Glass Slippers, Ever After, and Me

by Julie Wright

  —Charlotte Kingsley, The Cinderella Fiction

  (The “Honesty” Chapter)

  Anders did not kiss me. Maybe it was because he was a don’t-kiss-a-woman-before-the-first-date kind of guy. But I certainly hoped he wasn’t a don’t-kiss-a-woman-on-the-first-date kind of guy because, after some consideration, nothing sounded better.

  Anders spent the rest of the day at my apartment. When he discovered I had a cut on my palm, he did exactly as I had predicted and went into paramedic mode, complete with triple antibiotic ointment, bandages, and the confidence of a true professional. After that, he became full-on nervous. His embarrassed half smiles and quasi-stammers when he asked me to hand him something or conversed about my upcoming meeting with the agent made him decidedly awkward. The awkward wasn’t bad. It was actually kind of adorable.

  Kat’s behavior, on the other hand, was unbearable. She spent the day giving the smile of the smug.

  That girl belonged out in the rose garden with the evil cherubs.

  Even with Kat being smug and Anders being awkward, I could not have asked for a better support team to help me get ready for my meeting. Kat showed Anders the outfit options she had picked out for me.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You’ve made her look too runway model. This is a business meeting, not Vogue.” Anders then invaded the private space of my closet and picked out what he thought I should wear. It was a black pair of slacks and a blue button-up I’d actually forgotten I owned.

  Kat, whose dark hair had been put up into a twist and held in place with chopsticks from my kitchen drawer and who wore my elephant-print chiffon jacket again and who looked every bit the part of a fashion designer, gave Anders, who wore jeans and an EMT shirt that declared him a saver of lives, a flat-eyed stare. “This,” she began, “looks like a uniform worn by someone employed at a reform-school cafeteria.”

  He looked back at the clothes he held up. “No, it doesn’t.”

  She rolled her eyes and tugged the hangers out of his hand. “Totally does.” She discarded his choice to the pile of definitely-not-in-a-million-years that occupied the reading chair near my bed. They squabbled over clothing until they both agreed on an outfit that landed at that professional space between reform-school cafeteria employee and runway model.

  I watched the entire process, recognizing that my opinion was entirely irrelevant. But if I couldn’t trust my little sister and my best friend to pick an outfit for me to wear while chasing my dreams, then I was doing life wrong. Besides, anxiety chewed away at my nerves and short-circuited pretty much any shred of reliable decision making I possessed. My raw senses would likely misfire entirely and leave me dressed in a clown suit for the meeting if I were left on my own.

  Together, the three of us spent the rest of the evening doing Google searches on questions that were important to ask an agent making an offer.

  I almost went to my online writing groups for guidance but felt . . . apprehensive. What if my telling other writers about this new situation jinxed the whole thing?

  But even without those peer relationships, which might have helped me know what to do, Anders, Kat, and I spent our time at Google and YouTube University and learned everything I needed. Well, at least enough that I felt I had the information necessary to make a good showing at my meeting with Jennifer Apsley. We figured out what questions to ask and what answers to be on the lookout for. All of the online articles insisted that I treat the meeting as if I was employing her and not the other way around. Knowing that and doing that were probably going to be two totally different things. Because, in my heart, I knew the agent was the cool one, the one everyone wanted at their party.

  Anders had to work that Sunday, so when it came time to say goodbye Saturday night, he hugged me extra tight, holding me longer than he’d ever done before. His cheek was warm against mine as he whispered, “You’re going to be great, Lettie. Remember, you’re the one doing the interview. You’re the one with the product they want. Be smart, be confident, and remember how amazing you are.”

  As Anders pulled back from the embrace, he let his mouth trail across my cheek and dropped a gentle kiss there before pulling away entirely.

  With that kiss still burning against my cheekbone, it became my turn to stammer out a farewell parting. I think I might have told him to have a good time at work. Which was entirely blasphemous being that he was a paramedic.

  “A good time at work?” I said out loud after I shut my door and turned to face my sister. “Why do I say things like that? What would that even mean? Not having anyone bleed on him?”

  Kat shrugged, not looking up from her phone. “I guess a good time at work to him would probably mean no one ever calling them out for an emergency. It might mean that he gets to play video games all day. That’s a good time at work for most people.”

  Her point saved me from embarrassing myself further by texting an apology for saying the embarrassing thing in the first place.

  A text from Anders came almost directly after my decision to not text him. “I expect notification as soon as you are done with the agent and as soon as you are back in this apartment building,” he texted. “We can celebrate and first date at the same time. Knock ’em dead, lady. You’re going to be amazing.”

  I must have sighed and grinned stupidly because Kat returned my stupid smile with her smug smile and said, “Did you really try to tell me last night that you aren’t in love with that guy?”

  “Shut up.” I threw a throw pillow at her and felt no guilt because, by their very name, that’s what those pillows were made for. “You shouldn’t have gone over to his apartment in the middle of the night,” I added after a few moments.

  She threw the pillow back at me and hit me square in the face, knocking my head slightly to the right. “Shut up,” she said, mimicking me. Her satisfaction with herself did not end with that night but continued into the whole of the next day. Everything she talked about was in regard to Anders and I being a couple. She talked about needing a chaperone for her senior trip. And wouldn’t it be fun if Anders and I would be willing to do that with her? Kat basically had my wedding dress, my colors, and all of my bridesmaids picked out. And, of course, she would be the maid of honor. She said if I got chummy enough with my agent, perhaps she could be a bridesmaid as well. I laughed; that idea was ludicrous. It was even more fanciful than anything I could have ever concocted. Maybe the wrong sister was writing books.

  I awoke Monday morning an hour and twenty-three minutes before my alarm was set to go off. Of course, my body needed sleep. But no matter what I did, my mind would not stop racing with all the possibilities and probabilities and actualities the day had in store for me. My overnight needs were already packed in a small carry-on. My e-tickets were downloaded and ready on my phone. My clothes were hung up in the bathroom waiting for me to get ready for the day. All I needed now was more sleep. If I showed up at this meeting having missed nearly an hour and a half of sleep, there would probably be bags under my eyes. Or worse. What if I fell asleep during the meeting? What if I missed some important information that would help me seal the deal because I was too tired to pay attention?

  These worries only added to the stress of my already racing heart. They did nothing to help me go back to sleep. So, recognizing a losing battle, I pulled my exhausted-but-not-at-all-sleepy body out of bed to get in the shower and ready myself for the day. Anxiety proved to not be a very helpful companion there either.

  After my shampoo ran down into my eyes and I nicked my knee while shaving, it occurred to me that anxious, exhausted people should never be allowed in the shower. Where was the warning label for that sort of thing? My owner’s manual for my car came with a warning label regarding operating the vehicle while drowsy. Why didn’t my shampoo and razor offer me the same courtesy?

  After rinsing out my eyes, drying off, and bandaging my knee, I dressed carefully in the black slacks
and gray tunic with flouncy sleeves and an asymmetrical hemline, making sure that all the zippers were zipped and all the buttons were buttoned. I didn’t have lots of experience with wardrobe malfunctions—such things were hard to achieve when wearing only jeans and T-shirts—but I certainly didn’t want today to be the first. The outfit was graceful in a way that made me grateful for my sister and her fashion sense.

  My hair was in a loose-enough-to-be-whimsical-and-tight-enough-to-behave bun at the nape of my neck and pinned with way more pins than probably necessary to make sure not one strand moved out of place during my meeting. A final glance in the mirror startled me.

  I didn’t look like me. Not really. It wasn’t just the clothes. It wasn’t just the hair. Or even just the makeup. It was all of it together. Considering the lack of success I’d enjoyed in the past, maybe looking like someone who wasn’t me would prove to be the lucky charm I needed.

  With the usual traffic, a drive from Boston to New York City would have taken just over four hours. If you included the time needed to get through airport security and taxi down the runway for takeoff and landing, it almost took that long to fly. It would have been better for me to drive. At least then, my nerves wouldn’t have had idle time to send me into full panic mode, which is where I was when I found myself exiting the security area and looking at a woman waiting for me, holding a sign with my name scrawled on it.

  I stepped up to her and tried not to act ridiculously excited or ridiculously panicked. “I’m Charlotte Kingsley. Are you Ms. Apsley?”

  The petite, blonde woman smiled at me. “You can call me Jen. After all, we’re hardly strangers, right? We’ve been exchanging emails for quite a while now.” She lowered her sign and held out her hand. She had a strong handshake, not the limp-wristed quasi-squeeze of the insecure or disinterested and not the vice grip of the overeager or overbearing.

  I laughed, wishing she hadn’t mentioned the email exchange that had been taking place for several years. The reminder of my many submissions and subsequent rejections did nothing to quell my nerves.

  She indicated for me to fall into step beside her as she said, “I have so many things planned for today, but let’s get the work out of the way first so we can enjoy everything else comfortably.”

  Knowing how much more comfortable I really would be once the details of the book were settled made me nod my agreement. I wanted the meeting done and over with so the anxiety of questions could finally be put to rest.

  Only the fear of sounding like an amateur kept me from asking her if bringing me to New York for this meeting was normal.

  Once we were in the backseat of an honest-to-goodness limousine and moving through New York City traffic, Jen turned to me and smiled. “It is so good to finally meet you, Charlotte,” she said.

  I almost told her that she could call me Lettie in the same way she’d told me that I could call her Jen, but I waited too long to say the words, and the moment passed where such a thing would be anything but awkward.

  Instead, I said, “It’s nice to finally meet you, too—” I closed my mouth with a click of my teeth and swallowed down the other words I’d wanted to add to that statement. Like I didn’t think this would ever happen, or took you long enough to finally see my talent, or will you pinch me to make sure this is real? I smiled. She smiled. And the driver drove.

  When it must have become apparent that I had entered the silence that was self-preservation mode, Jen swished back her blonde hair and smiled wider. “I love your tenacity. Most people give up long before they get to this place.” She patted the luxurious seat we occupied. “It’s like the prisoner you wrote about in your book, the one chipping his spoon at the walls of his escape tunnel. You are the writer who keeps chipping away at the work that needs doing so you can get to where you want to go. It’s a very admirable trait.”

  Something like joy tightened in my chest. She had quoted me, well not quoted exactly, more like paraphrased—okay, not paraphrased either, but Jennifer Apsley, top-of-my-list agent, just referenced my book. The story was of a prisoner who stole a spoon from the cafeteria and used it to tunnel his way to freedom, going deeper and deeper until he was certain the entire thing was going to come down on him and he’d die buried under tons of rock and debris. Full of fear, he gave up. He hung his head and slumped back to the tunnel entrance, where he covered it back up so no one would ever know he tried to escape. He never discovered that if he’d just chipped away another inch, his rusty, bent little spoon would have thumped against the door to freedom. It was from the “Fear Sucks” chapter.

  She had referenced my work. I wanted to grin stupidly, maybe squeal, and possibly stand up through the sunroof of the limo like people in movies did, and cry out that today was the Best. Day. Ever.

  Instead, I said, “Thank you. That’s nice of you to say.”

  The life of Manhattan swished by in the form of tall buildings, busy streets, and traffic. The horns and sirens coming and going and passing by felt familiar.

  Jen followed my line of sight out the window and asked, “Do you come to the city very often?”

  She said this as if the words “the city” could only mean Manhattan. As if my living in Boston could be paralleled to living in the quaint outskirts of some little town or hamlet somewhere. Not that she’d offended me. To those who truly loved a place, that place became the center of everything. I felt the same way about Boston. My dad felt the same way about San Diego. Anders felt the same way about Sweden.

  “I come here every once in a while,” I answered, making it sound like visiting Manhattan was an experience that happened far more often than it actually did. The reality was that I only showed up in Manhattan when Kat begged me to take her to whatever new trendy play happened to be premiering. Kat loved all things pop culture and contemporary.

  “Well, hopefully I’ll be able to show you a few things you haven’t seen while you’re in town.”

  I nodded some more and refrained from saying aloud that the only thing she could show me that I hadn’t seen before was a book contract.

  Jen smiled encouragingly when the limo pulled over to the curb. She waved toward the building outside our window and said, “We’re here!”

  The driver handed us out of the car and then winked one of those very pretty blue eyes at me as he handed me back my carry-on that he’d fetched from the trunk. The wink seemed to say he could tell a limo ride was not a usual day-to-day activity for me. If I hadn’t already decided that Anders was a person of interest, and if Anders hadn’t already asked me out on a date, I might have worked in a way to get the driver’s name and phone number.

  Instead, I winked back. Why not? I had just been in a limo with an agent I had only dreamed about actually seeing in person. Weren’t these the moments that required the cocky reaction?

  Well, maybe they weren’t.

  But the confident reaction . . . Surely, the confident reaction was appropriate. I had to be confident. I couldn’t let them see my desperation. Nothing smelled worse than desperation.

  I squared my shoulders and lifted my chin, not enough to be cocky—because cocky really wasn’t good for the current situation—but enough to be confident. Jen Apsley invited me here; that had to mean she saw worth in me and my writing. Agencies didn’t spend money flying people around and picking them up in limousines just for fun. I turned my focus away from the driver to face my future. The city felt dense with cold. The smell of whatever was wafting up from the subway grates embedded in the smudged sidewalk crowded together with the noise of traffic in a way that made me feel claustrophobic. Don’t do it, I thought. Do not throw up, Charlotte Kingsley, not now, not when you’re in the last stretch of this crazy race.

  Jen greeted the doorman, who stood waiting for us to approach. They obviously knew one another and were on friendly terms. While they exchanged casual banter, I reminded myself to square my shoulders again.

&nb
sp; And then did so a third time because I couldn’t seem to remember that I was going for confident.

  Then we were in the building. A shock of recycled cold air—in direct denial of the chill outside—made me shiver. What kind of mutant ran the air conditioner with the sky clouded over and the day’s temperature not peeking up over fifty degrees?

  Jen’s high heels and the carry-on that I wheeled along behind me clicked through the marble lobby to the elevators. Once we were in the elevator, Jen looked at my carry-on in a way that said she’d only just remembered I still had it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have given you a moment to drop off your bag and relax at your hotel, but the way schedules worked today . . .”

  Then we were going up. We exited the elevator, walked down a short hall, and through some glass doors into the reception office of—my jaw dropped open—no! No way! I’d assumed I was meeting with Jen. Just Jen. Just Jen at Bennion Literary Agency.

  But Jen wasn’t taking me to her agency’s office. We were standing in the offices of Mirror Press—if the black Helvetica sign above the reception desk was any indicator. Jen had not escorted me to her agency to talk over the places she would send my book for submission. She had brought me to a boutique publisher well-known for its bestselling nonfiction.

  Maybe Bennion Literary Agency shared office space with Mirror Press?

  Jen announced us to the receptionist, who then invited us to have a seat while we waited. Announcing us to a receptionist meant it wasn’t a case of shared office space. This was happening. We were meeting with Mirror Press. Which prompted me to remind myself to not throw up all over again. I had to keep my hands stiff on my legs to refrain from yanking out my phone and texting a digital squeal to Anders and Kat.