Priscilla tips her cup toward Cate. “Thanks for the tea.”
The girl smiles shyly, clutching her own cup. “This is all kind of...” She shakes her head, then lowers her voice. “The way Fletch talked about these salons, I got the sense they were for a certain—tier?—of writers. But then, I don’t know what I’m doing here. In fact, I feel like a bit of an impostor.”
Priscilla leans in. “If it makes you feel any better, so do I.”
Cate’s expression softens. “Really?”
Millie jumps in. “Hey, come on!” she says. “We’ve all worked hard to get where we are. To finish stories and get published and see the actual books that we’ve actually written in actual bookshops. And sure, I was confused for a minute when I got the invite for this weekend, but then I said to myself, ‘Millie Mitchell, you are worthy.’ ”
Even though she’s still sitting, cross-legged, she might as well have struck a power pose. Priscilla smiles, lowering her cup. “I like that attitude,” she says, but at the same time Cate mutters something inaudible.
“What was that?” asks Sienna.
Cate blushes fiercely. Swallows, fingers fluttering around her mug. “I said, I haven’t done those things. I haven’t seen my book on shelves. I haven’t even got a book deal yet. I just signed with my literary agent a couple of months ago...”
“You’re not evenpublished?” yelps Millie, her cheerful demeanor slipping for just a second before she recovers. “I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Obviously. We all start somewhere.”
“Cate’s right,” says Sienna, glancing around. “No disrespect, butnoneof us seem to be the usual suspects for this sort of thing.”
Priscilla clears her throat. “Perhaps he’s decided to branch out... encourage more diverse voices? Or maybe he—”
GOOOONGGGGG!
A single deep, rich sound rolls through the room like a tide, and as it retreats, Priscilla mentally follows it, back through the door and down the hall to the foyer, and the grand stairs, and the copper disk on the landing.
Everyone falls silent, and in the absence of sound, all she can hear is her own heart hammering inside her chest. She wants to stop time, take a moment to collect herself. Instead, she rises with the rest of them, clutching the high-backed chair for balance as she gets to her feet.
“Whatever Arthur Fletch is up to,” she says, willing her voice smooth, “I think we’re about to find out.”
And then the room is bubbling over with excitement, bodies surging toward the door. Priscilla lets them pass, stalling for a moment to steady herself. She catches her reflection in the coffee table, awash in pink, eyes wide behind her rosy frames.
Well, she thinks, molding a smile onto her face.
No going back now.
The Young Adult Writer
MILLIEMITCHELL IS GOING TODIE.
At least, that’s how it feels. Her heart is a cloud of bees in her chest, so loud she almost can’t hear the voice coming from the stairs.
“Welcome, everyone. I do hope you’ve been making yourselves comfortable.”
The voice comes rolling down the steps, where they’ve all gathered, staring up at the two figures on the landing. Jaxon elbows her in the side, but she doesn’t look at him, because she can’t tear her gaze from the woman in the spiked red heels. The moment Millie saw her, her whole world slammed to a stop.
Because it’sEleanor Vandenberg.
Not just an agent, buttheagent.
The most successful literary agent in the world, according to an article inForbeslast month, though Millie has obviously been following her career forages, back when she was getting ready to query her first novel. It’s standard practice, researching agents before you send them your book, and then after, when you’re waiting for them to reply—a little light stalking on social media, everybody does it—but Eleanor would never deign to have an Instagram, so Millie had to do her homework—which, incidentally, is something she’s always been good at. That’s how she knows Eleanor was the head of her class at Brown, and chief editor of the school’sDaily Herald. That’s how she knows that at twenty-five, Eleanor worked for the oldest and most esteemed literary agency in the States. By thirty, her authors made up half the bestsellers list, and by thirty-five, she’d opened herownagency, taking every single client with her.
Okay, so in case it’s not totally obvious, Millie hasalwayshad an agent crush on Eleanor. She queried her back in the beginning, along with everyone else trying to break in, and even though Eleanor passed, she took the time to add a handwritten note to the form rejection letter.
This shows promise. Keep trying.
Which may not seem like much, but it meant a lot to Millie back then. Still does. Even though it all worked out, and she ended up signing with Dan, who’s a totally decent agent (well, technically he was still an agent’s assistant back then, but he was starting to build his own list). She actually submitted a literary novel, a bittersweet portrait of sisters in the vein of Ann Patchett, but he told her she should consider switching to young adult. Not that her writing wasn’tgood—whew—but given her age (and her appearance), there was a risk she wouldn’t be taken seriously in the literary world.
But YA, he explained, was different. Success relied on the whole package—the story, sure, but also the person selling it. It meant shelving that first book and starting over, but Millie was willing to do the work. And she’s done fine, aside from the bullying and the constant competition, and the fact that last year there was an actual internet award for Most Popular YA Author (which might as well have been called Hottest Author), and she wasn’t even on the longlist. Afterward, Dan sent her a text with a sad-face emoji and told her to hang in there.
