Chapter 7
To make up for his late article, James is at the newspaper office on a Saturday.
The clock slugs toward noon, until a mere ten minutes stand between him and his lunch break.
Though it’s not like Nancy regulates when he leaves his desk.
Or the building. She is always in and out in a pair of chunky clogs, clutching a camera, her purse swinging like a pendulum over her shoulder, moving at a faster pace than everyone else in lazy little Lincoln.
She once insisted they take a lunch break together and told him all about growing up in Chicago.
When he asked her what she thought about New York, she shuddered and said, “Too many people.”
After a bite at Lindsey’s Smokehouse, James spends two mind-numbing hours scrolling through the layout for next week’s issue.
He adjusts and aligns gray squares where photos will be placed.
Drags out text boxes and double-checks for grammatical errors before pasting them onto the page.
Across the dusty workroom, Nancy drops into her rolling chair, acrylic nails clicking against her keyboard.
If you’re working today, then I’m working today, she texted back earlier.
Thrown off by the change in routine, he forgot to bring her coffee, so she drinks from a ceramic mug, leaving red lipstick on the rim.
She scans the screen, probably planning editorial notes on James’s latest article.
Or flat-out changes she won’t consult him about.
She is the editor, after all, and she likes to remind him of that fact.
She pauses for a moment, sips her coffee again, and brushes a frizzy, reddish-brown strand of hair behind her ear.
Peacock feathers dangle from her earlobes.
James’s focus crumbles as the words on his screen blur into the shape of Nelle’s name, letters sliding away like streaks of her black blood, the ink on his hands, on the grass, on the side of the house, on his shirt, his shoe . . .
As he left her house last night, he resolved to never set foot there again. To move on with his life, finish his degree, possibly even go to medical school, and grind toward a reliable job.
All of which begins with forgetting about Nelle.
Which he seemingly can’t do. He scrolls through a folder of images from an awards banquet at Lincoln High School, but all the students’ smiling faces morph into Nelle’s.
He closes out of that tab and focuses on the newspaper layout, on transferring finished articles.
But the words smudge like fresh ink and become Nelle Nelle and Nelle went to the Nelle at the Nelle on Nelle—
James slams his fist into his keyboard, and a spurt of random letters appears in the middle of the word Saturday. He deletes the error with six furious jabs.
“You good?” Nancy hovers over him.
James jumps, his throat tickling as a cloud of floral perfume encroaches on him.
“Just this damn article,” he says. “Trying to get it done by three.”
She leans on his desk. “You’ve been working hard lately, James, but don’t spread yourself too thin. Take a break if you need it.”
“It’s okay, it’s already half past—”
“No, a break after work.” Nancy purses her lips. “Look at me, James.”
He does, really looks at her, for the first time.
She’s not old, maybe twenty-six? Her glasses are red plastic, her lipstick the shade of fresh blood, her hair carefully curled.
Black eyeliner wings cut into her temples.
She is pretty, a fact that somehow James hadn’t seen until now.
Maybe it has to do with her looming above him.
“I have two tickets to a walking performance of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe at Riverside Playhouse, if you want to come with me. My date canceled.” The perfume that previously suffocated James starts to smell like a field of wildflowers.
Her nails rattle against the laminated wood of his desk.
James swallows. All summer, he has thought of Nancy as his boss, his elder.
“How old are you?” he asks, immediately feeling a twinge of regret. Not the right thing to ask a woman who just asked you out, idiot.
“Twenty-five,” she says, and to further prove her youth, “fresh out of grad school. Why, do I seem older?”
“No, no.” His finger jitters on the space bar. “You seem, uh, very young. Not very young, but—”
Nancy peers down at him. Within seconds, her dusty-librarian aura became a sexy grad-student vibe, and James has lost all ability to speak coherently. Not the sparkly nerves he feels around Nelle, but adjacent. This is the anxiety he recognizes from any time an attractive girl has talked to him.
Can you go back to being my boss, please, so I can think straight? he almost asks.
But a night with a girl who isn’t Nelle might be exactly what he needs to cast her and her craziness out of his life forever.
“What do you say?” Nancy jangles her keys. “I’ll drive.”
When they arrive at Riverside Playhouse, a half-hour drive from Lincoln, the sun edges the field, painting the grass gold.
James and Nancy trot down a gravel path to a check-in booth and hand their tickets to a man wearing a cashmere coat.
Manure, sweet and putrid, rides the breeze from a pasture of grazing horses.
Past the honey-thick haze in the air, a creek gurgles.
The show starts in a barn decorated to resemble the interior of the English country house where the Pevensie siblings stay at the beginning of the novel.
James stands in the front of the crowd on a designated path, vaguely aware of his knuckles brushing the back of Nancy’s hand. She sucks in a sharp breath.
When the four child actors discover a wardrobe built into the wall, James and the rest of the audience follow them outside into a field transformed from a hot July evening to a winter wonderland.
Fake snow blankets the ground, the trees are frosted, and a horse-drawn sleigh gallops across the landscape.
Stuffed snow owls hoot from high branches.
James finds himself sinking into the show, watching in awe and wonder, full of imagination he hasn’t felt since he was a child.
The production ends with a battle and the Pevensie children returning to the mansion in the English countryside, far from Narnia and Aslan.
James follows them through the hole in the wardrobe, though the snow has been stripped away now to reveal emerald grass and full trees.
Back inside, the barn is a gray husk of what he glimpsed moments ago. He wants to go back.
When the show ends, Nancy asks him what he thought about it, but he can’t find the words to describe how it made him feel. Like magic is real. Like anything is possible. Like for the first time in years, he is alive.
Immediately, he wants to invoke that feeling in someone else, to stoke that fire within himself. A poem, a novel, a lyric. His fingers itch to create.
“Yeah, I liked it. Thanks for inviting me.”
They make small talk on the ride home—Where did you grow up?
Any summer plans? How’s the layout coming along for next week’s issue?
—but James is only half in the conversation.
His other half is plotting a secret move to New York.
He has some money saved up that he can use to help pay for rent if Jessie lets him stay with her.
He will have to get a job to afford out-of-state tuition if he wants to go to school there.
His parents would never help him be so irresponsible, even if they could, especially if he is going for a degree in the humanities.
Slow down, slow down, he tells himself. Start by finishing a novel. Get a practical degree in the meantime. Then see if you still want to wreck your life.
It’s what his mom would say. And he can’t argue that she would be wrong.
Half an hour later, Nancy parks her car outside the newspaper office.
She hesitates, hand on the door handle. “I had fun tonight.”
The tension of a potential kiss dangles like a string above the center console, but he can’t do it. He can’t give her what she wants. He needs to feel magic, and there is none.
At least, not with her.
“Thank you,” he says. “You don’t know how much I needed this.”
Nancy opens her mouth, a smudge of red lipstick on her front tooth.
“I think we should just stick to a professional relationship,” James says as he opens the door. The dome lights wash out Nancy’s confused face. “I really did appreciate this date. I loved the show. See you Monday!”
He waits in his truck for her to leave the parking lot, unable to wipe the giddy grin off his face as he backs out and drives off, out of the square. Not toward his parents’ house on Anderson Street, but right toward River Road. Then down Blackwood.
To a house with a mailbox marked Quill.
Nelle scrutinizes herself in her vanity mirror.
She ties her blond hair up, pink bow dangling like bubblegum strings, then takes it down so it falls in thin, blond locks over her shoulders.
She puts it up again. With a groan, she yanks the ribbon out and shoves it in a drawer.
Silver glints beside it, a chain that dangles and shimmers when she plucks it up.
A glass pendant hangs on the end, holding soil from the lake behind Father’s childhood cottage.
If she tries to write for herself, she will die.
But he never said what would happen if someone else wrote for her.
Nelle dumps the tablespoon of dirt into the drawer and pricks her finger with a sewing needle until a black bead blooms, and the little vial is full.
Holding the pendant makes her feel powerful and guilty at the same time.
Other than talking to James, siphoning off her own ink is the most directly she has ever disobeyed Father.
Shaking, she hides the pendant beneath a sheaf of drawings in the drawer.
A muffled tap beats on the windowpane.