I knew I shouldn’t judge him too harshly. Maybe, I told myself as I smiled for selfie after selfie—my readers, most teenagers and older now, were as obsessed with getting the perfect shot as Bernadette’s—Will’s rudeness to his fans had something to do with whatever had happened to him and his sister back when he’d been so rude about me at Novel Con.
Maybe when I finally found out what it was, I could make Kitty discover that the same thing had happened to Raul Wolf, and that’s why he was such an arrogant jerk—albeit one who was a teenaged wolf instead of a grown man who really should have known better than to take his problems out on his fans and innocent female authors.
That would only work, of course, if whatever had happened to Will wasn’t too dark for Kitty Katz readers. My audience expected a certain amount of humor from my books, as shown by the fact that I couldn’t get anyone in publishing interested in my books about the apocalyptic Marianne Dashwood and Colonel Brandon or the girl with the dying mother and broke musician dad.
It was toward the end of the signing—or at least the end for Will, because he’d whipped through his line so fast—that I began to notice something:
He kept glancing my way.
Not staring at me like he had during our panel, but darting little looks, like he was watching what I was doing.
Then, as Will watched me, little by little, he started to … there’s no other way to describe it:
Copy me.
He began actually to put on the brakes, look up at his readers, and smile at them. He even agreed to pose for the selfies they kept begging him to allow them—though I noticed he kept his arms at his sides and his hands on the table, obeying the Never Touch a Reader rule.
It was amazing. It was like watching an alien learn to adapt to life on our planet. Will was learning. Learning how to be human!
I couldn’t help feel like I was doing this. I was teaching Will how to act like a human being … or at least a professional writer in the twenty-first century.
But how had he never learned before? He was my age and had been doing signings for at least as long as I had. Had no one ever told him that he was being rude?
Actually, it was possible. This was occasionally the case with famous authors: No one at their publishing house wanted to insult their highest grossing author by suggesting that their writing (or behavior) needed improvement. The author could be so angry, they might flee to another publishing house.
But hadn’t anyone in Will’s family ever noticed his bad manners before? Or had he been raised by actual wolves, like Raul?
When I got a break in my line, I turned my head to see if Bernadette had noticed any of what had been going on beside me.
She had. She was watching Will with raised eyebrows—and also hadn’t missed how Garrett, one table over from Will, was doing the complete opposite: he kept draping his arms all over any reader who asked for a photo, no matter what age, drawing them close to him and then “magically” drawing a commemorative guild coin from their ear, grinning up into the camera lens, and shouting “Dark Magic” at whoever was taking the picture.
None of his young readers’ parents objected, though. My free promotional bookmarks (DON’T FUR-GET: KK#27, COMING SOON!) weren’t nearly as big a hit. No one wanted a bit of colored cardboard when they could have an actual coin (especially one magically drawn from their ear).
I got distracted from Will a second later, however, when a familiar voice said, quite close to me, “Oh my God, you guys, I just can’t thank you enough for what you both said today!”
I looked up to see Lauren and her friends standing in front of both my table and Will’s. They were in full resort wear—sunglasses, wedge sandals, and ruffly rompers over which they’d thrown floaty kimonos. Lauren was lugging a wheelie suitcase behind her and had clearly waited until both my line and Will’s had died down enough so that she could be last and have a nice, long chat with us.
I knew what the wheelie suitcase contained, though I wasn’t certain Will did. Will did not seem to understand anything about being a living human being and not a wolf, which was why I took the initiative and replied, “It was our pleasure, Lauren. We’re so happy you could come.”
“Oh, Lauren wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” Jasmine was sucking coconut water from a straw out of an actual coconut while hugging a pile of brand-new copies of Will’s When the Heart Dies. Beside her, Cassidy was clutching a well-loved edition of The Moment as well as several new volumes she’d apparently purchased to give away to friends. “Lauren’s going to skip going to the beach with us this afternoon to stay in the hotel and write, she’s so inspired.”
“Well,” Will said. I could tell by the way he was tugging at his shirt collar that he felt uncomfortable—as uncomfortable as he’d been at the airport yesterday morning, when he’d been swarmed by this same group of girls. “That’s the way to do it. Discipline. Stories don’t write themselves.”
I had to disagree—respectfully, of course. “I think it’s okay to skip writing for a day and go to the beach with your friends when you’re on Little Bridge Island for the first time.”
“No.” Will shook his head. “When inspiration hits, you have to take advantage of it.”
“Not when you’re her age.” I still hadn’t the foggiest notion how old Lauren and her friends were, but I knew they were way younger than I was. I also knew how many parties and trips to the beach I’d missed because I’d had to work to pay for things that other kids hadn’t, like my college tuition and our apartment’s electric bill. One of the reasons I wrote about cats instead of humans was because I had no idea what it was like to go to a high school dance or basketball game: I’d never been to one. I’d been too busy working. But no one knew what a cat high school dance or basketball game was like, so I couldn’t get them wrong. “She has plenty of time for writing. Right now she’s on vacation on a beautiful island with her friends. She should enjoy it.”
Will looked stern. “When inspiration strikes—”
“Oh, you two are so adorable together.” Kellyjean, who had finished up with her line, came sauntering over, her eyes sparking playfully over what she considered her brilliant witticism. “Ha-ha! Am I right? Aren’t these two always arguing just like an old married couple?”
I thought I might evaporate from embarrassment right there, and Will didn’t look particularly pleased, either, judging by the way he white-knuckled the pen he was holding.
“Oh, come on,” Kellyjean went on. She never knew when to quit. “You agree with me, right, Garrett?”
Garrett did not appear to appreciate Kellyjean’s comment any more than Will or I had. He was finishing up one last autograph—which of course included an elaborate Dark Magic School illustration—for an eager young fan. “Um, not really,” he said.
Lauren seemed to decide it was time to bring the subject back around to what mattered most: herself. She lifted her wheelie suitcase and placed it, with a thump, on my table, then opened it.
“I really hope you don’t mind,” she said, “but it’s always been my dream to get these signed by you.”
I watched as she began removing from the suitcase, one by one, all twenty-six books in the Kitty Katz, Kitten Sitter series, then stacking them in front of me.