Write This Down (14 page)

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 feel 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!

Maybe now she'll say she liked the lead-paned windows. Or that mine was by far the best of the four dream pieces. Or that if I revised the opening to delete the dream, she'd want to read more.

She doesn't.

“Don't give up,” she says. “Promise me you won't give up.”

But
The New Yorker
rejected my poems, and Olivia scooped the Kylee article, and Ms. Archer picked Kylee's review over mine. Now two agents with a combined eighteen years of experience made fun of my novel in front of a packed auditorium. I haven't proved a thing to Hunter. I certainly haven't made Cameron fall in love with the wonderfulness of my words.

Without a syllable, I turn away from her and head outside, where it's raining now, and I pedal home.

 

22

November 15 falls on a Tuesday. If the essay contest people are going to notify winners by “mid-November,” this is as “mid” as “mid” can be. I check my email all day long—before classes, after classes, surreptitiously under my desk during classes: nothing. Maybe they'll tell us by snail mail, not email? But when I check the mail first thing when I get home after school: nothing. The
New Yorker
editor emailed me on a Saturday, so maybe the contest judges work odd hours, too. But when I go to bed at ten, I've still heard nothing. I reach for my phone to check my email first thing when I wake up Wednesday morning, and keep checking it all day Wednesday. Ditto for Thursday.

Nothing.

It's starting to look as if I have a clean sweep of failure at everything.

After ballet on Thursday I go to Kylee's house for dinner, and we make necklaces together with the beautiful handcrafted glass beads she got at the bead show in Denver. She keeps saying that the agents were wrong and my novel is wonderful, but it's hard to let myself believe her. Well, if I'm no longer going to be a writer, maybe I can be a necklace maker. I don't think there's as much rejection in necklace making. There isn't any equivalent to a
New Yorker
necklace magazine. As far as I know, there aren't any brutally honest necklace agents.

*   *   *

Friday is the last day before our weeklong Thanksgiving break. It's also the day of the middle school dance, when Cameron might or might not be there, and the band might or might not play his song, and he might or might not ask me to dance. It's a day fraught with fraughtness.

We get our report cards eighth period, which for me is science with Mr. Cupertino. Isabelle is the only one of my friends who is in that class with me. Even though parents can check grades on Infinite Campus, we get a paper printout of them in an envelope for us to take home for our parents to sign, in case there are some parents who aren't as obsessed with Infinite Campus as my parents are. Plus, some teachers take forever to update the website, which drives parents like mine absolutely foaming-at-the-mouth crazy, but all teachers
have
to turn in all the grades for report card day. And report card day is when our grades become real and final.

When Mr. Cupertino hands out the envelopes, I channel Cameron and don't open mine. I put it in my science binder without even peeking.

“How'd you do?” Isabelle asks as we head to our lockers after the dismissal bell.

I shrug. “I don't know. I haven't looked yet.”

She stares.

I smile.

Maybe this is why Cameron is the way he is. It's lovely to feel so strong and pure, indifferent to what everyone else is worried about. Like I'm standing outside in a driving rain and everyone else is huddled under their umbrellas moaning about how wet their feet are getting, and not a drop of rain is falling on me. Or maybe it
is
falling, and I just turn my face up to the sky and say,
Oh. Water.

Of course, the minute no one is looking, I stand by my open locker, slip the envelope out of the binder, and open it.

All A's except for a B in pre-algebra.

Kylee appears next to me, ready to walk home together.

“What are we doing this weekend?” she asks. I love that she doesn't say anything about her report card or ask anything about mine. In her own way, Kylee is as cool as Cameron.

“Sleep?” I suggest. “You could knit?” Kylee's parents have allowed her to knit again, with a one-hour-a-day limit.