Afterworlds (41 page)

Standerson waited patiently for the noise to subside, and when the crowd was finally settled, he nudged them back into raptures with nothing but a sheepish “Hello.” They had been primed by a hundred videos to know every flick of his hair, every lopsided smile. And as Standerson began to talk, each delivery of his catchphrase—“Books are machines for completing human beings”—brought screams of recognition from the audience, even a kind of relief. He was exactly what they had expected him to be, but better.

The intensity of the crowd had settled a little by the time he introduced Imogen. He went about it casually, as if she were a friend he’d met on the way to the bookstore. But his praise was unchecked, and the audience loved her before she said a word. She was family now, like a long-lost cousin giving a speech at a wedding. And when she dropped a reference to frequent bouts of dyspepsia into her usual spiel about obsessive-compulsives, they loved her even more.

Darcy watched closely, struck with a kind of astonishment that this was the same man she’d had dinner with, the same woman she woke up with almost every morning. The spellbound audience made them shinier, more than real.

Darcy tried to absorb the performance, knowing that next year she would have to do this job herself. But she could hardly imagine any crowd so zealous for her, so full of love.

An hour after it had all started, the bookstore manager declared that it was time for the signing. The staff set to wrangling the crowd
into some kind of line, and a folding table was hoisted onto the tiny stage.

Darcy managed to squeeze in beside Imogen. “You guys were amazing.”

Imogen only nodded. She was breathing hard and shallow, like a fish on dry land.

“That was the easy part,” Standerson said. “Face-to-face is when it gets tricky.”

“Right. I guess I should leave you guys to it?”

“Stick around,” he said. “You can be our flap monkey!”

“Um, okay.” Darcy didn’t know what a flap monkey was, but she was certain that she wanted to be here onstage with them.

The signing line was a long and winding beast. They brought Standerson cookies; they brought poems and fan art; they brought still more questions about his characters, his videos, his well-known love of the semicolon. And of course they brought books to sign. Some had his whole collection, some only a single tattered copy of his first novel. Oddly, a few brought editions of
The Great Gatsby
(which he was known to love) or
Moby-Dick
(which he famously despised).

A dozen or so of his fans bought Imogen’s book that very night. A handful of them camped out at her end of the table, happy to chat about their own obsessive disorders, a little giddy at their proximity to Standerson. Imogen kept them entertained with her research on how to set things on fire.

All this time, Darcy was a busy little flap monkey, taking books from customers and tucking the flaps into the title pages, so that Standerson didn’t have to scramble for the right place to sign.
Darcy had soon learned the difference between full- and half-title pages. (The latter didn’t have the author’s name, and was therefore unsignable.) Sometimes she swapped places with the bookstore staff working the line. There was something pleasantly third-grade-teacher-ish about making sure that everyone had sticky notes with their names on them, so that their precious moments in Standerson’s presence weren’t wasted distinguishing a Katelyn from a Kaitlin, Caitlin, or Caitlynne.

It was a long two and a half hours, and Standerson’s patter began to cycle and repeat. His joke about hand cramps came every five minutes, his disquisition on smoked bacon every ten. Darcy’s mind began to entertain the possibility that she had always been a flap monkey in this signing line. She would always be a flap monkey in this signing line. . . .

But eventually, finally, it was all over. The exhausted booksellers were stacking chairs and ushering the last fans out the door. A hundred stickies littered the signing table, square yellow leaves dead and fallen. Imogen went missing, but was soon discovered lying on the carpeted floor in the biography section. Anton guided Darcy in front of the store owner one more time, and the two shared weary anecdotes about the night, old friends now.

Everyone was exhausted on the way home. Standerson was silent, and Imogen lay in the backseat with her head in Darcy’s lap. Even Anton’s driving was pacific, the roads back to the hotel dark and empty.

“Are you seriously doing this for another whole month?” Imogen asked.

Standerson looked dazed by the question, and only shrugged.

“I mean, how you can stand so much adulation?”

“Adulation is like rain. You can only get so wet.” Standerson turned to Darcy. “Was tonight useful for you? Did you learn anything?”

Darcy nodded, trying to find words. She felt smarter about readers, and was astonished anew at the power of the written word. Also, she knew the difference between full-title and half-title pages.

But something bigger had happened, a rearrangement in her brain. Since age twelve, Darcy had wanted unashamedly to become a
famous writer
. That pair of words had always called up certain fantasies for her: writing in longhand on a rooftop veranda, being interviewed by someone clever and adoring, a Manhattan skyline in the background. All these images had been calm, even stately, completely unlike that night’s bookstore event. But now Darcy could feel her regal daydreams transforming into something louder, messier, and full of joyous pandemonium.

“I’ll be your flap monkey anytime,” she said. “The owner can’t wait for
Afterworlds
. She asked for an advanced copy, signed to her personally. I should write her name down, I guess.”

“Anton will make it happen.” Standerson saluted Anton, who laughed. “Indispensable media escort is indispensable.”

As she smiled at this, Darcy tried to recall her first rattling moments in Anton’s car the afternoon before. That flutter of anxiety over a trifling thing like death seemed so long ago now, before her first school visit, her first stint as a flap monkey, her first glimmer of YA heaven.

 CHAPTER 30 

OVER THE NEXT DAYS, I
waited for the old man in the patched coat to come to me again. I hated not knowing where Mindy was, and I kept imagining her being unraveled into flailing threads of memory for the old man’s amusement. The only thing that kept me sane was Yama, his presence in my room at night, his touch, and his certainty that she was okay.

Being able to sleep again helped a lot. School was much easier, no longer teeming with the phantoms of leftover crushes and humiliations. The echoes of the past were still there in the hallways, of course, but they were quieter now. My last semester in high school drifted toward normal life, almost boring after everything that had happened since Dallas.

But the best thing about sleep was that it washed me clear. Some mornings, I was awake for five minutes before the memories flooded back in.

*  *  *

“Any news on the secret agent front?” Jamie asked at lunch one day. “I haven’t seen him lurking lately.”

“He’s been busy,” I said, which was probably true. Agent Reyes had drugs to interdict, death cultists to surveil. I was thankful that the FBI had bigger worries than keeping watch over me.

“But you guys keep in touch, right?”

“Yeah, we talk most nights.” This was also true, because I had decided that Jamie was asking about my actual boyfriend now, and not the secret agent from her last question. It was amazing how I never lied to my best friend, as long as I interpreted her questions flexibly.

“Most nights? That sounds serious.”

I smiled at her, because it
was
serious. Not just the time spent in my room, but our conversations on his windswept atoll, and our long hikes in another of his places, a mountaintop that I guess was in Iran. (Yama called it Persia, because he was old-school like that.) And we’d made plans to travel farther, even to Bombay, once I was ready to face its excessive ghost population. And, of course, one day in the distant future he would take me to his home in the underworld.

“You still haven’t told your mom about him, have you?” Jamie asked.

I shook my head. “I’ve thought about it, but she’s always too tired for big news. She’s had enough to deal with.”

“Can’t disagree with that.” A pair of non-seniors hovered at the other end of our table for a moment, wondering if they could sit there, but Jamie sent them away with a glance. “You can’t keep
her in the dark forever, though. That’s just being mean.”

“Of course not.” I’d already been wondering about how that was going to work. When
do
you explain to your mother that you’re dating a millennia-old psychopomp? Do you spell out the rules of life after death? Or have him over for dinner with a cover story all prepared? “I was thinking of waiting until after graduation. Like, maybe when I’m away at . . .”

My voice faded, because college was up in the air as well. I’d finished my applications last semester, but did newbie valkyrie even go to college? What was the appropriate major?

“Are you okay?” Jamie asked.

“Yeah.” I gathered myself, needing a moment of honesty between us. “It’s just been hard to think about planning my life lately.”

She didn’t answer at first, her eyes glistening a little in the cafeteria fluorescents. Lunch was almost over, and the clatter of dishes rushed in to fill the silence between us. “You mean, you feel like something horrible might happen again. So what’s the point in making plans?”

I nodded, though my problem wasn’t that death could strike at any moment, but that death was all around me. In the walls, in the air. Leaking like black oil from the ground. I couldn’t hear the afterworld’s voices all the time, not yet. But I could feel its eyes out there, watching me.

“That’s really common,” Jamie was saying. “A lot of people who’ve had near-death experiences can’t make plans.”

I only smiled. The words “near death” seemed like an understatement. I was traveling on the River Vaitarna, waiting to rescue a kidnapped ghost, sleeping beside a lord of the dead.

I wasn’t
near
death, I was swimming in it.

“Or maybe it’s survivor’s guilt,” Jamie said. “Feeling bad that you made it and all those other passengers didn’t.”

I rolled my eyes. “Did you buy a psych textbook or something?”

“No, that’s from
Les Misérables
.” She leaned closer and sang a haunting line, barely audible above the buzz of the cafeteria.

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe it’s about that too.”

“At least you don’t have to worry about those Resurrection guys anymore.”

It took me a moment. “The Movement for the Resurrection?”

“Um, yes. The guys who almost killed you. Did they slip your mind?”

Oh. I remembered what Agent Reyes had said on our phone call. “There’s a big standoff at their headquarters, right?”

She stared at me. “You mean, the one that every FBI agent in the country is headed to? I assumed you knew about it, Lizzie! Don’t you have a boyfriend who might be shipped there sometime soon?”

“He doesn’t do that kind of thing,” I said.

“Crap.” Jamie frowned. “I keep imagining him in a bulletproof vest. Is that wrong of me? It wasn’t in a lustful way, much.”

I shrugged. Men with guns seemed so ordinary now.

“Okay,” Jamie said. “I’m starting to think it’s not near-death syndrome
or
survivor’s guilt. You’re showing classic signs of being in denial.”

“I deny that completely,” I said, which actually got a smile from her.

The bell rang then, and as I got up to leave, Jamie reached
across the table and took my hand. “It doesn’t matter what you call it, Lizzie. Just as long as you know I’m still here. What happened last month doesn’t go away just because it’s not on TV anymore.”

I squeezed her hand, trying to smile. She didn’t know that what had happened to me would never, ever go away.

*  *  *

That night my mother announced that we were making ravioli.

It’s not as tricky as it sounds. You have to roll the dough out really thin, but we had a machine with little rollers for that, and we used a cookie cutter to make the pieces all the same size. For the filling my mother had decided on ricotta cheese.

“If I’d gotten home earlier, I could have made some,” she said as we got started, giving the tub of store-bought ricotta a suspect look. Even before my father left us, she thought that buying things was sinfully lazy if you knew how to make them yourself.

“We’ll survive,” I said.

Soon the dough was made, and I was sending the first wad through, turning the machine’s little crank to spin the rollers. My mother took the end that came stretching out, as thin as a coin and marked with the flecks of black pepper we’d ground into the dough.

We worked in silence for a while. This was the first time we’d cooked together since the old man had taken Mindy from me. I missed her ghostly presence in the corner, the way she watched us, intent but dutifully silent.

My mother started with her usual conversational gambit: “How’s school?”

“Better,” I said.

She looked up from the bowl of ricotta, which she was crumbling with a fork. “Better?”

“My friends have stopped tiptoeing around me.”

“That’s great. What about everybody else? I mean, the kids who aren’t your friends.”

“Jamie keeps them in line.”

My mother smiled. “How is she?”

It took a moment to realize that I didn’t have a good answer. “We mostly talk about me. I’ve been a pretty crappy friend lately.”

Mom reached up with a dishtowel and dusted flour from my chin. “I’m sure Jamie doesn’t think you’re a bad friend. She probably doesn’t want to talk about herself. She wants to be there for you.”

“Yeah, she’s pretty good at making me spill my guts,” I said, silently promising myself that the next time I saw Jamie, I’d listen to her problems too.

“So what have you been spilling your guts about with her?”

I gave Mom a look. She wasn’t even
trying
to be subtle. “Whatever I’ve been thinking about that day.”