After all this hard work . . .
Darcy slid out of bed, put on a bathrobe and slippers, and padded to the kitchen to make coffee. It was Imogen’s percolator waiting on the stovetop, Imogen’s brand of espresso in the fridge. Their possessions were entangled, their tastes entwined. But on mornings like this, when Imogen was still asleep and Darcy was alone in the early March chill, she felt fallen.
Cast out of YA heaven, and living with Audrey Flinderson.
She measured the grind, filled the percolator, and watched the flame bloom. As she waited for the gurgle of coffee, Darcy warmed her hands over the heat.
In some other universe, she’d chanced on another part of the diary—a research note, a plot idea, or one of Imogen’s ridiculous pen names. The Darcy in that world was still blissfully ignorant, no doubt excited to face a new day of writing. But this Darcy hadn’t typed a single word of Untitled Patel.
The night before, not for the first time, Imogen had caught her staring out the window, brooding. Imogen had closed her laptop with a sigh and said, “There’s nothing wrong with flailing after you finish a novel. It’s just postpartum depression. But the cure is to start the next one.”
This wasn’t bad advice—Untitled Patel was due in less than six months. But Darcy was still wrung dry from her final days of rewriting. She’d thrown away all her previous efforts and gone in a new and crazed direction. She’d sent her characters to hell, sliced them up, and killed one of her favorites. And she’d left Yamaraj finally feeling like a proper death god, wounded in his heart and freighted with eternity.
The result wasn’t exactly a happy ending.
The weird thing was, both Moxie and Nan Eliot loved it. Darcy should have been celebrating . . . after all that hard work.
But Imogen hadn’t read it yet, not in the endless weeks since Darcy had finished. She kept delaying, saying she needed to focus on the first draft of Phobomancer. Once that was done, she could give Darcy’s new ending her full attention.
Or maybe she was sick of hearing about it. Sick of everything Darcy Patel–related.
Maybe it was all just hard work now.
The coffee burbled and sputtered on the stove, promising solace and caffeine. Darcy poured, cupped the warmth of the mug with both hands, and joined her laptop at the writing desk in the big room.
Waiting in her in-box was an email from Rhea:
Hey, Darcy! Attached are the copyedits and style sheets for AFTERWORLDS.
We fast-tracked these edits, and Nan says that if you can get them back to us by Friday, the advanced copies at BEA can be copyedited. Yay!
A glimmer of excitement stirred in Darcy, her gloom lifting. There was something pleasingly official about being copyedited, and frightening as well.
She opened one of the style sheets. It was a list, the names and attributes of every character in Afterworlds.
Lizzie: 17, short for Elizabeth, white, only child, hair color unknown
Yamaraj: appears 17 (3000?), Indian (brown skin), crooked eyebrow, beautiful, brother of Yami
Darcy frowned. The details of her protagonists seemed so sparse and flat. Surely Lizzie’s hair color was mentioned somewhere in the book. She opened the file and did a quick search on the word “hair,” but discovered only that Lizzie’s was long enough to push behind her ears when wet.
“Crap,” Darcy said aloud. Then she read the next description.
Jamie: 17, has car, lives with father
“ ‘Has car’? That’s it?” she cried out. No hair color, no brothers or sisters? No particular race? Hardly anything at all. But as Afterworlds had unfolded, Jamie had grown into someone quietly amazing. Not just a friend, but a touchstone of normal life that kept Lizzie from leaving the real world behind.
And she was nothing but a cardboard silhouette.
“Fuck!” Darcy yelled.
“Hey,” said a sleepy-looking Imogen from the bedroom door. “Are you yelling at yourself?”
Darcy nodded. “Copyedits. Turns out I suck at characters.”
Imogen scratched her head, sniffed the air. “Is that coffee?”
* * *
They sat across from each other at the desk, perusing printouts of the style sheets.
“This timeline rocks,” Imogen said.
“I know, right?” The copyeditor had sifted through Afterworlds for every reference to time (Was it a school day? Nighttime? How many weeks had passed?) and put them all into one place. Darcy marveled that she hadn’t made so obvious and useful a document herself.
Another document, the Paradox in-house style guide, was more arcane than helpful, though. Paradox demanded serial commas, and wanted “recalled dialogue” to be set in italics. Numbers one hundred and below had to be spelled out, but for anything higher numerals were used. Unless the number appeared in dialogue or was a big round number, like a million. There were so many issues Darcy had never thought about. But these decisions, at least, had been made for her.
When Darcy turned to the manuscript itself, she found the tricky questions, the judgment calls. There seemed to be hundreds of queries, several on every page. Darcy drifted through the document, reading the copyeditor’s notes at random.
“What does this mean, Gen? ‘Can’t hiss without sibilant.’ ”
“Where is that?” By now, Imogen had her own copy of Afterworlds open on her laptop.
“When Lizzie’s in her kitchen with Mr. Hamlyn.” Darcy followed the dotted line leading from comment to text. “The paragraph that says, ‘“Be quiet!” I hissed.’ What the hell does ‘without sibilant’ mean?”
“It means there’s no s in ‘Be quiet.’ ”
“Oh. You can’t hiss something if there’s no s in it?”
“I can. Be quiet! ” Imogen hissed, her voice sinking into a fierce whisper, her neck muscles tensing, her teeth bared like a snake’s.
“Whoa,” Darcy said. “You totally hissed that.”
She created her own little comment box, and typed “stet.” Kiralee had taught her this word, a magic spell for making edits go away.
“One down, a million to go.” Darcy read further. “Okay. Here’s a note that says, ‘You seem ambivalent about ghosts. Are they people or not?’ ”
“Wait. The copyeditor queried the whole moral dilemma of your book?”
“Yeah. But she’s right, Gen. Lizzie keeps worrying about Mindy being a real person. But when those five little girls disappear, it’s no big deal!”
Imogen shrugged. “That’s because they’re minor characters, like the guys in war movies who die in the background. Novelists are evil psychopomps, basically. We treat a few characters as real, but the rest of them are cannon fodder.”
“But if the copyeditor’s asking about this, it must be confusing. Maybe my book has a fundamental lack of ethical coherence!”
“Or maybe copyeditors just hate ambiguity,” Imogen said.
“Very true,” Darcy hissed, not as snakily as Imogen. “Stet.”
They read in silence for a while, Darcy still adrift among the endless queries. Tomorrow she would start at the beginning and address each in order, but at the moment sampling them was daunting enough. She didn’t want to panic and ruin this moment here with Imogen.
Darcy had missed working together at the same desk, the quiet tap of keys, the shuffle of paper. Imogen was still in her pajamas, her hair bed-mussed and growing raggedly out of its last cut, beautifully unkempt. Maybe once Darcy was writing again, the words she’d found in the diary would fade from her mind.
“Good coffee, by the way,” Imogen said.
“Thanks.” Darcy stared into her own empty cup. “And thanks for doing this. I know you’re busy with Phobomancer. But I’d be going bat-shit without you here.”
Imogen smiled and gave her a lazy cat’s-eye blink. “You should enjoy this, Darcy. Copyedits are the fun part! You get to sit here for a whole week, poking around in the Oxford English Dictionary, pondering whether a semicolon or an em dash is better.”
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“Your idea of fun and mine are somewhat different,” Darcy said. “I mean, what does all this have to do with stories? Does a semicolon ever make the difference in a novel having the juice?”
“Dude. Semicolons bring the juice.”
“Once in my creative writing class in tenth grade, I called them winkies out loud.”
Imogen’s eyes widened. “Don’t ever tell Kiralee that. She will disown you and never blurb you again!”
Darcy giggled. She’d completely forgotten about winkies. But then she said, “Hang on. She’ll never blurb me again? Is Kiralee giving me a blurb?”
“Crap. That was a secret. Kiralee wanted to tell you herself, because she really likes the new ending. She called it ‘suitably brutal.’ But I’m hoping that phrase won’t be in the blurb.”
Darcy felt a smile on her face, the gloom of the last weeks lifting again. “I’m so glad you told me, Gen, even if you weren’t supposed to.”
“So when Kiralee calls, can you, like, pretend to be surprised?”
“That shouldn’t be hard. A big chunk of me is still amazed that Kiralee Taylor even read my book, much less is going to blurb it.”
Imogen smiled. “I’d blurb it myself, but I don’t think my name would sell too many copies.”
“But you haven’t read it,” Darcy said.
In quick succession, flickers of surprise, embarrassment, and annoyance flitted across Imogen’s face. Darcy hadn’t meant to say it like that, or to have sounded so deadly serious, her voice breaking a little on the final word.
“Not the new ending, anyway,” she added lamely.
“Yeah, I’m sorry.” Imogen raised her hands. “I’ve been crazy, I know.”
“It feels like you’re mad at me.”
“Don’t be silly. I’m pissed at fucking Phobomancer, not you.”
Darcy tried to stop herself, but the words kept coming. “You keep saying I’m such hard work!”
“I do?”
“Well, maybe you only said it once, when I was snooping in your high school yearbook. But it kind of stuck in my head, because . . .” Darcy squeezed her eyes shut. Crap. This was it, the time to be honest. “I sort of looked at your diary.”
Imogen said nothing. Darcy opened her eyes.
“It was an accident. Nan was about to call me, and I couldn’t find my phone.”
“So you used mine.” Imogen’s voice revealed nothing. It wasn’t angry, or disappointed, or intense. Her face was impassive, her eyes motionless. For a moment, she looked like a cardboard cutout.
Imogen: 23, white, tall, short dark hair
“I didn’t mean to look at anything, Gen, I swear. I was just going to call my own phone—to find it. But I saw a page of your diary by accident. And you called me hard work, and a bitch. Just like that other girl.”
Imogen shook her head slowly. “No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.” Now that her honesty had finally arrived, Darcy had no choice but to give it free rein. She needed to say everything. “Do a search. Find the words: After all this hard work, another bitch!”
Imogen drew the phone from her pocket, tapped at the screen with slow deliberation. Darcy sat there, aware of her own heartbeat in the corners of her vision, the room warping with every angry pulse. When she blinked, a single tear trickled from her eye.
After an endless silence, Imogen raised an eyebrow. “Huh. I never noticed that.”
“Never noticed?” Darcy shook her head. “How could you not notice? You typed it!”
“Not really.” Imogen’s voice was still infuriatingly flat. “That wasn’t about you, Darcy. It was about my opening. The version my agent didn’t like.”
“That makes no sense. Why would you say that about a scene?”
Imogen stood slowly. She was all in slow motion now, a statue come to life.
“B is next to H,” she said quietly, and walked away across the big room.
Darcy knew that she should follow, should keep arguing until everything was out in the open. This wasn’t about her spying on some precious diary, it was about the two of them knowing what they really thought of each other. It was about honesty, not secrets.
It was about whether Imogen/Audrey was writing another savage screed in her head, or in her diary, this time about Darcy Patel.
But somehow she couldn’t make herself move. She was too angry, too astonished that Imogen was responding in nonsense phrases.
B is next to H. What the fuck did that mean? In what universe could that diary entry have referred to the opening of Phobomancer?
B is next to H . . .
Darcy’s fingers twitched, and then, quite suddenly and completely, she understood. Not with her mind, but in the marrow of her hands, the muscles informed by the millions of words she’d typed in her life, all the emails and school papers and fan fiction, all the discarded drafts of Afterworlds. Her fingers twitched again, spelling out the words, telling her what Imogen had meant.
Darcy stared at the open laptop in front of her. On its keyboard the B was, in fact, just below the H. She closed her eyes, and saw the words again . . .
After all that hard work, another hitch.
Imogen’s finger had slipped and hit the B. Or one of the other letters in that little cluster—G, N, or V—and software had brought the error home.
“Fucking autocorrect,” Darcy hissed.
She stood up and made her way to the bedroom door. Imogen had changed out of her pajamas into street clothes. She was stuffing T-shirts into a plastic bag.
“Please don’t, Gen. I get it now. It was just an accident.”
Imogen turned. “Just a hitch, I think you mean.”
Darcy tried to smile, but it felt wrong on her face. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” Imogen said, and cleared her throat. “I could deal when you snooped in my old yearbook, Darcy. It made sense. You just wanted to learn more about me. And you had every right to know my real name. You were going to find that essay sooner or later, after all.”
“Imogen . . .”
“And in the end, it wasn’t that big a problem that you stole my scene. You didn’t mean to. Shit like that happens when writers live together, I guess. It was all okay, really, as long as I could have one thing that was my own. My fucking diary.”
“I know. But it was an accident.”
“How long ago? When did you read it?”
Darcy stared at the floor. “Six days before my deadline. The night Nan called. I was just looking for my phone.”
“Sure. But you didn’t forget it. And you didn’t tell me you’d read it for six weeks! That’s why you’ve been so depressed, right? Because you keep thinking about that essay.”
“Yes,” Darcy said. She had to be honest from here on out.
“Because those words from my diary became the most important thing for you, because they were supposed to be my secret. Because they were mine.” Imogen turned away, stuffing a handful of underwear into the garbage bag. “Nothing else I’ve said to you in the last six weeks really mattered, did it? It was the words in that diary that you believed. The fucking typo that you trusted! Not me.”
“I trust you, Gen.”
“No you don’t! Whatever I hide will always be more important to you than what I say and do. Whatever I give you will matter less than what I keep to myself. You’ll always want more than what’s in front of you. You’ll always want my innermost thoughts, my writing ideas, my real name.”
“Imogen Gray is your real name.”
“Not really. I’m Audrey, who wrote that pathetic, spiteful essay. That’s how you see me.”
“I see you as Imogen.”
“That’s just my pen name, and it might not even be that for very long.”
“Please stop saying that. And please stop packing.” Darcy leaned back against the wall, sliding down until she was on the floor. “Talk to me.”
“Okay. Do you want to know what I really think? What my diary really says about you?”
“Yes . . .” Darcy heard her own voice trail off. “I mean, except if you don’t want to tell me. Keep any secrets you need to, Gen.”
“I never thought you were a bitch, Darcy. Never once. You’re the opposite of that—a really sweet kid. Maybe a little lucky, a little sheltered, but smart enough that you didn’t really need the world to beat you up.” Imogen had stopped packing, but she had gone still again, her voice flat, her face expressionless. “Smart, but maybe not as lucky as you seem. I think you got published too young.”
“Oh,” Darcy said softly. Her heart had just broken.
“Not because your writing isn’t ready, but because you aren’t. You don’t trust me, and you won’t trust your own novel when it gets out there and people start to write about it. Thousands of people, some brilliant, some stupid, or vile and hurtful. I’m so scared for you, Darcy. There are pages and pages in my diary about how scared I am for you.”
“I had no idea,” Darcy said.
“That’s because I didn’t want my fears to become yours. Because they’re mine. And I was right about keeping them a secret too, because you’ve spent the last six weeks freaking out over one fucking typo! What’ll you be like when a thousand people start picking apart your novel?”
“It’ll be okay,” Darcy said. “Because you’ll be there.”
“Maybe.”
Darcy didn’t understand the words. She couldn’t. She shook her head.
“I think you also met me too young,” Imogen said. “That’s in my diary too. You want something more epic than this relationship, something fantastical and heavenly. You want us to read each other’s minds.”
“No, I don’t. I just wanted you to read my fucking ending.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry about that.” Imogen’s stone facade had cracked. She looked defeated now, her hair in disarray, her face flushed, like someone who’d lost a fistfight. “But right now my opening still sucks, and I haven’t gotten any work done in the last month. And I really need to get my head clear, so I have to go home. I have a book to write.”
Imogen turned away, stuffing a last few things of hers into the plastic garbage bag—her phone charger, a handful of rings, a signed copy of Standerson’s latest from the tour, and the box of matchbooks that she’d brought over for writing purposes, full of random jobs and settings and potential fires.