“Maybe you could email it to us? Start to go over it in a couple of weeks, yeah?”
“Sure Samuel. Okay, let’s do it.”
The group cheers.
“I wanna read it too.”
I look over at Hughie, who looks exhausted. I think the older kids wiped him out.
“Maybe buddy. Might be a bit too old for you.”
Hughie rolls his eyes. “Like everything I’ve read from your class? Try again.”
Niall shoots me a look. “You try telling the kid no.”
Hughie lets out a big yawn. “You ready to call it a night?”
He nods, and I help him up from his chair. I start to lead him to our tent, but Noah grabs at my arm. He looks at Hughie. “Hey Hughie. Do you want to stay with the old people, or come have a cool sleepover in our tent?” Noah points to the Marvel tent, his and Samuel’s.
“Yes!”
I look back and forth between Samuel and Noah. “You don’t have to do that.”
Samuel leans in close to my ear. “We figured it may have been a while since you two, you know…have had a night alone. Your tent happens to be the furthest away from ours.”
It takes me a moment to pick up what he’s putting down. “Oh.” I turn to Niall, who gives me a thumbs up. “Yeah, sure. Thanks guys. Enjoy your sleepover Hughie.”
***
I fall back on the air mattress, my hair slick against my forehead.
“We should get the kids to babysit more often,” Niall says, out of breath. I find the trash bag in the corner of the tent and bury the tied off condom at the bottom.
Don’t need to have to explain that one to Hughie.
“Thanks to agreeing to this. I know it was random.”
“You kidding? This was amazing. Hughie’s having the best time.” He turns to face me. “And, about Michael’s manuscript.”
“What about it?”
“Why don’t we host the discussion and review at the book pub? Then the students who don’t care to participate won’t feel obligated to hang back. I even have a large bulletin board we can use to plot out what’s missing.”
“That sounds nice.”
“I’ll let you tell them, like it’s your idea.”
I roll over and nuzzle against him. “Nah, you’re part of it now. You can tell them in the morning.”
30
“You really made this look like we’re hunting serial killers Danny.” Samuel leans in close to the board, his finger tracing the outline of a red string from one side of the board.
To be fair, maybe I should have used a color other than red for this exercise.
Niall and I had spent most of a slow Sunday at the book pub putting the board together, Hughie cutting out the different length strings at our direction. The board, at first, looked too busy, the plot lines and characters too broken out. We ended up redoing the board, leaning more into the plot holes and, more specifically, the ending.
Lily drops her printed out copy of the manuscript on an empty table. Most of the class took to mocking up notes on their laptops and iPads, but Lily had thought it was more authentic to have an actual hard copy.
