My copy editor makes sure my characters don’t have blue eyes in one scene, and brown eyes in another, I hear Epstein say.
If anyone needs any of their stories proofread, Annabelle’s your girl, I hear her say again.
“What’s wrong with your eyes?” I ask Will.
“What do you mean?” Will replies, and blinks. And when he opens them again they are blue as ever.
He’s too good to be true, I hear Ava say. Sounds like he was made for you.
“Annabelle?” Will asks, leaning closer. “Are you okay?”
And then the craziest thought occurs to me. What if Will was made for me? Or not made, but . . . written?
8
TK’s Steakhouse
I MUST’VE banged on the door of Rosewater Café & Bookstore sixty times, and am seriously considering breaking in, when Ava suddenly appears behind the glass, looking like she’s seen a ghost.
“Where were you?” I ask, my voice bordering on accusatory as I push past her, forcing her to take a few steps back.
“I was in the basement restocking,” she says slowly, as though she’s talking to the guy on the Boardwalk who sells portraits of John Travolta and only John Travolta. John Travolta as a deep-sea fisherman. John Travolta as Jesus. You get the idea. “We close at ten. What’s wrong? Take a breath.”
I take several breaths, placing my hands on my hips, before waving the syllabus for Epstein’s class in her face. I ran all the way here, and now I’m out of breath. “I think she may have been telling the truth,” I say.
Ava squints. “You’re gonna have to give me a little more than that.”
I sigh. “Will. He’s so perfect, and he’s so organized, and we’re so similar, and he’s so into to me . . .”
“You know that’s not wildly shocking, right? That he’s into you. You’re smart and beautiful and sure maybe you have the personal interests of a senior citizen, which is a little weird, but—”
“That’s not it! Listen.” I run a hand through my hair. “Something has been off lately. Ever since Will got here. Sure, everything we have in common could be coincidence or fate or whatever, and his interest in me could be real, but then there’s Lucy Keating and what she said, and then there was the ice cream and the eyeballs—”
“Still talking crazy,” Ava cautions me. “Back it up.” She sits on the counter, her legs dangling off. And I start from the beginning.
When I finish telling her about what happened at the ice cream shop, Ava thinks. “Are you sure you weren’t just distracted? You know, by all his smoking hotness?”
I raise my hands in the air. “But it was a banana split!” I exclaim.
“You hate bananas,” Ava states. Like she is president of the Preservation of Annabelle Burns Society. I wait for her to say something else. To make sense of it all. To tell me everything is going to be okay.
Instead, she nods carefully. “Weird.”
“Weird,” I say.
“Did Will notice the changes?” she asks.
“Not only did he not notice the changes, it was like he rebooted himself,” I say. “Like he’d been programmed. And . . . there’s one more thing.”
“What?”
“I think Elliot and I had a . . . I don’t know. A thing? A moment? It’s hard to explain. There was something there tonight, between us,” I say.
“What?” Ava shrieks, and she looks like she’s about to laugh. But she sees my face and stops. “No seriously. What?”
And then it all just comes out in a rush. I tell her about how he and Clara broke up, how he’s been giving me this attention, and how he just showed up at the show tonight when he wasn’t even supposed to be there. How funny that made me feel. How there was the energy, and then he got knocked out, and no sooner had that happened than Will showed up to save the day. When I finish Ava is just looking at me.
“But you hate Elliot Apfel,” Ava says. “Just like you hate bananas.”
“I know,” I say, and fidget with a bracelet around my left wrist. “Ava, what if she was right?”
“Who?” Ava looks at me hard. “You cannot possibly mean Lucy Keating.”
“But think about it. Will shows up, and he’s perfect. But every moment he’s not perfect . . . like when he offers me the wrong ice cream . . . he changes. Epstein told us all about copy editors fixing inconsistencies. Maybe that’s what I saw in Will’s eyes. Maybe Lucy forgot she made his eyes blue.” I realize this sounds insane. But . . . what if?
Ava thinks for a moment. “Will does appear to be sent from heaven. I mean, if you asked my dad if you were a character in a book, he’d probably tell you anything is possible. He’s also usually high, but it’s food for thought.”
Ava’s dad was a rock star in the 1990s, and now he runs a retreat center in Malibu. He lets Ava throw all her birthday parties there. We take over the whole camp and roast marshmallows and roll out our sleeping bags in the community center, under a big Buddhist statue.
“But I mean, it’s not true, right?” I say. “Because that would be crazy. I am not actually the main character in a book written by Lucy Keating.”
Ava shakes her head. “It’s not true, but I’ll indulge you. You fire up the coffeemaker in the café. I’m going to find every Lucy Keating book we have, and we are going to look at the facts. Your favorite. Except that this time, the facts are fiction. Let’s put those journalism skills of yours to good use.”
Two hours and one giant pot of coffee later, I am standing in front of the chalkboard on which they usually write the specials. We’ve wiped it all off and at the top is written:
IS ANNABELLE IN A BOOK?
Below it the board is divided into two sections:
YES / NO
Ava leans back in a chair, her hands propped behind her head.
“Okay, in the Yes section: Annabelle Burns. Relatively adorable family unit with only minor, good-natured dysfunction. Perfect childhood home she is irrationally attached to.”
I cringe. “Not for long.”
Annabelle holds up a finger. “Major life disruption that includes possible divorce of loving parents, and the parents selling of the perfect childhood home, yet another signature Lucy Keating move. Sorry.” She pauses and gives me an apologetic look.
Under YES I write: family, house, divorce.
“Lack of self awareness that she is strikingly beautiful.”
“Oh, please,” I say.
“Exactly,” Ava says, and continues. “Utterly incredible dream boy that notices her in typical, classroom walk-in scenario.”
“That did feel contrived,” I mutter as I scrawl dreamboy. “And don’t forget the small things. Like, I love sneaking weird snacks in the middle of the night, like the girl in Something True; I have a scar I got when I was little like the girl in Across the Sea; and I always have those nightmares about getting the wrinkles out of my bedsheets, like in The Waking Hours.”