The Undoing of Thistle Tate

by Katelyn Detweiler

“Five starred reviews! Between Two Worlds just got its fifth star! It’s a new record for us! This is a great way to kick off pub week and the tour on Tuesday. Five!”

  He’s beaming up at me and waving his hands in the air. I guess he expects me to start tap dancing around the room next, twisting and twirling in glee, but I don’t. I can’t even bother to smile.

  “Thistle?”

  I ignore him. My eyes go to the bookshelves instead: rows of Girl in the Afterworld in English and every other language I could ever think of. Plus some that I would never have thought of.

  And now, the second book in the series: Between Two Worlds.

  Titles change on foreign editions, but the author is always the same: Thistle Tate.

  Me.

  There’s only one book up there that’s different from the rest, and I walk across the room to pick it up: The Princess and the Pizza Delivery Man, made out of construction paper and ribbon. Apparently when I was little—according to Dad, at least—I’d get bored with whatever picture books he’d try to read to me and make up my own stories instead. I hadn’t quite mastered the alphabet yet, so he wrote down this particular story for me, and I drew the pictures. I guess I really loved pizza. And princesses.

  I had written three words of it on my own, though: By Thistle Tate, in bright red crayon on the front cover. My s and e’s were backward.

  By Thistle Tate.

  Those three words may have been true then.

  But they’re a lie now.

  two

  Marigold had always hated the abandoned house that faced the street where the accident happened. It was less than a mile from where she lived, entirely unavoidable, and she hated how sad and empty it made her feel to see it. Abby and Sam used to call it the Death House. Now they didn’t say anything when they passed by it on the rare times Marigold hung out with them.

  Marigold dreamed about the accident—and that house—every night. But instead of lying on the road next to her mom, she was sitting in the old rocking chair on the rotting porch of the house, watching the accident come to life. There was crashing and wailing and flashing, a body tumbling through glass, and then—her mom stood up from the road and turned toward the house.

  She looked at Marigold and smiled.

  —EXCERPT FROM LEMONADE SKIES, BOOK 1: GIRL IN THE AFTERWORLD

  I can still remember everything about the day my dad and I made the decision, two and a half years ago, a few weeks after my fifteenth birthday.

  The day we chose to lie.

  I was painting a map of the Holy Roman Empire for my Latin “class,” to include in the end-of-year portfolio for my homeschooling evaluator—Mrs. Everly, an English teacher we hired from a local high school—and trying not to worry about my dad. He’d been distracted the night before and all that morning, too, and after he’d given me my assignment, he’d disappeared into his office with the door closed.

  When my mom died, my dad quit his job as a high school English teacher. He wanted to be home with me, and that didn’t change when it came time for kindergarten. He was a teacher, so he could teach me himself. Homeschooling, home everything else, too. We rarely left the house, except to go to the grocery store five blocks down and the Chinese take-out restaurant across the street. Sometimes we went to the library or the park or one of my favorite local museums—the Please Touch Museum and the Franklin Institute. Dad didn’t even replace the car Mom had totaled in the accident. He began to stop seeing old friends, eventually cut off any former social life altogether. I was too young to understand that Dad was too sad for friends, and that he was scared. Scared that more bad things would happen if we stepped outside—another accident, another freak tragedy he couldn’t control. It was safer to stay home.

  My universe was tiny but lovely, at least in the early years. Dad channeled his energy and grief into doting on me—reading me books for hours every night until I fell asleep, working tirelessly on homeschooling lesson plans, cooking me chocolate chip pancakes anytime I asked, watching online tutorials so he could learn to braid my hair and paint my nails. He was so good at being a dad that sometimes I almost forgot to miss my mom. Almost.

  I’d work on assignments while he tried and quit a whole slew of stay-at-home jobs—online tutor, virtual assistant, customer service agent, audio transcriber. There was no mortgage to worry about because my mom had inherited the house from her parents, one stroke of luck in our favor—if it can be considered luck that both of her parents died too young. And my parents had me later in life, well into their thirties, so they’d had some savings by then. Life insurance also helped. My dad tried to explain it to me once, when I’d asked why he didn’t have to go to work like Liam’s parents. But still, even when I was a kid I wasn’t dumb. I knew there were bills to pay.

  Writing was my dad’s only constant. It had always been his dream, though he’d gone into teaching because it was the practical thing to do. But it was a side bonus of quitting, he said: fewer papers to grade and more time to write. At first he tried a memoir—single dad coping, raising a daughter alone. He submitted it to literary agents nonstop for a year. No takers, though. So he tried picture books next, then chapter books, then middle grade novels, evolving as I did. Adventure, fantasy, science fiction, historical, mystery. He tried everything.

  Over ten years of writing, and not a single sale. Every rejection made him sink just a little bit lower and took him just a little bit farther away from me. As I got older I realized it wasn’t only the rejection letters. It was as though the more time passed, the more real life got, the harder it was for him to pretend that everything was okay. He missed my mom—sometimes I heard him crying in the middle of the night—and he was worried about money. I’d eavesdropped on him talking to a Realtor about selling the house, but neither of us wanted to leave. This was her house. If she was anywhere still, it was here, not at some ugly pink gravestone that we never visited. I offered to start going to school so he could teach again, but he said he’d rather be at home with me.

  And then, finally, there was hope. A new manuscript, the best I’d read yet—Girl in the Afterworld. The idea had come from one of my dad’s English assignments for me: Create a scene in your own afterworld. His prompts tended to be a little on the dark side.

  But I’d loved the concept, and I’d spent more time on the story than I ever had on any other project. I wrote about a never-ending skyscraper up in the clouds, every floor filled with people who had died. I was alive and could transport there through a portal—the porch of an abandoned house in our neighborhood—and return home anytime I wanted. I searched for my mom while I was there, of course, making new friends from across the world. And at the very end, for one glorious moment, I’d found her. Mom.

  I hadn’t known it until a few months later, but that was the start of Marigold Maybee. My dad slaved over the manuscript, and when I finally read it, I was stunned.

  The story opened with fifteen-year-old Marigold just barely surviving a car accident that killed her mom, Violet. But then Marigold found a portal, a second chance—just like the one I’d described—to a place called the Afterworld, where it was beautiful and dark and perfect and so similar to the world I’d created for my assignment.

  My dad had been reluctant to send Girl in the Afterworld out, no matter how much I told him I loved it. He was terrified of more rejection, kept saying it needed more work. I believed in him, though. And in Marigold. So I’d pushed. But he kept saying no.

  That had been just a few weeks before. Had he sent it out after all? Was he drowning in more rejections?

  I was too worried and curious to keep working. I put down my paintbrush and walked to the office. Lucy followed at my heels, bumping up against my ankles as I stopped in front of the door.

  “Dad, everything okay?” Silence. I was about to turn the knob when the door swung open.

  “Everything’s fine. I just need to
talk to you about something.”

  “Something good?” I was afraid to hope.

  “I think so, but…it’s complicated.” He looked away, his brow furrowing.

  “Tell me.”

  He stepped back into his office and gestured for me to take the love seat. He sat in the desk chair, rolling it over until he’d stopped right in front of me. Lucy had already settled at my feet, perched on her haunches, watching my dad as closely as I was.

  “So I listened to you,” he started. His eyes were fixed on his hands, clenching and unclenching on top of his knees. “I sent the Marigold story out to literary agents.”

  “What? Dad! That’s great!” I leaned forward to hug him. He wrapped one arm loosely around my back, giving me a few light, quick pats.

  I sat back, frowning. “Okay. Well, that was a lame hug. What’s the catch?”

  “Right. Perceptive as always, aren’t you?” He forced a laugh. “So I decided to send the manuscript to only ten agents this time—my dream agents, really. But when I sent it, I…er…”

  There was a pause. I squinted, confused.

  “You…?”

  “Well, I was so afraid this one would be rejected, too, that I decided to do an experiment. I was curious to see how much biography and background play in to their consideration of manuscripts by unknown authors. So I—um…I decided to switch it up a bit, I guess you could say? I told them someone else wrote it.”

  “You’re losing me,” I said. “If you didn’t say you wrote it, who—?”

  “You.”

  I laughed. “That makes no sense. Me?”

  “Yes. I wrote the cover letter as you. I said that I had just turned fifteen, and that I’d had the idea for Marigold because my own mom had died in a car accident when I was little…and I sent a photo, too. Of you.”

  I stared at him.

  “It was the one of you in your garden,” he continued. “You’re watering the marigolds. You know the one? From last summer?”

  He took my silence to mean that no, I didn’t know exactly what photo he was talking about. He rolled back to the desk, picking up a frame from next to the computer monitor.

  “This is one of my favorites of you—you are so much like your mom.”

  He shoved the frame into my hands, and all I could do was stare. I looked so young, my thick black curls falling out of a messy braid, clear blue eyes without a trace of mascara on the lashes, pale skin with a smudge of dirt along my forehead. I was fourteen then, but I could have passed for eleven or twelve, easily.

  “But no one would ever believe that,” I said, words finally coming back to me. I pointed to my face behind the glass. “I look like a kid in that picture!”

  “Well, Thistle, that’s the thing. They must have loved the photo, the idea of you. And most importantly, they loved your story.”

  “But it’s not my story. It’s yours.”

  “Well, I mean, technically, yes, I wrote the words…” He ran his fingers over the top of his thinning gray-black hair. “But it was your idea, remember? You thought of the Afterworld, and the portal…”

  “I wrote a ten-page story, Dad. You wrote a whole book.”

  “You were the muse, though. This story wouldn’t have happened without you.”

  “That’s beside the point,” I said. “And what are you even saying? They loved the story? And me? What does that mean?”

  “Well, I sent it out two weeks ago, and now there are five agents fighting for your story.”

  “Your story.”

  “No, our story.” He looked me in the eyes for the first time. I fought back another defiant your story. Because as nervous as he was, he also looked hopeful. Excited even.

  I barely recognized those emotions on his face.

  “Thistle, I’ve been thinking about it, and…I know which agent I want to pick. Who we should pick, but only if you agree.”

  “If I agree to what? To lie? To pretend to be the author? They’d meet me and they’d know.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true, sweetie. There are a few teen authors out there these days. Successful ones even. Publishers love it, readers love it. It feels more genuine that way. Much more relatable than if the story were coming from someone like me—a fat, schlubby fifty-something-year-old guy, trying to write a fantasy love story for teen girls.”

  “You’re not fat,” I said, on instinct. But we did need to eat less takeout. His clothes were looking uncomfortably tight lately.

  “Chubby.”

  “Okay, but not the point. If they like it so much, why does it matter if it’s you or me on the book jacket?”

  “They get hundreds of manuscripts a week, Thistle. They’re only going to notice a few of them, tops. And this…it caught their eye. The story, yes. But the author, too. It’s a package deal. The publicity people will love having this hook.”

  Agents, publishers, publicity people now, too—it was too much, too bizarre to take in. It was all happening just a few hours away from us, in New York City, but I’d never been there before. I’d barely been outside of Pennsylvania, except for a few vacations with Liam’s family. Publishing might as well have been taking place on the moon, it felt so far away from our quiet little world in Philly.

  Still, I understood enough to know that we couldn’t do this.

  “No way, Dad. I’m not agreeing. Obviously. It’s…wrong.”

  He moved his chair closer, resting his hands on my shoulders.

  “It would only be for this one book. That’s it. Anything else I write in the future will be under my name.”

  But what if they find out? I almost asked, but didn’t. That question was way beyond my ability to process.

  “I can’t even lie to you when Liam and I raid your change jar. I could never ever lie about something this huge.”

  My dad shook his head. “I need something, Thistle. For me. It’s—it’s knowing that something I wrote is actually good enough. That someone thinks it’s worth making into a real book. And this is only the first step. We don’t know what will happen next. Maybe publishers won’t like it.”

  I didn’t say anything to that, which he must have taken as a green light to keep going.

  “The agent I want to work with, Susan Van Buren, is very picky. She’s a big deal. It’s a dream opportunity, Thistle. A dream. So what do you say? Do we give it a shot?”

  “I’m sorry, Dad, but no. Maybe it’s not too late to tell this Susan that it’s actually you? If she really loved the story?”

  He shook his head slowly. “It’s this or nothing. There’s no backtracking now. I just…” He trailed off.

  “You what?”

  “I haven’t wanted to worry you, but we need money—I know we both want to stay in this house, but selling it and downsizing might be the only option we have soon, and we’d get an advance if the book sells to a publisher.”

  The words burned deep down in my stomach.

  Bills were piled up on the kitchen table. We needed money. It was just one book. But he deserved to have it published under his name: Theo Tate. If he couldn’t have that, maybe this was the next best way.

  “I only want this if you want it, too. We’d do it together, you and me. Teamwork. I’m sure we’ll have loads of revisions to do. I think that could count toward your English requirements for the year. Mrs. Everly would no doubt approve.” He gave me a weak smile. “So what do you say?”

  We sat there staring at each other. Silent. Both of us waiting to hear what I would say.

  I didn’t want to live a lie.

  But I loved him. I wanted him to be happy. I wanted us to be happy. And I also wanted to stay in Mom’s house.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Yes.

  * * *

  One month later, Girl in the Afterworld sold at auction to one of the six big publi
shing houses competing for it. All of them trying to impress us with the most money, the most promises for huge publicity and marketing campaigns.

  But the winning publisher didn’t want just one book. They convinced my dad—and my dad convinced me—that it had to be a series. He had a detailed synopsis for two more books ready the next day.

  Three books in total: The Lemonade Skies trilogy.

  But that would be the end. Just this series.

  Only Marigold.

  * * *

  Elliot Archer, our young but brilliant editor at Zenith Publishers, had us come to New York City to meet him. That was the first time I had to wear my lie like a second skin.

  From the minute I stepped off the train into Penn Station—filled with the smell of deli coffee and greasy pizza and pastries, rotting garbage and urine—I wanted to be back in Philly. I wanted to skip our meeting with Elliot and go home to my own quiet corner of life. The need to disappear only swelled as we climbed into the waiting limousine and traveled through massive throngs of cars and people, passing through Times Square, buildings growing taller and shinier and grander as we went.

  This wasn’t my city. This wasn’t me. Why was I doing this?

  Dad. Money. Our home. Mom’s home.

  “You’re a wonder, Thistle,” Elliot had said, toasting me with sparkling apple juice in his office. “This is one of the most perfect first drafts I’ve ever read. Just think, if you’re writing like this at fifteen, imagine what you’ll be writing as an adult!”

  My dad looked like he might combust with joy. They were both too preoccupied with their own delight to realize how undelighted I was, thankfully.

  I’d chugged my juice as Elliot grinned at me, my throat burning from the fizz.

  We’re lying! I wanted to scream, before it would always be too late. But I didn’t.

  I didn’t say a word.

  three

  Marigold knew it had only been a dream, but she had to go to the old house. She snuck out at night, when her dad was asleep.