12
B ecause leaving the library with Nora Pike would’ve meant too much uninterrupted time with Nora Pike, MC headed out early, telling her to swing by the meeting whenever.
“And if you really don’t want to be there, I get it.”
Nora had looked grateful, in a wary way, and MC had realized this meant they probably wouldn’t be seeing each other later after all. Maybe it was for the best. Things had gotten too serious in the stacks, even if it’d just been for a moment.
Of course, she was sabotaging yet another opportunity to rescue the sinking ship of her promise to Joe. But she didn’t want to think about that.
Then, in the middle of the meeting, as MC was leading the year’s first real workshop discussion—Mr. Pryor, apparently, had been turning the group into an extracurricular lecture series on modernist masterpieces of the interwar period—Nora appeared in the doorway.
“Everyone,” MC said, “this is Nora, master of the magazine back in the day, which I heard you all want to bring back.” She got up and pulled over a desk. “After we finish workshopping, she’ll walk us through the layout and printing process.”
Nora took the seat, looking ashen. Maybe it was because she’d scrubbed off all her witch makeup. MC was sad to see it gone. Nora’s commitment to the holiday had inspired MC to borrow a pirate hat, eyepatch, and fake mustache from Mr. Pryor. Now she felt like she’d missed the memo, as always.
The workshop resumed—a hot debate over whether the main character’s epiphany was earned. The emerging consensus was that it was not.
“Why does it have to be earned?” said a girl named Sheila. She had a rough voice and dark nail polish. “Like, can’t people just realize shit sometimes?”
“I agree,” said a guy across the circle. Patrick. He was dour and solitary, with long skateboarder hair and a nervous foot. “It’s not like this is a thriller.”
“But it’s still a story,” MC said. “Readers expect stories to have different rules than reality.”
“Hashtag not-all-readers,” said Ben, ever the good-natured commentator.
They argued and snarked for another twenty minutes or so.
There were a dozen students in attendance, mostly upperclassmen.
The only one who didn’t speak was the girl MC had seen at the library on her first night back in Green Hills.
Her name was Heather. MC had deduced this from the meeting sign-in list by process of elimination.
“Okay,” MC said, clapping her hands, “let’s move on to the magazine. First off, tell Nora a little bit about why you want to bring back the print edition.”
There were the requisite complaints about how annoying it was that everything had to be online, how fake and transient everything felt there.
“A printed magazine is transient too,” Nora said. “You can hold it in your hands, but then it gets thrown out. Or stuffed in a box in your mom’s attic.”
Sheila frowned. “Are you saying we shouldn’t do it?”
“I’m saying you should think about what it means to make a record of your lives at this point. Because it won’t give you a sense of permanence.” Nora’s gaze flicked to MC. “And looking back on things later can be embarrassing.”
“Whatever I wrote definitely sucked,” MC said.
The group laughed, but MC could tell Nora had made them nervous. She’d made MC nervous too. Was her judgment directed at MC’s terrible short stories, or her own poem? And if she was talking about her poem, did that mean she was embarrassed about what she’d written about MC back then?
Now?
“The thing is,” MC added, taking a chance on her instincts for once, “so what? I think it’s brave to put yourself out there, even when you know you’ll be a different person down the line.
” She got a few skeptical looks. “Do you really want to go through life believing that you never had anything to learn?”
“Yes,” said Ben.
Everyone laughed again.
“Okay,” MC said, “let’s move on to design for a second...”
MC got Nora to explain their old process of working with the Art Department to solicit illustrations, paintings, and photography.
Then Nora named some zines in the library’s archive collection that were worth looking at for ideas.
After the meeting, MC saw Heather walk over to Sheila and propose checking out the zines together sometime.
Sheila seemed surprised by the suggestion, but nodded.
After the students had left, as MC and Nora were rearranging desks, MC said, “Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it.”
Nora shrugged. “I mostly did it for Heather.”
“Is she a library intern or something?”
“No. She just hangs around a lot.”
“I noticed.”
“Her parents are screwups.”
“So, you guys are... friends?”
“Not exactly. But she talks to me. She told me she was into a girl in this club.”
“The zines.” MC smiled. “You set her up for that.”
“My Halloween treat.”
“Well, sorry if the rest of the experience was painful.”
“I dropped a book on your head. You reminded me how shitty high school was. Now we’re even.”
MC thought back to being in these meetings together.
Nora in the Heather role, but with more confidence.
And, in the beginning, more pushback—especially from Joe.
Everyone was annoyed by what they saw as her insistence on isolating herself.
Whenever she did speak, it was assumed to be a setup for attack.
“I’m sorry people were assholes to you,” MC said.
“I don’t need you to apologize on their behalf.”
“Fine. But I should’ve stood up for you more.”
“I didn’t want a knight in shining armor.” Nora shoved a desk into place. “I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t going to squeeze myself into one of the teen stereotypes available at the time, and I understood there was a price for that.”
MC felt a flare of annoyance, thinking of the high school chapters of Girl Next Door . “Did you think I was one of the stereotypes?”
Nora’s eyes flashed. “Weren’t you?”
MC shook her head, pulse racing. “Why do you act like you know everything about me?”
“I don’t.”
“You do.” MC squared off with her. She knew she needed to rein it in, but couldn’t seem to help herself. “It’s kind of rude.”
She’d done it.
She’d said something unfriendly.
For a few moments, Nora seemed at a loss for words.
Then she ripped MC’s mustache off.
MC put a hand to the stinging strip of skin above her upper lip. “What was that for?”
“It was crooked,” Nora said.
“So?”
“So.” She leaned across the desk, her voice low.
“It was bothering me.” She reached up and carefully put the mustache back on, pressing her palms to MC’s cheeks and smoothing the fake fuzz with her thumbs.
There was a look in her eyes that made MC’s stomach flip.
Warmth coursed through her chest, a dam breaking, and her lips parted. She leaned forward, just a little—
“Wow,” Conrad said, “the dynamic duo reunites.”
Nora and MC reared back from each other.
“How’d it go?” he asked, waltzing into the classroom.
Nora stared at him in disdain. “I have to run.” There was a trace of unsteadiness in her voice. If MC hadn’t been feeling the same thing, but tenfold, she never would’ve noticed. “I need about eighty pounds of candy or my house gets egged.”
“Kids these days,” said Conrad.
“Thanks again for coming to the meeting,” MC said hoarsely. “See you around?”
Nora cleared her throat. “Yeah.”
After she left, MC and Conrad stood silently, staring at each other, for a solid minute.
“Cool hat, sis.”
“Cool camisole, bro.”
Trying to shake off the furious blush in her cheeks, she snapped the top of the Superman spandex poking out from his half-buttoned shirt.
He’d slicked his blond hair into the Clark Kent curlicue.
A pair of fake glasses perched on the edge of his nose.
She tried to focus on how annoying he was, as opposed to the way Nora’s thumbs had felt as they’d brushed across her mouth.
She said, “Is this a literalization of your savior complex?”
“Sure.” He flicked the brim of her pirate hat. “You look cute, by the way.”
“Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Belittle me.”
“How could I belittle you when your facial hair’s finally come in?” He smirked. “Nor Dog was looking pretty cute too.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, nothing. Just that I finally figured out why you’ve started coming back home again.”
MC’s eyes widened. Her mind swirled with images of her brother curiously picking up a copy of Girl Next Door left behind in a classroom, reading the back cover, connecting it with Joe’s phone call, the fact that he was a magazine editor—
“You have a thing for her, right?”
She laughed breathlessly. “What?”
“I don’t know how I didn’t put it together when you first got here. All that time at the library, zero interest in catching up with me, though I guess that’s typical—”
“Hang on—”
“There was always such an intense vibe between you guys.”
“Conrad.”
“Come on, am I not allowed to mention something that might be, dare I say it, kind of cool?”
“You—wait, what?”
“Reconnecting with Nora. Getting it right this time.”
“What did I get wrong, exactly?”
“Not going for it with her.”
“I’m not going for it now.”
“If you say so.” He shrugged. “Look, I just want you to be happy. Hopefully you realize that.”
MC was stunned. “Oh.”
They walked out, not speaking. By the time they reached the parking lot, the wind had picked up, threatening to blow MC’s hat off. She held it in her hands, feeling silly.
“Sorry to be weird,” she said. “I’m not used to talking about girls with you.”
“It’s your business.” He unlocked the Destroyer of Worlds. “Just bums me out that it seems to be a forbidden topic between us.”
She ducked into the passenger seat. “I think I’m always embarrassed to tell you how little progress I ever seem to make in that department.”
Conrad smiled. “Well, seeing as you’re absolutely, definitely not into Nora... are you dating anyone?”
She smiled back. “I just got broken up with, actually.”
He turned the car on, and they set off. She found it surprisingly easy to tell him about Lisa.
How’d they’d met, what their relationship was like.
She even described some of Lisa’s more memorable immersive theater pieces, in which naked Brooklynites did domestic chores in loft apartments to pulsing EDM.
“And then, just last month, I saw her making out with a hot dude in Grand Army Plaza.”
He whistled. “Shit.”
“At least Joe was with me.”
Conrad got quiet. MC wondered if it was because he was feeling weird about MC’s reliance on Joe. But he only cleared his throat and said, “By the way, I invited Jae over for dinner tonight. I know she’d like to see you and catch up a little more.”
“Is this your solution to being a workaholic? Polyamory with your work wife and your real one?”
In a shocking first, Conrad blushed. “I think she gets lonely on holidays. Her husband left her two years ago.”
“That sucks. But I mean, it’s Halloween...”
“Yeah, well, it reminds her of how she’d expected to have kids by now.”
“Superman to the rescue.”
He shrugged.
“Dinner with Ms. Kim sounds great,” she said. “Sorry. I should’ve just said that off the bat.”
“And tomorrow?” He raised an eyebrow. “Are we having a birthday rager or what?”
She sighed. “Technically, Joe got us tickets to a warehouse dance party in Bushwick.” Which was true. And at the time, it’d seemed like the perfect excuse to leave Green Hills before anything too complicated could happen.
But now she didn’t want to leave.
“Well,” Conrad said, “I’ll just have to bake you a cake for breakfast, then.”
MC smiled.
When they got back to the house, Gabby—decked out in hippie bangles and a beehive hairdo—practically jumped into MC’s arms. “I love that this is becoming a thing!”
MC wanted to temper Gabby’s excitement, but didn’t have it in her.
Maybe it was the fact that Conrad had asked her about her own life for once and listened to her answers, and also wanted to bake her a cake, but she felt like it was probably annoying to always be reminding everyone that she had a foot out the door.
She tossed her bag in the guest room. Which was her own former bedroom, stripped of its Eminem posters and unflattering snapshots from Joe’s love affair with Polaroids.
Then she hopped in the shower, a little less self-conscious about being back in the house than last time.
When she’d gotten dressed and headed into the kitchen, there were already kids ringing the doorbell, chicken and potatoes in the oven, and a small, unusual warmth in her chest.
It felt like she was home.