I’m shaking my head. “I—no. No.” I got onstage tonight at the open mic. And Kirby and Mara, we’re okay. We’re going to work things out. Neil doesn’t know that, but I’m not about to tell him. I don’t owe him anything. I don’t have to convince him that he’s got me all wrong.
He straightens to his full posture. Exactly my height, and yet somehow he seems so much taller right now. “You’re standing in your own fucking way, and until you realize that, you won’t ever be happy with your reality.”
I only have one more comeback.
“If we’re not friends,” I say, my voice this horrible choked sound, “then why are you still here?”
His face is a mix of pained emotions. Hurt, confusion—regret? Maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part.
“Good question.”
With that, he puts his back to me, shoulders hunched against the wind, and walks away.
And then I’m on my own in the cold, dark night.
HOWL STANDINGS
TOP 5
Neil McNair: 14
Rowan Roth: 13
Brady Becker: 12
Mara Pompetti: 10
Iris Zhou: 8
PLAYERS REMAINING: 13
12:27 a.m.
IF PIKE PLACE Market really is haunted, the ghosts would be out right now. I feel a little ghoulish myself as I slump through downtown, past the commercial district and along the waterfront. It’s colder out here. Windier.
I hug Neil’s hoodie tighter around me, wishing it belonged to anyone but him. It’s annoying that it still smells good. Curse you, good-smelling hoodie I can’t take off without freezing.
My feet ache from all the walking. I parked at the market, which was empty, the shops long closed, but then I needed to clear my head and figure out what the hell happened and what the hell I’m supposed to do now.
I must be obsessed with Neil McNair because even with him gone, he’s all I can think about. The worst part of it is this: he wasn’t wrong.
That success guide is four years old. Just because I’m not 100 percent who I wanted to be at that age doesn’t mean I’m not successful. Deep down, maybe I’ve known that all day, but the guide was such a comfort to me, the idea that I still had a chance to cross something off.
Nothing about today, about tonight, went as planned, and until our fight, it was okay. Great, even. I’ve clung to my fantasies and convinced myself the reality can’t measure up.
I allow myself to think something I never have before: What if the reality is better?
I just… don’t know how to fix this about myself. This flaw, Neil called it. If I manage to finish Howl by myself, then we’re done competing forever. He goes off to New York and I go off to Boston, and if we see each other in Seattle when we’re home on breaks, maybe we’ll have a moment of sustained eye contact, a nod, and then a quick glance in the opposite direction. If something happened between us, he would be just another thing that ends after high school. Our schools are more than four hours away from each other. (I looked it up earlier.)
I want to tell Kirby and Mara, but I don’t know if I can put what happened into words yet. And despite everything else, I’m glad I got onstage and read my writing. Another thing Neil McNair is inexorably tied to.
Fuck it.
I whip out my phone and hit the familiar icon on the home screen.
“Rowan?” My mom picks up after the third ring. They always celebrate deadlines the same way: getting incredibly wasted. They keep a bottle of twelve-year-old scotch in their office for these occasions. “It’s late. Is everything okay? We just opened the scotch—”
“I’m writing a book,” I blurt out.
“At this very moment?”
“No—I mean, I’ve been working on it for a while.” I chew the inside of my cheek, waiting for her reaction. There’s some shuffling in the background, and I can tell she’s put me on speaker. “It’s a romance novel.”
Silence on the other end of the line.
“And I know they’re not your favorite, but I really love them, okay? They’re fun, and they’re emotional, and they have better character development than most other books out there.”
“Ro-Ro,” my dad says. “You’re writing a book?”
I nod before realizing they can’t see me. Ugh, talking is hard. “I am. I—might want to do that. Professionally. Or at least I’d like to try.”
“That’s incredible,” my mom says. “You have no idea how cool it is to hear that.”
“Yeah?”
She laughs. “Yes, the fact that having us as parents hasn’t ruined the writing magic for you? That’s kind of awesome, if you think about it.”
And maybe it is.
“It’s a romance novel,” I say again, in case they didn’t hear me the first time.
“We heard you,” my dad says. “Rowan, that’s”—a pause, and some exchanged murmurs between them—“I’m sorry if we ever gave you the impression we thought it was… a lesser genre. Maybe it was because you started reading them so young, and we thought it was this cute, funny phase you were going through.”
“It wasn’t.”
“We know that now,” my dad says.
“I love what you do, and I love those books,” I say. “And I know I have a lot to learn, but that’s what college is for, right?”
Predictably, my dad laughs at this non-joke.
“Full disclosure,” my mom says. “We’re both a little tipsy. But we’re so glad you told us. If you ever want either of us to read it, we’re more than happy to.”
“Thank you. I don’t know if I’m there quite yet, but I’ll let you know.”
“Are you doing all right? You won’t be out too late, will you?”
“We’ll probably be asleep by the time she gets home,” my dad says, “if the scotch does its job.”
My mom lets out a low whistle. “This is almost as bad as what happened after that D. B. Cooper book. I think that was whiskey, though.”
“The what?” I ask.
“Riley tried to solve the D. B. Cooper case in one of the Excavated books,” my mom says. “Do you remember? We were so upset when our editor didn’t want to publish it. She didn’t think it was kid-friendly.”
“D. B. Cooper… That was a Seattle thing, right?”
“You don’t know the story?” And when I tell her no, she explains it to me.
This is the legend of D. B. Cooper: In 1971 a man hijacked a Boeing plane somewhere in the air between Portland and Seattle. He asked for $200,000 in ransom and parachuted out of the plane… but was never found, even after an FBI manhunt. It’s the only unsolved case of its kind.
I’d read the book in manuscript form, but must have forgotten about it when they had to shelve it. And Neil wouldn’t have known about it either.
“We even worked with the staff at the Museum of the Mysteries,” my mom says. “That creepy old building downtown?”
“It’s just as creepy on the inside,” my dad says. “And weird, too. It’s half museum, half bar. So they keep it open late.”