Amelia Unabridged

by Ashley Schumacher

  “Do not call me that.”

  Her dark, curly strands bounce toward me all at once, and her eyes narrow, but a corner of her lips is restraining a smile.

  “Oh, come on, JenJen. Lighten up. It’s a perfectly good name for a girlfriend … or a poodle.”

  “Shove off,” she says, laughing. She steers us into a booth of T-shirts in all the colors of the rainbow with catchy book phrases printed on their fronts: I READ PAST MY BEDTIME or I’M A BOOK DRAGON, NOT A BOOKWORM. Most can also be purchased as posters, and I push us toward the rolled-up plastic tubes near the back of the booth.

  “This is why boyfriends are useless,” Jenna mutters. “They distract you from schoolwork and they make up stupid names that your so-called friends never let you live down.”

  “Chin up, JenJen,” I say, extracting one of the poster tubes from its brethren. “What do you think of this one for our dorm room?”

  The top of the poster is decorated with little cartoon people attempting and failing to ski, skateboard, and surf, the message below reading, “If at first you don’t succeed, read a book instead.”

  “That hardly seems conducive to an encouraging study environment,” Jenna says. “Besides, I don’t appreciate the implication that one cannot be a reader and an athlete.”

  “Killjoy.” I thwap her on the shoulder with the tube.

  “Child.” She grabs the poster from me and hits me lightly atop my head, before heading to the register and sliding her father’s credit card across the counter.

  “You didn’t have to buy it,” I say afterward.

  She shrugs. “Dad said, and I quote, ‘It’s your graduation present. Go crazy. But don’t tell your mother.’”

  “Your poor mom,” I say. “She’s going to want to throttle you when the credit card bill comes in. Meanwhile, you’ll be far away in Ireland, collecting plants and being nerdy.”

  “Specimens,” Jenna corrects.

  “Whatever.” I sidestep a woman in a long skirt pushing a dolly full of boxes like it’s a race car. “She’ll want to give you one of your own lectures and you won’t be there to hear it.”

  “I’ll just blame it on you and she can give you an earful.”

  We move into a slim, unoccupied space between booths so Jenna can pull up the festival schedule on her phone.

  It suddenly strikes me as very adult, our solitary trip to California. Jenna and I are in charge of the events we attend, where we eat lunch, what swag we buy. I keep waiting for somebody to accuse us of being unaccompanied minors, to escort us from the premises and call our parents, but we’re eighteen. We’re enrolled in Missoula for the fall. We are adults. Sort of.

  I am vitalized and cowed by this realization, and I want to remember this moment of watching my friend lead the way on our first long-distance solo trip. While Jenna scrolls, I wrestle my trusty digital camera from my backpack and remove the lens cover. I look through the viewfinder and snap one picture—it’s my rule—and then let the camera hang from its strap around my neck.

  “If we book it, we could make it to ballroom C for the ‘It’s Only a Flesh Wound: Violence in Fantasy’ panel,” I say, grinning. “Get it? Book it?”

  My laugh echoes in the small space, but Jenna only snorts and keeps scrolling. I practically have the schedule memorized, after a week of alternating between staring at the welcome email and obsessively rereading the two Orman books.

  My mind wanders ahead to what his session will be like, my head spinning with everything I know about Orman and Endsley.

  While the first book—The Forest Between the Sea and the Sky—is about finding Orman and the power struggle set up between Ainsley and Emmeline, the second book—The In-Between Queens—is about Emmeline and Ainsley gathering their armies to fight each other for the throne. But because the Old Laws only let them stay in Orman for spurts of time, for parts of the book they are dealing with each other and their parents back in our world. They’re rulers of their realms in Orman, but here in our world they still have to do homework and clean up Oreo crumbs they drop on the carpet. It’s funny to watch them try to exist in such different environments.

  Everyone thinks the third book is going to be set completely in Orman, but I hope not. I like to imagine the girls somewhere in this world with me—Emmeline running out of toilet paper after she pees and dealing with real stuff alongside me, but slipping back into Orman to take her place as the true queen of the kingdom.

  They’re the kind of stories that keep you up late at night, ones I sink into so fully I’m certain they are secret histories of a real world that I just haven’t figured out how to get to. Reading them makes me feel as if I’m putting on a suit of armor over a beloved sweater, fierce and comfortable, nostalgic and adventurous.

  And N. E. Endsley is some sort of absurdly young writing prodigy. He’s only a year older than Jenna and me. Social media lit up a few weeks ago on his nineteenth birthday, and a few prominent sites ran articles recapping his improbably glorious success.

  He started writing the stories when he was only thirteen and published the first book when he was sixteen, the second book’s publication following a year later. The third and final book of the trilogy was supposed to come out this year, but the release date was pushed back indefinitely.

  No one knows why.

  There are rumors, though. Some say that he has writer’s block and can’t figure out how to end such an epic story when it’s become so popular. Some go further and accuse the fandom of being the root of the problem, using words like vapid and invasive. Expecting too much, putting too much pressure on Endsley’s creative space.

  Others still say he’ll never finish, that he’s become a social recluse before the age of twenty-five and that whatever has caused it, the story will end with the second book.

  I hope it’s not true, but I don’t have much to hope on. Nobody does. Endsley rarely grants interviews. What the Orman fandom knows of him comes mostly in trickles and hearsay.

  One night I couldn’t sleep and I fell down an internet rabbit hole, reading comments from people who’ve run into Endsley in New York City, where he lives. One girl saw him at the public library and approached to ask for an autograph of the second book, which she happened to have with her. Endsley refused. But as he walked away, a different boy approached her. He apologized for Endsley’s behavior and asked for the girl’s address, promising to send her a signed copy, before apologizing again for Endsley’s rudeness and disappearing into the crowd.

  In an updated post, the girl claimed to have received the book.

  Who knows if it’s true. Maybe I’ll be better able to judge for myself when I see him face-to-face.

  “What about the ‘Just Enough Cooks in the Kitchen’ panel?” Jenna asks, interrupting my daydreaming. “June Turner and some of the authors from that anthology about feminism in high school are speaking. You know, the book I gave you to read last week that you never did?”

  “How do you know I didn’t read it?” I ask.

  “Because you gave it back to me without a page out of place, that’s how. There wasn’t so much as a smudge on it.”

  “Are you suggesting I’m a book destroyer?”

  Jenna gives me the same look I’ve seen Mrs. Williams level at Mr. Williams on weekly grocery runs, when he sneaks extra boxes of prepackaged muffins into the shopping cart, which he claims are “for his girls.” It’s a look of exasperation, but full of so much love it makes my insides burst.

  I laugh. “Fine, I’m not a neat freak. Sue me. And you’re right about me not reading it, but only because I was—”

  “Rereading the Endsley books,” Jenna interrupts. “I know.”

  I link my arm through hers, dragging her once more into the river of people.

  “Feminism panel it is, JenJen. We better get moving if we want seats up front. I know that’s where you’ll want to sit.”

  Jenna is obviously resisting the urge to roll her eyes at me again as I stubbornly keep my arm linked through
hers. It’s difficult to walk side by side with so many people around us. She doesn’t drop her arm, though. It’s her job to make the big and not-so-big choices in this friendship. It’s my job to make whatever she chooses fun, no matter how many faces she makes.

  Both of us have an easy task today, because though she won’t say it aloud, I know that Jenna’s heart is beating just as eagerly as mine, marking time until we are closer to Orman and its creator than we’ve ever been before.

  * * *

  After the surprisingly hilarious talk on feminism, Jenna wants to squeeze in another panel before we get in line for the Endsley session, but I don’t want to risk getting crappy seats. It doesn’t take much whining to wear her down.

  “Fine,” she says, rolling her eyes. “But we’re going to be in line for over an hour, and I’m not going to hear any of this She’s cutting nonsense, so if you need to go to the restroom, go now.”

  “I don’t have to go that bad.”

  “Bad-ly. You better start using proper grammar if you are going to be a professor of English someday.”

  It’s my turn to roll my eyes. Jenna forced me to take an expensive career aptitude test last spring that made all sorts of promises about accuracy and reliability and blah, blah, blah. It spit out Professor. Jenna had said, “Perfect. You can teach English,” and that was that. She had my ten-year plan sorted within the next two hours, my light red boxes lining up next to her purple ones on a spreadsheet.

  The first entry of note—getting into the same college—has already been updated on our shared document, with lines drawn through it to signify its completion. The next, a university preparatory class at the local community college, is highlighted only in my red boxes, because I am to take notes—careful notes, Amelia—while Jenna is in Ireland. It’s only a one-day seminar, but it’s supposed to teach you all kinds of new study techniques and coping mechanisms for getting through college with your dignity and sanity intact. Jenna insists it’s a necessity.

  “Fine. I’ll go,” I tell her, answering for the bathroom run but thinking of the stupid prep course. “Hold my book bag, will you?”

  Jenna gives a long-suffering sigh. “Mine is already too heavy. I’ll sit here and wait for you.”

  She points to a blessedly empty patch of carpet beside a roped-off hallway with a long line of windows overlooking the ocean. From the rope dangles a sign: NO CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS. A soda and half-eaten pastry on the other side of the barrier suggest the presence of a volunteer who has abandoned their post.

  “I’ll be quick,” I say. “I’ll meet you right back here.”

  Jenna leans both our bags against the wall, rotating her shoulders and rubbing her neck as I scamper off, tripping over my feet in my rush.

  The first bathroom I come across has a line that winds out the door and halfway up the wall that borders it. I consider using the men’s restroom (Why is there never a line?) but decide to try my luck on the first floor, hoping the bathrooms there will be empty.

  They’re twice as busy. But it seems silly to go upstairs again so I spend twenty minutes in line, bouncing up and down on my toes, before washing my hands in record time and rushing back upstairs to Jenna and the line for N. E. Endsley.

  My heart is already thumping in my throat, so it doesn’t have a chance to react when I trip on the last step and fall headfirst into the legs of a boy at the top.

  He’s all dark hair and white skin that looks sun-kissed, with warm eyes that are concerned when I meet them. This is what a human chocolate chip cookie must look like. A very stressed cookie. His forehead is furrowed so deeply, I have a headache just looking at him. I would probably care more—about how cute he is, about the lanyard that identifies him as being part of the festival, about whatever is provoking the forehead wrinkles—if I weren’t so eager to get back to Jenna and to see N. E. Endsley.

  “I am very sorry,” the boy says. “I didn’t see you there.”

  “No worries,” I say, bracing myself against his elbow to straighten up. “My fault. I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

  I’m already peering around him, my eyes searching for Jenna, as the boy slides past me and hurries down the stairs, his plastic lanyard blown to the side and bouncing against his shoulder like Clark Kent’s tie.

  At first I wonder if Jenna has left, but she’s only moved to the other side of the hallway. She doesn’t see me approach because her head is turned. Something about her posture reminds me of Gatsby looking forlornly toward the green light at the end of the dock, which makes me nervous.

  “I’m back,” I say, and her head jerks toward me, startled.

  “What’s going on?” I ask, frowning.

  She blinks once, twice, and fidgets. “Nothing. Just lost in thought. Do you think one suitcase is enough for Ireland?”

  I squint at her, trying to reconcile my in-charge friend with this skittish creature before me. She picks at an invisible piece of lint on her tights.

  “Fess up, Williams. What is it?”

  For a moment, she looks guilty, but when she speaks I realize I’ve misdiagnosed her foreboding.

  It’s not shame on her face; it’s pity.

  “Amelia … there’s a rumor that’s been floating around since you left. One woman walked by with a walkie-talkie and I overheard…” She tilts her head toward the hallway. “And another came out only a few minutes later with a team of volunteers. They’re going to announce it shortly.”

  Something sick twists in my stomach.

  “Announce. What?”

  Jenna flinches at my hardened tone.

  “Amelia, let’s try to be as under—”

  “Ladies and gentlemen.” A voice booms from the overhead speakers and the din of the room hushes as much as is to be expected.

  “This is Linda Lancaster, head of events here at CCBF. Due to unforeseen circumstances, N. E. Endsley is unable to attend today’s festivities. We offer our sincerest apologies for this unexpected turn of events. Those who paid for the session will be refunded, or you may donate the difference to our charity partner. Representatives and volunteers will be stationed in the lobby should you have any questions or concerns. Thank you.”

  Rolling sounds of confusion and disappointment splash against the rocks of the blue polo–clad volunteers. I’m looking straight forward, my eyes resting on a booth that sells cloth book covers, but I don’t really see it.

  “Amelia.” Jenna sounds like she’s approaching a wounded animal. “Amelia, please talk to me.”

  I can’t. I can’t handle her trying to comfort me.

  “This is a mistake,” I say. “Right?”

  “It’s not a mistake, Amelia.”

  “Would you stop saying my name like that? I’m not going to”—I wave my arms above my head—“flip out or something.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m pissed.”

  “I know.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  Something in her face doesn’t look quite right, but she doesn’t answer. How can she be so cavalier about this? Endsley was supposed to be the main event of the festival—and my summer. The memory of breathing the same air as him was meant to keep me company during the long Jenna-less summer, while she was in Ireland.

  Now I’ll be alone to suffocate in my thoughts. I’ll spend the next two months waiting for the people on the Wheel of Fortune reruns Mom watches over and over to guess the stupid puzzle, while Jenna enjoys her “Irish excursion,” which most would treat as a vacation but she’ll treat as a botanical expedition.

  I would have done all of these things anyway, but the whole reason I told the Williamses I didn’t want to go with Jenna to Ireland was because it was already too much—the last four years of them paying for dinners and weekend outings and this festival besides. A trip abroad felt like stepping over the invisible line I know I’ve been toeing since freshman year with them and their seemingly endless two-lawyer-parent income. I mentioned the line to Jenna once. She snorted and ignored
my comment completely. But it’s there, even if she can’t see it.

  It’s as present as Jenna’s not-so-subtle insistence that I do something sensible with my college degree instead of pursuing photography like I mentioned once. As present as the high-pitched sobs of a girl half my age who is clutching a worn copy of The In-Between Queens and pressing her face into her father’s shirt.

  It’s all too much.

  “There are a few more panels,” Jenna begins, but she is uncharacteristically cowed into silence when I whirl around to face her, tears that I didn’t give permission to fall rolling down my cheeks.

  She steps forward, and I wonder if this is the beginning of a rare Jenna-initiated hug, but she stops before we’re touching.

  “Maybe we should go back to the hotel and recharge,” she says. “Eat some overpriced mini-fridge ice cream.”

  I’m relieved that it’s her idea to go. I can’t stand the thought of staying here and wandering from panel to panel while my heart does acrobatic maneuvers in my chest.

  On the way out the sliding glass doors of the conference center, I drop my nicked wristband in the trash can.

  chapter two

  The long drive to the airport the next day is disastrously silent. I ask the Uber driver to roll the windows down because the air is cooler here than back home in Texas. I do my best to enjoy it, to find the magic in the dull heat of the sun dappling my cheeks, but I’m in no mood.

  I’m thinking about the phrase “counting chickens before they hatch” and wondering how you’re supposed to find magic in the world and all that crap if you can’t have reasonable expectations of outcomes, when Jenna suddenly begins to roll up the window on her side of the car, forcing me to either close mine or have my eardrums burst from the pressure.

  I’m about to protest, but she cuts me off with, “Don’t be angry.”

  “A little late for that,” I say.

  “I met N. E. Endsley,” she blurts.