she gets pregnant and they have a baby. She breastfeeds it. There’s even this weird scene when the baby appears to be swimming in the ocean on its own before it can really walk. I’ve been pushing for that movie to be shown to the whole fifth grade instead of the dumb sex-ed class they do in like forty-five minutes the second-to-last day of school, but the assistant principal thought it was inappropriate. She’s from Staten Island and super Catholic and conservative. I made my son watch it when he was eleven. I think it was sort of liberating for him but also really scary. Your character Ceran totally reminds me of my son—so little confidence and self-awareness he appears almost stupid. But I guess you were a teenage boy once too, not that long ago. You know what you’re writing about.”
“Not really,” Roy disagreed. “Not at all, actually.”
Peaches stopped talking. Roy Clarke made her nervous. He was either completely brilliant or just a very lucky clueless person—she couldn’t tell. His pages were like a script for a movie that would never get made. But if she tried to write a book, it wouldn’t make any sense either. And what was her problem anyway? Did she have to be so critical? Why was she so competitive? Yes, for the five minutes that she’d actually attended college she’d thought she wanted to be a writer, but she was a nurse now. Roy Clarke was a real writer and he’d asked her to read his pages, which was amazing. But it was also confusing. Surely he could have asked someone more qualified.
Roy couldn’t believe Nurse Peaches had a son, certainly not a teenager. He’d thought she was about twenty-seven.
“It’s on TV sometimes, The Blue Lagoon,” Peaches rambled on. “Probably no one in England has ever seen it.” She crouched down to open the bar fridge, looking for boiled eggs, but the fridge’s shelves were bare. She slammed the door closed again and stood up. “It’s not, like, good cinema or anything—it’s really cheesy. But it is educational.”
“I can’t believe you have a teenage son,” Roy said. “You’re what, twenty-five?”
“Thirty-eight,” Peaches cut him off.
“And your son? How old is he now?”
“He just turned seventeen. I held him back in kindergarten. He and your daughter are in the same class. He’s tutoring her in math. Didn’t she tell you?”
“Really? No, I had no idea,” Roy said, feeling a bit flummoxed. Shy spoke to him more than she spoke to anyone else, but clearly she didn’t tell him everything. This was good news, actually. Great news. Shy would have a friend. A clever boy with a wonderful mother.
“So, is this like a dystopian novel set in the far distant future, or is it set in the near future, based on current space stuff and socioeconomic issues that are happening today?” Peaches went on, still trying to be helpful.
“I don’t want to do a lot of research,” Roy said stubbornly.
“Okay. But you do need to create verisimilitude,” she insisted, making use of her Oberlin creative writing workshop vocabulary. “You still need to draw a vivid picture of the space station or whatever it is they’re living in and the kids’ schedule of activities in order to make it as believable as possible. I’m imagining it like boarding school in space, except the adults are too busy being astronauts and scientists and doing ‘important work’ to pay much attention to the kids. So they’re raising themselves. They’re smart and interesting and horny. It will have all the same everyday tragedies and comedy as your other books, from what I’ve read about them—part of it just takes place in space.”
“Right,” Roy agreed despondently. “Or maybe I ought to write about something else.”
“No.” Peaches pointed at the pages in his hands. “You came up with that for a reason.”
She leaned over the bar. Her breath smelled like coffee ice cream.
“Just keep going. The story will become less disjointed. I know it will, because you are the connection. I know that sounds so cheesy. But you’ve done this before. It must feel familiar. It’s like, maybe you have to get a certain distance away before you can get into orbit, not to overuse the space metaphor. Then you have to stay up there and complete your mission. And then you have to come back.”
She cleared her throat. Just for something to do, she picked up a lemon slice and ate the fruit off it. Then she ate another. They tasted