My mother arrived four hours later, and I didn’t have to say anything to her at all. She just held me while I cried.
CHAPTER 7
MAX, MOXIE UNDERBRIDGE’S ASSISTANT, CAME to collect Darcy for YA Drinks Night at exactly six that evening.
Darcy had been ready since five, which wasn’t like her. But the little black dress demanded makeup, which she’d never worn often enough to get any good at. Usually after her first attempt, Darcy had to start over completely. But today’s ventures at the mirror had gone perfectly, leaving her fidgeting for a solid hour, afraid to touch her own face.
It would have been easier to wear jeans and her fancy black silk T-shirt, with no makeup, like she’d planned. When Max arrived, he was in chinos and a Thundercats pullover.
“Am I too dressed up?” Darcy asked as they rode the elevator down.
“You look great!” Max eyed her up and down. “But Drinks Night isn’t what you’d call a party. It’s just a thing Oscar does every month.”
“And I’m really invited?”
“Anyone with a published YA novel is.”
“Oh,” Darcy said, wondering if Afterworlds really counted as published. It wouldn’t come out until late next September, almost two years after she’d finished it. Didn’t “published” mean your book was actually in stores? Or did it just mean you’d sold it to a publisher? What if you’d signed a contract but hadn’t written a word?
The elevator doors opened, and a moment later they were outside, Max leading the way. The sky had turned a watery blue overhead. The sun was low and the streets in shadow. The heat of late afternoon was cooking up a thickish smell from the sidewalks, as if the city had worked hard all day and needed a shower.
Darcy tried to memorize the storefronts passing by, so she’d know the way home. An organic coffee place, a small theater, a bicycle repair shop.
“Are you online yet?” Max asked.
“Um, I have this Tumblr. But I don’t update it enough. I don’t know what to say, really.”
He laughed. “I meant, did you get online at Moxie’s?”
“Oh, sorry. Not yet.”
“It’s You_Suck_at_Writing.”
Something twisted inside Darcy. “Pardon me?”
“Moxie’s wifi network is You_Suck_at_Writing, with underscores. The password’s ‘DearGenius,’ no space. You found the note on her desk, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.” Darcy took a few slow breaths while the echoes of alarm faded. She’d seen a handwritten page pinned beneath a flickering white blobject on Moxie’s desk, but Darcy hadn’t even cracked open her laptop yet. After the family’s tearful farewells, she’d sat in Moxie’s bedroom, staring into the fabulous closet and arguing with Sodapop about whether birds could talk or not.
Living here in New York felt somehow fragile, breakable if Darcy moved too quickly. She wanted to wait until more realness had settled over her before daring to email her friends with photos of the apartment. Putting on the little black dress and daring Drinks Night seemed positively foolhardy, but she’d promised Moxie that she would go.
She felt a strange moment of jealousy for her friends Carla and Sagan back home, who had the whole summer to read novels and relax beside Carla’s pool before heading off to college. Darcy had an apartment to find, a city to learn, and rewrites to finish in the next few months.
Without looking up from his phone, Max stepped over the stripped frame of a bicycle chained to a NO PARKING sign. “Did you get your ed letter yet?”
“Nan said it’s coming this week,” Darcy said, feeling new jitters. The editorial letter would be the official list of everything wrong with Afterworlds. It seemed perverse for her editor to go into detail, when Darcy herself had spent the last six months wallowing in the novel’s shortcomings. But at least she had an excuse to procrastinate before the rewrites.
“And one last thing she wants me to ask . . .” Max was still reading from his phone, an email from Moxie, apparently. “How’s Untitled Patel going?”
That was the contractual term for the sequel to Afterworlds. But said out loud, the words sounded wrong, like one of Nisha’s verbal tics.
“Um.” A tiny dog tied to the stanchions around a sidewalk café skittered and yipped as Darcy went past. “I’m still outlining, I guess?”
“Still outlining,” Max repeated in a neutral tone, typing with one thumb as they walked.
Darcy wondered why she’d just lied. Afterworlds had simply poured from her fingers, and she had no intention of outlining Untitled Patel. Darcy was fairly certain she didn’t know how to outline.
It was possible she didn’t know how to write novels either, and that last November’s efforts had been some sort of statistical fluke. If a hundred thousand novels were written all at once, surely one would be good purely by accident, like passages of Shakespeare typed by a monkey. But that lucky primate would never write another sonnet, even if someone gave it a publishing contract.
Why was Moxie asking about Untitled Patel already? The first draft wasn’t due for a whole year. Did agents yell at you when you were late? Or were they more like the teachers at Darcy and Nisha’s school, quietly but deeply disappointed when you fell short of your full potential?
Max came to a halt, at last looking up from his phone. “And here we are.”
Candy Ruthless looked like a quaint Irish pub, with its odd name painted in a kelly-green Celtic font on the picture windows. There were loading docks to either side and the faint smell of a fish market in the air. Over the ten-minute walk the neighborhood had changed from refined old edifices to working warehouses. Darcy had no idea of how to get home.
Max paused, his hand on the pub door. “How old are you again?”
“I’ve been to bars before.”
Max only shrugged at this vaguery. Darcy was a published author, after all, and had a reasonably convincing Pennsylvania driver’s license saying she was twenty-three if it came to that. Even so, she found herself grateful to her mother for the little black dress. In the mirror, it had made Darcy look positively adult, and fit perfectly.
“Okay,” Max said. “I’m just going to introduce you to Oscar and leave. I’m not allowed in there.”
“You aren’t twenty-one?”
“I’m twenty-six.” Max gave her an indulgent smile. “But Drinks Night is no agents, no editors, no whatevers. Unless they’re published too, of course.”
“Ah. Of course.” Darcy took a steadying breath as she followed Max inside.
* * *
Darcy had expected Drinks Night to have taken over all of Candy Ruthless. She’d imagined a guest list on a clipboard at the door, or at least a private room separated by bloodred velvet curtains. But now, at ten minutes after six, the reality was a lone wooden table with a drink-ringed, battered surface and three people sitting at it.
Max ushered her forward. “Oscar, this is Darcy Patel.”
Oscar Lassiter rose a little and offered his hand, beaming a class-president smile. “Nice to finally meet you!”
As she took his hand, Darcy realized that the other faces at the table were familiar. She’d seen them in videos, as Twitter avatars, on book jackets.