surfed and ate in those outdoor pop-up barbecue restaurants near the Gowanus Canal with dumb names like Pig Party and Cow Town. He probably had a beautiful twenty-three-year-old girlfriend with a perfect body and amazing hair, piercings in all the right places, and even more tattoos.
“Wanna walk back to school with me?” he offered.
Shy shook her head. “I’m actually going home. I’m… um… not feeling that well.”
The corners of Mr. Streko’s expressive mouth turned down in sympathy, his black mustache glinting sexily in the bright sun. He patted her on the shoulder and Shy flinched. He’d never touched her before. Was her face red? Could he tell how nervous and pathetic she was?
“Bummer. Well, get some rest and feel better quick, okay?” He raised the brown paper Chipotle bag in his hand. “Think it’s rude to eat a burrito in a meeting?”
Shy shrugged her shoulders and smiled, embarrassed that he’d asked for her opinion on an issue of such grown-up, professional importance and embarrassed that he was most likely meeting her mother.
“Ita est vita,” Mr. Streko said, which was the Latin equivalent of c’est la vie. He said it all the time in class when the students moaned about an upcoming quiz or too much homework. “I get weird when I’m hungry.” He chuckled and Shy half smiled back. “Sometimes when I get weird I post dorky Latin quotes on Twitter.”
Shy stared at him stoically. She wasn’t on Twitter, but in about thirty seconds she would be, just as soon as they parted ways.
“See ya,” Mr. Streko called, striding away to make the light.
His Twitter feed was long and adorable, filled with Latin quotes and links to pictures of his enormously fat black cat in comical situations. In one of the pictures the cat was asleep on its back on Mr. Streko’s chest—his bare, muscly, elaborately tattooed, very hairy chest! It was enough to send Shy crashing into a lamppost.
“Sorry,” she apologized to the inanimate object and kept walking. Still staring at her phone, she continued down Court Street to Kane, then onto Strong Place and home.
* * *
As soon as Wendy and Shy left that morning, Roy Clarke had gone out for his morning walk. The sun was bright and the air was crisp and full of promise. Autumn was coming. He loved autumn in America. It was so American. Apple pie. Burning wood. Pumpkins. Mulled cider. Tartan shirts and down gilets. Ambition. It wasn’t the same in England. In England autumn didn’t feel like anything, with the exception of Bonfire Night, when there were bonfires and fireworks and everyone got very drunk and stood outside. Roy and Wendy had decided to get married at the bonfire on Primrose Hill. “Let’s get married then,” he’d said, and she said, “All right,” and then the fireworks began and they held hands with their faces turned up to the night sky, murmuring, “Ooh,” as each one went off. Pure magic.
This particular autumn day felt so promising that he dashed back inside to retrieve his laptop and set out once more with the idea that he’d go and work on his new novel somewhere in the neighborhood. All the autumn energy might somehow permeate his skull, resulting, hopefully, in words on the screen.
“You can’t force these things,” he always told Wendy when he tried to explain why he hadn’t written a new book in six years. She would nod resignedly as he went on, “It’s like a snowstorm, dusting and dusting, building and building, so slowly and quietly, until you look out the window in the morning and find it piled up on the cars and stoops, glistening in the sun, finished and perfect.”
The building-and-building part was the challenge. He’d thought starting with a title would somehow inspire him, so he’d come up with Black and White—two noncolors, unlike the splashy titles of his previous books. But he’d begun to think the new title felt ostentatious and overly ambitious. He would feel obligated to explore race relations and the history of the newspaper trade. He hated even the idea of research, let alone the actual practice of finding information, taking notes, and getting it into his story properly and accurately. All of his other novels had been chatty and witty and not about anything, really, just people from deranged families, talking. Or deranged people starting families accidentally. He preferred to simply make things up. Black and White seemed to build up some kind of expectation that he couldn’t possibly fulfill.