“I’m steadfast. I’m the fucking steadfast tin soldier. But Moxie’s coming back in eleven days!” Darcy pulled out her list. “Maybe we should skip to the more expensive ones.”
They were out on the street now, and the sky had darkened. All of Darcy’s weather apps had warned her of rain today, but she had no umbrella of her own, and Moxie’s was huge and covered with vintage images of naked men.
Imogen held out a palm to check for drops. “Those last two places looked pretty pricey already, even if they were whimsical. What’s your budget?”
“Three thousand a month.”
Imogen’s eyes widened a little. “Seriously?”
“That’s what my little sister says.”
“Your little sister’s coming to live with you?”
“No way! I mean, she’s only fourteen.” This might have been an apt time for Darcy to tell Imogen her own age, but she didn’t. “Nisha’s the math brain in the family. She made me a budget for the next three years, because Afterworlds comes out next year, and the sequel a year later. So I figure by the year after that, I’ll know if I’m a real writer or not.”
“You mean, you’ll know how you’re selling?”
Darcy nodded, wondering if her words had been a false step. “That’s a habit Nisha got me into. She keeps saying I’m a real writer now, but I might not always be.”
“You wrote a book,” said Imogen. “That’s real, whether it’s a bestseller or not.”
Darcy stared down at the black fossils of chewing gum on the sidewalk. “But it’s not just sales. It’s getting to say ‘my agent’ and being allowed in at Drinks Night. I know it’s kind of pathetic, but all that stuff makes me feel more real.”
“Don’t apologize. Money and status are pretty real.”
“It’s not that I need to be super-rich and famous,” Darcy went on. “It’s just . . . it feels like someone’s going to ask me for ID. Like, writer ID.”
The sky let out a rumble, and they both stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. As the first drops fell a man went past them in a hurry, walking a beautiful black greyhound. The metal dog chain slid for a moment against the knee of Darcy’s jeans.
Imogen pulled Darcy beneath an awning, and they stood together against the glass front of a shop that sold pipes and cigars. The sweet, heavy smell of tobacco mixed with the fresh scent of rain.
“I know what you mean,” Imogen said. “Remember back in high school, when you were at a party, and if you weren’t talking to that one person you had a crush on, it was pointless being there? Like everyone else wasn’t real. Which is a crappy thing to think about other people, but that’s what it felt like, you know?”
Darcy knew very well, but she nodded vaguely, as if those days were a distant memory.
“Or sometimes it’s food,” Imogen said, the rain coming on harder as she spoke. “Like when a big pile of french fries is the only real thing to eat, and you have to go out at midnight and find some or you’ll die.” Imogen’s hands were in fists now. “For me, writing’s the only thing that’s always real. I’ve never regretted a day I wrote a good scene, whatever else I screwed up that day. That’s what’s fucking real.”
Darcy had stopped breathing, because she agreed so much. She wished she could spin time backward and steal Imogen’s words, just to hear them in her own voice.
“I know,” she managed. “But it only happened once. . . .”
Last November, she meant, when that billionth random monkey had taken up residence in her head and helped her type Afterworlds.
“Right. Sophomore slump.” Imogen waved a hand, her intensity fading. “I was like that after Pyromancer. Because my first girlfriend was a pyromaniac, so maybe that was the only thing I could ever write about. Like it was all an accident. But books don’t happen by accident.”
Darcy nodded. Imogen’s certainty was contagious, and Darcy felt more real just standing here with her, the rain building to a roar and clearing the air around them. “So I just need to write another book, and I’ll be cured.”
“For a while. There’s one little hitch: I felt the same way again after finishing Ailuromancy. And Kiralee says that every book she’s ever written feels like an accident. We can all look forward to an endless sophomore slump.”
“That’s okay, kind of,” Darcy said. The slumps would be worth it, as long as there were more Novembers.
Imogen was smiling now. “So you can suffer a lifetime of angst, but you can’t deal with a few more whimsical apartments?”
“I remain steadfast.” Darcy looked at her list, but the addresses had begun to swim before her eyes. “Where do you live, anyway?”
“Chinatown.”
“Is that good for writers?”
Imogen laughed. “I live there for the food.”
“Oh, right,” Darcy said. “I like noodles.”
This made Imogen laugh as well, though it had sounded feeble in Darcy’s ears.
“If you hate everything up here, we can go look near my place. Got anything on your list?”
“A few, I think.” Uncertain of where Chinatown began and ended, Darcy handed over the printouts. “I’m not keeping you from writing a good scene, am I?”
“I don’t write when the sun’s up. Too unromantic.”
“Well, if we’ve got all day . . .” Darcy waited to be contradicted, to be told that Imogen only had another hour or two to spare, but Imogen said nothing. “Let me buy you lunch, then we can keep looking?”
“Great.” Imogen handed back the printouts and pulled Darcy into motion, despite the rain. “I know a place with noodles.”
* * *
Darcy’s budget, which was really Nisha’s budget, went like this:
Afterworlds and Untitled Patel had sold in a two-book deal to Paradox Publishing for the princely sum of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars each. Of that three-hundred-thousand-dollar total, fifteen percent (forty-five thousand) belonged to the Underbridge Literary Agency, and another hundred thousand or so to the government, depending on how much Darcy let Nisha finagle her taxes.
After a new laptop and some furniture, that left her with about fifty thousand a year for three years.
At this point, Darcy could do the math herself. Fifty thousand divided by twelve was a little over four thousand a month, which meant a maximum of three for rent. And a thousand divided by thirty was thirty-three dollars a day.
Neither she nor Nisha knew if that was enough to eat, clothe, and entertain oneself in New York City, but it sounded reasonable. And there were always noodles.
Though at this exact moment the noodles that Darcy and Imogen were eating—ramen with Tuscan kale, pork shoulder, and white miso reduction—had exceeded that amount already.
“Whoa,” Imogen said when Darcy was done explaining the budget. “You’re rich!”
“I know. Crazy lucky, right?” Even as she spoke, Darcy realized that when her mother used that word—how lucky Darcy was to have published a book—it made her unspeakably angry. But between Imogen and herself, lucky was okay. “I know everything I write won’t sell for that much.”
“Yeah, you never know,” Imogen said. “Kiralee’s books haven’t done well since Bunyip.”
Darcy looked up from her noodles. “Really? I thought Coleman was kidding the other night.”
“Nope. He says Kiralee’s books only sell about ten thousand copies each,” Imogen said.
“That sucks.” Darcy wasn’t sure exactly what that number meant, but it sounded low compared to her own advance. “And it’s scary. If a writer like Kiralee can’t sell books, how am I supposed to? I mean, everyone I know has read all her books.”
“The people you know read books.” Imogen gave a shrug. “But Bunyip broke into a much bigger demographic—people who don’t read books. Or, they read maybe one a year. Coleman says that’s where the money is in publishing—people who don’t read.”
“Whoa. That explains a lot about the bestseller lists.”
Darcy had
spent every spare minute of the last four years in her high school library, surrounded by the Reading Zealots, who all had widgets on their blogs counting down to the next Sword Singer or Secret Coterie pub date, and who sent each other photoshopped YA covers with lolcat captions for Valentine’s Day.
But now that Darcy thought about it, that was only about twenty kids out of a thousand in her school—2 percent. What if the rest of the world’s readers shared those slim proportions?
“Now I feel guilty,” she said.
“You should. One-fifty times two? Crap.”
Darcy wondered what Imogen had been paid for Pyromancer, but Imogen hadn’t volunteered the number, so she felt weird asking. “Well, minus taxes . . . and Moxie’s cut. And the twenty bucks Nisha charged me to make that budget!”
Imogen grinned at this, and her eyes blinked in a slow, catlike way. Darcy wondered if that always happened when she smiled.
“Speaking of Kiralee,” Imogen said. “She wants to read Afterworlds.”
Darcy froze. “But it . . . it’s not even edited.”
“Yeah, she hates reading edited novels. There’s not enough to complain about. If you send me the draft, I’ll forward it to her. Maybe she’ll give you a blurb.”
“Um, sure.” Darcy recalled the mix of elation and anxiety at having her book analyzed by Kiralee, and wondered how gut-churning the examination would be once she’d actually read it. “So how serious was she the other night? You know, about my hijacking a god for purposes of YA hotness?”
“Pretty serious,” Imogen said. “But it’s got more to do with Bunyip than you. It’s her book that everybody loves, but it’s the one she has the most regrets about.”
Darcy frowned. “What do you mean, exactly?”
“Okay, so it takes the mythology of an ancient culture, and uses it to frame a colonist girl’s angst about her first kiss. Which is tricky enough. But then all the aboriginal characters, who are actually from that culture, don’t really appear in the last half of the book.”
Darcy thought for a second. “Whoa. I didn’t even notice.”
“Yeah. Because it’s all about that first kiss.”
“Which is such a great kiss,” Darcy said. “And the funny thing is, if Kiralee hadn’t stolen that myth, I wouldn’t know about bunyips at all.”
“That’s the power of Story. And with great power . . .” Imogen spread her hands. “Kiralee doesn’t want you to feel the same way about Afterworlds in fifteen years.”
“Or sooner.” Darcy was already nervous about her mother reading the book, and now she had another eight hundred million people to worry about.
“But you’re a Hindu,” Imogen said. “Isn’t it your culture?”
“I modeled Yamaraj on a Bollywood star, which shows how much I know about Hinduism. I’m worried he turned out more hot than serious. For a lord of the dead, I mean.”
Imogen shrugged. “Well, you’ve still got rewrites.”
“There’s only good rewriting,” Darcy murmured. She still couldn’t remember who’d said that first.
The waitress brought the check then, and Darcy waved away Imogen’s battered wallet and paid with cash. With a tip, the bill was more than twice her Nisha-approved daily allotment, but the noodles had been very good indeed.
“Do you want to read it too?” Darcy asked as they headed for the door.
“Of course. I’ll send you Pyromancer.” Imogen scooped up a handful of matchbooks with the noodle shop’s logo on them and shoved them in her pocket. “Ready for more whimsical apartments?”
“Sure,” Darcy said. “Thanks for showing me this place.”
“The best way to know a city is to eat it.”
* * *
“I’m a tin soldier. Steadfast,” Darcy said tiredly. But the word had lost all meaning. Maybe she would use it somewhere in her rewrites, just to remind her of this endless day.
They were approaching their sixth apartment since eating. The first two had been in the Meatpacking District, one across from a FedEx garage, whose rumbling trucks Darcy could feel when she pressed a palm against the walls, the other on a street that smelled like meat. The next three had been soulless white boxes in the glass towers surrounding Union Square. It was the sort of neighborhood that Annika Patel would approve of, but Imogen had warned that nothing written in such a sterile place would ring true.
So they’d headed down to Chinatown in the clearing rain. They were met in front of a corner building by an Israeli man named Lev, who had a Russian accent and wore a three-piece suit. He led them up a wide staircase that, instead of doubling back at the landings, just kept climbing in the same direction, like the steps of a Mayan temple. Without any key fumbling, Lev opened the door of apartment 4E.
It was the largest Darcy had seen yet, occupying half the floor of the building. The ceilings were at least twelve feet high, and two walls had rows of windows looking down onto the street corner below. A glimmer of pale sunshine had appeared in the sky, a glaring leak in the clouds. It angled through the windows to ignite a galaxy of dust suspended in the air.
“You could roller-skate in here,” Imogen said with quiet awe.
“It was dance studio.” Lev gestured at the mirrors along one wall. “But you can take those down.”
Darcy stared at herself in the mirrors; she looked tiny with all this open space around her. She went to the nearest window—the glass was mottled with age, bulging in the bottoms of the panes like a slow liquid. The buildings across the street were garlanded with fire escapes covered in leftover raindrops, dripping and sparkling. The floor creaked as Darcy walked from window to window, looking out at Chinatown.
“Where does that hall go?” Imogen asked. It was beside the apartment’s front door, in the corner opposite the two walls of windows.
“There are two changing rooms for dancers.” Lev wiggled his finger for them to follow. “And a kitchen, not very big.”
The two changing rooms weren’t big either. Each had a row of lockers along one wall, and between the two rooms was a bathroom with a shower.
Imogen stood in the hallway. “You could make one a bedroom, the other a closet. You’ll be the only person in Manhattan with a shower connecting to your closet.”
“No,” said Lev. “I have seen this before.”
“I didn’t bring that many clothes,” Darcy said. Though, of course, she could always ask her parents to drive up with more. And she planned to buy clothes here in New York, of course, once she’d decided what writers wore. She’d forgotten to take notes at Drinks Night, too overwhelmed with everything else.
Lev showed them the kitchen last. It was the smallest room in the apartment, but Darcy didn’t see herself cooking much. She wanted to go out and eat the city until she knew it in detail.
“How far is this from your place?” she asked Imogen when they were back in the big room.
“Five minutes’ walk? We’d be neighbors if you lived here.”
Darcy smiled back at her, then looked at her printout of apartments. Her heart squeezed a little when she saw that this was one of the places with no listed price.
“Is this lease even legal?” Imogen was asking Lev. “I mean, a dance studio would be zoned for business, not residential.”
“It was illegal as dance studio,” he said with a shrug. “Now is legal again.”
Darcy didn’t care. The very fact that she could live in New York, in this apartment, hardly seemed real. Legality was an afterthought.
She took a slow breath. “How much?”
Lev opened a green leather binder, the spine of which crackled. “Thirty-five hundred. Utilities included.”
“Crap,” Darcy said, and two things clicked inside her. One was a hopeless feeling of falling through the floor, the other was the certainty that she could write here. That she had to write here.
“Can you give us a moment, Lev?” Imogen asked quietly. He bowed, a knowing smile on his face, and drifted away into the tiny kitchen.
?
??I have to ask my sister,” Darcy said, already texting: What does $3500/month do to budget?
“So you want it?”
“I need it. I don’t even know why.” Darcy stared down at the street. It had the same bustle as the view from Moxie’s, but the streets were more crowded here in Chinatown. And from only five stories up instead of fifteen, the rippling current of bodies was more intimate, more personal. An open-air stall selling fresh fish bathed in a shaft of sunlight, white ice and silver scales glittering. “This room’s so big, I’d have to tell myself stories just to fill it up.”
Imogen smiled. “Where would you write?”
“My desk goes there.” Darcy gestured at the corner where the two walls with windows met. She would orient the desk outward and diagonally, taking in the whole view. The rest of the room would stay empty.
“You can pay that rent and still eat?”
“Maybe. Or maybe I’ll just write and not eat.” Darcy realized that the desk she was imagining was from her school, square and wooden, with a scooped plastic chair. Was that the best her imagination could do? Some writer.
Her phone dinged with Nisha’s answer:
$3500/mth = 2 yrs, 8 mths #mymathisyourgod
She groaned and showed the message to Imogen. “This means I lose four months!”
“Um, you could get a job, you know.”
Darcy almost started to explain that her parents would surely make her go to college if it came to that. But Imogen probably thought that Darcy had already graduated. She promised herself to tell Imogen how old she was very soon, even if it meant feeling young and, frankly, a bit less real.
But not right now, while her future was being decided.
The phone dinged, Nisha again.
Alternate plan: 3 whole yrs but eat only $17/day
HAHA RAMEN GIRL! #weightgain
Darcy sighed. Nisha didn’t realize how expensive ramen could be here in New York. Of course, there were noodles with Tuscan kale, pork shoulder, and white miso reduction, and there were noodles pressed into bricks and priced at three for a dollar. Darcy liked them, too, as long as she could add Tabasco, turmeric, and a soft-boiled egg. She could write on seventeen dollars a day, especially in this magnificent room.