“No—”
“Do you not like her because she’s so successful?”
“No!”
“Is it because she finishes so many books and you still haven’t finished yours and you’re afraid you’ll never finish it and somehow her success threatens your own chances at being a happy, successful writer someday?”
Ladies and gentlemen: these are my friends.
“It’s probably because he’s afraid they’ll be wearing the same T-shirt again,” Fox put in.
“It’s not any of that!”I snapped.“Ididfinish my book, thank you very much.”
“Kind of,” Keme said.
Millie giggled way too loudly about that.
I refused to engage with them, but I couldn’t let the other insults stand.“And for the record, that T-shirt is from the boys’ department, so I don’t know why Pippi—”
“You know what we should do?”Millie asked.“We should play Who Wore It Best?”
“Pippi,” Fox said.
“Children,” Indira said.
“Okay,” Bobby said.He put his arm around my shoulders and drew me against him.He was warm and solid, and he smelled like that clean, sporty scent I had come to associate with him.“No more teasing Dash.”
“It must have cost her a fortune to rent that gallery,” Fox said.“Michael has an outrageous sense of his own importance.”
“Oh no,” Millie said, “she got the space for free.”
Fox’s “What?”sounded choked.
“Yeah,” Millie said.“Because she did this collaboration with all these other writers and artists on the coast, and they all contributed something, and so there’s an anthology of stories, and they’ve got all these accompanying pieces that you can buy to go with them.”
In the silence that followed, the drone of voices from the gallery washed out into the night.
“Probably motel art,” Fox said.“Insipid little watercolors with no passion, no soul.”
“What writers on the coast?”I asked.“Who?Because therearen’tany writers.”
Indira raised her eyebrows.
Face heating, I stammered, “I mean, no real writers—”
Even Keme looked kind of disappointed in me at that one.
“Professional writers,” I said.“Writers who are working at a professional level.”
No one said anything.
And then Keme said, “You’re a donkey.”
Fortunately, Fox swept in at that moment with “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that gallery.Shilling my wares to—to a crowd of smug, self-satisfied corporate drones.”
Indira’s eyebrows went up again.
“Hawking my work—the work of mysoul—like I’m a fishwife at market!”
