Afterworlds (47 page)

It was horrifying but, like a bloody accident on the side of the road, Darcy couldn’t look away. She was too wrapped up in the guilty pleasure of watching a stranger shredded in public. An awful person, who deserved it, and who somehow Imogen had loved for a while.

When Darcy was finished, she leaned back from the screen, a tremor in her breathing. The scary thing was, she’d seen hints of Imogen in every sentence—her passion, her intensity. She had even imagined the motions of her hands as the rant unfolded. This was essential Imogen, distilled by anger and betrayal.

And she’d been rewarded for it. The essay had over a thousand comments, and had been shared countless times. It would probably always be the first result for a search on “Audrey Flinderson.”

Darcy tried to imagine reading this five months ago, the day after she and Imogen had first kissed. It was searing enough now. Back then, it would have been boiling oil poured on naked skin.

At least the secrecy made sense now. As Darcy sat there, she murmured Imogen’s warning from the other night. “The things we write, they aren’t always really us.”

That was true, wasn’t it? Maybe this essay was partly in character. Maybe Imogen had only been playing at being this wounded, vicious person, like when Darcy imagined herself as Mr. Hamlyn. All writing had some element of fiction in it, after all.

Unless, of course, it was the other way around, and Audrey Flinderson was only playing at being Imogen Gray.

Darcy shuddered that thought away, and pulled out her phone.

It was just a scary story
, she typed to Nisha.
Nothing real.

*  *  *

Winter spilled out its white heart on New York City. Frost spiderwebbed the windowpanes in the big room, and fallen snow shushed the growl of trucks and cars outside. No matter how hard the ancient radiators clanked and wheezed, apartment 4E stayed cold, keeping Darcy in sweaters and Imogen in fingerless typing gloves. But the two never complained, because a chill in the air was a small price for all those windows, that view of the rooftops of Chinatown sharpened with glittering icicles.

It was the ending of
Afterworlds
that made Darcy shudder at night.

She’d rewritten the last three chapters many times now, a dozen tries at keeping Yamaraj alive and her romantic couple together. In some of the attempts, Lizzie gave up her human life, descending into Yamaraj’s underworld kingdom to live forever in splendor, cold and gray. But those endings always left Lizzie’s mother and friends grieving somewhere in the background, and Darcy’s realization that guys with castles were sort of Disney had never faded.

In other versions, Yamaraj would give up immortality to live with Lizzie in the sunlit real world. These endings didn’t leave Lizzie’s friends and family hanging (and had no castles) but they introduced the nagging problem of Yamaraj’s people and his sister Yami. All those ghosts were left behind, fading in the novel’s rearview mirror like thousands of unwanted puppies on the side of the road. Even worse, in removing Yama from the underworld, Darcy would be erasing the last traces of Hinduism from her invented world.

Darcy had to find a third way, an ending that kept both characters’ lives intact while still resolving the story (and leaving
something for
Untitled Patel
to explore). She had to make Yamaraj deeper, more than just a prize to be won.

Those perfect last chapters had to be out there in the writing ether. But no matter how many rewrites Darcy began, or how hard she stared out the big room’s rimed windows, this ending wouldn’t come.

She asked for another extension, and got it, to the end of January. But Nan Eliot laid down the law—this was a final deadline, a drop-deadline, a line beyond which even a lord of the dead could not pass.

*  *  *

“My parents asked me about Christmas,” Darcy said one night when her writing wasn’t going particularly well.

“Yeah?” Imogen didn’t stop typing.

“Well, ‘asked’ is probably the wrong word. They
expect
me to come down and visit them for a week. And it’s not really Christmas. We celebrate Pancha Ganapati. It’s a five-day thing, in honor of Ganesha.”

Imogen looked up, her fingers pausing. “I thought your family wasn’t religious.”

“Not really,” Darcy said. “But we put twinkly lights on pine boughs and give each other presents on the last day, which happens to be December twenty-fifth. Because the whole thing was invented to make little Hindu kids shut up about Christmas.”

Imogen let out a laugh. “This sounds like a flexible religion.”

“It’s pretty fun, actually, and it’s not like I have a choice about going.” Darcy paused for a moment. This conversation was proving harder than expected. “So I was thinking, do you want to come with me?”

“That depends.”

Darcy waited for more, but nothing came. “Um, on what?”

Imogen gave her a look. “Do they know about me?”

“Oh.” Darcy’s throat tightened a little. “No. I mean, I talk about you all the time, of course, so they know who you are . . .”

“But not about you and me.”

“Nisha knows.” Darcy sighed. It was always frustrating when her new life bumped up against the one she’d left behind in Philly.

“Yeah, she texted me about that.” Imogen closed her laptop and leaned back in her chair, which meant this conversation was serious now. “Obviously it didn’t come up when you were down there for Thanksgiving.”

“I was going to say something, but my Aunt Lalana was with her boyfriend in Hawaii. She wanted to be there when I told them.”

Imogen nodded, but looked a little tired. “Okay.”

“Look, it’s
not
okay! You’re the most important person in my life, so it’s not okay that they don’t know. I just . . .”

It was hard to explain. Darcy’s parents weren’t going to freak out and disown her for dating a girl. If anything, they would giggle at her for having hidden it for so long.

But here in New York, everyone figured out on their own that she was with Imogen. Most of the people they met already knew about the two of them from the publishing grapevine. If anything marked them out as a couple, it was the fact that they were both YA novelists. Darcy loved how the first thing everyone said was,
Oh, you’re those two writers.

But in front of her parents, being in love with Imogen would be reduced to a phase, just like her writing “career.”

“I just . . . ,” Darcy started again, but it took a moment. “It doesn’t feel right, having to
tell
my parents.”

“They’re just supposed to guess?”

Darcy shook her head. “It’s so easy up here. And when I compare this new me to the old me back in Philly, it feels like I don’t deserve who I am. Like when I showed up in New York, they gave me an adult card without checking. Everything gives me impostor syndrome.”

“I think what you’re trying to say is, you’ve been lucky so far.”

“How is this about luck?”

A truck rumbled past below, its tires tempered by the snow into a long, exhausted sigh.

“I figured out what I was halfway through high school,” Imogen began. “I had to explain it to my father while I was still living under his roof. I had to deal with friends who didn’t like me anymore, with teachers who were mostly assholes about it, and with a school bus full of gossips and jocks and other assorted fuckwads, every single morning. And the cherry on the top was a vice principal who already pretty much hated me, so imagine his excitement when I added a girlfriend with a habit of
setting things on fire
.”

Darcy stared at the floor. Having snooped her way through Imogen’s high school yearbook, she should have figured most of this out already. “That sounds pretty crappy.”

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Not all of us make it, you know.”

The big room was quiet for a while, except for the whispers of car tires down on Canal Street. Darcy’s hands curled into fists, because on top of her usual mix of clueless and ashamed, she was
angry now, for what a bunch of total strangers had done years ago to Imogen White and Imogen Gray.

It was Gen who spoke again first, her hands spreading. “But we all have different experiences, all equally valid. I guess.”

Darcy looked up. “Even us lucky little shits?”

Imogen smiled at this, but her jaw was still a hard line.

“Do you want to come home with me or not?” Darcy asked.

“For Christmas with the family?”

“Not Christmas, Pancha Ganapati. And Carla comes over for most of the holiday stuff, so you won’t be the only non-Hindu in the house.”

“But I’ll be the only person who’s lying about why they’re there.”

Darcy didn’t answer. She hadn’t thought about keeping this secret as a lie, but of course it was. She was careful how she mentioned Imogen to her parents, and often had to change details in her emails to them.

“Is this because you looked me up?” Imogen asked. “You don’t want them to know about me?”

“Of course not.” This was the first time either of them had mentioned the essay aloud since the night Imogen had revealed her name. “I haven’t thought about Audrey Flinderson much. Really, Gen, I don’t care what you blogged about in college.”

Imogen let out a sigh. “Well, good. So this is just you being a chickenshit.”

“It’s not about being afraid!” Darcy cried. Suddenly all that mattered was that Imogen understand her, completely. “When I sold
Afterworlds
, I didn’t just get a book deal. I got a whole new life, one that came with no assumptions about who or what I was. And I know how lucky that is, like winning
the lottery. But it’s still
my
lottery ticket, and I don’t want to give it up! And part of that is not having to define myself.”

Imogen was shaking her head. “You define yourself all the time, Darcy. You hold my hand when we walk down the street. You think people don’t notice that? You never hear it when some homophobic fuckhead says something?”

“Of course I do.” Darcy reached across the desk. “But holding your hand is like breathing—it’s easy. It always has been. That’s the way it
should
be, right?”

“Of course,” Imogen said. “But it doesn’t always work out like that. Back in the hallways of Reagan High, holding Firecat’s hand was like setting off a bomb.”

“That sucks, but that isn’t how it’s been for me,” Darcy said. “And I like my life the way it is. I don’t want to see my parents being
understanding
. I want everything to stay exactly the way it is between you and me and our friends up here in New York.
I like it in fucking YA heaven!
”

Imogen listened to all this, and then sat staring out the window for a long time. Her fingers were twitching just a little, as if she were typing to herself.

“Sure,” she finally said. “Who wouldn’t want that?”

“So you understand?”

Imogen nodded. “This is your dream life, and you don’t want to mess with it. But it’s not my dream life to sleep alone in your parents’ guest bedroom, or steal kisses from you when no one’s around. I don’t want to spend Christmas being your five-years-older secret girlfriend.”

“Pancha Ganapati, not Christmas,” Darcy said, quite clearly. “And what does this have to do with your being older than me?”

“It makes the whole thing more embarrassing.” Imogen stared out the window again. The radiator beneath the desk began to tick and wheeze, building up to another burst of warmth.

Darcy managed to smile. “
Now
who’s being a chickenshit?”

“
You
are! The chicken is officially
you
,” Imogen said. “But if I go along with you and lie to your parents, then I’m one too. And I’m supposed to be older and wiser.”

“Older and wiser than me? That’s not saying much.”

“Look, we all feel like impostors sometimes, but you don’t have to about
this
. If you want to make your dream life real, you have to connect the new Darcy to the old one.” Imogen’s voice dropped. “Just like I had to connect Imogen Gray to Audrey Flinderson. I had to tell you, even if it made you hate me.”

“Never,” Darcy said, squeezing Imogen’s hand. “That’s not what this is about. It’s just that finishing my book, telling my parents, and the rest of growing up—everything’s taking longer than I thought.”

*  *  *

The morning of Darcy’s first full day back in Philly, she and her sister were busy stringing pale yellow lights around the Ganesha painting that their mother had brought down from the attic that morning. Lord Ganesha stood with one heel in the air, ready to dance. But he was also meditative, his palms open and facing upward. A pair of freshly cut pine boughs arched over him, giving off a bright forest smell and shedding needles on the beige carpet.

“Twinkling or not?”

Nisha stood back, surveying their work. “Twinkling, clearly.”

“Okay, here we go.” Darcy plugged in the lights.

After a moment, Nisha shook her head. “This is mere blinking, Patel. It’s way too slow to constitute twinkling.”

“Maybe they need to warm up?” Darcy’s father had always been in charge of the lights. But both her parents were in the kitchen, flooding the house with the smells of roti and coconut and sugar at high heat. “Why is Dad cooking, anyway? I thought he wasn’t allowed to when guests were coming over.”

“I think they want us to have quality time together.” Nisha lifted one foot, half imitating Ganesha’s pose. “In other words, they want me to acquire gossip.”

“Seriously?”

“You should hear Annika every time I get a text from you. She wants details. She wants
analysis
.”

“Ugh. I thought they were getting better.” Darcy lay back on the carpet. “Dad hasn’t bugged me about going back to college in, like, a month. Driving me home from the train last night, he even asked me how my
career
was going!”

“Yeah, I talk about your ‘career’ all the time, mostly to annoy them. But now they’ve started saying it too.” Nisha placed her hands in prayer position and bowed at the waist. “You’re welcome.”

“Thanks,” Darcy said. “But can I point out that it really
is
a career? Like, with actual money?”