We were back to one-word answers, I noticed. “Thank you for telling me.”
“I only mentioned it because it seemed relevant to your situation,” he said stiffly.
“My situation.” I didn’t follow him at all. “I’m not wounded.”
“I’m referring to your writing. What you said about copying other writers you admire.”
“So?” I hated the defensive note in my voice.
“Using someone else’s style... It struck me as the same thing.A crutch. Something you can lean on while you work out your own. And then, when you’re strong enough, when you don’t need it anymore”—he looked up, finally, his eyes opaque as silver—“you can let it go.”
I melted. “Tim...”
He moved around the counter, lifting his hand toward me. “You have a, ah...” He leaned in closer. I held my breath. “Flour. Right there.” His fingers brushed my cheek before he shifted back. “From the towel.”
My face flamed.
He put two scones in a bag for me to take home. I couldn’t blurt outI love youthe way I had to Reeti. We weren’t that kind of friends.
But when I left, clutching the scones, I took his book with me, too.
—
When I was in eleventh grade, I went to see the guidance counselor. I already knew I was going to KU, because of Toni. But after I took the SATs, the postcards started coming from other colleges: Columbia in New York, Northwestern in Chicago, little glimpses of my mother’s world arriving in the mail. Maybe I thought Mrs.Bradford would encourage me to apply.
But all the counselor wanted to talk about was our dead mother. “Mourning a loved one isn’t a linear process, Dorothy,” Mrs.Bradford had said, fixing me with a professionally sympathetic smile. “We say that grief has five stages, but you can experience any of those feelings at any time.”
I’d pretended not to know what she was talking about.
But now, working on my writing assignments, I remembered Mrs.Bradford and her five stupid stages of grief. Week after week,I went through them all. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. My Dust Bowl story was dead, and I was in mourning.
Acceptance, unfortunately, was still a long way off.
I didn’t give up on my protagonist as Maeve suggested. But as the term went on, I grew increasingly impatient with Rose. She was not a victim, I thought. Or a slut. But was she the hero of her own story? I made her older. No, younger. Maybe her real adventure began after she left the farm. Maybe she was abducted. Trafficked.No, too dark.Maybe she ran away.Too close.
“What happened to her parents? Her mother?” Claire asked in the workshop, and my mind froze.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. Except a part of me knew that it did.
We brainstormed ideas. How could Rose set off on her own, a twelve-year-old in 1930s Kansas? Not on her own. Not with the traveling magician. Rose needed to defeat her own dragons, I decided, or at least to fight them. It would take some magical event, a portal to another world. Caught up in a dust storm, maybe? A cyclone? It was no voyage to Narnia, but it was a start.
Maeve raised her eyebrows over the morphing of my bleak literary novel into middle-grade fantasy. It wasn’tseriousfiction. Not like the other students were writing. I had no deep insights on the human condition, no clever exploration of social or political themes. But my classmates accepted the transformation without a blink. They threw around words likecommercialandmainstream. Most of us were taking Oscar Diggs’s seminar next term. “Quests are big,” Ryan, the game writer, assured me. “I like that she is too young for a love interest,” Erinma said with satisfaction.
When Reeti declared we should celebrate a real American Thanksgiving at her flat the following Sunday, I invited the whole group over for dinner.
We asked Tim, too, since the bird barely fit into Reeti’s oven and we needed his kitchen to cook the stuffing. And Sam, because... Well.Sam. My heart skipped at the thought of seeing him again, away from the shop, where he always had one eye on his customers, or the sidelines, where his sisters and Sophie and Lily were always watching us.
He came, bringing a loaf of Fiadh’s bread and a package of crisps. I was half-afraid he would spend the evening holding a beer and propping up a corner of Reeti’s fireplace like the angry Irish revolutionary in a period drama. But Sam was in shopkeeper mode, quick and affable.
“He’s very charming,” Claire said after she’d spent half an hour in close conversation with him, alternately touching his arm and her hair. “Where did you say you met again?”
“Clery’s Newsagents. He’s Sam Clery,” I said.
Shauna grinned. “Well done, you.”
“Vegetables do not belong in pudding,” Alan declared, sampling my pumpkin pie. But he had two helpings of Erinma’s Nigerian yam dish, I noticed, and someone ate up all Reeti’s saag paneer, and everyone drank too much.
“Happy Thanksgiving,didi,” Reeti said after the last guest left.
