I laughed. “You should go to work for my agent.”
She smiled and beckoned me to her. I rose, somewhat hesitantly, and carefully made my way to the center of the flower. (Was that the pistil? I’d always sucked at natural science.)
She carefully stepped out of it on the couch side, as I entered from the credenza side.
She sat on the couch as I stood at the center. “Okay,” she said, hands up, as if gentling a wild animal. “This is just a thought, an idea. Like I said, I love it already as it is, but something kept striking me as I was reading, and then it clicked for me.”
I looked at the papers, trying to see, trying to guess, what she meant. “What?”
“You’re using the secondary character Brandon as your Greek chorus, right?”
I’d stopped being impressed and surprised by Syd’s knowledge of literary structure and devices. The way she’d broken down all my notes and cut and pasted them together when she’d put them on the flash drives proved time and time again that she was wisewaybeyond her years when it came to books and the way that a novel worked.
“Yes,” I said. “Part Greek chorus and part voice of reason,” I added.
She was already nodding. “Right. Exactly. And I kept thinking, ‘this isn’t a Brandon. This isn’t a new character.’”
“It isn’t? He isn’t?”
She took a deep breath as she shook her head. “No. It’s…Aidan Colly.”
I just stared at her, then looked down at the papers again, too far away to read as I stood over them. My head came back up to see her watching me. “It is?”
She nodded. “It is. It’s exactly the Aidan at the end ofFolly, where you left him, having sort of figured it all out.”
“Is that bad? I mean, will people just think I recycled one character and threw him in another book with a new name?” I knew I shouldn’t worry about what other people thought about my work, but there would be alotof scrutiny on this book since it took me so long to write it, and because of how wellFollyhad done.
“No, it’s not bad. But…here’s a thought.” A huge, bright smile came across her face and I couldn’t help but smile back at her, even though I was scared to death of what she might say next.
“What if it’s not Brandon? What if itisAidan Colly?”
“Like, find and replace Brandon with Aidan? Bump up his scene count?” It wouldn’t be hard to do, but it felt kind of…false.
“Sort of,” she said, then rose from the couch and walked the outside perimeter of the flower. “I think the thought of Aidan came so easily to me because I’d recently transcribed your notes forGangster’s Providence.”
“Okay….”
She took another step around the circle. “And then I thought about the notes you’d started forProvidence, and things clicked.”
“Clicked?”
“Yep. As I was reading, there was something that was being forced. Like you were trying to fit a green triangle into a red hole.”
“What?”
She waved a hand. “Like that little kids’ game, with the pegs and holes and squares and stuff.” I nodded, and she went on. “I know that feeling. I’m like the green triangle and Bribury is the red hole.”
I wanted to ask her about that, to dig deeper, she so seldom talked about herself, but I only waited. Though I did file the thought away for later.
“Like here,” she said and crouched down in front of one of the petals of paper. “Brandon is doing this while he’s with Esel—cute placeholder amalgamation, by the way—but at one point forProvidence, you thought Aidan would saythis.” She pointed at two of the sheets of paper and I squatted down in front of her, with just a paper petal, four sheets of paper wide, between us.
“Hewould say this to Esel. My thought is Aidan is your Brandon—your secondary character, your voice of reason and Greek chorus—but you use your notes fromProvidenceto do it. To make him really Aidan, even give him a small character arc that you alluded to in your notes, here.” She pointed to the petal in front of us and I read her printout from theProvidencetranscribed notes. “And here,” she said, pointing again to a different petal. “And also here.” Another point. Another petal.
My mind was spinning. I wanted to both scream with frustration, and plant myself on the floor and start scouring her notes and breakdowns.
I told myself to keep it together. We could not have another scene like the time I’d pitched a fit when I saw her reading all my chapter ones. We had come a long way since then. And I hoped thatI’dcome a long way in the arrogant asshole department.
“Listen,” she said, rising and taking a small step back, and then another, leaving the flower altogether. “In case you want to freak out and don’t want to do it in front of me, I’m going to go to the bathroom, and take a long walk around the building to stretch my legs.”
