“Shelley.”
“Percy?”
“Ugh, no,” James says. “Mary.”
“True,” she says.
“Okay. Last question. You ready?”
Nelle shakes her head. “No, but ask anyway.”
“When you grow up, what do you want to be?”
Too long a moment passes, enough for James to worry he has offended her somehow.
Then she grins, all teeth, and says, “A horse.”
They talk and watch the people as the revelry winds down. Children whine through their sleepiness about wanting to stay. Families wave goodbye to each other across the square. When the courthouse bell rings ten, Nelle jumps to her feet, her white sundress aflutter.
James follows her up. “Is everything all right?”
“I have to go home.” Her face falters. “But I want to see you again.”
“I’ll text you.”
“I ... don’t have a phone.”
How odd.“Well, where do you live?”
“Twenty-three Blackwood Road.” Nelle spits the words out as if to expel them before they burn her tongue.
The address sounds familiar to James. “I can drive you. It’s kind of a hike.”
“I’ll be fine, but thanks,” she says. “Good night, James.”
“Good night.” He lifts his hand in farewell, too dumbstruck by her abrupt departure to chase after her, to insist she not walk two miles alone in the dark.
Cinderella fleeing the ball, a phantom between buildings, sinking into the shadows behind the courthouse. A white pebble dropped in a lake, visible for a moment before she is overtaken by darkness.
After he’s out of his stupor, James tries to follow her, but she’s long gone.
Chapter 3
James stops his razor mid-stroke, cutting a pale rectangle through charcoal stubble. His cheeks are hollow. Eyes sunken. Jaw sharp. Most of his diet consists of fast food and cases of coffee, so his problem could be a lack of nutrition, but he doesn’t have the motivation tofixit.
He has wasted every night of the summer hunched over his typewriter, clanking out articles for Nancy. Attempted a couple of novels, too, but he has yet to breach a second chapter, and the stress induced by those scrapped dreams demandsmorecoffee. Or whiskey. His traditional Southern parents don’t approve of alcohol in the house, so he keeps a liter stuffed under the mattress.
His routine is simple. Wake up, go to work, go home, write, read, shower, sleep, then resist the urge to pound his head into the mirror as the cycle of what he will do tomorrow haunts him. Instead of harming himself, he finishes shaving, wipes his face, towels off, and steps back from the glass. Cold tile underfoot, he takes a deep breath. Come autumn, he will be back to textbooks.
That’s it,he thinks.After work, I’m seeing Nelle.
That promise draws him to his dresser to find an outfit. Her address tickles the back of his mind, but he is not sure how he knows it. He has never had any friends who lived on Blackwood.
On his way to work, he stops at the gas station, buys two coffees, and pockets some creamer packets. When he started bringing Nancy the French vanilla she liked, she started being a lot nicer to him.
Inside the office on Lincoln’s square, the smell of ink, paper, and old coffee grounds hits James’s nose. He ducks through the foyer’s cloud of dust—the building is a converted Civil War–era home—and into the back room. Nancy is at her desk, rapid-fire typing on her dinosaur of a computer. Over her glasses, she burns holes into his head until she notices the extra coffee in his hand.
James sets the packets of creamer on her desk, followed by his finished article. After his encounter with Nelle the night before, he was struck with creativity and cranked out the remaining eight hundred words as easily as exhaling.
