Chapter 26
Montrose
A month later I pushed “send” on the email to Nora with Down In Flames attached.
It had been a tremendous month writing-wise. In every other way I was completely miserable.
I’d freaked when I realized Syd had been a…superfan. I couldn’t call her a Folly Dolly, even though I wasn’t really sure what the difference was between her and the other women who felt they were destined to be with me because of a character I wrote years ago.
The difference was I was in love with Sydney O’Brien.
And there were lots of other things, too. For one, she’d never let on that she’d read Folly that many times. I’d played all our conversations over in my mind countless times in the last month and I was fairly certain she had never even mentioned that it was one of her favorite books.
And for another thing, she never initiated contact with me in any way. And, being in my class, she certainly had every opportunity. Hell, if I had been told I had a zealous fan in that class I would have pegged Jane Winters as it for sure.
I sat back in my chair at the kitchen table in my apartment and watched as the email to Nora chugged through.
Even though Syd was no longer in my office in the evenings (or ever), I continued to work in my apartment, only spending time in the office for my official office hours and to pick up and drop off students’ papers.
It was just too painful to spend time in a room that reminded me of Syd at every turn.
She had finished her work a couple of weeks ago, just around the first of April.
It felt like a cruel April Fool’s joke to see her note reading “last one” with a flash drive sitting on my desk.
But it was no joke, and I realized that, even though Bribury was a small campus, there was a very good chance that I would never see Syd O’Brien again.
I’d had all the boxes with my original notes shipped to my parents’ place.
They were going to put them in storage for me.
I didn’t want to trash them altogether, even though Syd had transcribed every bit of them, and I’d backed them up on external drives, flash drives and on Dropbox.
I still liked knowing they were there for me somewhere—five years of my life.
Five tough years of floundering with ideas that wouldn’t stop coming, and no focus or direction to do anything with them.
Syd had given me that. Or Bribury. Or time. Or just plain manning up.
But I knew…it was Syd.
I’d wanted to call her so many times in the past month. Or leave her a note on the desk. But then I’d look at the calendar and realize we only would have another couple of months anyway (and only a month by now), and I’d crumple up the paper, or put my phone down.
She was so young, so sharp, and the drive she had…Syd was going to go places. And I didn’t want her making any of those life decisions based on me being in NYC.
The night we broke up, when she told me about her past… My heart ached for her, for her thirteen-year-old self, for the woman she was becoming. I’d wished I could have taken on her pain myself. I’d also wished that I had half the guts that she did. Does.
And then I’d gone and caused her more pain. It was for the best, though. Or at least that’s what I’d told myself about forty times a day for the past month.
My phone rang, jarring me out of my pity party. “Hey, Nora,” I said when I picked up. “I just sent you—”
“I know. That’s why I’m calling.”
“That was fast.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve been waiting five years for that email.”
I laughed. “Hopefully it will have been worth it.”
“I’m sure it will. Listen, Billy, I want to show this to Adina first as we talked about. I’m prepared to give her a week to make a preempt deal if you’re okay with that. If she doesn’t hit our number, we shop it all over and hope it goes to auction.”
“Yeah, that sounds good. I’d really like to work with Adina again. So, what should we ask for?”
We discussed our magic number for a while and finally came to an agreement. I thought Nora was asking for too much, but she assured me she could get it.
It wasn’t about the money for me, it never had been.
I just wanted to be able to write. But the way publishing worked, the bigger the advance, the bigger the push a publisher made, protecting their investment.
And I wanted this book to do well. Ego. Pride.
Professional preservation. Whatever. It was very important to me that Down in Flames be read.
“Okay, I’m going to call Adina tomorrow morning and tell her we’re sending it to her. And that we’re offering her the chance at a preempt.”
“You’re not going to read it first?”
“Normally, yes, but I’ve had her salivating since we had lunch weeks ago, so I’ll read it while she does.”
“Okay,” I said.
“It’s good, right? Strong? Do you think I should read it before I send it to her?”
I thought for a second. Thought about the hours I spent deconstructing Syd’s flower of ideas. Everything had clicked after that. Her combination of Gangster’s Providence into Flames was startling with how well it fit. It had been there all along, I realized, I’d just been too close to see it.
But Syd saw it. And had the guts to show it to me, even after getting involved before had turned me into a complete asshole and cost us a valuable month of our time together.
“Yes,” I said to Nora, no doubt in my voice. “It’s strong. It’s good.”
“Okay then, I’ll let you know what I hear in a few days.”
“Okay. And hey, if she passes on it completely she’ll be discreet right? I mean, word won’t get out that my Folly editor passed on my second book?”
“I thought you said it was good? Strong. Why would she pass? I can see not meeting our number, but passing completely? Not going to happen.”
“Okay…”
“Jesus, you authors. So talented and yet so…” She caught herself. We had a good relationship, Nora and I, but she probably knew better than to call me out on my bullshit.
“Insecure? Neurotic? Completely self-absorbed?” I offered up the choices for her. All being completely accurate. At least for me.
“Yeah, that,” she said laughing. “Okay, more later.”
“Okay,” I said.
“And Billy?”
“Yes?”
“Have some champagne chilling.”
I hung up and thought about maybe taking her advice and getting a bottle of bubbly in case good news came. At the very least I could toast typing “The End” for the first time in a long time.
And then I thought about not being able to celebrate with Syd. And about the fact that she hadn’t even read the completed manuscript, made possible by her brilliant ideas.
It wouldn’t be the same. Nothing would be the same for a long time.
I crossed champagne off my mental grocery list, pushed my laptop aside and pulled over a pile of papers to grade.