Chapter 2
I coined that term for the group, actually. Remarketed, more like.
For some awful reason, Hugh and the other six authors had called themselves “the group” for decades (painfully uninformative,
I know), and I wasn’t six months in before I changed the group’s official title to something the book world had been calling
them all along anyway: The Magnificent Seven.
The Magnificent Seven is exactly what they are: seven celebrated authors each in a different genre who banded together forty
years ago to prop one another up as they carry the candle in their distinctive fields.
It’s worked tremendously well, actually.
All things considered, it proved to be an ingenious plan to unite this unlikely group of authors together to cheer one another
on. After all, fiction readers tend to read widely. What better marketing technique is there than for one famously good author
to constantly recommend the books of the same six famously good others?
Lore is that Hugh and these six other stranger authors were all en route to a writing event and became stranded in an elevator with one random reader. Stuck together for hours, Hugh eventually asked the gentleman, “So. Which of our genres do you read?”
He replied with a hearty laugh, “What do you mean ‘which’? I read you all!”
That day, a plan was hatched.
What if all of these completely distinct authors worked together to promote one another at events? Book signings? Presentations?
Endorsements? What if they made an oath to promote one another—and one another only—whenever they were inevitably asked in interviews about their favorite book recommendations? What if, separate in so many
ways and yet the same, they grabbed hands and pulled one another up as they all climbed the proverbial ladder? Together?
The Magnificent Seven.
And forty years later, the partnership is something of a fellowship of rings, all but two members (who recently retired and
passed the proverbial baton) still the same. Rumors about the group abound, ideas involving secret handshakes, secret codes.
The wildest one so far is that there is a secret passageway accessible via Hugh’s library that opens to another room, where
an underground ring of publishing elites gather with the sole purpose of skyrocketing The Magnificent Seven’s books to the
top of every chart.
For the record, there’s no passageway.
At least, I haven’t found one yet.
And if any outsider would know, it would be me, considering I’ve been working for Hugh and the group for five years.
There are seven genres under the banner of the group.
Sure, we almost added the horror writer Aleksandar, but frankly, he was too scary in real life.
Even if he did live in a legitimate castle and threw the best parties (part of the thrill was that you never really knew if you would actually make it home).
And here’s the list:
Vibrant Neena, always handing out fruit baskets and throwing propriety in the air for the sake of the bold life. Writes romance.
You know. The stuff with people drowning in satin dresses on the covers.
Prim Jackie, the definition of “antithesis to Neena,” who considers being five minutes early as being late and collects—with
particular obsession—pushpins from the 1700s. Like, ten-out-of-ten-level hype. Goes on and on about sharing a distant lineage with the king of
England and uses that single fact to promote every single one of her historical fiction books. I once saw her holding up a
Garfield souvenir T-shirt in quiet fascination. She caught my eye and dropped it like it was gasoline at a fireworks show.
Gordon, who is almost always in some costume or other. To say he lives for the medieval renaissance fair or a good Comic-Con
is an understatement. Fantasy.
Crystal, twenty-two-year-old fellow NYC native who made one twelve-second TikTok about her book idea and it blew up to the
point of becoming a Paramount movie. She’s always missing important meetings because she’s off water-sliding somewhere.
Ricky, who, I’ll be honest, is totally creepy. Has a mysterious history working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory before finding
his niche in thriller. Talks extraordinarily slowly and cautiously as though he’s seen things. You never know what they are, and you never really want to find out, but you’re absolutely certain they happened.
Things. Rumor is he and Stephen King play chess on their phones together.
Nash, who . . . well . . . he’s Nash. Everybody calls him dashing.
Everybody thinks he’s wonderful. Me too, of course.
I’d be blind, deaf, and a liar not to admit it.
He’s been one of my closest friends in the past three years he’s been on the team, if I really had to pin a title to us.
Not that we have a title, of course. Not that we are anything.
Good friends feels like a stretch, honestly. I don’t dare tell others that. He’s far too, well, everything I’m not. I’m perfectly
comfortable being the group’s assistant and, by design, his assistant. I’m like his cheerful butler and he the delightful-to-everyone
socialite. We laugh behind the scenes; we don’t laugh in them.
And as if his career alone isn’t leagues more extraordinary than my own, Nash grew up on a ranch. He goes off-grid at a snap
of his fingers and tells nobody. Spends half his time somewhere out west, preferably under the canopy of a full sky and with
absolutely no protection from beasts or rabid people except for his God-given muscles and a larger-than-life knife. Fun fact:
He has worn Wrangler jeans, boots, and a cowboy hat in every single photo I have ever seen of him. Every single one—even the
blurry paparazzi photos where people catch him at 7 a.m. heading into a coffee shop. I’m not sure, honestly, if he lifts weights,
but if he does, I can guarantee it’s while wearing a hat. Writes . . . unsurprisingly, Westerns.
And Hugh. My boss. Incredibly intelligent. Charming. Risk taker. Founding father of the group, whose brain is constantly whirring,
taking in every speck of detail from the moment. Casually chatting with you about the tarragon in the sauce while mentally
solving real live murders. Still works part-time for the police department.
Voluntarily. As a “mental exercise,” he says.
Just to “keep his mind fresh” at seventy-five while being a benefit to society.
Writes mystery. Not the kind with an apple pie on the cover beside an illustrated cat, but Agatha Christie.
Dorothy Sayers. Convoluted stories. Surprising, sometimes bitter, sometimes bittersweet ends.
Nobody in the group fights.
There are no arguments. Not really. Not actual, shout-to-the-rooftops arguments over anything more substantial than where to eat dinner.
Just pure support year in and year out.
In my five years as Hugh’s assistant and, by extension, assistant to The Magnificent Seven, I’ve never seen anything like
it.
Honestly, if I didn’t know them better, I’d say they were hiding secrets.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say they had to be.
After all, they’re human.
“Come along, Pip,” Neena chirps. “Even through our mental breakthroughs, we cannot dawdle.”
It takes approximately twelve more honks and thirty more minutes, but at last here we are, halfway up the gangplank with our
luggage, sweat carving streaky paths down our sunscreened faces. My skirt is mostly dried. My hair is knotted in the ugliest
let’s-just-keep-everything-together bun alive. My blouse is missing a button.
I feel terrible they all followed me down to the beach, but as Neena says, “Once we saw the whole thing through Ricky’s binoculars”—another
question for another time: Why was Ricky watching me through binoculars?—“what choice did we have but to save our baby?”
(I’d ignore the reference to my babyhood and assert myself as a capable adult, except for the fact that at the time, I was
indeed acting like a child and did indeed need a capable adult.)
Neena has put on her gigantic floppy beach hat, which looks like it weighs approximately forty pounds. She turns toward me, and despite being a full three feet ahead, it whacks me in the face.
“He was gross. And,” I add pointedly, “he was inconsiderate.”
A far worse crime.
Somewhere along the way, driven by guilt mostly, I’ve added Neena’s suitcase to my load.
It’s not easy dragging our bags, considering her suitcase is not only one hundred pounds of glow-in-the-dark purple with a
thousand stickers of her book covers smashed all about, but also twice the height of mine with a dodgy wheel. I’m lopsided,
pulling along her protesting suitcase beside my modest (and personality-less) beige one.
And while I’m kicking myself while I’m down, I must note it reflects well who I am though, doesn’t it?
“Of course he was inconsiderate. As men so often are,” she says in a we of the female population have resigned ourselves to this fact singsong voice.
Hugh ahead raises his brow.
“Quite the statement for the romance author,” I say.
It’s funny because, for one thing, she’s surrounded by the most trustworthy, upstanding men in the universe (minus Ricky?),
and for another, her specialty is writing utterly unrealistic, nearly nauseatingly self-sacrificing and noble firemen-type
males.
“Gordon and I are the same, honey,” Neena says. “We both write fantasy.”
Now it’s Gordon who jerks his head back.
She’s just trying to make me feel better. I’ve suffered from a male, ergo, she, too, will strike her fist in the air. I appreciate
the move of solidarity. Even if it’s a bald-faced lie.
She stops and turns, and I dodge another whack of her hat to the face. “Would you like me to write him into my next book, sweetheart? I’ll kill him off, if you like. Just for you.”
Golly gee. What a treat.
“I appreciate the gesture, Neena. But that’s more Hugh’s genre.”
“The Pineapple Murder,” Hugh announces cheerfully. “Has a ring to it.”