Jessa looked down at her shoes. “I’m tall, okay. I need a larger surface area for balance.”
“And there’s no reason to idolize Maxine. I met her. She wasn’t perfect. She loved her husband but neglected her marriage to write. She doubted herself constantly. She probably sped up her own death by taking up writing again after she was supposed to retire and rest. She put on her granny pants one leg at a time, trust me.”
“You’re one to talk. You think your mother was the perfect Book Witch.”
“She was.”
“Ha,” Jessa said.
“Ha?” Rainy asked.
“Ha!” Jessa exclaimed.
“Why are you ha-ing at me?”
“You really are clueless if you haven’t put two and two together about your mother,” Jessa said. “And if you didn’t idolize her so much and think she was flawless, you wouldn’t even need me to finish the book. You would have figured it out by the end of Act One.”
“I don’t even know when that is! Do you think I see the act breaks floating in the air like confused bumblebees?” Rainy waved her hand to indicate little word clouds dancing above her eyes. “It doesn’t work like that, Jessa.”
“It’s after the ‘Find the March Hare’ phone call from your grandfather.”
“You obviously know how the story ends. You know more than I do. I have a fairly good idea who the March Hare is, although what that has to do with my mother, I still don’t know.”
“I can tell you,” Jessa said. “I can tell you everything.”
Rainy narrowed her eyes at her and said slowly, threateningly, and in no uncertain terms, “Write…it…down.”
“You are so annoying,” Jessa said. “I can’t believe I wanted to be you.”
“I hop in and out of books and hang out with fictional characters.I’ve been to Narnia. I’ve been to Middle-earth. I’ve been to Camelot. I’ve been to Mars,sweetheart.The last time I was on a beach looking at the ocean was with Elizabeth Freaking Bennet, okay? Everybody should want to be me.” Rainy paused, rethought a few things. “Apart from the dead mother. Nobody wants that. Almost nobody, I mean. I’ve readCarrie.”
“My mother’s alive,” Jessa said.
“No need to rub it in.”
“But my parents divorced when I was a freshman in high school.”
Rainy’s heart dropped. “Oh, Jessa, I’m sorry. That’s the hard time you mentioned in your speech?”
“ ‘Hard time’ was a euphemism for ‘the worst time of my entire life.’ Probably why I wanted to be you. I was metaphorically living in books while you were literally living in books.” Jessa looked up at the sky. “And now I’m arguing with you at Maxine Blake’s funeral. I am having a nervous breakdown.”
“Later. Finish the book first.”
Jessa laughed. She shook her head and sighed. “I’m not Maxine,” she said to Rainy. “I’ll never be her.”
“Good, because she’s gone. And you’re here. And here always beats not here. Jessa, I need you. I need a writer. I’m not saying you have to write a trillion more of my books, but at least finish this one so I know…I know what my mother was trying to tell me.”
Jessa sighed. “Her message to you is pretty good.”
“Maybe if we went down to the beach, you could write on the sand,” Rainy suggested.
Jessa pulled her hands through her red hair and shook her head. “I don’t know, Rainy…I mean, I don’t even know if I believe this is actually happening.”
Rainy felt her happy ending beginning to slip away.
What could she say to make Jessa understand how much she needed her?
“There’s a fun scene inThrough the Looking-Glass,” Rainy said, “where Alice meets the unicorn. You know it?”
