by Julie Wright
“Me too. I was up late last night. It makes me grumpy.” He leaned in for a real kiss. As soon as his lips settled on mine, I felt better, which made the lie about not feeling well a little more of . . . well . . . a lie.
But his leaving without being angry or hurt or whatever it was that had made him go silent on me made it so I could go back to my apartment and work.
He went to the movie.
I stayed up until nearly three in the morning writing an article and answering questions in a witty, personable way. It was important to me to get every word right because the publisher had paid me a lot. I wanted the book to sell and earn out its advance.
Every minute of the process tortured me because of what it had cost me in terms of time with the man who said the magical words—words I believed and returned and felt in my bones. “It’s just this one night,” I promised myself. “They won’t need much more from me after this until the book releases.”
Except they did.
They needed me quite a lot.
After that, Toni didn’t allow me to skip a day of responding to comments. She had a vigorous schedule of times I needed to tweet, times I needed to post images on Instagram, times I needed to write contemplative commentary on life on Facebook.
My life was filled with Toni’s lists of requirements. Whenever my phone pinged, Anders said, “Tell her no.”
Even Kat had grown tired of Toni’s interruptions. “Your outfit looks great, and if Toni doesn’t like it, you can tell her that I think her cats of Instagram are as unoriginal as vanilla ice cream.” Kat had taken a particular dislike to Toni because Toni criticized every outfit Kat had put me in that made its way to a public profile. I finally stopped asking for Kat’s advice.
Kat could say very little good about Toni.
Anders had nothing good to say at all.
He would watch as I disappeared back to my apartment with some excuse of a headache or a stomachache or a toe ache or the pleas of needing to get work done on a new writing project.
Which was the biggest lie of all—even bigger than the toe lie, since I actually had stubbed it while walking in sandals Toni had insisted I buy but that didn’t fit right.
There was no new writing project.
I suffered from social media exhaustion. I responded to people’s comments, wrote platitudes worthy of being framed on walls, answered interview questions, and wrote articles that would allow the book to hit the ground running when it released.
From the time my fingers had gripped the pen used to sign the contract to now, I’d scarcely written anything new for me.
And with every new day that no creation happened, I became more unsettled. When I wasn’t creating, I felt like I was tangling instead. The last time I’d written anything unrelated to marketing my book had been when Lillian had direct messaged me and asked me to do a writer’s sprint with her. She’d scolded me when I told her I couldn’t find the time to write. “Oh, honey,” she’d written. “Time is made, not found. You never find time for the important things. You make the time. That’s how you’re sure they’re the important things. You wouldn’t be scooting over to make room for them if they weren’t.” I cancelled my plans with Anders so I could do the writing sprint with Lillian.
When she found out I’d cancelled plans for a date, she called me so she could scold me again. “Not people!” she said when I answered her call.
“What?”
“You do not ditch humans for writing.”
“You told me I had to make time for the important things.”
The harrumph that blew through my phone told me that if we were in person, she’d smack me upside the head. “People are important things, Lettie. People are the most important things. You do not ditch humans. You can ditch Instagram and Twitter and article writing—especially if the articles are strictly for marketing and not for pay, but you do not ditch humans.”
She was right. Of course she was right. I promised her I would do better.
“You’d better do better because it’s like my momma always said, ‘If you can’t get your priorities straight now, those hairpin turns are going to make up the mountain you careen down later.’ So do better. If you can’t balance your human connections with your creative connections then nothing will connect. Do you understand me?”
I assured her that I did understand. But understanding and accomplishing were not the same thing. Other also-important things kept coming up to take the place of writing and humans. A few sales internationally went through. It meant more money—enough that I was overwhelmed with the windfall of it all. But it also meant more work. More places that required my focus. Although Mirror Press was rushing to get the book released domestically, a few of the international publishers actually beat them to the punch. In August, the book released in Great Britain to shining reviews and accolades and brought a wave of new hype for the book domestically. I wore my Cora original with the British flag for that release. Anders didn’t say anything about the shirt, but he did hum the tune to “God Save the Queen.”
In the little time left over for me, I tried to take Lillian’s advice and focus on the humans in my life. I spent time on the phone with Kat to try to talk her off the ledge that was running away from my mom to join the circus. I spent time helping Anders do a growing number of photo shoots for various authors.
But not enough time. I had to end calls far too quickly with my sister so I could answer other calls ringing in—other calls that were almost always Toni. I had to leave early from time spent with Anders so I could be on time for interviews with radio station and talk show hosts who’d been given ARCs and wanted to be a part of increasing the pre-release buzz. Saying no to those interviews at such a crucial time would be like book murder. So I never said no.
Lillian’s words haunted me. My human connections and creative connections had no balance.
I’d been emptied, creatively speaking.
I felt it in my response to Kat when she called and told me she just couldn’t take my mom anymore. “Seriously, Kat. You gotta learn to handle it. There are going to be people you don’t get along with through your whole life. You won’t like all your coworkers or your bosses or your college professors. It’s just life. You need to learn to deal.”
I’d sounded just like my mom talking.
I felt it in my response to Anders when he suggested we had potential for a long and happy life together. “Get serious, Anders. You don’t want to be saddled with someone who can say she doesn’t believe in marriage even when there’s a possibility that a married couple falls down dead every time she says it.”
That was my fear-of-turning-into-my-mom talking.
How many times had Lillian cautioned me to be careful to protect my relationships?
Not enough, I thought, as Kat started to take hours to answer my texts and as Anders invited his friends from work to go out to the movies with him—even before asking me.
I planned to do better. I would do better. To prove it, I took Anders to a Red Sox game. I wanted the night to be special for Anders and so I got the best seats available. Anders brought his camera, insisting he wanted pictures to commemorate a day with just the two of us.
“And the thousands of other fans and the two or three fans over on the visitor side,” I said. Anders laughed at my joke and hurried to take several successive shots of me. “Hey! I wasn’t ready!”
“Which is why the pictures are beautiful.”
We shut up because the game started.
Shortly into the second inning, my phone buzzed with a text.
Anders didn’t seem to notice with all the noise of the crowd and the announcers. I slipped my phone out of my pocket, justifying to myself that the text might be Kat. It was Toni. I would have put the phone away immediately except that I saw part of the message: catastrophe. I had to keep reading—to know what had been a ca
tastrophe.
It was the Dawson’s Morning Show interview schedule. She needed it rearranged because the launch date and the interview had been set up on the same day, which would mean I’d be late to my own book launch.
I had to respond.
Several minutes later, Anders nudged me, “You’re missing the game, Lettie.”
I hit send and looked up.
My phone buzzed again. Anders tensed. I willed myself not to look.
And I didn’t.
Not for that first message. Or the second one. Or the third.
“I just need to see,” I said helplessly as I slid my phone out again on the fourth message buzzing in.
When I started texting again, Anders got up. “Where are you going?” I asked.
“The lost and found,” he said.
“What did you lose?” I asked.
“Your attention, apparently.” He stomped up the stairs.
Chapter Thirteen
“Pinocchio teaches us the hard truth about honesty. Be honest with others. Be honest with yourself. Even if you can afford a nose job later, you can’t guarantee no one will take your picture before the surgery and post it online where the whole world will see.”
—Charlotte Kingsley, The Cinderella Fiction
(The “Honesty” Chapter)
I went to follow him up but dropped my phone as I stood. By the time I found my phone, picked up his camera bag so it wouldn’t be left unattended, and jostled my way through the people, he’d disappeared. “He won’t leave me,” I muttered to myself. This assurance wasn’t because I believed I didn’t deserve to be left. It wasn’t even because he’d left his camera bag and would have to come back for it. It was because Anders wasn’t that kind of guy.
I texted him an apology and went back to our seats. The first rule of being lost is to go back to the last place you saw the people you are currently missing. I could wander Fenway Park for the whole night and never find him.
Anders returned a short time later with two bags of cashews. “I’m sorry,” I said as he put one of the bags in my hand.
“I know,” he said. “Me too.”
I turned off my phone while he was watching and put it away, hoping that he would accept my sacrifice. It took some time, but somewhere in the fifth inning, he had his arm around me and was cheering along with the crowd. We would be okay.
On the way home, Anders took his eyes off the road for a moment to look my direction. “Hey, what are your plans December 19th?”
I laughed. “Probably lying on my couch with a cold rag over my head because I’ll be coming off the crazy book tour schedule.”
He tossed a smile over my direction. “You’ll have been home for over a month by then. Will you still need a cold rag?”
“As nervous as I am about all the public speaking they’ve set up for me, it will take months—maybe even years—to recover.”
“If I give you a shoulder massage, would I be able to coax you out of the house?”
“Why? What’s going on?” I hooked a finger around the slingshot handle hanging from the interior’s roof. Sometimes Anders took turns too fast. It was good to hang on.
“There’s the opening of a photography exhibit my friends and I are putting on called ‘Many Faces.’”
“Well that sounds . . . ominous and creepy in the back-alley, selling-parts-to-Dr.-Frankenstein kind of way.”
He made the left-hand turn before rolling his eyes at me. “Really? Selling parts to Dr. Frankenstein? You should be writing scary books with that kind of imagination. The point of the exhibit is to show the many faces a person has to wear during the day.”
“Still sounds like Dr. Frankenstein.”
“Lettie, you’re killing me. You know what I mean.” We arrived at our apartment building. Anders pulled into his parking space under the building, turned off the car, and turned to me to try to explain again. “It’s to show how people have different sides of themselves. It’s a display of the authentic and the false. Will you come?”
“Of course. But remember, my attendance is based on the promise of a shoulder massage while we watch The 10th Kingdom.”
He got out of the car, leaned down, shook his head, and said, “Nice try,” before he closed his door.
When I was safely tucked into my apartment, I turned on my phone. Toni had written.
And written.
And written.
And called.
Eighteen texts and three missed calls with lengthy voice mails scowled at me from my phone’s screen. I considered throwing the thing against the wall but instead sat down on what Kat called the Flintstone couch because it felt like it was made out of rocks. From there, I read and listened.
And felt sick.
Her first text said, “I need to talk to you about your boyfriend.”
Her second text said, “Seriously. I need to talk so call me.”
Her third said, “Char, you’re getting sloppy regarding important stuff. He’s tagging you in his posts where there are many pictures of the two of you looking very much like a couple.”
I had imagined hiring a PR firm would give my life an extreme makeover. What it had turned out to be was an extreme takeover.
Her voice mails were long and delivered in her cool, always reasonable, always unruffled tone. She talked about the thing we’d discussed to pieces: My book wasn’t about Cinderella getting the guy; it was about Cinderella getting her head right. I needed to toe the line and do my part.
“I’m not trying to tell you what to do,” she said in her last voice mail, “or how to live your life. I’m just trying to help keep your brand untarnished for the first little while of this release. You can keep your relationships, obviously. Just don’t allow them to have advertising space in the online world.”
There was no way I could tell Anders not to tag me in photos. I liked the photos he took and posted. I liked occupying space in his social media life. Those photos and his willingness to make them public made me feel cared about—cherished. It made me really think about how he felt regarding all the space that should have belonged to him in mine.
As soon as this initial push of sales and the launch was over, I’d make it up to him.
Anders and I had an afternoon date to go listen to a local high school youth symphony play at the Hatch Shell in the Common. He had the whole day off, but, since he’d worked nights the entire week prior, he’d be sleeping in until later, so the concert not starting until three in the afternoon worked out well for us.
I packed us some snack foods, zipped everything up into my backpack, and went to get Anders from his apartment.
He opened the door before my knuckles could rap against the wood. “I am ready for a day to relax!” he said. He took the backpack from my hand, slung it over his shoulders, took my hand, and gave me a kiss before we set off to the shell.
I’d brought a blanket, which Anders spread out on the ground under the trees heavy with foliage. He arranged our “table” on the ground. He set out all the food and made everything look properly presented. “You and your artist’s eye,” I said when he rearranged a few things because the display felt “out of balance.”
“Is that a bad thing?” he asked, settling down next to me so we could actually eat.
I leaned into him as the first leaves of autumn fluttered down every now and again around us. “Mm, no. Never. Your artist’s eye is one of the things I love most about you.”
He grinned. “What other things do you love about me?”
“All the things. If I had to list them all, we’d have to live here because it would take forever. But if you want to know another thing, I love that you are patient with people.”
“I’m not always patient.”
I pulled a few grapes off their stem. “You are too. You’re even somehow always patient with tha
t dragon Shannon—even after she accused me of sabotaging pipes.” I’d nearly clubbed her with a pipe just to show her what kind of damage I could really do with one, but Anders had stepped in and explained why her theory was impossible.
As if reading my thoughts, he said, “The way she was getting you all worked up would have ended in violence. I wasn’t being patient. I was keeping us out of jail.”
“You’re the only person who could have talked her out of charging me for the cleanup and damage fees.” I raised my voice to something shrill and borderline malevolent, “Oh Anders, Anders, is there anything I can do for you? Would you like me to massage your feet while I feed you grapes and fan you with palm fronds and poison your girlfriend?”
“Shannon does not have a crush on me,” he said, though he laughed at my impersonation of her. “You and Kat and your conspiracy theories. But if she offered me a foot massage and a grape feeding . . . I might take her up on it.”
“What about the poisoning of the girlfriend?”
“Well . . . I mean . . . it’s not like you’ve ever offered to feed me grapes.”
“Let me remedy that for you.” I flicked a grape at his forehead and hit my mark, not that such a thing was hard, since he was sitting right next to me.
He raised his hands in surrender. “I kid! I kid! And you have wicked good aim, Charlotte Kingsley.”
“This would be a good thing for you to keep in mind.”
“Noted. But seriously, if Shannon ever offered to poison you, I’d let you carry out your plan to club her with a water pipe, even though doing such a thing would make us bad people. We’d end up being dragged to the underworld for an eternity of torment along with people who don’t string their string cheese and who talk in movie theaters during the movie.”
“Not stringing your string cheese is worthy of endless torment?”
He nodded.
“Anders, I have something to confess—”
“Don’t even think about finishing that statement. Besides, I know for a fact you do string your string cheese and that you’re a good person, so there.”
