Will had stood up in the driver’s seat and now turned back to face us.
“Here we are,” he said. “If you follow me, I’ll show you to the auditorium. We’ve got a green room where you can sit and relax before your panel, or, if you’d like, you can explore the festival. We hope you’ll find a lot to entertain you.” Then his gaze flicked to Garrett. “You can leave that here on the bus.” He gestured to Garrett’s ukulele.
Garrett had wrapped his hands protectively around his instrument. “But I—”
“I promise it will be safe.” While Will’s tone was perfectly pleasant, there was something deadly serious in his dark eyes. “We’ve already hired local musicians—as well as face painters and jugglers—to entertain the children attending the festival, so I don’t think you’ll be needing it … unless it’s part of your presentation?”
But before Garrett had a chance to reply, Kellyjean interrupted in her loud Texas drawl, “Oh, no, he won’t be needing that thing. We’re going to be talking about writing and magic. You don’t need a ukulele for that, do you, Garrett?”
“I guess not.” Garrett mournfully laid the instrument back in its case.
“Psst,” I said, poking Bernadette in the back as we shuffled off the bus behind the Colemans.
She was talking on the phone to her wife. Apparently, there was some kind of crisis involving Sophie, their eldest.
But since there was always some kind of crisis involving Sophie, I didn’t think twice about whispering, after Bernadette mouthed, What? “Do you think Garrett uses that ukulele to seduce unsuspecting fangirls?”
Bernadette rolled her eyes. “Would you have been seduced by ‘You Are My Sunshine’ back when you were younger?”
“No. But my personality was about as sunny then as it is now.”
Bernadette snorted as we disembarked, then said into the phone, “No. No, I never said Sophie could have her friend Tasha sleep over. Well, why didn’t you mention this when we talked last night? Yes, of course I trust you, but they’re six years old—”
As I moved away from Bernadette to let her argue with her spouse in private, I saw that there was an air of excitement outside the library that was almost contagious. Will hadn’t been kidding: Little kids were running around with their faces painted like tigers and butterflies, and there were jugglers tossing colored balls high into the air amid the enormous roots of one of the banyan trees. Live music was coming from somewhere I couldn’t immediately see, but it sounded about as festive as the wafting scent of cookies and brownies, coming from the Snappettes’ nearby bake sale, smelled delicious.
“Jo! Jo, over here!” I heard some female voices squeal nearby, and when I turned my head, I saw the girls I’d met on the plane—Lauren and her friends—waving excitedly to me from one of the small lines that had formed to get into the building.
I waved back, which caused them to giggle and wave even more excitedly.
“I told you, didn’t I?” Will had come up behind me. He was carrying a wooden sign that said PUPPET SHOW THIS WAY with an arrow pointing to the right. He seemed unconscious of the fact that there were a lot of people (such as myself) who’d have paid good money to see Will Price carrying a sign that said Puppet Show This Way, only now we were getting to see it for free. “You’ve got a ton of fans here.”
“Uh … yeah.” Did he really not know that the person those girls were waiting for was him? Of course they liked me, too, but he was the one whose signature Cassidy wanted on her chest.
“Are you nervous?” he asked. “I still get sick to my stomach every time I have to speak in public.”
“Do you?” Why was he telling me this? Why was he even talking to me? I’d agreed—sort of—to pretend to have forgiven him for the weekend for his sister’s sake, but not to be friends. So what was this? “I used to get nervous, but I don’t anymore.”
He nodded like he knew what I was going to say. “Practice?”
“Sure, something like that.”
I’d lost my fear of public speaking after years of visiting schools and talking about writing the Kitty Katz series. Many school systems understood the impact that bringing an author into the classroom could have on impressionable young readers. Not only did it teach them that books were written by actual living human beings, it inspired many of them to read more, and even try writing their own stories.
But Will Price had obviously never been asked to do a school visit because his books, instead of inspiring kids, would only end up putting them into therapy. Take The Moment, for example. Johnny and Melanie’s relationship? Completely toxic.
“Are you carrying that sign somewhere,” I asked him in order to change the subject, “or are you just holding it because you’re the festival’s official puppet show sign holder?”
He looked down at the sign in surprise. “Oh, right. There’s so much to do with Molly out of the loop. Which reminds me, since she’s at the hospital, I’m going to have to moderate your panel this morning.”
What?
Will Price was going to moderate a literary panel on female empowerment in young-adult fiction? Will Price, who routinely wrote books where the female characters became empowered only after being rescued from their tragic past by a man with whom they fell in love (who then died or, alternatively, was the one who rendered the heroine’s past so tragic in the first place)?
My shock must have shown on my face since he asked, “Are you all right?”
“Oh, yes,” I said faintly. “I’m fine.”
But I was lying. My fear of public speaking—or something like it—had returned, with a vengeance.
CHAPTER TWELVE
LITTLE BRIDGE BOOK FESTIVAL ITINERARY FOR:
JO WRIGHT
Saturday, January 4, 9:10 a.m.–10:00 a.m.
Speaking Panel
“From Little Women to Teenage Assassins in Space, How Young-Adult Literature Focused on the Female Point of View Has Developed and Changed Through the Years.” Bestselling authors Jo Wright & Bernadette Zhang in Conversation
(Moderated by Molly Hartwell Will Price)
Things only got worse from there.
I was sitting in the front row of the library’s newly renovated auditorium, a gorgeous room featuring a well-lit stage, on which Will Price stood with a microphone.
Molly and her team—which I knew now included Will—had done a wonderful job of making the stage look like a warm and welcoming place for the festival panelists. There was a Persian carpet set across the middle of a raised dais, on which three black leather chairs had been arranged to look more like a living-room conversation nook than a literary panel. Someone (probably Molly) had even been thoughtful enough to set out a couple of large potted ficus trees and little end tables, complete with bottled waters and boxes of tissues in case a panelist needed to blow their nose—or possibly dry their eyes from weeping if things got too emotional.
The only way you’d know, really, that it was a set and not someone’s home was the handheld microphone resting on the seat of each of the chairs … and of course the gigantic scrim behind the chairs, onto which was being projected a very professional graphic proclaiming the words Little Bridge Island 1st Annual Book Festival.