Write This Down

by Claudia Mills

  I’m looking hard out of the window—the animal shelter sign says ENROLL FOR PUPPY PREP SCHOOL NOW!—when I feel Kylee’s hand reach out for mine.

  “I’m sorry,” Kylee says.

  “For what?” I don’t even try to keep the bitterness out of my voice.

  “That Ms. Archer picked my review, not yours.”

  Even as publication-crazed as I am, I know that’s not something Kylee should have to feel sorry about. Who knows more about knitting stores than Kylee? Of course, her review would be wonderful. Ms. Archer told us to pick a subject that would draw on our special areas of expertise; she never told us to pick a subject that would allow us to get revenge against somebody who broke our heart. Besides, Kylee’s review makes the perfect companion to Olivia’s feature.

  Kylee totally does not need to apologize to me for getting published first.

  “I’m glad she picked your review!” I say. It’s even (sort of) true. But then the bitterness creeps back into my voice. “But why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I just felt so bad. Because I knew you wanted it more. And I wanted it more for you than I wanted it for me.”

  How can I stay bitter with a friend like this?

  “But you’re going to get published, too, Autumn,” she promises me, as if she has the power to make the promise come true. “You’ll get published in a bigger, better place than our school paper. Maybe this is the week you’ll hear from The New Yorker!”

  Now tears blur my vision, not tears of disappointment for my rejection, but disappointment in me for not sharing it with Kylee. Who am I to be mad at her for keeping a secret?

  I shake my head.

  She reads the truth from my forced smile and welling eyes.

  “Oh, Autumn,” she says, squeezing my hand and snuggling up against my shoulder.

  Whatever dreams don’t come true for me, I have the best friend anybody on earth ever had.

  I squeeze her hand back and rest my head against hers, without speaking.

  20

  We haven’t had a family dinner, with all four of us at the table, for days. Dad was away at an orthodontist convention. Hunter’s been claiming to be at extra sessions with the band. I had dinner at Kylee’s one night because her mom made this special spicy pork-and-noodle dish that I love. But we’re all here tonight.

  “What’s new with you, Autumn?” Dad says. He always starts with me, as if to get some good news before he has to turn to Hunter for the bad news. But today I have no good news. Today I have the total opposite of good news.

  “Nothing,” I say with false brightness.

  “Nothing?” Mom asks.

  I thrust out my chin. “Nothing,” I repeat. I can be as surly as Hunter when I want to be.

  At least there are only two more days until the agents come to the library and I have a chance to show them chapter one of Tatiana and Ingvar. Plus, there’s still the essay contest, though my hopes for it are dimming. Winners are supposed to hear by mid-November; it’s already November 10, and I have a feeling I would have heard by now if they read my essay and were enraptured by it.

  “Hunter, what’s new with you?” Dad asks.

  “The band has another gig,” Hunter says.

  “That’s wonderful!” Mom gushes.

  “And we’re getting paid this time,” Hunter adds, unable to keep the pride out of his voice.

  For a second I feel as if I’m in some kind of alternative universe, where I’m Goofus and Hunter is Gallant, where I’m the one sitting in sullen silence while he gets to crow about a major accomplishment.

  But I’m not going to let him know how jealous I feel.

  “To Hunter!” I’m the first one to say, holding up my water glass to start a round of clinks. And once Dad raises his glass, too, I almost do feel happy for Hunter, and happy for me. This is what normal families should be doing, celebrating someone’s success with an ice-water toast.

  “What is the gig?” Mom asks.

  “We’re playing for the dance at Southern Peaks,” he says. I notice he doesn’t call it Southern Pukes this time. A school that is paying you to play at their dance can’t be all that pukey.

  Now I have something else in my life to hope for. Even though my publishing dreams have had some crushing disappointments, the first big if of my Cameron-at-the-dance fantasy has come true: Paradox is playing there! Now all I need is for Cameron to come to the dance, and for the band to play his song, and for him to ask me to dance. The first two of these are now pretty likely. So I need to concentrate all my deepest wishing on the final one.

  I’m so lost in these thoughts I miss the last couple of things said at the table. Apparently, while I blinked, it all turned not-so-good.

  “All I meant,” Dad is saying, “is that while it’s great that the band is getting gigs, you should consider signing up for some school clubs or activities, too. You’re on a roll now! Keep the momentum going!”

  “Save the Rhinos?” Hunter asks. “Anime Club? Board Gamers Guild? Like, my life will be totally better if I join the Board Gamers Guild?”

  “Okay.” Dad forces a smile. “I concede that the Board Gamers Guild is not likely to be a big life changer. But what about the school newspaper, or the debate team, or the knowledge bowl? Or—even if you don’t want to do cross-country—surely there is some other sport…”

  “Oh, Derrick,” Mom says. “Let’s just celebrate Hunter tonight.”

  “That’s what we’re doing,” Dad says. “But, Hunter, you’re in high school now—”

  “Am I? Thanks!” Hunter says. “For a moment there I had forgotten.”

  Dad’s color deepens. Like Mom, I wish he’d get off the why-don’t-you-do-a-sport topic. But Hunter’s sarcasm is going too far.

  Dad continues as if Hunter hadn’t interrupted him. “And college admissions committees are going to want to see more on your application than ‘drummer in a rock band.’ That’s a fact. I’m just pointing out a fact.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to go to college,” Hunter shoots back.

  I wait to see if Dad is going to blow up over this one, but he gives another conciliatory smile, even though it’s a condescending smile, too.

  “You say that now. But let’s see what you’re saying two years from now when all your friends are applying to colleges and getting into good places. Your mother and I want you to have choices. We don’t want you doing anything now that limits your choices.”

  “Maybe my choices for me are different from your choices for me.”

  “You aren’t going to have any choices then”—Dad raises his voice—“if you don’t start making some different choices now. You do realize that report cards come out next week?”

  Hunter shrugs.

  If there’s one thing Dad hates, it’s a shrug.

  “I hope,” Dad says, “that a certain drummer will complete some missing work and turn it in between now and then. I hope that a certain drummer can bring up certain grades to at least C’s so that he doesn’t get grounded. It’s hard to play at a dance if you’re grounded.”

  Hunter has already pushed his chair back from the table. He walks upstairs without a backward look at his barely touched make-your-own taco.

  Maybe he’s gone off for one last-ditch study spurt to get his grades back on track. He could still finish that missing work and turn it in for partial credit. Hunter is smart. He could raise his grades if he tried. He’s just never cared enough to try.

  “Couldn’t we be happy for just one evening?” Mom asks as I hear Hunter’s door slam.

  “He’s not going to get into a decent college with those grades,” Dad says wearily. “How happy will we all be then? How happy will he be when he gets a dead-end minimum-wage job with no benefits and no future, just a few fifty-dollar gigs now and then? We’ve tried letting him have his own way, follow his own path, walk away from the cross-country team after one week—one week! Maybe we need to ground him right now, today, this minute, rather than sit around waiting for him
to fail next week, or next year, or for the rest of his life. Maybe it’s time we imposed some consequences on him, or one of these days the real world is going to be doing that for us.”

  “Give him one more chance,” Mom says. “You’ve made your point. Let him get that missing work finished on his own. Maybe we haven’t trusted him enough.”

  “Or maybe we’ve trusted him too much,” Dad says.

  So Hunter and I are both Goofuses now, and our family has no Gallants at all.

  21

  When I get to the library for the Calling All Authors event, I see a big sign saying it’s in the auditorium. It took longer to bike here than I thought it would, and the auditorium is already packed. Apparently there are a lot of people in the world who want to find out how to get published. Kylee offered to come with me today, for moral support, but I decided this was something I needed to do alone.

  Everyone I see is older than I am, and some of them are downright old. One woman has a little oxygen tank she’s dragging along behind her; another one hobbles in with a walker. Part of me feels good that such old people still have dreams. But part of me is sad that they’ve lived so long without having their dreams come true. I want my dreams to come true now.

  I thought Olivia might be here, but she’s nowhere to be seen. I feel a spiteful pleasure in the thought that maybe she didn’t even know about it. Thank you, Kylee! The Broomville Banner picked up Olivia’s Peaks Post feature on Kylee, so now Olivia has been published not only in our school paper but also in a real grown-up paper that thousands and thousands of people read each day.

  There’s a box by the entrance with a handmade sign that says, “First pages.” Now that the moment has come, I hate the thought of surrendering my precious page to the box with all the others. This must be why my mother cried as she was videoing me walking into school on the first day of kindergarten. Should I put my page on top? I decide to tuck it into the middle of the pile. The pile is getting thick, with maybe thirty or forty first pages in it. Maybe time won’t permit the agents to get to mine. Wouldn’t it be heartbreaking to be the one they were just about to read before time ran out? I retrieve mine from the middle of the pile and put it on the top again. But it would be unfair to read them in that order, with the latest arrivals read first. They’d probably shuffle the pile, right? I put my page back in the middle again.

  The program starts ten minutes late, which is agonizing. But finally the library lady introduces Nannerl and Marcy, who both look a lot older than their pictures. They start out by telling us how hard it is to get published. Last year Nannerl got forty-three hundred submissions from authors seeking representation; she accepted three as her clients. Marcy got forty-six hundred; she accepted one.

  I should have brought Kylee with me. Instead I have to tell myself what she’d be whispering if she were there beside me: Somebody has to be the one. Why not you?

  They tell us they’re going to be “brutally honest.” That’s fine. I can take brutally honest. Lately I’ve had plenty of practice.

  The way this is going to work is that the library lady will read aloud the first pages. As she reads, the agent ladies will tell her to stop at the point they would have stopped reading if this had been a real submission at their real office in real life.

  “Okay?” Marcy asks, as if they’d change the procedure if someone said no.

  I feel the palms of my hands getting damp and clammy.

  This is scarier than I thought it would be.

  They interrupt the first reading after two sentences. It’s a picture book for young kids about Sammy Squirrel and Charlie Chipmunk.

  “No anthropomorphized animals,” Marcy says. I figure out that this means: no animal characters that look and act like humans.

  “No alliterative names,” Nannerl says.

  I’m grateful Tatiana and Ingvar are humans. Well, Ingvar is a wizard, but I think wizards are still technically human. I’m grateful their first and last names don’t start with the same letter.

  The second story is about a girl who is staying at her uncle’s ruined mansion in the Yorkshire moors. In the first sentence she’s about to open the door to a forbidden attic. I think it’s terrific: lots of deliciously creepy atmosphere, with something exciting happening right away to catch the reader’s attention. But Nannerl and Marcy cut off reading after what sounds like the first paragraph. It turns out both of them hate any story that has a forbidden attic. Apparently forbidden attics are used too often. Who knew?

  Thank goodness Tatiana and Ingvar’s story has no forbidden attic in it anywhere.

  Another story opens with a wonderful first line: “If only I had never glanced out the window on that fateful Tuesday, everything would have been different.”

  But that’s the very line that dooms it in Marcy and Nannerl’s opinion. They said the line was a cliché.

  Well, some things become clichés because they work. That line worked for me. I wanted to know: What did the narrator see through that open window? How did it change everything?

  As submission after submission gets rejected, I almost start to hope time won’t permit them to get to mine. Except I still can’t help hoping they will. So far, mine doesn’t have a single one of the things they hate.

  They come to one they like. It’s a funny story about a boy on a ranch that has a weird name: the No Luck Ranch. The boy is trying to win a llama-raising contest. Marcy praises the “voice.” Marcy praises the “humor.” I had thought they might have some rule against weirdly named ranches. But both of them say this one makes them want to read on.

  The library lady picks up the next one and begins to read.

  “‘Tatiana Rostoff tried to scream.’”

  I try to listen objectively, as if I hadn’t written it. Reacting with complete objectivity, I like it so far, I do, I do! I like her name. Why does she want to scream? Why is she failing to scream? Because “tried to” suggests unsuccessful activity. Those five simple direct words have intrigued me. I want to read on. I want to publish the book!

  “‘No sound escaped her. Smothered beneath the weight of the silken coverlet pressed against her face, she heard a man’s voice, all the more menacing because he spoke in a muffled whisper, “Tell the secret or you will die!”’”

  I love the silken coverlet. It hints at wealth and royal status. Smothered is a strong verb. The contrast between the violent message and the whispered tone catches my attention. What secret? Why does he want to know it so badly?

  “‘Tatiana awoke from her dream to find herself cowering beneath her velvet bed curtains as pale sunlight filtered through the lead-paned windows of the castle.’”

  Love the pale sunlight! Love the lead-paned windows!

  “Stop,” Nannerl says.

  “Stop,” Marcy agrees.

  Stop?

  “Dream,” they say together.

  “The worst of all openings is beginning with a dream,” says Marcy.

  “Other people’s dreams are inherently uninteresting,” says Nannerl. “If you want to bore someone at a party, start telling them your dreams.”

  But one of my favorite books ever, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, begins with one of the best lines ever: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” It’s true Daphne du Maurier doesn’t trick the reader into thinking the opening dream sequence is really happening, but she still starts with a dream. Would these two agents reject Rebecca, too?

  The library lady is already starting to read the next submission. Guess what? It starts with a dream. And so do the two submissions after that! The audience actually starts laughing on the fourth one when the library lady reads the line “Jacob awoke, heart pounding, from his dream.”

  Would I feel even worse if I were this fourth dream-beginning author? Or was it worse to be me, sitting there like a happy idiot, still hoping they’d praise my voice, my dramatic timing, my ability to create an instant rapport with the reader?

  I’m glad I didn’t bring Kylee with me. I fee
l hurt not only on my behalf but on hers, too, as if she had just been mocked for being dumb enough to think my writing was good, dumb enough to believe in me.

  I should leave. Once two agents with a combined eighteen years of experience destroy your dream, why stay? But I don’t want to call attention to my flaming cheeks and trembling lips, signaling to everyone around me that I was one of the capital-C Clueless authors who thought it was a brilliant idea to start a story with a dream.

  Just then Marcy and Nannerl finish rejecting the next submission, and the library lady says, “Let’s take a ten-minute break—we have some cookies and lemonade set up for you in the lobby—and we’ll reconvene at two-thirty.”

  I do not plan to reconvene.

  I plan to go home and put Tatiana and Ingvar into the shredder my mother keeps for bank statements and tax stuff. No, I’ll burn them in the fireplace. Ours has a gas-insert thing, but it still burns with a real flame.

  And I do not want any cookies and lemonade.

  I’m in the lobby, shoving my arms into my jacket sleeves and strapping on my bike helmet when Nannerl, the agent with the glasses and spiky hair, the one who said, “If you want to bore someone at a party, start telling them your dreams,” comes up to me.

  “Are you all right?” she asks.

  I feel as if she just ran over my newborn kitten with a twenty-ton trash truck, scraped the kitten’s last bits of blood-spattered fur off her huge studded tires, and then asked me, “Is everything okay?”

  But her voice is kind, and I’m already three-quarters of the way to blubbering, so now I’m all the way there, and tears are spilling out of my eyes and running down my face.

  “Which one was yours?” she asks gently.

  “The first dream one.”

  “Oh.” It’s clear she’s not quite sure what to say now. “I’m sorry … I have to say, Marcy and I didn’t expect to be critiquing anybody your age. This program was targeted to serious writers who are ready to seek publication.”

  But that is me! I’m a serious writer! I’m seeking publication harder than anyone!