“I worry about you,” Jacob said, massaging Rasul’s weary fingers and wrist. “I think you might be working too hard.”
“Probably. But I want to finish.” He let his body go slack against Jacob, shifting to provide his other hand for treatment. “I want you to read it. I want to turn it in. I want to feel like I can still do this.”
“Is it okay for me to ask how close you are to the end?”
“Normally, no. Right now, it’s okay.” Rasul shut his eyes as Jacob’s ministrations hit just the right spot. “I’m in the middle of the dark moment. I’d have been all the way to the end by now if I’d let myself revise after, but I’m super invested in handing it to you as fast as possible before I get too invested in big edits. So I keep going over old sections, adding things, moving them, expanding. There are only about eight scenes ahead of me, but it’s going slower because of the way I’m drafting and editing at the same time.”
“I’ll forever have a new appreciation for how hard authors work after this.”
Rasul shrugged. “I don’t think it’s always like this. It wasn’t like this the last two times for me. The stakes are just so high.”
He thought about those stakes all the time. He stayed up late that night once Jacob had gone to bed, stopping work on the scene he’d been on to go back to the midsection, the opening, several big reveals, scraping over every detail as if it might be the one that redeemed him, that took him to a new place.
If I get this done, he kept telling himself, everything is going to change. He couldn’t articulate what that change would be. He only knew in his soul that his whole life would pivot around this point and take him to a new dimension.
Maybe it was because this was his first queer main character, a character with his own ethnic identity. A character who yearned the way he did, who got lost the way he did, who screwed up the way he did. Several delirious nights as he got too lost in the dimension-creating storyline, he became convinced writing this novel would heal all the hurts of his youth.
Because he was putting them all in. Coded, remixed so he had to draw on the distilled nature of them, not the fine details, but he included them all. His confusion and sorrow over his parents’ disinterest in his life. His frustration as a teenager of not understanding what his identity was—was he Syrian? Brazilian? American? All three? Did it matter that to a lot of people, he passed for white? Was it okay that he buried parts of himself to fit in? Was it bad that he partied and lied to everyone, including himself, about who he was, just for a moment’s peace?
Above all, though, he soaked himself in the central, vibrating question: What would have happened if, when he was smiling and pretending he wasn’t cracking and hollow inside, someone like Jacob had appeared before him and led him to a place of peace? What would have changed if he’d accepted that hand?
He had an index card taped to the top of his laptop that read, in black Sharpie, WHAT IS HAPPINESS? Whenever he was stuck, he stared at it.
Whenever it was late at night and he was alone inside the veil of stars, he answered it, usually out loud.
“Happiness is knowing peace within myself.”
He gave that peace to Adam as best he could. He empowered Adam and Milo both, but to Adam in particular, he paved a way to understanding and accepting himself and his path. Showing him how to find the way through to the light, which came from his own heart.
I’m okay. I’ve always been okay. I can be okay whenever I want, no matter what happens.
He wrote a love scene for the boys. He knew his editors wouldn’t like it, that they’d say young adult novels shouldn’t have sex, people underage, etc. Thinking of Judy Blume and Forever, he didn’t just ignore his editor’s anticipated objections, he wrote the sex in a way that would make it absolutely impossible to remove. In some kind of strange move by the universe, his thermostat broke the night he wrote that scene, sending his apartment above eighty degrees. He wrote the scene naked with ethereal Middle Eastern vocals blasting in his headphones, a towel draped over the wrist pad of his laptop to catch the sweat. He made the characters sweat too, giving them the intense, passionate union he knew they deserved. He made Adam say to Milo everything he longed to say to Jacob.
Everything he fully intended to say.
He wept several times while he wrote, sometimes at points that made sense, sometimes in some kind of release-valve catharsis that didn’t come from the scene but from the act of finishing the story itself. Well before he wrote the final chapter, he understood fully that he was completing this. That no matter what his editors, his agent, the literary world thought about it, this was the book he’d needed to write. That for him, it was already exactly what it needed to be.
He knew, in his bones, that it was exactly what Jacob needed it to be too.
It was two in the afternoon on December 31 that he wrote the last words of the final scene. It felt so… random, so off script, but that’s when it came. Had it been the middle of the night, he’d have gone out into the snowy street and shouted, but it was midday and people were bustling about, getting ready for New Year’s Eve parties. He thought about doing it anyway. He thought about renting one of those trucks with a megaphone and announcing it to the town.
He thought about calling Jacob, and he almost did. But then he stopped.
No. I’m going to see him in person. I’m going to do this right.
He made a frantic call to Evan Clare, who enthusiastically met him at the college and approved his three-hundred-and-fifty-page double-spaced, single-sided printout. He went to the florist, the chocolatier, and even the thrift shop. He packed up the things he needed at home, made a call to Gina, and when she arrived, loaded himself and a bulging suitcase into her car.
He sweated a little as he sat in the parking lot behind the bookstore long after she went inside, shutting his eyes and giving himself one last pep talk. Then he grabbed everything and went in through the front door.
He looked past the customers to the man behind the counter. The man in the soft blue cardigan patiently going over his sales figures. The man who looked up at him, surprised, then smiled with warmth behind those brown eyes.
Heart galloping, Rasul strode up the counter, plunked down the box.
Waited.
As he watched Jacob open the lid, face lighting up with surprise and joy at what he saw inside—a printed manuscript surrounded by a chain of flowers and battery-operated lights and weighed down by a box of gourmet chocolate—Rasul felt the universe opening up for him the way it had for Adam. Ever-changing, always racing, but anchored in every way around the central point of this man.
He let out a breath as his heart sighed and settled, finally, into place.
JACOB’S ENTIRE nervous system began to hum as he realized what was in the box in front of him. Heart beating in what felt like triplicate, the world narrowing, he met Rasul’s wild gaze. “This is…?”
Rasul nodded. “Finished. A bit rough still, but… yeah. Finished.”
Jacob ran his hand over the title page. VEIL OF STARS by Rasul Youssef. In the upper right corner it said 80,000 words.
The flowers that surrounded it were white, and they glowed slightly. He realized there were tiny battery-powered lights embedded within them.
Rasul rubbed the back of his head. “The lights and… everything is a little cheesy, but… well.”