your supremely well-timed disappearance, it’s practically almost over.”
He doesn’t say the obvious: that I didn’t have to wait for him.
“You didn’t want to tell me about a book signing?” he asks, further igniting my frustration. He says it like it would have been so simple. “Didn’t we talk about romance novels earlier? Didn’t you see one on my shelf? I don’t know why you felt you had to keep this a secret.”
“Because I’m writing a book, okay?” It just slides out, and after a moment of shock, I realize I like the way it sounds out loud. Admitting it sends a shot of adrenaline through me. “A romance novel. I’m writing a romance novel. I’m not ready to show it to anyone yet, and it’s probably terrible anyway—I mean, some parts of it are okay? I think? And I haven’t told anyone because you know how people treat romance novels, and I just thought, this event, seeing her, being around other people who love these books… I thought I’d feel like I belonged there.”
I’m not sure why my brain picks the moment I declare myself a writer to prove I’m completely inarticulate. I brace myself for the taunts, but they don’t come.
“That’s… extremely cool,” he says.
I wasn’t expecting the relief to feel quite like this: my shoulders relaxing, a long exhale. I assumed he wouldn’t understand the weight of a secret kept for so many years—except maybe he can.
“You really think so?”
He nods. “You writing a book? Yes, absolutely. I don’t think I’ve ever written something longer than ten pages.”
“I want—” I break off, collect myself. There’s no going back now. “I want to be a writer. And not in the sense that I’m writing and that, by definition, makes me a writer—it’s what I want to do with my life. And it feels… really lonely sometimes. Not the actual writing—of course that’s mostly solitary. But feeling like I can’t tell anyone, it almost makes me think it doesn’t really exist. This book signing felt like some validation of that.”
“I’ve read your papers,” he says. “None of that was fiction, of course, but you’re a good writer.”
“Sure didn’t stop you from nitpicking my grammar and punctuation,” I say, but I want to relish the compliment. I want to embrace what I love all the time, not just with Neil on the last day of school, when the stakes are pretty much nonexistent. I want to be fearless about it even when people judge it. “I guess it’s like, in my head, my writing can be as great as I want it to be. But as soon as I declare I’m a writer, I’ll have something to prove. It’s hard to admit that you think you’re good at something creative. And then it’s so much worse for women. We’re told to shrug off compliments, to scoff when someone tells us we’re good at something. We shrink ourselves, convince ourselves what we’re creating doesn’t actually matter.”
