by Julie Wright
She nodded. Her eyes were still shiny from tears. But her fingers were no longer digging into the lawn to uproot helpless blades of still-brown grass, which proved she was trying to see the other point of view. That was important. Seeing the other point of view kept people from becoming villains.
I believed in villains. Every time a person failed to see how somebody else might feel or think, that person became the bad guy in every story. “What do you think we should read your mom today?”
“Cinderella?”
I gave her a smirk. “I think we’re experiencing enough real angst against stepmothers for the day. Try again.”
She laughed, which was good to hear. “Fine. How about the story of the boy who wanted to know what fear was? We haven’t done that one in a long time.”
We hadn’t. I opened the book of fairy tales we’d brought with us and read the story to her while she lounged against her mother’s headstone, and plucked a few of the flower petals from the roses we’d bought, and rubbed them between her fingers, bruising them enough to send their scent into the air.
The sun hung low in the sky, and the air had chilled considerably.
She grinned at me when I finished the story. “You should be an elementary school teacher or a librarian who does the story-time hour. You have a great reading voice.”
I smiled back and stood, wiping grass clippings from my pants and inwardly sighing at the wet spot that definitely marked the back of me. Though the day had been warmish, it was cooling quickly enough that we needed to head back. “I was kind of hoping to use that great reading voice for doing actual readings for my books before book signings.”
“Right. The books. How’s that going?” She stood, too, and turned in the direction of the car.
“My employer told me I’m wasting my time and talent on dreams that will never happen.”
“Wow. You went to work for your mom?”
I laughed and bumped her with my shoulder. “You have an evil side, little sister.”
She laughed, too. “I learned from the best. Thank you, Felicity, for your grand education!” She raised her hands to the sky and brought them together in a show of humble gratitude.
“You’re awful!” I said. “Anyway . . . work was less than awesome. But I did just finish a new book.”
She whirled on me, her face twisted in the indignation of one who had been left out. “And you haven’t sent it to me yet?”
“It’s not a fairy tale. It’s . . . something else.”
“But I read everything you write. I’m your comma queen.”
I gave her what I hoped was my most apologetic look. “I’ve already sent it in to the agent.” I didn’t have to specify which agent because we both knew who I really wanted.
She scowled but good-naturedly asked, “Any bites?”
“No, not yet. But it’s only been a few days.” That was kind of a lie. It had been a week and a half. We walked to the car, and, as I was clicking the key fob to unlock the doors so we could get in, my phone pinged with the message. Without really thinking, I swiped the message open and then glanced down to see who was writing. My jaw went slack, and I had to lean into the car to hold me up because my knees no longer seemed to think they had to hold me upright.
“What’s wrong?” Kat asked from over the top of my car.
I stared up at her, my jaw still slack, my heart slamming my ribs. My eyes had never seemed to stretch open so wide before. In one breathless sentence, my entire life changed. “I just got a bite.”
Chapter Five
“Know what you want and dare to go after it. Bargaining your life away to a sea witch so you can lose your fins, get legs, and talk to the prince of your dreams might get you turned to seafoam. But it might not. And you’ll never know unless you dare to try.”
—Charlotte Kingsley, The Cinderella Fiction
(The “Make Your Own Magic” Chapter)
“No way!”
“Way.” I couldn’t breathe. Was I hyperventilating?
“Well? What does it say?”
I was dreaming. I had to be. I’d been climbing the ladder to success for so long that it felt like this new development might really be me just falling off, not me arriving at the top. “It says she wants to talk to me as soon as possible and wants to know if right now or sometime in the next few hours would work for me.”
Kat practically pole-vaulted over the hood of my car. She had to come to me because I still couldn’t move from where the car held me in a stable, vertical position.
“No way, no way, no way!” Kat grabbed my phone from my hands so she could read the message for herself. “No way, no way, no way!” She shoved the phone back into my hands. “What are you waiting for, dummy? Tell her to call!” My sister was great at giving simultaneous positive and negative feedback.
“Now? We’re in a graveyard.” My hands shook. Maybe we were having an earthquake. Maybe I was about to pass out.
“Tell her to call!” My sister yelled through the fog and the black that was edging into my vision.
My fingers moved on the screen. I’m not sure what I wrote. It might have been, “I just wished hard on a star. Please don’t make it explode.” I felt delirious and happy and slightly sick all at the same time. If this was true joy, then true joy was weird. My finger hit send.
“What do I do if she does call?” I asked. The phone rang just as the question left my mouth.
I held out the phone as if it had turned into a scorpion with a wicked, twitchy tail.
Kat laughed. “Answer! You answer, Lettie. I’ll go hang out with Mom some more.” She slipped the Grimm’s fairy-tale book from my arm and bounded off across the cemetery.
I obeyed my sister and answered.
The conversation was shorter than one would have imagined. Big things apparently didn’t require lengthy conversation. I managed a few verbal grunts of agreement and maybe caught half of what she actually said because everything turned to static after her opening sentence. “We absolutely love this concept!”
They loved it.
Who they were in regards to the we she mentioned hardly mattered because they loved it. They loved what I wrote. They loved my words.
“I’d like to offer you representation. How do you feel about that?”
How did I feel about that? Was this a trick question? “I think that would be terrific,” I said, instead of squealing and crying and saying thank you, thank you, thank you over and over and over again.
She talked some more about how our partnership would be fantastic and how she felt real excitement in finally getting the chance to work with me. Then she said she wanted to meet with me.
The agent of my dreams wanted to meet with me.
She gave me a proposed time to meet, and I must have said something that sounded like agreement because her next words were, “I’ll send you the travel itinerary in the next ten minutes. Write back to confirm you received it and that everything checks out, okay?”
She was sending me a travel itinerary. They loved it.
“Okay, Charlotte?” Jennifer Apsley prompted me again as my mind started drifting away in the moment where daydreams collide with reality. My reality-sucks-but-it-is-reality mother never prepared me for this.
“Yes. That’s great, Ms. Apsley.”
“Call me Jen.”
“Jen. I look forward to meeting you.”
“Yes. Bright and early Monday!” She made a salutation that almost sounded like a kissing noise.
“She wants you there Monday?” Kat said, when she realized my phone was no longer near my ear, and hurried over to discuss what had just happened. She didn’t even try to pretend that she’d made it back to her mother’s grave and hadn’t been creeping back in my direction to eavesdrop. I grabbed her arms and let out a happy, scared, manic scream that should have awakened all the pe
ople in their caskets. Kat screamed with me. We jumped up and down and screamed.
Then I started crying. Because I was a ridiculous excuse for a grown-up. I’d finished my first novel not too long after my twentieth birthday. Six years of rejection and failure were wrapped up in those tears, and they released in a torrent I couldn’t have controlled if I tried.
Kat laughed while I cried, but she stopped abruptly, her eyes suddenly serious. “We don’t have time for this. We’ve got to get you home. We’ve got to get you packed. Got to get you dressed. Get you ready! Come on, Lettie. We’ve got to go!” She cast a look back over her shoulder in the direction of her mother’s grave and said, “Bye, Mom! Gotta help my sister! Love you!”
Kat pretty much shouldered me out of the way after that so that she could open my car door and then ramrod me inside.
I don’t remember driving home at all. It obviously happened because before I could comprehend anything, Kat was gathering up the delivery order left at the door, propelling me into my apartment, dumping the groceries on the couch, and talking a mile a minute about my wardrobe for the big meeting.
“And we should absolutely celebrate tonight!” she declared as she moved into my bedroom and farther still into my closet. “When does Anders usually come by? We should totally wait for him before we head out.”
The silly smile that had occupied my face from pretty much the moment I ended the call with Jennifer Apsley slipped from my lips. I focused my attention on the bedroom and followed Kat’s voice. How could such complete happiness crash around me in so little time? “Anders won’t be coming by. It’ll just be the two of us.”
“Not coming? Why not? Oh, did he get called out? Did he text you or something?”
“No, he didn’t text me. I don’t know if he got called out or not. He just doesn’t come by anymore. That’s all.”
“Why wouldn’t he come by anymore? He’s, like, your best friend. I mean, besides me. Obviously.”
“He’s engaged.”
She dropped the several hangers of shirts she felt were possible candidates for the meeting. “No. He’s not.” She shook her head.
I nodded my head to counteract her shake. “Yes. He is.”
“He can’t be engaged when everyone knows you two are meant to get married. So unless he’s engaged to you, and you’re a jerk for not telling me, you’re wrong.” She actually stepped on the clothes she’d dropped as she exited the closet, still shaking her head. The snap from one of the hangers breaking under her weight felt like my emotions had been given a brief voice.
Snap.
Break.
I hadn’t allowed myself to feel the sad that had been leaking in about Anders. I’d shoved it away every time its shadowy fingers reached for me, but now—in the stark contrast of the happiness over having the agent of my dreams call and declare me validated as a writer—his absence felt like a dagger twisted under my ribs.
“How could you let that happen?”
Her words carried such force, I actually backed up a step. I let out a stuttering laugh. “Oh, come on, Kat. It’s not like that’s something I get a choice in.”
“But you do have a choice. All you have to do is tell him that you love him.”
I laughed again, only this time it was in straight-up panic. “I don’t love him. I mean I do but not like that.”
“Yes, you do.” She crossed her arms over her chest and gave me a look that reminded me of my mother. Whether Kat liked her or not, she’d managed to acquire a few of my mom’s mannerisms during their time together.
“No, I don’t.”
With a grunt of frustration, Kat swept past me to the couch, where she’d left her backpack when we’d come in. She returned with her phone, her fingers moving over the screen until she found what she was looking for, then she turned the phone to me. On the screen was a picture of me sitting on the couch with Anders. There was a bucket of popcorn sitting on our laps. Half of the bucket was on his right leg and half of the bucket was on my left; that’s how close we were sitting next to each other. I looked calm, relaxed, peaceful, in a way I never felt when I looked at myself in the mirror. Is that what people saw when they saw me with Anders?
“Yes. You do.”
Yes. I do, my heart said.
Kat’s voice softened. “And you should go tell him before you can’t ever tell him.”
I rolled my eyes at her and shook my head. “I’m not that girl. I can’t ever tell him. Not now. Not ever. He’s engaged, so that book is closed.”
She harrumphed at me and flounced back to my closet as if I had offended her in the worst way. She picked up the clothes she’d dropped and then sighed. “We should still celebrate. This is all kind of a big deal.”
I smiled, faking every centimeter that my lips stretched upwards. “Yes. We should definitely celebrate.”
After Kat pretty much emptied my entire closet onto my bed in order to find the perfect outfit for my meeting on Monday, we went to dinner. Cicero’s was the restaurant of choice because it was the nicest restaurant in my neighborhood. Besides, Italian was Kat’s favorite food. She looked so incredibly depressed about Anders getting engaged, I knew I had to do something to lift her spirits. The nice thing about trying to make someone else happy was that usually made you happy, too. The evening turned out to be really good even with the prickling reminder that Anders was out of my reach. I tried to reason with myself, to make myself understand that he had never been within my reach, but his continued absence left a little hole in me that got bigger every day I didn’t see him.
Kat’s dad called her halfway through the meal. “You need to answer that,” I said.
“No, I don’t.” She kept her eyes on the penne pasta drowning in marinara sauce.
“You absolutely do.” It was the third ring. My phone went to voice mail on three, but having had experience with Kat’s phone, I knew hers didn’t go until the sixth ring.
“Why?” Fourth ring.
“Because you’re still a minor, and he’s your father—your legal guardian. And because neither of us want a policeman knocking at my door and arresting me for kidnapping you. So. Answer. The. Phone.” I had to give her my stern look, though I didn’t believe she ever truly took it seriously, because we’d made it to the pause between the fifth and sixth rings.
She answered, but glared at me. Just like she didn’t take my stern look seriously, I didn’t take her glare seriously.
Based on the hushed and angry hisses that came from her end of the conversation, and the loud noise that came from him through the phone, I gathered that the conversation didn’t go very well. She explained to him that she was staying with me for a while. My stepfather and I didn’t have the best relationship. It wasn’t like I ever thought to myself, “Man, I really wish I could go hang out with Edward for while . . . maybe catch a movie, go to a baseball game, or fishing, or whatever it is that dads do with daughters.” But the relationship wasn’t too awful either. I didn’t do those things with my own father. Why would I expect to do them with Edward? What we did have was a mutual respect for one another. Edward was a pretty decent guy, all things considered.
Because of that mutual respect, Edward relented and said that Kat could stay with me for a few days. It didn’t hurt her cause that she reminded him of the anniversary of her mother’s death—the one he’d told her to get over. He must have had some time to rethink his words to his daughter. He didn’t exactly agree to the entire week but neither did he disagree, which meant she would be staying for the entire time that she planned on and probably longer just out of spite. I was totally fine with that, especially in light of everything happening in my life. I would have someone to share my excitement with over the possible contract with an agent and maybe even a publisher, and I would have someone to mourn with over my situation with Anders. There was no downside to Kat spending time with me.
; Except when there was.
The downside came while I was sleeping. At some point, Kat sneaked out of my apartment and stirred up a tempest.
No wonder stepsisters always got a bad rap in the fairy tales.
Chapter Six
“Fairy tales teach us that family is not always to be trusted. There’s always some stepmother ordering a huntsman to rip your heart out, or a dad leaving you in the woods with your brother—never mind the fact that a gnarled little witch with a house made out of diabetes and stomachaches is out there.”
—Charlotte Kingsley, The Cinderella Fiction
(The “Love the Family You’ve Got” Chapter)
I awoke to the noise of excited chatter and pans clanging around in my kitchen. I would have thought it was the television except I didn’t have a television in my kitchen. Did Kat invite friends over? When one of the voices revealed itself to be distinctly male, though muffled, I actually felt irritated. Had Kat invited a boy over? Because as much as I wanted to be the cool big sister, I really wasn’t okay with her inviting someone over without talking to me about it first. Because if she wasn’t asking me if she could have friends over, she certainly wasn’t asking Mom or Edward.
My sister would not end up as a teen pregnancy statistic on my watch.
Besides, she had the sort of stepmom who’d go all Mother Gothel on her and lock her up in a tower while shamelessly dropping Kat’s prince out of the tower window into a thorn patch. I would’ve thought that would be enough deterrent.
I’d been a teenager before, which meant I knew that when a teenager had something to hide, there was probably a good reason to be hiding it. Sure, whatever was being cooked up in the kitchen smelled amazing, but that didn’t mean responsibility could be thrown out the window along with Kat’s would-be prince. I entered the kitchen prepared to be the stern grown-up.
But I was not prepared for what actually waited for me in my kitchen.
Anders.
I stared at him, a million questions on my tongue, but I was unable to ask any of them because as much as it had hurt to not see him since the day he’d told me he might be engaged, seeing him in my kitchen for the first time and knowing he was out of my reach hurt so much worse.
