at that very moment! C’mon! I need to know what happens now!”
“Sorry! I’ve been busy.”
“With Tallulah?”
“Yep.” Tallulah’s the main character in my other work in progress—a swoony story about a mousy Black girl with a fluffy fro and Thomas, the hipster singer-songwriter with moody eyes and dark hair and deliciously broad shoulders, who moves to town and makes her his muse.
“Well, send me that one at least.” She sighs as if it’s a consolation prize. “And have they finally kissed yet? All the pining and googly eyes are getting to be a bit much. I need some action! They’re barely on base zero point five. Not going to lie, Colette is so much more interesting.”
I smile and shake my head. “I can’t help where the inspiration takes me, Colette.”
“Your audience is waiting, Tallulah.”
By my “audience,” she means herself. She’s my biggest fan . . . and my only fan. But I’m not complaining, because that’s just the way I like it. I don’t write for other people. I write for me and Caroline.
The stories have always come easy to me. My mom said I started writing stories down as early as kindergarten, but I was secretive even then, keeping whatever notebook I was working in safe under my pillow. The subject matter changed as I got older, the what-ifs transferring to what would happen if Harry ended up with Hermione instead? And then what would happen if Harry ended up with me? I felt embarrassed about the stories, but they also made me feel warm inside, and seen. It was empowering to create a world in which I was the center, the prize, the one desired.
Caroline talked her way into reading through one of my notebooks eventually. I expected her to laugh, but instead she praised me as a romantic genius and asked me to write her into a story too. (She always had a thing for Ron.) And she told me there was a word for what I was doing—fan fiction. That made me feel less embarrassed about my stories. At least I wasn’t crazy or something. Other people were doing this too.
Soon I graduated from Harry and Ron to Edward and Jacob to members of our favorite boy band, Dream Zone. (Because okay, Miles likes Dream Zone because I liked Dream Zone. A long, LONG time ago. But I try to keep that shameful secret on the down low.)
I kept thinking the stories were something we would outgrow, like Dream Zone, but they never stopped. They just became about our relationships with my own made-up boys instead of someone else’s. Like, fan fiction of our own lives. It wasn’t like we could go to a bookstore and find many fluffy love stories with girls who looked like us in them.
Now that I’ve moved, I share my stories with Caroline through Google, instead of passing her my beat-up laptop at lunch. I act exasperated, but I’m also secretly happy she hasn’t stopped asking. That, at least, this part of our relationship has stayed the same.
“Wait, what is that banging?” Caroline asks, “I don’t think that’s on my end.”
I pull the phone away from my ear and listen. At first I think it’s the fast drumbeat of Dream Zone’s “Love Like Whoa.” But no, that’s a knock. A loud one. And it’s followed by a faint but shrill “I know you’re in there!”
The Doorbell Ringer is back, or maybe they never left. I guess I said I would answer on the third try. . . .
“Hey, Caroline, I gotta go.”
“Okay, but tonight I better get—” The doorbell rings two more times in quick succession, drowning out the rest of her demand.
Are you kidding me?
I sigh, close my laptop, and say a silent prayer that I won’t lose the faint flicker of inspiration I was chasing, that Tallulah and Thomas’s first kiss will wait. The baby, baby, babys float in from Miles’s TV as I maneuver around the boxes still littering what will eventually be the living room. He’s singing along now, and he’s turned it up even more—way past the fifteen volume limit that Mom has written on two Post-its next to the set.
The bell goes off again, just as I’m opening the door.
“Jesus Christ, have some patience!”
It comes out meaner than I planned, and my cheeks immediately redden when I see Mrs. Hutchinson there, reeling back like she’s scared for her life. She clutches her pilled hunter-green coat around herself, even though it’s a million degrees outside. “Sorry,” I