Afterworlds Read online

  Imogen laughed. “I saw this thread on your forum. Doesn’t everyone get their own research team, complete with historian, martial arts expert, and consulting surgeon?”

  “That sounds nice,” Darcy said as they reached an escalator headed down. “But what if you’re not actually in print at the time of your grisly car accident? Do you still get into YA heaven?”

  “That’s a tricky one,” Standerson said. “Do you have any blurbs yet?”

  “One from Oscar Lassiter, and Kiralee Taylor is waiting for the rewrites to decide.”

  “Oscar and Kiralee? Goodness. Then heaven ye shall find!”

  Darcy was oddly relieved at this news.

  The baggage claim area opened up below them, hundreds of bags parading on a dozen carousels. It looked stressful and chaotic, and Darcy felt virtuous for having all her luggage already in hand. She made a mental note to follow all of Standerson’s touring advice.

  From the bottom of the escalator, a large man in a dark green suit was waving at them. He held a handwritten sign that said ANDERSON, and the two greeted each other with smiles and handshakes.

  The man turned to Darcy and Imogen. “Welcome to San Francisco. Anton Jones at your service. My car’s this way!”

  They followed, and a few minutes later their luggage was in the trunk of a large gray sedan. Standerson sat in front with Jones, and Imogen and Darcy took the backseat. Their hands stretched out to find each other, squeezing tight. They were really here together, on tour.

  As the car left the airport, Anton Jones told them all about his last client, a celebrity chef who ran his book signings like a restaurant during a dinner rush. The chef shouted orders to waiting bookstore staff behind him, who scurried forward with books that were butterfly clipped open to their title pages, while a team of publicists skulked about the edges of the room with trays of autographed photos and corkscrews.

  It was a very funny story, but as Anton imitated the chef ’s shouts and gestures, it became clear that his bad driving was not one of Standerson’s fantastical conceits. Jones thrust the sedan through the late-afternoon traffic, switching lanes with abandon and stomping alternately on the accelerator and brake, as if trying to crush a deadly ferret loose in the floorboards.

  A cold sweat broke on Darcy’s skin, and her stomach muttered the first rumblings of carsickness. She tried to swallow, but the dry air of the plane had left her cotton-mouthed.

  As Jones swerved around a truck, the sedan’s lateral momentum pressed Darcy into Imogen. Crushed in turn against the car door, Imogen let out a low groan. When the car steadied for a moment, she put an arm around Darcy.

  “Tell me about YA heaven again?” Darcy pleaded.

  The boys were still jabbering in front, heedless of danger, so Imogen answered softly. “There’s a dress code. If you were a New York Times bestseller, you get to wear a black robe with red trim, like a don at a boarding school.”

  “That must annoy everyone else,” Darcy said.

  “Not really. The robes look fancy, but they’re really hot, and everyone secretly covets the sparkly tiaras that only Printz winners are allowed to wear.”

  “The Printz Award’s that big a deal?”

  “Of course! It’s basically a YA knighthood.”

  Standerson had heard her somehow, and said over his shoulder, “Actually, knighthoods are inferior, because they can be revoked for treason or other serious crimes. But even if you become a serial killer, they still don’t take those Printz stickers away.”

  “Good point,” Imogen said. “But awards don’t matter in YA heaven, because you get to write all day. No bills, no cooking, no cleaning. Just writing and talking about writing, and everyone has cover approval.”

  Darcy closed her eyes and tried to imagine that the swaying of the sedan was a hammock beneath her. As silly as it was, the idea of YA heaven made her deeply happy. Often back at home, when the writing had gone well and they’d been out to dinner with Oscar or Coleman or Johari to argue plots and words all night, Darcy felt that she was already there.

  * * *

  With the tour beginning in earnest the next day, Darcy had expected not to sleep that night. But the giant and comfortable hotel bed, combined with three hours’ jet lag, had her unconscious by midnight.

  The next morning began with school visits. Anton Jones picked them up early for a drive out to the suburbs, where the auditorium of Avalon High awaited. Talking in front of student assemblies had always terrified Darcy, and she was happy that this was only her prepub tour. Her job was to schmooze with librarians and bookstore people, but otherwise keep herself from view.

  The morning rush-hour traffic kept the sedan below lethal speeds, and Standerson, who had suffered one of his frequent bouts of dyspepsia the night before, managed to fall asleep in the front seat. All went smoothly until the GPS announced that they had arrived at the school, which was only partly true. A tall wire fence stood between the sedan and a cluster of buildings glimpsed across a well-kept soccer field.

  “Can never find the damn office,” Jones said, and began to drive along the fence. The barrier seemed to stretch forever, without any hint of an entrance.

  “Brilliant security concept,” Imogen said. “Just one little hitch—nobody can get in.”

  Jones nodded. “Been this way since Columbine, which is ridiculous. That was students shooting up the place!”

  “Didn’t your schedule have a contact number?” Darcy asked.

  “Right, the school librarian.” Imogen started searching through the twenty-page fax of travel and event details that had been waiting at the hotel desk the night before. She pulled out her phone and tapped in digits. “Crap, it’s going to a message. He’s supposed to be waiting at the front.”

  “I don’t see any front,” Jones said. “This school’s all backsides!”

  “The suburban high school as impenetrable fortress,” Imogen said grimly. “I was always so good at breaking out of these places.”

  Standerson stirred from his nap and opened one sleepy eye. “We there yet?”

  “Sorry, Stan,” Anton said. “It’s one of those schools where you can’t find the damn office.”

  “Flagpole,” Standerson mumbled, then slumped back against the passenger-side window.

  The other three leaned forward and, all at once, pointed ahead and to the left, at the stars and stripes whipping in a crisp wind.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later they were onstage, facing a thousand empty seats. Standerson seemed wide awake and not at all dyspeptic, Imogen paced nervously, and Darcy was mostly carsick.

  “High school,” Imogen said. “I thought I’d never be inside one of these again.”

  “I know, right?” Standerson inhaled deeply. “The smell of lockers and pheromones, the earnest panache of handmade posters. It’s brilliant of our publishers to make us do school visits and remind us how all this really feels.”

  “I hadn’t actually forgotten,” Darcy said, though Standerson was right about the smells. High school was rushing back into her brain, like a memory from four days ago instead of four months. Her relief that she wasn’t going up onstage was redoubling every minute.

  “What if we never really left?” Imogen said. “What if we’ve always been here, and adulthood was just an illusion?”

  “Nice concept,” Standerson said. “But for a trilogy or a tweet?”

  “I can’t tell anymore,” Imogen said.

  Darcy was still wrestling with this question when the school librarian, who had left them for a quick trip to the office, reappeared. He was a tall man with red hair and a precision in his consonants that made Darcy wonder if he’d grown up speaking Spanish.

  “Okay, they’re about to call the classes down,” he said. “I’m afraid there’s some testing going on, so it’ll only be about two hundred kids, grades nine and ten.”

  A nervous laugh spurted from Imogen. “Only two hundred?”

  “I’ll make sure they sit down front.” T
he librarian turned to Darcy. “The publicist just emailed me last night to say you were coming. You’re a novelist too?”

  Darcy felt a blush forming. “Yeah. But not in print yet.”

  “And you’re how old?”

  “Eighteen,” she said.

  “That’s great. I can’t tell you how much my creative writing kids will love hearing your story.”

  Darcy blinked. “Wait. What? I’m not—”

  “I’m sure they will too,” Standerson cut in. “Darcy’s an inspiration to us all.”

  “I’m not even supposed to—” Darcy began, but at that moment the school’s loudspeakers crackled to life, and a call for all English classes to head to the auditorium was echoing through the hallways. By the time the announcement ended, the librarian had disappeared again, and a young student in a death metal T-shirt stood beside Darcy, clipping a lapel microphone onto her hoodie.

  “So you wrote a book?” he said as he worked. “That’s pretty cool.”

  “Um, thanks.” She looked up at the entrance to the auditorium, where the first students were already arriving. The cold sweat produced by Anton’s driving had returned.

  Somehow she had no other choice than to go onstage, any more than the students trickling in had any choice but to watch. Imogen was right—Darcy was still in high school. She would always be in high school.

  Moments later the three of them were led onstage, where three orange plastic chairs and a lectern waited.

  Imogen covered her lapel mike with one hand. “You’re lucky, Darcy. At least you didn’t have time to get nervous.”

  “I think I’m catching up,” Darcy whispered. The stream of arriving students had turned into a flood, and the volume built in the auditorium. The chatter didn’t sound like it was made of voices, but of a primal and dangerous energy, directionless except for a posse of obvious Standerson fans gathered on the front row. They took countless pictures of him with their phones and emitted squees whenever he glanced in their direction.

  Then a bell sounded, and as the crowd went silent, Darcy felt herself depart from her own body, as if watching everything from a thousand miles away. The librarian introduced the three of them, there was applause, and then Standerson began his presentation. He didn’t talk about his book at all, but spoke of the people who had inspired him to write. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, his small-town librarian, and finally a cute and bookish girl he’d wanted to impress in tenth grade. He was effortless, charming, and seemed to know when every laugh would come, where every beat would fall.

  When he was done, genuine applause swept the room.

  Imogen stood up next. Her voice trembled at first, just barely, and her hands stayed locked in fists. But then she started talking about the obsessive-compulsive disorders she’d researched while writing Pyromancer—manic hoarders, chronic hand-washers, a woman who had to check her front door locks twenty-one times before going to bed—a host of bizarre details that held the audience rapt. Imogen’s own hands finally started to move, and soon her passion was in full flight. Darcy found herself carried away by how beautiful her girlfriend was.

  But then, far too soon and too suddenly, she was done.

  It was Darcy’s turn now.

  She didn’t stand up, as the others had, just sat on her orange chair with her hands tucked beneath her thighs. The lapel mike cast her voice into the auditorium’s sound system, making it huge and unwieldy, as if she were typing the words with hammers.

  “Hi, I’m Darcy Patel. Unlike these guys, I haven’t written novels. I’ve only written one. Not novels. Novel; singular.”

  She sat there in the rich, deep silence for a moment, astonished that those words had sounded anything like a joke in her mind. But she had to go on, she had to keep talking. The hundreds of eyes gazing up at her would not accept silence.

  “I guess that’s because I’m only eighteen. A year ago, I was a senior in a high school kind of like this one, and I wondered what would happen if I wrote two thousand words a day for a month. Turns out, you wind up with sixty thousand words.”

  The weird thing was, people had actually laughed at this line before. Real, adult people who lived in New York City had found it humorous. Or at least, as Darcy realized now, far too late, those people had pretended to find it funny. Clearly they had done so as part of some misguided effort to be nice, but their generosity had left Darcy unprepared for the truth that the joke was not particularly amusing. And high school was all about the truth.

  “Anyway,” she managed to continue, “it turns out that sixty thousand words is pretty much a novel. So I sent my novel to an agent, who sent it to a publisher, and now I write novels for a living.” As Darcy spoke, the term “novel” began to feel alien in her mouth, like a word that had echoed with meaning in a dream, but made no sense upon awakening. “But here’s the thing: I didn’t really have to write two thousand words a day. I mean, that’s like six pages, which is a lot of work. But you can write just one page a day, and in a year you’ll have a novel.”

  The last word reverberated in the auditorium, having lost every bit of meaning it had ever had.

  “Anyway, people say a lot of stuff about books, and writing, and literature, most of which sounds really complicated. But in a weird way, it’s very simple. You just type a little bit each day, and you get better and better at telling stories.”

  The strange thing was, the silence had deepened as she’d spoken. Almost as if they were listening.

  “And that’s how every book ever got made. Thank you.”

  Standerson was the first to applaud, with great swoops of his hands that started wider than his shoulders and swung together like cannon shots. The crowd followed him, and through some mysterious alchemy of teenage graciousness, there were even a few cheers mixed in. And at that moment, Darcy could see why a million people loved Standerson with all their hearts, and why so many people spent their whole lives trying to make other people clap for them.

  But the applause faded, and it was time for questions.

  The first was asked by a tiny girl with thick glasses. She pronounced each word distinctly, like a ten-year-old entrusted with two lines in a school play. “I have a question for all three writers. Which of the five elements of a story do you think is the most important? Plot, setting, character, conflict, or theme? Thank you.”

  Darcy looked across at the others. Standerson was stroking his chin, taking it all very seriously. He cleared his throat and said, “It’s a well-known fact that plot is the most important element.”

  Imogen glanced at Darcy, shrugging a little.

  “For example, check out this weird thing that happened to a friend of mine,” Standerson went on. “A couple of months ago, his girlfriend got a new job. It was a normal job at first, nine-to-five, but after a few weeks she started working later and later. She kept saying she loved the job, but never told my friend much about it. And she was hardly ever home at all. So finally one day he got fed up and drove out to where she worked.” Standerson leaned forward, his voice dropping just a little. “And there she was, coming out the door at five o’clock on the dot. So my friend ducked down in his seat, and when she drove away, he followed her, and found where she’d been spending all that time. . . .”

  He stopped, letting the silence linger. There were a few squeaks of the chair hinges, a smattering of whispers, but the auditorium held its silence for second after endless second.

  Finally Standerson said, “And that’s why plot is the most important element of a story.”

  A confused burble broke out, breaking the silence that gripped the auditorium.

  “But what happened?” one of the kids yelled.

  Standerson shrugged. “I don’t know. I just made that up.”

  A kind of roar erupted from the audience, half laughter and half annoyance. As the librarian tried to calm the students, Darcy heard them proposing theories to each other, finishing the story on their own, as if the narrative demanded its own completion.
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  When the room had finally settled, Standerson leaned back and said, “See? That story had no setting, no theme, hardly any conflict, and two characters called ‘my friend’ and ‘his girlfriend.’ And yet you all hate me right now because you will never, ever know what happens next. Plot rules.”

  Standerson pulled his sunglasses from his shirt pocket and dropped them on the stage.

  Laughter came from the audience, still mixed with annoyance.

  Darcy looked at Imogen, wondering how they were supposed to follow that answer. Obviously, Standerson had done this whole plot schtick before. But Imogen was smiling, already standing up.

  She walked over to where Standerson’s sunglasses lay on the stage, and looked down at them disdainfully. Then she knelt, picked them up, and put them on.

  “He’s totally wrong,” she said. “Character rules.”

  The audience went silent at once, like a light switching off. This had become a competition.

  “I’m going to give you a hundred million dollars,” she began, which set off a few trickles of noise. She raised her hands. “And you’re going to make a movie. With all that money, you can put in whatever you want, right? Dinosaurs, spaceships, hurricanes, cities blowing up. No matter what your story is, your movie is going to look totally real, because of all that money, and because computers can make anything look real. Except for one thing. You know what that is?”

  She waited in silence, daring them not to answer. Finally a boy called up, “Actors?”

  Imogen smiled as she took off the sunglasses. “That’s right. You’re going to need actors, because people never look right when you make them with computers. They look wrong. They look creepy. So why is that? How come special effects can make dinosaurs and spaceships, but not people?

  “It’s because everyone you love is a person, and everyone you hate is too. You look at people all day long. You can tell from the slightest twitch when they’re angry or tired or jealous or guilty. You are all experts at people.”

  God, she was beautiful.

  “And that’s why character rules.”

  Imogen dropped the sunglasses back onto the floor. The reaction was less intense than what Standerson had produced, but the entire audience was engaged now. Like a pendulum, huge and sharp, their eyes swung to Darcy, whose brain began to race.