The summer I met Simon, I lost Jennifer. It was as if a hole opened in my heart, and he stepped right in, his hand where hers had once been, his smile replacing hers. Granted, they were different. She was eleven, he was twenty-two. She ran away…
I delete the last line, and then the entire paragraph. Lies. I am forgetting that this is not an ordinary novel, that I can’t take fictional liberties, can’t provide clues, or lead the readers down a path I didn’t travel.
There is no Jennifer. Maybe if there had been, then I would be in a different place now. Maybe if I had had a friend, even an eleven-year-old one, then Simon wouldn’t have been my everything.
I try to picture a friend of the twenty-year-old me, a girl whose interests had been singularly focused on reading and writing, her days spent at a notebook or computer, her mind preoccupied in thoughts of fictional characters and strange cities. Girls in my high school had seemed like foreign creatures, the boys leering villains. Another writer would have been my best bet. Or possibly a librarian, though none had ever given me the time of day.
I think of Marka Vantley, of our seven-year war, and make a face. Maybe another writer wouldn’t have been my best bet. Then again, most writers aren’t buxom supermodels who write trashy smut.
My gaze drifts over the stack of books beside my desk, all but one of my novels present. Missing is Blue Heart. The worst book I ever wrote. It was about a girl who gets a heart transplant as a child and—either due to the medical procedure or her God-given personality—is unable to love. Critics loved it and readers rushed out to purchase it, a million copies sold in the first year. Marka Vantly sent me a scathing email that spoke the truth. It said the book was terrible—flat and insipid, my attempts at matchmaking weak.
She had been right.
I hadn’t responded well, reading the email and then pushing the laptop off the counter’s edge. Simon had come home to find bits of the screen dotting our kitchen floor, punk music blaring through the house—an unsuccessful attempt to drown out her words.
I never responded to her email. I hadn’t known what to say, my footing weak and unfamiliar. I’d solved the problem with a big sleeping pill, topped off with Chardonnay and hostility toward my husband. That email had been the spark that had started Marka’s and my rivalry. The kindling had been our constant competition on the bestseller ranks, every week a new scorecard, our print runs and sales figures a giant tally that anyone with a Publishers Weekly subscription could access. That email had been the first of many, each release bringing another, my competitive nature unable to resist similar pettiness, barbs exchanged with increasing hostility.
I’d always told myself that it didn’t matter what Marka Vantly thought. I’d convinced myself that she wrote trash, and couldn’t tell intelligent talent from the smutty garbage she vomited out. But honestly, her prose isn’t trash. If anything, behind all of the ass slapping and handcuffing and screaming orgasms… it’s fairly good. What I hate—and what I can never confess in my emails to her—is that she is wasting such writing on smut. I write sex. I write, in the majority of my novels, a fair amount of sex. She can write sex and still write a great novel. And that’s what infuriates me about the woman, even more than her perfectly pouty lips and incessant publicity. She’s wasting her talent. She could be giving us more.
Then again, she might not have anything more to give. Maybe all she was blessed with is the talent to tell stories, and not the talent to create them. There’s a very real distinction between the two. Maybe she writes drivel because she doesn’t have a better story to tell. I feel a momentary burst of empathy for the woman, the sort of emotion I instantly recognize as condescending. But still, it’s there, a crumbling of the hatred I’ve fostered for so long, a peace at the understanding of my adversary. Maybe that’s why she sends such vile emails, the poor woman coming from a place of insecurity, jealousy, and frustration.
It’s a good possibility, and I hold onto it, envisioning the positive scenario as an actual tree, giving it roots that dig into the earth and branches that reach into the sky. It is an exercise I haven’t done in a decade, the concept taught to me by my psychiatrist mother, back when I was a bookworm without friends, a condition worthy of concern. I had a dozen painful appointments on her micro-suede couch before my mother gave up. In those appointments, I learned how to compartmentalize worries into an imaginary box in an attempt to relax. I also learned this stupid tree exercise, and how to bore clients while pretending to know a lot of stuff. Mom learned she was stuck with me and my ‘oddities’, which I’m fairly certain she blamed on my father’s genes. If he loved learning, the dogged pursuit of a perfect SAT score, and setting the bell curve out of pure competitive spite? Then yes, we’re practically twins. But I wouldn’t know any of that. He took off two weeks after Mom told him she was pregnant. He left his wedding ring on the kitchen counter, along with divorce papers and a note. I don’t love you enough. I’m a pretty cold, emotionally distant individual, but even my black heart can tell you that’s just wrong.
I shove my Marka tree of happiness into a wood chipper and give up, pushing to my feet and abandoning the manuscript, moving downstairs in search of food and a distraction.
Seventeen hundred words down. Seventy-seven thousand to go.
Impossible.