by Hazel Yeats
“Questions about Mommy’s book.”
“Bunny!” The sound of her scream resounding through the auditorium made Zoe giggle, and she shouted again.
“That’s fun, isn’t it?” Cara said. “But you have to keep your voice down now, okay?” She put a finger to her lips. “Remember what we talked about?”
Zoe nodded and put a finger to her lips too. Her face became serious as she was reminded of her super-important tasks.
“They’re not going to talk about Bunny,” Cara told her. “They will another time, but this time they’re talking about Mummy’s other book.”
Zoe looked at her blankly.
“The book that’s called What’s Another Day. Remember?”
“I want to play with Ede,” Zoe declared, suddenly bored with being a grown-up.
Cara nodded. “Maybe tomorrow, okay? We’ll ask Aunt Myra if we can take Ede to the park with us and have a little picnic.”
“Sure,” Myra said. “Take her. Take all of them!”
“Yay,” whispered Zoe. She looked up at Cara, proud of herself for following the rules.
“Aw, honey.” Cara put her arm around the girl and pulled her close. “You’re doing that so well!”
Myra reached across Inge and tapped Cara on the knee. “I could even be persuaded to let you take Arend if you ask me real nice.”
Cara shook her head. “Thanks. But no thanks. Our picnic’s an all-girls party.”
“Honey,” said Myra, “your whole life is an all-girls party.”
Slowly, the auditorium was filling up. It had wing access from both sides, and Cara turned her back to the stage to see two steady rows of teens walk down the steps and take their seats. It was funny, she mused, how Jude’s audience seemed to have aged more than a decade in a little over a year. Gone were the sidekicks dressed as rabbits. Gone were the screaming toddlers, sitting cross-legged on the floor, listening breathlessly as Jude took them through another one of Bunny’s adventures, their parents patiently waiting in the background. It was a very different crowd that she was catering to now—much more physically intimidating, often morose, shy and self-conscious, or inappropriately loud, insecure, doting, full of questions and criticism. Jude’s novel had seemed to attract the more pensive ones among the young readers, the brooding types, the late night poets.
The idea for What’s Another Day was born one night by accident, when Jude and Cara had been watching the sci-fi channel. Without realizing that the subject held any special interest to either of them, they started talking about time travel. Cara wondered what it would be like if you could hop back and forth in time, for the duration of your own life span, to consult your older self and base your choices on knowing what the outcome would be.
Before they knew it, Jude had produced the first draft—a wild ride of a teen time travel story. It took her a good many months to produce a final manuscript, but by then it was somehow clear to Jude, as well as to her agent, that this book stood a good chance of being a huge success. Jude, having been a pretty successful writer for years, realized that she hadn’t known what true success was. She became a star, a Young Adult heroine.
“All I did,” she’d say in many of the interviews that followed the publication, “was what I’ve always done—help kids come to terms with the scary mysteries of life in a way they will understand, whether they’re four, or sixteen.”
The teen readers became devotees. Jude was no stranger to admiration, but where the toddlers had loved Bunny, the teen fans were mostly interested in her, the writer.
There was the pressure of a sequel, naturally, but pressure came with the territory.
“Pressure schmessure,” Cara said. “Sequel schmequel.” Jude punched her, which was enough to take the pressure off. They had long since stopped being amazed at how often this was simply enough to resolve an issue—a stupid joke and a playful punch. It seemed that they had wanted the same things all along. The only things that were ever in the way were trust issues—assumptions about what they were convinced would go wrong, but, when put to the test, turned out not to go wrong at all. It helped that they were careful to avoid getting too symbiotic, and that they allowed each other the right of personal space and development. They were always there for each other, but as two separate beings, not as some kind of fused-together, double person. It was the kind of commitment they’d both been dreaming of, the kind that Cara had seen represented in the design of Jude’s necklace on their very first date.
“They’re all girls.” Alice pouted as she watched the crowd begin to fill the rows of seats. “I told you this would happen. She could have doubled her audience if she hadn’t insisted on going with that thing.”
That thing was Alice’s preferred reference to a crucial and gripping scene in the book, where the eighty-year-old protagonist tells her sixteen-year-old self that it’s okay to be gay, and that yes, coming out of the closet now is essential to her future.
“We’re actually very proud of that thing,” said Cara.
Alice shrugged. “All I’m saying is that she’s now a lesbian writer. It’s a label she’ll never get rid of. Ever.”
“We’re proud of the label too,” Cara said.
“Personally, I love all the baby dykes.” Inge was bouncing in her seat. “And the goths too.”
“And all of them are in love with Jude,” Myra said.
“What are goths about anyway?” Alice watched, with obvious fascination, a girl completely dressed in black with a face full of piercings sit down at the end of their row.
“What everybody is about at that age,” Myra said. “Angst.”
“So why weren’t they around when we were young? We had angst!”
“They were.” Cara smiled. “They just didn’t get out much.”
In less than half an hour, the auditorium was packed—all two hundred and fifty seats filled. The stage was complete now, with two leather armchairs, a large potted palm and a table full of water bottles and glasses between them.
“When is the movie starting?” Zoe asked. She was pointing to the automated screen at the back of the stage. A lightshow was projected on it now that may or may not be actual footage of the aurora borealis.
“There’s not going to be a movie,” Cara told Zoe. “Or maybe just a very short one, with Mommy in it.”
“Mommy’s not in the movie!” Zoe shook her head at so much ignorance.
“But she sure is a star,” Alice said.
Zoe, not particularly fond of Alice, stuck out her tongue to her.
When the lights were dimmed, Cara felt the anxiety she always did the moment any interview started. It was worse now—she didn’t think Jude had ever talked in front of so many people before. Sometimes, exactly at moments like this, Cara would think back, longingly, to Jude’s Bunny days—when it had all, in spite of her initial fear of the little ones, been so simple, so low-key. Cara was in awe of the ease with which Jude seemed to have made the transition to having such a different position to her readers. And not just to her readers, either. She had a different position as a writer too—it was almost as if she were held more accountable, as if what she had to say mattered far more than it used to. Cara, very much part of the writer’s life, but still a bystander, had adapted to the changes more slowly, and never quite as convincingly. She would compare the change to moving from the countryside to a large city—it was much louder and busier, and much more stressful. On the other hand, the rewards were considerable.
Cara was so immersed in her thoughts that it was the applause that made her realize Jude was walking onto the stage. Cara could actually see her slip into her role. She wasn’t adopting a different persona—she was always Jude, even in public, but with more of a sharp edge. She sat up straighter, talked a little fancier, smiled a little more, and she was endlessly more patient, answering questions she had been asked a hundred times before as if
this was actually the first time she heard them.
It was always somewhat of a mystery to Cara how she related to Jude when she was doing things in an official writer capacity. Cara was her life partner, but there was a layer of something impenetrable that stuck to her on occasions like these, almost as if she were wearing some sort of costume. She smiled. Costumes seemed to play an important role in their lives—Santa, Bunny, and now the invisible costume of the idol.
Jude took a sip of water as the interviewer cleared her throat and fired her first question at her. Jude smiled and put down her glass.
“A muse, I guess.” she said. “At least for me. Any good story starts with my muse whispering something in my ear. From that moment on, it’s simply hard work. It’s simply a matter of sitting down and getting the job done.”
She sat up straighter. Cara smiled, knowing that Jude was going to shine. And although she loved seeing Jude so confident, and so successful, she couldn’t help thinking that three hours from now they would be home, put Zoe to bed, and just sit in the dark with a glass of wine, very close together.
Those hours, when all the costumes had come off, would always be her favorite.
ABOUT HAZEL YEATS
Hazel Yeats resides in the Netherlands, the country of flat polders, green pastures, and lots of water. She knew from an early age that she wanted to write, but it wasn’t until decades later that she finally wrote a novel. Once she had, there was no going back—she was hooked.
When she’s not slaving away at her day job, she’s cycling, sipping cappuccinos, or getting her hands dirty by growing her own veggies. And she sings, in a very unambitious choir. You wouldn’t peg her for a soprano, but she is.
CONNECT WITH HAZEL YEATS:
E-Mail: [email protected]
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© 2016 by Hazel Yeats
ISBN (mobi): 978-3-95533-500-7
ISBN (epub): 978-3-95533-501-4
Also available as paperback.
Published by Ylva Publishing, legal entity of Ylva Verlag, e.Kfr.
Ylva Verlag, e.Kfr.
Owner: Astrid Ohletz
Am Kirschgarten 2
65830 Kriftel
Germany
www.ylva-publishing.com
First edition: 2016
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fi
ctitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Credits
Edited by Gill McKnight
Cover Design & Print Layout by Streetlight Graphics