On Wednesday afternoon, after her Biology final, Cath sat in front of her computer. She wasn’t going to leave the room or get on the Internet until she finished her Fiction-Writing project.
She wasn’t going to stop typing until she had a first draft. Even if that meant typing things like, I don’t know what the fuck I’m typing right now, blah, blah, blah.
She still hadn’t settled on a plot or characters.…
She spent an hour writing a conversation between a man and his wife. And then she realized there was no rising or falling action; the man and his wife were just arguing about Brussels sprouts, and the Brussels sprouts weren’t a metaphor for anything deeper.
Then she started a story about a couple’s breakup, from the perspective of their dog.
And then she started a story where a dog intentionally destroys a marriage. And then she stopped because she wasn’t all that interested in dogs. Or married people.
She thought about typing up everything she remembered writing from Nick’s anti-love story. That would get Professor Piper’s attention.
She thought about taking one of her Simon/Baz stories and just changing the names. (She probably could have gotten away with that if Professor Piper wasn’t already on to her.)
Maybe she could take a Simon/Baz story and change all the material details. Simon is a lawyer, and Baz is a spy. Simon is a cop, and Baz owns a bakery. Simon likes Brussels sprouts, and Baz is a dog.
Cath wanted, desperately, to escape to the Internet. Just to check her e-mail or something. But she wouldn’t let herself open a browser window, not even to check whether the b in “Brussels” should be capitalized.
Instead, she shoved away from her desk and went to the bathroom. She walked slowly down the hall, trolling for distractions, but there was no one milling around trying to be friendly. Cath went back to her room and lay on her bed. She’d stayed up too late the night before studying for Biology, and it was easy to close her eyes.
It was almost a nice change of pace to be stewing about Nick instead of Levi. Had she actually liked him? (Nick, that is. She’d definitely liked Levi.) Or had she just liked everything he represented? Smart, talented, handsome. World War I handsome.
Now just thinking about Nick made her feel so ashamed. She’d been taken. Grifted. Had he planned to steal the story all along? Or was he just desperate? Like Cath was desperate.
Nick and his stupid story.
It really was his story. It was nothing Cath ever would have written on her own. Stupid, quirky girl character. Stupid, pretentious boy character. No dragons.
It was Nick’s story. He’d just tricked her into writing it. He was an unreliable narrator, if ever she’d met one.
Cath wanted to work on her own story now. Not the one for class. Carry On.
Carry On was Cath’s story. Thousands of people were reading it. Thousands of people wanted her to finish.
This story she was supposed to be writing for class? Only one person cared if she finished it. And that one person wasn’t even Cath.
*
She fell asleep with her shoes on, lying on her stomach.
When she woke up, it was dark, and she hated that. It was disorienting to fall asleep in the light and wake up in the dark, instead of the other way around. Her head ached, and there was a circle of drool on her pillow. That only happened when she slept during the day.
Cath sat up, miserably, and realized her phone was ringing. She didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?”
“Cather?” It was a man’s voice. Gentle.
“Yes, who is this?”
“Hey, Cather, it’s Kelly. Kelly from your dad’s work.”
Kelly was her dad’s creative director. The panda bear guy. “Fucking Kelly,” her dad called him. As in, “Fucking Kelly is making us start over on the Kilpatrick’s campaign.” Or, “And then fucking Kelly got it in his head that the robot should be dancing.”
Kelly was the reason her dad still had a job. Every time Kelly switched agencies, he talked Cath’s dad into following him.
Kelly chalked up all her dad’s extreme behavior to “the creative mind.” “Your dad’s a genius,” he’d told the twins at one Christmas party. “His brain was specifically designed to make ads. He’s a precision instrument.”
Kelly had a soft, wheedling voice—like he was trying to talk you into something or sell you something, every time he opened his mouth. “Have you girls tried the cocktail shrimp here? The cocktail shrimp are amazing.”
Hearing Kelly’s soft-sell voice now sent an unpleasant chill scrabbling up Cath’s spine.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hey, Cather. I’m sorry to call you at school. It’s finals week, right? My Connor tells me it’s finals week.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Look, I got your number from your dad’s phone, and I just wanted to tell you that he’s perfectly okay, he’s going to be fine. But he’s spending tonight—maybe the next day or two—here at the hospital. Here at St. Richard’s Hospital—”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened, he’s okay. I mean it. He just needs to get his balance back.”