“You’re just looking for a reason to prance around in a microscopic flapper dress, aren’t you?”
She laughed, leaning back against the salt-roughened edge of a crooked metal sign.No Trespassing, it posted.Private Drive.I ignored the pit in my stomach and instead focused on the warm and pleasant swirl just above it. Katie’s eyes were twinkling.
“I think we both know,” she said, “I’ve never needed an excuse to do that.”
23
Katie
The next morning, there was no sign of Meredith in the house. Even though she’d told me to make myself at home, it didn’t feel right trashing her kitchen without saying hello first. Besides, I’d promised Tyler I’d send him a selfie with that day’s newspaper as early as I could.
And so, with the sun rising and the sea breeze blowing, I slipped my laptop into my bag, slid my headphones onto my ears, and soaked up every step—every hedge, fence, and modern farmhouse—until I was in the middle of downtown Southampton. The wide and sleepy streets were understated. Even bustling Main Street, the city’s crown jewel, was quiet at its core: a simple string of boutiques, bake shops, and bistros, all red brick and white siding. I meandered into a café, ordered a latte, and sat by the window.
Alive,I texted, along with the promised proof.
But for how long?he wrote.
I laughed and responded,Longenough to tell you your chapter sucked.
Two seconds later:I was just about to tell you the exact same thing.
I tore off the corner of my croissant.Yesterday was a disaster. I’m going to redo all of it. I’ll let you know when I’m done.
Okay,he replied.No landscape architects, please.
I kicked my feet as I typed.In the prose or in real life?
He responded with an eye-roll emoji. I smiled, then turned my phone upside down and on silent, cracked open my laptop, and stared at my blinking cursor.
But for some reason, when I touched my fingers to the keys, nothing worth keeping came out.
24
Tyler
Katie’s second attempt at her new chapter was even worse than her first. And when I attempted to write mine, it was twice as horrible. We, for all intents and purposes, had writer’s block, and by Wednesday evening, it no longer made sense to fight it. After all, the Fourth of July was tomorrow. And so, our week of writing lost and our manuscript stalled at 121 pages, we committed to forgetting all about our characters and, instead, throwing ourselves back into our real lives. The hope, we’d agreed, was that by giving our brains the holiday weekend to breathe, we’d come back to our pages on Monday and see them in a whole new light.
Katie, I’d surmised, wasn’t even coming back to the city. She had friends who’d rented a house in Montauk and was headed there for the long weekend. I did not ask which friends, and she did not offer to tell me. I, on the other hand, had a ticket to the hottest party in town: an unsanctioned picnic of recovering drunks in Central Park, where an Oakland-bound Arthur had promised a newcomer I’d meet him.
I showed up with a tray of frosted grocery store cookies around two in the afternoon. The newcomer—this happened sometimes—was nowhere to be found. I moseyed past a potluck table, a throng of middle-aged men playing cornhole, and a few girls I knew froma meeting downtown who did not want to speak to me any more than I did not want to speak to them. A few minutes later, I found Pedro sitting on a blanket, scrolling through his phone. I sat down across from him.
“You hear from Arthur at all?” I asked. “He and Rachel make it to the airport all right?”
Pedro laughed. “She texted me before they took off. Said Arthur was so excited last night, he refused to sleep. Laid out his clothes for the flight and everything.”
I grinned, shooting Arthur a quick message demanding photos of his trip and telling him he should ask his grandkids to help him set up a shared album—that I was more than happy to relinquish my role as explainer of all things electronic.
“So,” Pedro said once I’d slipped my phone back in my pocket. “How’s the book coming? Having any fun with it, at least? Now that things are all right with the girl?”
I shrugged. I wouldn’t say that Pedro knew everything about Katie, but she didn’tnotcome up at dinner last Friday. “Everything was going great, honestly. Then Katie had to leave town, and now the pages are lifeless. They suck. It doesn’t make any sense—that, all of a sudden, neither of us can string a decent sentence together. I mean, it’s a romance novel. It’s not supposed to be hard. It’s all right there, what’s supposed to happen. There’s literally a template: They fuck. They fight. They fall in love.”
Pedro scratched his mustache. The women who hated me laughed about something. A squirrel scuttered. In the distance, a horse neighed.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just amazing to me how bad you are at this.”
“At writing?”
