Afterworlds

  “Both your points are valid,” Standerson said. “And you should keep doing the school events with us, Darcy. There’s no better research than interacting with our constituency.”

  Imogen laughed. “Darcy was our constituency, like, five months ago.”

  Darcy ignored this and asked, “What’s the worst question you ever got?”

  Standerson gave this a moment’s thought, then said in a theatrical voice of doom, “ ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ ”

  “That one’s easy for Darcy,” Imogen said. “She steals them.”

  “I do not!”

  “What about my closet scene?”

  Darcy looked down at the table, her cheeks heating up. “That was an accident.”

  “Trouble in YA heaven?” Standerson asked, his eyes lighting up. “Spill me the beans.”

  “Do we have to?” Darcy pleaded.

  “Yes.” Imogen turned to Standerson. “So Pyromancer’s the first book in a trilogy.”

  He nodded. “It’s awesome so far.”

  “Thanks . . .” The compliment flustered Imogen for a moment, but she managed to continue. “The second one just went into copyediting, so I’m starting book three—Phobomancer. It’s phobias instead of fires. The protag is claustrophobic, and it was supposed to open with her trapped in a closet. Great, right? So I tell my girlfriend here about the idea”—Imogen flicked Darcy’s shoulder—“and she rewrites one of her scenes so that her protag gets trapped in a closet, complete with claustrophobic panic!”

  “That was a coincidence!” Darcy cried.

  “I thought you said it was an accident,” Standerson said.

  “It was both! A coincidence because I’d already made a big deal about Lizzie’s father’s closet being fancy, and Mindy sleeping in closets, so using a closet made perfect sense. And it was an accident because I didn’t realize what I was doing. Plus, Gen, you admitted it was way better than my first version, where the old man just shows up and whisks Mindy away.”

  “Yes, it was better,” Imogen said. “But it was my scene!”

  “But your new scene is better too!” Darcy turned to Standerson. “Now her protag starts out trapped in the trunk of a car! Much scarier, right?”

  Imogen didn’t argue, just ripped a tiny piece from the corner of her placemat.

  “We all steal,” Standerson said. “The trick is to steal from regular people, not other novelists.”

  Imogen nodded. “My first girlfriend was a pyromaniac, and I can’t remember half the lines I stole from her.”

  “Ariel was real?” Standerson leaned forward, his eyes alight. “Tell me about her.”

  Within moments, he and Imogen were in a deep discussion of Imogen White, Pyromancer, and the intersections between the real and the fictional. Soon they were arguing character and plot all over again, and planning what to say at tonight’s bookstore event.

  Darcy huddled in her corner of the booth, happy to listen. But the shame of her scene stealing lay hot on her skin. The closet idea had been so perfect for Mindy’s kidnapping, and the writing of it so easy. Not until she’d read the words aloud to Imogen had she realized that the whole concept had been pilfered.

  Maybe that was the price of loving someone: you lost your grasp of where they ended and you began.

  * * *

  The event that night was downtown, in a smallish bookstore with two levels. The place was already crowded by the time Darcy, Imogen, and Standerson arrived. The ground floor was full and there were more kids upstairs, looming over the small stage, their legs dangling between balcony rails.

  Not wanting Standerson’s arrival to start a riot, the store manager was waiting outside to take him around to the freight entrance. But Imogen insisted on coming in through the front door. Nobody recognized her or Darcy, of course, and they were free to wander and observe.

  Of course, they went to see Imogen’s books first. There was a pile near the door, the flame-red cover dazzling in quantity.

  “See?” Darcy said, straightening the top of the pyramid. “You’re not an impostor.”

  “I could still be a really good impostor.” Imogen’s fingers glided across one of the covers, reading the embossed letters of the title like braille. “But if so, these are excellent forgeries.”

  Darcy rolled her eyes and dragged Imogen away into the crowd.

  Standerson’s fans were abuzz—with anticipation and with each other. Most wore name tags with internet handles, so online buddies would recognize them in the flesh. Spontaneous friendships were popping up, lubricated by T-shirts decorated with Standerson’s catchphrases and covers. A whole community was face-to-face with itself at last, and seemed dizzily happy about it.

  “Aren’t you nervous?” Darcy asked.

  Imogen looked up from the photography book she’d been leafing through. “I always feel safe in bookstores.”

  Darcy laughed. “So it really is all about setting.”

  “That appears to be the theme of the day.”

  “Well, I’m nervous for you.”

  “As long as it’s not contagious.” There was the barest twitch in Imogen’s eye.

  “I won’t say another word.”

  They mingled in silence, Darcy taking the measure of the crowd. They were almost all teenagers, and the adults looked more like Standerson fans than chauffeuring parents. They were maybe three-quarters female, and about as diverse as the students that day had been—a California mix of Hispanic, white, black, and Asian, including a few kids from the subcontinent. But all of them had decided to come here, to a bookstore, on a cold and drizzly Tuesday night, when they could be at home with a thousand channels or the whole internet at their fingertips. When Standerson had called them a “constituency,” it had sounded odd to Darcy, but maybe it was the right word after all.

  Ten minutes before seven, Anton appeared and took Darcy and Imogen to the break room. The bookstore owner introduced herself, and Anton delivered the smoothest pitch for Afterworlds that Darcy had ever heard, picked up from their random conversations in the car and polished to perfection. The owner listened raptly and asked Darcy a half-dozen questions, none of which were how old she was, and Darcy found herself forgiving all of Anton’s erratic driving.

  And then, quite suddenly, it was time for Standerson and Imogen to take the stage.

  “Okay. Nervous now.”

  “You’ll be great.” Darcy hugged her, squeezing tight for luck.

  A moment later, a cordon of bookstore staff was leading the three of them out into a rush of gasps, tears, screams, and squees. The crowd had transformed into a conduit, an engine pumping fannish fervor into the room. Darcy was placed to one side of the bookstore’s stage, only an arm’s length away from Imogen and Standerson. The stage was only two feet high and a few yards across, and the crowd pressed close.

  Standerson waited patiently for the noise to subside, and when the crowd was finally settled, he nudged them back into raptures with nothing but a sheepish “Hello.” They had been primed by a hundred videos to know every flick of his hair, every lopsided smile. And as Standerson began to talk, each delivery of his catchphrase—“Books are machines for completing human beings”—brought screams of recognition from the audience, even a kind of relief. He was exactly what they had expected him to be, but better.

  The intensity of the crowd had settled a little by the time he introduced Imogen. He went about it casually, as if she were a friend he’d met on the way to the bookstore. But his praise was unchecked, and the audience loved her before she said a word. She was family now, like a long-lost cousin giving a speech at a wedding. And when she dropped a reference to frequent bouts of dyspepsia into her usual spiel about obsessive-compulsives, they loved her even more.

  Darcy watched closely, struck with a kind of astonishment that this was the same man she’d had dinner with, the same woman she woke up with almost every morning. The spellbound audience made them shinier, more than real.

  Darcy tried to absorb th
e performance, knowing that next year she would have to do this job herself. But she could hardly imagine any crowd so zealous for her, so full of love.

  An hour after it had all started, the bookstore manager declared that it was time for the signing. The staff set to wrangling the crowd into some kind of line, and a folding table was hoisted onto the tiny stage.

  Darcy managed to squeeze in beside Imogen. “You guys were amazing.”

  Imogen only nodded. She was breathing hard and shallow, like a fish on dry land.

  “That was the easy part,” Standerson said. “Face-to-face is when it gets tricky.”

  “Right. I guess I should leave you guys to it?”

  “Stick around,” he said. “You can be our flap monkey!”

  “Um, okay.” Darcy didn’t know what a flap monkey was, but she was certain that she wanted to be here onstage with them.

  The signing line was a long and winding beast. They brought Standerson cookies; they brought poems and fan art; they brought still more questions about his characters, his videos, his well-known love of the semicolon. And of course they brought books to sign. Some had his whole collection, some only a single tattered copy of his first novel. Oddly, a few brought editions of The Great Gatsby (which he was known to love) or Moby-Dick (which he famously despised).

  A dozen or so of his fans bought Imogen’s book that very night. A handful of them camped out at her end of the table, happy to chat about their own obsessive disorders, a little giddy at their proximity to Standerson. Imogen kept them entertained with her research on how to set things on fire.

  All this time, Darcy was a busy little flap monkey, taking books from customers and tucking the flaps into the title pages, so that Standerson didn’t have to scramble for the right place to sign. Darcy had soon learned the difference between full- and half-title pages. (The latter didn’t have the author’s name, and was therefore unsignable.) Sometimes she swapped places with the bookstore staff working the line. There was something pleasantly third-grade-teacher-ish about making sure that everyone had sticky notes with their names on them, so that their precious moments in Standerson’s presence weren’t wasted distinguishing a Katelyn from a Kaitlin, Caitlin, or Caitlynne.

  It was a long two and a half hours, and Standerson’s patter began to cycle and repeat. His joke about hand cramps came every five minutes, his disquisition on smoked bacon every ten. Darcy’s mind began to entertain the possibility that she had always been a flap monkey in this signing line. She would always be a flap monkey in this signing line. . . .

  But eventually, finally, it was all over. The exhausted booksellers were stacking chairs and ushering the last fans out the door. A hundred stickies littered the signing table, square yellow leaves dead and fallen. Imogen went missing, but was soon discovered lying on the carpeted floor in the biography section. Anton guided Darcy in front of the store owner one more time, and the two shared weary anecdotes about the night, old friends now.

  Everyone was exhausted on the way home. Standerson was silent, and Imogen lay in the backseat with her head in Darcy’s lap. Even Anton’s driving was pacific, the roads back to the hotel dark and empty.

  “Are you seriously doing this for another whole month?” Imogen asked.

  Standerson looked dazed by the question, and only shrugged.

  “I mean, how you can stand so much adulation?”

  “Adulation is like rain. You can only get so wet.” Standerson turned to Darcy. “Was tonight useful for you? Did you learn anything?”

  Darcy nodded, trying to find words. She felt smarter about readers, and was astonished anew at the power of the written word. Also, she knew the difference between full-title and half-title pages.

  But something bigger had happened, a rearrangement in her brain. Since age twelve, Darcy had wanted unashamedly to become a famous writer. That pair of words had always called up certain fantasies for her: writing in longhand on a rooftop veranda, being interviewed by someone clever and adoring, a Manhattan skyline in the background. All these images had been calm, even stately, completely unlike that night’s bookstore event. But now Darcy could feel her regal daydreams transforming into something louder, messier, and full of joyous pandemonium.

  “I’ll be your flap monkey anytime,” she said. “The owner can’t wait for Afterworlds. She asked for an advanced copy, signed to her personally. I should write her name down, I guess.”

  “Anton will make it happen.” Standerson saluted Anton, who laughed. “Indispensable media escort is indispensable.”

  As she smiled at this, Darcy tried to recall her first rattling moments in Anton’s car the afternoon before. That flutter of anxiety over a trifling thing like death seemed so long ago now, before her first school visit, her first stint as a flap monkey, her first glimmer of YA heaven.

  CHAPTER 30

  OVER THE NEXT DAYS, I waited for the old man in the patched coat to come to me again. I hated not knowing where Mindy was, and I kept imagining her being unraveled into flailing threads of memory for the old man’s amusement. The only thing that kept me sane was Yama, his presence in my room at night, his touch, and his certainty that she was okay.

  Being able to sleep again helped a lot. School was much easier, no longer teeming with the phantoms of leftover crushes and humiliations. The echoes of the past were still there in the hallways, of course, but they were quieter now. My last semester in high school drifted toward normal life, almost boring after everything that had happened since Dallas.

  But the best thing about sleep was that it washed me clear. Some mornings, I was awake for five minutes before the memories flooded back in.

  * * *

  “Any news on the secret agent front?” Jamie asked at lunch one day. “I haven’t seen him lurking lately.”

  “He’s been busy,” I said, which was probably true. Agent Reyes had drugs to interdict, death cultists to surveil. I was thankful that the FBI had bigger worries than keeping watch over me.

  “But you guys keep in touch, right?”

  “Yeah, we talk most nights.” This was also true, because I had decided that Jamie was asking about my actual boyfriend now, and not the secret agent from her last question. It was amazing how I never lied to my best friend, as long as I interpreted her questions flexibly.

  “Most nights? That sounds serious.”

  I smiled at her, because it was serious. Not just the time spent in my room, but our conversations on his windswept atoll, and our long hikes in another of his places, a mountaintop that I guess was in Iran. (Yama called it Persia, because he was old-school like that.) And we’d made plans to travel farther, even to Bombay, once I was ready to face its excessive ghost population. And, of course, one day in the distant future he would take me to his home in the underworld.

  “You still haven’t told your mom about him, have you?” Jamie asked.

  I shook my head. “I’ve thought about it, but she’s always too tired for big news. She’s had enough to deal with.”

  “Can’t disagree with that.” A pair of non-seniors hovered at the other end of our table for a moment, wondering if they could sit there, but Jamie sent them away with a glance. “You can’t keep her in the dark forever, though. That’s just being mean.”

  “Of course not.” I’d already been wondering about how that was going to work. When do you explain to your mother that you’re dating a millennia-old psychopomp? Do you spell out the rules of life after death? Or have him over for dinner with a cover story all prepared? “I was thinking of waiting until after graduation. Like, maybe when I’m away at . . .”

  My voice faded, because college was up in the air as well. I’d finished my applications last semester, but did newbie valkyrie even go to college? What was the appropriate major?

  “Are you okay?” Jamie asked.

  “Yeah.” I gathered myself, needing a moment of honesty between us. “It’s just been hard to think about planning my life lately.”

  She didn’t answer at fir
st, her eyes glistening a little in the cafeteria fluorescents. Lunch was almost over, and the clatter of dishes rushed in to fill the silence between us. “You mean, you feel like something horrible might happen again. So what’s the point in making plans?”

  I nodded, though my problem wasn’t that death could strike at any moment, but that death was all around me. In the walls, in the air. Leaking like black oil from the ground. I couldn’t hear the afterworld’s voices all the time, not yet. But I could feel its eyes out there, watching me.

  “That’s really common,” Jamie was saying. “A lot of people who’ve had near-death experiences can’t make plans.”

  I only smiled. The words “near death” seemed like an understatement. I was traveling on the River Vaitarna, waiting to rescue a kidnapped ghost, sleeping beside a lord of the dead.

  I wasn’t near death, I was swimming in it.

  “Or maybe it’s survivor’s guilt,” Jamie said. “Feeling bad that you made it and all those other passengers didn’t.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Did you buy a psych textbook or something?”

  “No, that’s from Les Misérables.” She leaned closer and sang a haunting line, barely audible above the buzz of the cafeteria.

  “Okay,” I said. “Maybe it’s about that too.”

  “At least you don’t have to worry about those Resurrection guys anymore.”

  It took me a moment. “The Movement for the Resurrection?”

  “Um, yes. The guys who almost killed you. Did they slip your mind?”

  Oh. I remembered what Agent Reyes had said on our phone call. “There’s a big standoff at their headquarters, right?”

  She stared at me. “You mean, the one that every FBI agent in the country is headed to? I assumed you knew about it, Lizzie! Don’t you have a boyfriend who might be shipped there sometime soon?”

  “He doesn’t do that kind of thing,” I said.

  “Crap.” Jamie frowned. “I keep imagining him in a bulletproof vest. Is that wrong of me? It wasn’t in a lustful way, much.”

  I shrugged. Men with guns seemed so ordinary now.