“Alex,” I said.
“What’s next on the agenda?” she said. “Do we have an agenda? What I’ve learned from this experience is that you just can’t have fun unless there’s an agenda, so I think maybe our first agenda item is to create a system for agenda creatio—”
I shouted, “Oh my God, stop saying agenda!” and then Alex broke down laughing, and ever since then she’s stymied all my attempts at book discussion by saying she’ll add that to the agenda.
So there it is. Maybe the problem is that I’m trying to slap an ending onto a friendship that only began like six months ago.
Wait, I guess one more thing has happened:
Today, my phone chimed while I was helping a customer. It was an e-mail from that media agent, Amy Zazo, saying she’d asked Linda to send her the latest version of my book and was there a good time for Amy to call me? My heart started to pound. Was this it? Was I going to be back on top? As I sized the customer’s foot and brought out three boxes of sneakers for her to look at, all the fantasy scenarios spun themselves out in my head: She’d found a publisher! Someone in Hollywood wanted to option my book! They needed me to go back on TV to promote it!
Finally, the woman took her shoes to the shiny sales counter—it’s covered in yellow and blue stripes—at the front of the store, and I sent an e-mail to Amy, telling her to call me whenever she had the time.
Afterward, I went home and read my manuscript. And, maybe this is strange, but as I went through it, I started crying. Every word felt so much like me. Normally, I think of myself as having a very cold heart, but I could feel the warmness and the desperation oozing up through the text. Did Amy really think it was worthwhile? And what draft had she read, exactly?
I looked back: the last version I’d sent Linda had been right after I was named salutatorian, but before I’d given my commencement speech. Amy had loved the book even though she didn’t have the full ending.
The next morning, Amy called me at the start of my shift, and I ducked out into the warehouse area to take to the call.
She started off by giving me a very warm “It’s so wonderful to finally get a chance to chat with you!” and went on to say, “I know Linda didn’t think this book had a future, but I have to say that, while she is a very fine children’s lit agent, I don’t think she sees the full potential here.”
Then she praised my book’s gracefulness and insight and explained that she’d been following my whole case very closely, and that now she had my side of the backstory between Susan Le and my parents, she thought there was a wonderful opportunity to turn this into a really gripping, plot-driven memoir.
“It’s the kind of story people love!” she said. “You knew, all along, that a wrong had been done to your family, so you struggled against all odds to correct it, and you finally succeeded! I mean, I obviously don’t have those chapters, but I can just imagine that sense of triumph when you’re delivering that speech to that silent audience. You know, that’s really the capstone: all through the book it feels like you’re always asking permission from your parents to speak out and defend their rights, but in that moment, you’re finally taking permission. It’s the moment when you come into full moral consciousness.”
Even though we were on the phone, I was smiling desperately. “Yes, although it was actually very complicated….”
“And sitting next to Susan Le…what was that like? Did you ever speak to her? What were you thinking? What did you feel when you saw her? You know, in many ways, she’s your shadow self here: a version of you that grew up without the strong, instinctive moral center that grounds you.”
The only thing I could feel was the metal superstructure of the shelves that I was leaning against.
Last night, when I was reading my book, I realized that I didn’t really write it in order to get into Stanford. Or, well, I did, sort of. But actually writing the novel and getting into Stanford were two aspects of the same desire: I just wanted someone to love me. And at that moment, while I listened to Amy praise me, all I could hear was my own voice begging Susan Le to see that she’d never find another person like me.
I let Amy talk to me for a few more minutes and found myself promising her that I’d send her the rest of the chapters as soon as possible.
After ending the call, I felt weirdly empty. I had a decision to make. I could either write the chapters the way Amy wanted, or I could send her the real manuscript.
The only problem was that both of those options felt completely repulsive.
Then I heard a rattling noise. Someone had banged a dolly into some of the metal shelves. I turned, and then the dolly clanged again and boxes rained down. I heard George curse.
I forced myself to smile, then walked around to where he was scrambling around on the ground, trying to assort the shoes back into the right boxes.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Damn dolly,” he said. “It’s too wide to fit in these aisles. I keep complaining to the manager about it, but he doesn’t do shit.”
“Why don’t we just move the shelves?” I looked around. “Look, all we’d need to do is move this shelf so it’s flush with that wall, and then we’d have more than enough space.”
The ventilation clicked off, and suddenly my voice sounded way too loud.
George was still crouching on his heels, but he looked up at me and then brushed his hair out of his eyes. “Wait, what’s wrong?”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
“Resh, what’s wrong?”
I started wrestling a shelf out of position. That, unfortunately, made even more boxes rain down. Finally, George and I realized that we’d need to unload each shelf before we could move it. As we worked, I kept looking over my shoulder, hoping that the manager wouldn’t notice I wasn’t out on the floor. But I guess it was a pretty slow day. George kept complaining, saying no one was even gonna notice that we’d done this, but I tossed him a few kisses whenever he looked ready to quit.
When we finally finished, the room looked almost exactly the same. George started kissing my neck while my back was against a metal shelf, but I broke free and made it out to the sales floor.
I suppose the manager missed me—or maybe he noticed how flushed I was—because he rolled his eyes and said, “Come on, Resh. I know it’s slow, but you can’t just be disappearing to the back whenever you’re working the same shift as George.”
I glanced at the floor and tried to look contrite, even though my heart was pounding. When my manager turned away, I rocked up and down on my heels.
And that’s when I realized that this novel was finished. No need to name it. No need to give it a tidy wrapping-up. Maybe someday I’ll send it to Amy, and maybe I won’t, but for now it’s going to sit on my hard drive.
I grabbed an old sales invoice and a pen and leaned on the sales counter. In between customers, I outlined my plans for the future.
My store really was abominably managed. Any healthy competitor could’ve run it out of business in a month. And, since my store remained in business, I could only conclude that the entire field was equally sick.
This whole retail sector was ripe for conquest.
By sunset, the back of the invoice was covered in thick squiggles: the arrows were overlapping and running into each other. And each arrow had a label so tiny that I was reading them more by memory than by sight. But I can tell you this: the words hook and admission and school were nowhere on that page.
First, thank you for reading my book.
Second, I have to apologize to my mom and dad. I was totally going to dedicate this entire book to you, but then I started wondering if maybe it’d be uncool for my very rebellious teen book to have “For my parents…” as its first line. But don’t worry—your thank-you is on its way.
Still, before I circle back to you guys, I want to thank my agent, John Cusick. His editorial comments were transformative. When he told me that I ought to cut twenty thousand words from my initial draft,
I was skeptical, but he was absolutely right. Without him, you’d be reading a much slower-paced novel. And as if that wasn’t enough, he’s also been a tremendous advocate and career counselor. He is this book’s other father.
A number of editors have made their mark on this book. Thanks to Lisa Yoskowitz for purchasing the book. Thanks to Emily Meehan and Julie Moody for providing the first round of comments; without them, Reshma’s relationships with the men in her life would’ve been much less substantial. Aakash, in particular, grew and grew thanks to their influence. Julie’s also been with the book this whole time and, at this point, probably knows it better than I do. It’s hard sometimes to piece out her individual contributions (the curse of being an assistant!) but any comments that’ve come to me with her name have always been spot-on.
Thanks to Jody Corbett for her copyediting. She’s made a number of excellent catches—it’s been invaluable to have a fresh pair of eyes on the book during the latter stages of the publication process.
Thanks to Kieran Viola for adopting the book and being so enthusiastic about it. She’s been everything I could’ve hoped for in an editor. In terms of comments, she’s more responsible than anyone for fine-tuning Alex and Reshma’s relationship. In my initial drafts, their friendship was inconsistent and unsatisfying. Kieran is responsible for any warmth that eventually crept into it.
Thanks as well to Kathy Dawson for that one-hour phone call wherein she completely destroyed my conception of the book. Kathy explained, very carefully, that Reshma had no character arc. In initial drafts, Reshma was much more focused on competing with Chelsea. It was Kathy who helped me realize that the heart of the book was in Reshma’s relationship with her parents. Without her, this book would’ve been much colder and crueler.
Thanks to Rebecca Fraimow for reading an initial draft and advising me on “girl stuff,” and for being such a wonderful friend over all these years. I don’t think I could have imagined, when the two of us were involved in that play together during our freshman year of college, that someday I’d be thanking her in print.
Ever since I sold this book, I’ve periodically reminded myself, “You have to thank Valynne! You have to thank Valynne!” So here I am, thanking her. This all started because she won a writing contest and then e-mailed me—the first runner-up—with an offer to introduce me to her agent. I don’t know anyone who’s as thoughtful and generous as Valynne Maetani. She is the person that I e-mail whenever I have questions or concerns about the world of children’s book publishing. I can’t thank her enough.
Thanks as well to Courtney Alameda, Kelly Loy Gilbert, Christian Heidicker, Michelle Modesto, Tess Sharpe, and Erin Summerill for their support and advice on my debut author journey.
Thanks to Nick Mamatas for being an electrifying instructor and a no-nonsense mentor. Thanks to Prof. Brad Leithauser for admitting me to the MFA program at Hopkins, even though I was writing about flying houses and spaceships and things like that. Thanks to Prof. Jean McGarry for being my fellow traveler in all my reading adventures. I still remember how excited I was to find someone who shared so much of my taste. And thanks as well to Profs. Matt Klam, Alice McDermott, Eric Puchner, Mary Jo Salter, Glenn Blake, Yvonne Gobble, Amy Lynwander, and the rest of the staff at the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. The first draft of this book was written during the winter break of my first year at Hopkins, and I know that it would not have been possible without the unique mix of freedom and instruction that my professors offered.
Okay, I promised myself that I was ONLY going to thank people who directly impacted the writing of THIS book, but I am going to make one exception. I’d like to thank my first boss, Ernesto Sanchez-Triana. He hired me right out of college, tolerated my incompetence, and created an environment in which I could learn how to be a functional human being. Working with him has taught me so much about time management and how to communicate with others, and I’m extremely grateful for the day that our paths crossed.
And, finally, I’d like to thank my parents: Sonalde Desai and Hemant Kanakia. There it is. You know this book is forevermore going to be on the results page when people Google you, right?
Anyway, thank you so much, parents of mine, for your wisdom and your faith in my abilities. If I’ve accomplished anything in life, I’m pretty sure that 90% of the credit belongs to you. If parents were assorted and ranked like high schoolers, you two would be perfects.
RAHUL KANAKIA’s short stories have been published in Clarkesworld, the Indiana Review, Lightspeed, and Nature. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins, and a BA in economics from Stanford. Rahul lives in Berkeley, California, where he works as an international development consultant. This is Rahul’s debut novel. Visit him online at www.blotter-paper.com or on Twitter @rahkan.
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