“Mr.—Gary, please let me pay for you,” Travis said.
Gary laughed. “My boy, it’s no secret to you that I have sold many books. I am a millionaire many times over. I will be buying the ice cream this evening for all of you, thank you very much. Buy Deathstorm when it comes out if you must repay me.”
“Oh, I will. You better believe I will.”
Gary approached the young man behind the counter and pulled a fat, intricately tooled wallet from his pocket. “I’ll be paying for my young friends here. And whatever they order”—he leaned in with a conspiratorial wink—“make it a triple. All around.” He drew a circle in the air with his finger.
They all sat down with their ice cream.
“So, Travis, what house are you?” Gary asked, spooning ice cream into his mouth and grunting with delight.
“Oh, Northbrook. Definitely Northbrook,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation.
Gary pointed his spoon at Travis. “Indeed! I had you pegged as a Northbrook, but I was prepared to talk you out of whatever other ideas you may have had. House Tanaris? House Wolfric? Who knows how people think.”
Travis beamed.
“All right, then,” Gary said. “Let’s put your friends in their rightful houses, shall we?”
“Yeah! Dill’s a musician. So…”
“Minstrels’ Brotherhood,” Gary and Travis said simultaneously. They grinned.
“All right, Lydia…she’s supersmart and she loves to read and write…so…House Letra?” Travis said.
“Yes, yes,” Gary said, rubbing his chin. “Or…The Learned Order?”
Travis considered the proposition tentatively, not wanting to contradict his idol, but realizing he might have no choice. “Only thing is that there’s a lifelong chastity vow.”
“I forgot about that,” Gary murmured.
“Nope,” Lydia said. “My chastity vow extends only to high school. I’ll take the other choice. Hey, I don’t want to interrupt the Bloodfallery, but Gary, how did you become a writer?”
He finished a bite of ice cream. “I grew up on a farm in Kansas. Wheat. Corn. We had some animals. We worked from dawn until dusk. I loved the books of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Robert E. Howard. As I worked, I would create worlds in my mind. Characters. People. Languages. Races. Battles. It was my escape. Pretty soon, I had too much for my head to hold and I needed to put some on paper.”
“I do that!” Travis said. “I work at a lumberyard and I imagine stuff while I work. What did your parents think about you becoming a writer?”
A wistful smile. “My father…was not a kind man. He drove me hard and he thought writing was foolishness. And maybe he was right. But you couldn’t have told me that then and you couldn’t tell me that now.”
A moment of quiet. Gary finished another bite of ice cream. “Are you a writer, Travis?”
“Oh no.”
“Why not?”
“I mean…I can’t write.”
“Well, have you ever tried?”
“No.”
“Then of course you can’t! Writing is something you can learn only by doing. To become a writer, you need an imagination, which you clearly have. You need to read books, which you clearly do. And you need to write, which you don’t yet do, but should.”
“Don’t you need to go to college to be a writer?”
“Not at all. Listen, we live in a remarkable time. There’s free advice everywhere on the Internet. Have you ever read Bloodfall fanfic?”
“Yes,” Travis said, hesitating. “But I’ll stop if you want me to.”
Gary laughed. “Nonsense. Start there. Write some Bloodfall fanfic. Borrow my characters. I give you permission. Get practice writing. And then begin to create your own. I sense something special in you. A great imagination. I sense that you have a story to tell.”
Travis glowed. Something began to grow inside of him. Something that might be able to grow through the rocks and dirt that his father had piled on him.
He and Gary spent an hour and a half discussing the Bloodfall series while Dill and Lydia sat outside and talked. Travis told Gary about Amelia. He borrowed Lydia’s phone and they took many photos together. The time came to leave. They returned to the airport.
“Before you go, can I tell you one of my favorite parts of all of the Bloodfall books?” Travis asked.
“Please,” Gary said.
“I don’t know why I love this part so much. But I love the engraving Raynar Northbrook put on Baldric Tanaris’s tomb after the Battle of the Weeping Vale.”
Gary gave a melancholy smile. “I remember that part well. I wrote it right after my first wife passed away. I was deeply depressed, and I was thinking a great deal about what it meant to live a good life. And I decided that it was so your friends could write something of that nature about you when you were gone.”
“I think that’s why I like it,” Travis said. “It makes me want to live a good life.”
Gary beamed. “Good,” he said softly.
As Gary was about to get out, Lydia gasped. “Wait! I almost forgot!” She pulled a hardcover edition of Bloodfall from her bag and handed it to Gary. “Please sign this for my friend Travis.”
“Indeed, indeed!” Gary pulled a gold fountain pen from his jacket pocket and signed the frontispiece with a flourish. To Travis of House Northbrook, my new friend, large in stature, strong of imagination. Become who you were meant to be.
Lydia handed the book to Travis. “You need to lend me your old copy of Bloodfall, since I need to read it.”
Travis got out to give Gary a last handshake. Gary chuckled. “We’re friends now, Travis. I hug friends goodbye.” He grabbed Travis in a huge bear hug and they took one last picture together.
“I can’t believe this night happened. I can’t believe this really happened. Lydia, you’re so amazing.” He repeated this mantra. His bouncing up and down in the backseat made the car rock.
“I’m pulling over if you don’t stop.” Lydia had a teasing lilt in her voice. “You’re going to make us run off the road.”
“Sorry. Y’all, I’m going to do what he said. I’ll start writing. Maybe I can take some classes at the community college in Cookeville or something.”
“Do it, Trav,” Dill said. “You’ve got what it takes.”
His mind buzzed the whole way home. It was rare for his real life to be so good that it would displace his imaginary life. But this time it was.
He formulated his plan. He’d get some sleep (yeah right, especially once I start texting Amelia), and the next day, when he was done at school and the lumberyard, he’d get on the Internet and start looking for writing advice. Maybe I should get a notebook to keep it in. I should start saving up for a new laptop and writing classes. And I should get someone who knows writing to read it. Maybe Lydia will. But I better write fast before she leaves for college and gets too busy. Exuberant purpose filled him.
They dropped him off after more fevered thank-yous. As he walked up to his house, he again lamented that he forgot to bring his cell phone. Yes, Lydia got plenty of pictures, as usual, but he wanted to send Amelia photos of himself and the master and upload them to the Bloodfall forums as soon as possible. They’ll never believe that G. M. Pennington—sorry, “Gary”—bought him ice cream and hung out with him for more than two hours. Oh, and the signed copy of Bloodfall.
He entered the dark house. His father sprawled on the couch in the flickering glow of the TV. When he saw Travis, he picked up the remote and turned it off.
“Where were you?” he asked, slurring.
Travis knew his father’s tone. His heart sank. Please not tonight. Please not tonight of all nights. Let me just have this. “With my friends, like I told you, remember?”
“No, I don’t remember.”
“Well, sorry. Anyway.” He started for his room.
“Get your ass back here. We ain’t done.”
Travis turned, yanked thoroughly back to Earth. And so it begins.
“I got a call come in at four-thirty needing a load of pressure-treated for a deck. Five-hundred-dollar order. And guess what? I didn’t have nobody to deliver it.”