Teddy blinked. “In what way?”
“Well, for us freaks who’ve been pursuing the same thing since infancy, there isn’t any room for exploration. I always knew I wanted to be a puppeteer, and I wanted my own show. So my whole life was dedicated to that, and either I succeeded or I failed. With you . . . well, every new thing you try can be a success, you know? Who’s to say what’s a failure?”
Teddy smiled. “That’s a nice way of thinking about it. But what do you mean, no room for exploration?”
Everett leaned back and looked at the ceiling. “This sounds ungrateful. And maybe a little pretentious. Okay?”
“Okay,” Teddy said slowly.
“I’ve never tried anything else,” Everett said. “This has always been what I’m good at, so this is always what I’ve done. And I worked and worked for this, every step leading me toward my own show, and then when I got it, toward making the show the best thing it could be, the ideal version that was in my head. But now that I have it . . . where do I go? I got exactly what I wanted, but I have this strange, empty feeling inside me, like this isn’t enough, but I don’t know why.”
Teddy chewed thoughtfully. “What would be bigger than having your own show?”
“Well,” Everett said, crossing his arms behind his head. “Having my own national show. I have a meeting with the Imagination Network coming up.”
When Teddy kept chewing without reacting, he smiled. “I always forget that not everyone is obsessed with the same things I’m obsessed with. They’re basically the biggest possible deal when it comes to children’s entertainment. Think Disney.”
Teddy nodded. “Yes. Disney. That name, I know. So do you want to make your show with them?”
Everett paused, his brow knitted. “Well, yeah. I mean, doesn’t everyone?”
“I’m not the person to ask.”
“I can’t really go anywhere else from here. There’s no higher place to take the show than the Imagination Network.”
“What if,” Teddy said, extending her arm, “instead of going vertically . . . you explore laterally.”
Now it was Everett’s turn to stare at her.
“I’m sorry.” She grimaced. “I had one glass of wine and I’m giving out unsolicited, unqualified advice.”
“No.” Everett turned to fully face her. “That’s . . . no one’s ever suggested that to me before. What do you mean, explore laterally?”
“Maybe instead of trying to make the show bigger, you could . . . explore other things, you know?” As Everett stared at her, she started to think that maybe she’d said the wrong thing.
“I mean, I’m drunk,” Teddy said, even though she wasn’t. Instead, she felt a familiar sense of shame creeping over her. This was the part where Richard—she meant Everett—would tell her that she didn’t know what she was talking about. That she couldn’t possibly give him advice on being a doctor—er, having a television show—when she worked retail. What would she know?
She opened her mouth to apologize again, but Everett was moving on. He didn’t seem offended in the least that she’d given him career advice. In fact, he seemed excited.
“Can I show you something?” he asked as he stood up, holding his hand out to her.
Teddy let him pull her off the sofa and followed him into his bedroom, which was relatively sparse aside from the desk in the corner. Her feet tapped along the hardwood floor as she looked around. He let go of her hand to grab something off his desk, and then held up a puppet.
“This is what I’ve been working on,” he said.
Teddy tilted her head. “A puppet,” she stated.
“Correct,” Everett said. “But it isn’t finished. I’ve spent weeks trying to give this thing a genuine personality, and I can’t do it.”
“What do you mean, a genuine personality?” Teddy asked as she sat down on the bed, which felt a little bit forward but he was the one who’d brought her in here (and anyway, they both knew that Candy Land was functioning as board-game-based foreplay). She looked around his room again as he sat down beside her; it was clean, with dark green walls, a plush comforter, and even throw pillows.
“Wait,” she said. “You have throw pillows. Did you pick those out yourself?”
Everett laughed. “I went to the store, looked at a display bed, and said ‘I’ll take that whole setup, please.’ Home décor is another one of those things I don’t have much time for.”
Teddy smiled. “Okay, so back to what I asked before. How can a puppet have a genuine personality? Don’t you give it a personality?”
“That’s what a lot of people think,” Everett said, “but that’s never been the way ideas work for me. I can’t will them to happen. I just have to keep working and eventually, if I try enough things, something will come to me. It’s like magic.”
“Magic that involves you working very hard and trying lots of things,” Teddy corrected. “That kind of sounds like . . . work.”
Everett smiled. “Right. But it doesn’t always look that way on the outside, you know?”
Teddy sighed. “I wish I had what you were talking about earlier. A calling. Something that I love enough to keep working on it until I get a breakthrough. Something that feels like magic, even if it isn’t.”
“You’ll find it,” Everett said. “Or maybe it’s not one thing for you—why limit yourself? Maybe there are tons of things out there that you love to do. A calling isn’t always your job, you know. Maybe life itself is what feels like magic.” He paused, looked away, and then looked back and met her eyes. “I can definitely say that my life feels a little bit more magic when you’re in it.”
Perhaps it went without saying that no one had ever told Teddy anything like that before. She’d spent most of her life feeling like she was objectively unmagical and now, hearing Everett say this, it was like a balloon was inflating in her chest.
“Magic?” she asked softly.
“Yeah, Teddy,” Everett said, his eyes moving to her lips. “You’re magic.”
Teddy could have justified this as doing something that scared her, could have pretended that closing the space between her and Everett and grabbing his face with both of her hands as she kissed him was something that required bravery. But it wasn’t. Kissing Everett in that moment and letting him roll her back onto his bed was the most natural, comfortable thing she’d ever done. It didn’t feel scary in the least.