I sigh with frustration. That’s not the point, I want to wail. I mean, yes, sure I’ll talk to Poppy first. But the point is, Haven made me lookbad in front of everyone, and she did it so smoothly, so subtly, that no one even realized she was doing it. It feels like high school all over again. What can I do to stop it from happening? I’m not crazy, I know I’m not. I’m not imagining it. Everyone else just—
A new private message pops up, and all my thoughts screech to a sudden stop. Because the name that’s appeared in bold is Haven’s.
Haven:Hey, Fern. It’s been a while. How’re you doing? Congratulations on your book deal!
For the longest time, my mind remains blank. No, that’s not quite right. It’s actually whizzing around at such a fast rate that I can’t make out any thoughts, it’s just a blur of blinding white. How can she just pop back into my life like this? So casually, as though nothing terrible happened in our past. As though Dani were still alive. I give a small shake of the head and blink furiously. My fingers hover over the keyboard and move of their own accord, bypassing the mess in my head.
Fern:Hi. Yes it’s been a while. Thanks, and congrats on your deal too
I add an exclamation mark at the end of the last sentence to be friendly, then find that I can’t bear it. I delete it, reread the message, and hit send.
Haven:I just wanted to reach out and say I hope there are no hard feelings. That was a million years ago, huh? I’m sure we’ve both grown a lot as people.
My entire body feels hot, as though the blood in my veins has been replaced by liquid flames. No hard feelings? A million years ago? We’vebothgrown a lot? How dare she? It was ten years ago, and I still remember everything she did to me, to Dani, down to the smallest details. Itwas ten years ago, but Dani is still dead. She will forever be gone. But of course, to Haven, none of it truly mattered. It was all just a game to her, and now here she is, trying to play the role of the bigger person. What do I say to her? Should I tell her she’s full of shit and I know exactly what’s behind that beautiful mask of hers? Should I pretend like I don’t know what she’s talking about, so she has to spell it out?
Of course, in the end, my cowardly ass doesn’t do either of those things. I can’t even do passive aggression; I’m more of a straight-up passive kind of person. One might call me a doormat. I would call myself a survivalist.
Fern:God, no, of course no hard feelings. High school was a whole different life. So glad we’re in the same debut group
As soon as I hit Enter, I feel so slimy, so unbearably uncomfortable, that I immediately follow up withGtg, I’m meeting a friend for dinner. Bye!
I close the window and bury my face in my hands. I squeeze my eyes shut and focus on my ragged breathing. I’m okay I’m okay I’m okay I’m ...
Eventually, I calm down enough to look on the bright side of things. I’m still on the other side of the country, far, far away from Haven. Haven reached out with a peace offering. Sure, it’s probably a calculated move, but she has no incentive to target me again, right? I’m a nobody. She has better things to focus on, and like she said, we’ve both grown into different people. She might’ve changed. She might’ve found peace, her vicious edges sanded down by maturity. And all her messages in the Slack group aren’t that bad. Yeah, she’s different. She’s no longer the Haven who made my life hell for seven years. And now that she’s reached out, we can put everything behind us.
Maybe she and I can even become friends one day.
Chapter 12
Despite my initial despair over Lindsay’s notes, I do hop on a call with her after a week of licking my wounds, and the call helps me see that Lindsay’s vision for my book is in fact really good. I end the call excited to work on my book, to take it apart and sew it back together all better. I spend the next four months toiling over it, deleting entire chapters, erasing beloved characters, and rewriting the bulk of the story over again. When I finally get done, the book is altogether a different story. The only thing that made the cut was my main character, and even then, she’s very much changed. I send the new draft to Lindsay with not a little apprehension, and proceed to go on vicious evening runs in the hopes of outrunning my anxiety while I wait for Lindsay to read it.
By the time she replies a month later, I’ve lost five pounds thanks to all the extra running I’ve been doing. The first line of her email says:Fern! I can’t believe how well you’ve tackled this draft.
I burst into tears. I made it. I was handed a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, and I managed to overcome it. Lindsay continues to tell me how proud she is of me, and I think: You know what, Lindsay? I totally agree with you there.
And in this way, the following year alternates between plodding along and whizzing by. Haven and I don’t become friends, but we are generally cordial toward each other, and I have gotten really good at carving out my own space away from hers. Lisa and Jenna and I chat throughout the day, every day. On weekends, our chat channel isgenerally quieter, since they’re both married with kids, but on weekdays we rack up hundreds, if not thousands, of messages to each other. The general Slack channels have settled into a comfortable rhythm, and you know what? Some days, I don’t even really think about Haven as much. Thanks to a combination of meditation, my evening runs, and my incessant baking, I have trained myself into an almost peaceful online coexistence with my nemesis. I am so proud of myself.
There are moments when I backslide. For example, at some point, someone in the debut group suggests exchanging manuscripts with one another so we can read everyone’s books and then provide them with a review on Goodreads. The unspoken agreement is, of course, that you should only give other authors positive reviews, though no one would actually say this out loud. “Honest reviews” is what we actually said. We created a shared folder on Google Drive and uploaded our manuscripts into the folder.
Of course, I immediately open up Haven’s manuscript. When it loads, I see that there are twenty-seven other people currently reading it. I go back to the shared folder and open up my manuscript. There are only three other people currently reading it. Then, as I stare, one of the bubbles disappear, followed by another. Now there is only one person reading my book. I would be lying if I said that didn’t hurt. They didn’t even stay that long, only long enough to read the first page. Is it really that bad? I’ve hacked and slashed at my manuscript, thanks to Lindsay, and I think it’s in amazing shape now. I may have whined endlessly while I edited it, but looking at the new draft, I am glad that Lindsay suggested all these changes. And yet here it is, still unable to retain anyone’s attention. What is it that I’m missing?
I go back to Haven’s manuscript with a sigh. I read the first sentence, frowning. Then the next, and the next, and before I know it, I’ve just raced through three whole chapters. When I finally tear my eyes away from the screen, I’m confused for a split second, feeling that disorientation that comes with resurfacing after a deep nap. I glance back at the screen, my mouth dry. Holy shit. Haven’s book is so good.Unbearably so. When I first started it, I’d read with a critical eye, hoping to catch weaknesses to bitch about to myself, but instead, it grabbed me by the throat and yanked me into its dark, seductive world, and I forgot everything else and fully immersed myself in it.
Shame overwhelms me. Is this what it feels like to be truly humbled? I’d assumed all this time that the reason Haven got her massive seven-figure deals is because of, well, the same reasons she always got the best of everything—because she’s beautiful, because she’s charming, because she has this thing about her that makes people fall in love with her and want to give her the world. But now, reading her manuscript, it becomes clear that the reason Haven got these huge deals is simply because she’s a brilliant writer, and this is somehow so much worse.
For years, I’ve clung to the thought of writing as my own special, unique thing. No one else at my high school had the same passion for it that I did, and even in college, when I studied creative writing, I held this secret thought in the deepest folds of my mind that no one else wanted this quite as badly as I did. I knew it wasn’t true, of course, I wasn’t completely delusional, but it was a thought I liked to hold on to, just to give myself a sense of hope, a sense of purpose from the universe that tells me: Fern, you are not just another drop in the ocean. You are unique. You have something that is so distinct to you, something that makes you special.
But now, it’s clear that this isn’t the case. I have to accept the painful truth, that there’s nothing about me that’s special, not even my writing. No, it’s Haven that’s special. Haven who’s been blessed with everything: beauty, brains, and heaps and heaps of talent. I wish I could take apart whoever made her, dig my fingers in and rip everything apart and try to find the why of everything. Why does someone like Haven get the entire world and someone like me get nothing? She even got Dani, and look what happened to Dani in the end. Tears rush into my eyes as the memory of Dani threatens to overwhelm me once more, and I shake my head furiously, trying to literally shake it off.
So suffice to say I spun out for a bit there. Okay, for a couple of weeks. I would keep myself away from Haven’s manuscript, swearing offit for the sake of my mental health, then within a couple of hours my resolve would crumble like a sandcastle, and I’d click on the document and devour more chapters. I did this until about halfway through her book, then I abandoned all pretense of not reading it and gulped the rest of the story down in a single night. The next day, I stumbled into the office like a zombie. I hadn’t even bothered to hide the dark circles hugging my eyes. Annette looked up from her desk, glanced at me, then turned her gaze very meaningfully to the clock before rolling her eyes. But I’d spent the rest of the night in a baking frenzy, and Annette brightened up a little when she saw the container of donuts I’d brought in.
But I am doing well now. Reading Haven’s book was a hiccup, but eventually I did get over it. Eventually. I slowly wrenched my focus, kicking and screaming, back to my own work. Eyes on the prize, I reminded myself, and now here I am. I’ve got a good routine going. I bake, I go to work, I come home, I go for a run, then I spend the rest of the evenings writing reviews for my fellow debuts. In bed, the thought that puts me to bed is: Just one more year before I become a published author. It’s a thought I take out of a drawer in my mind as I pull my duvet over me and burrow into my bed, a lovely, sweet thought that brings with it a slow, gentle joy. I go to sleep nowadays with a small smile on my lips. 2020 is going to be the year that my life will finally begin.
When articles about a strange virus start circulating in the news, I pay them very little attention. There’s nothing new about a strange virus in a faraway country; it’s a familiar story to me, one that has a predictable end—the government will find some way of shutting down the spread of the virus, and all’s well that ends well. I remain focused. How can I not? My book is coming out this year, this beautiful, glorious year.
I only start paying attention when COVID-19 starts going viral (hah!) on Twitter. Seemingly overnight, my Twitter feed goes from publishing news to COVID-19 news, with people tweeting about how theyknow a friend of a friend who traveled to here or there and came back with it. Still, the many years I have spent learning to put blinders on and ignore the world around me and focus on my own shit kick in, and I’m able to ignore these tweets, shutting them down mentally. It doesn’t matter, I tell myself. The government—or governments, rather, since the virus is now in multiple countries—will come up with a way of dealing with it. It’ll be fine. I need to focus on my book, which is due to come out in just six months’ time.
Based on the size of my advance, I already knew not to expect much marketing and publicity from Harvest, so, in an effort to be proactive, I shelled out twelve grand to hire an independent publicist. Sarah Clarke came highly recommended, and she told me she would get me interviews in magazines and also pitch me to events like book festivals and conferences for me to speak at. Twelve grand is a lot of money, but I don’t have college debt, since I went to a community college for two years before transferring to a cheap in-state school, and I’m a single woman with a full-time job and no social life. I don’t have friends that I have to go out for dinner and drinks with. I don’t travel. My hobbies, baking and running, are about as cheap as hobbies get. I figure I’ve been so responsible with my money that I deserve this one thing—to be able to ensure that my book doesn’t fade into obscurity as soon as it comes out. I did have to empty out most of my savings for it, but it’ll pay off when my book takes off and starts earning royalties.
