Writers & Lovers - Lily King Page 0,96

worry about not hearing from her until next month.

But she is on my machine when I get home from school Thursday afternoon. It’s a brief message, and she is talking very quickly. I have to play it a few times. The revision did the trick, she says. She’s going out with it.

I call Muriel and play it for her to make sure she is saying what I think she is saying.

She screams.

Saturday night I meet her, Christian, Harry, and James at a Thai place in the Square. Muriel draws a picture of my book in hardcover on a napkin and has us all pile our hands on top of it.

‘On the count of three we are going to raise our hands high and let out a barbaric yawp.’

Everyone has their own version of what a barbaric yawp is, but our collective yawp is loud and the management comes over. Muriel shows him the napkin drawing and points to me and explains, and he comes back with a yellow cloth.

‘Yellow is our very lucky color in Thailand,’ he says.

We lift our plates and he spreads it out. I don’t think I ever did anything so kind for a customer at Iris.

Harry makes a toast and our glasses clink and it feels separate from me, the book, momentarily, like it’s on its own path.

The next week of school is shorter—only four days of teaching then the writing festival on Friday.

Monday, washing my hands in the faculty bathroom, I’m smiling. I don’t even know why. The gray bruises under my eyes are fading. My face is filling out. The food at the school is as good as it smells, and I eat a lot of it. It’s already a joke with my ninth graders, how much food I put on my tray at lunch.

Wednesday Jennifer calls in the late afternoon. I’m home from school, making some notes for the speech I have to give at the festival. She gives me names of the publishing houses she sent my book to. I write them all down, these names from the spines of the books I’ve been reading all my life. It doesn’t seem real that my novel has actually been delivered (by messenger, she tells me) to editors at these offices. My pulse is hammering and I worry that it won’t slow, but it does, like a normal heart.

‘I’ll check in with you when I hear something.’

I give her the number at school, and we hang up. Oafie has gotten out and is scratching at my door. I let him in.

‘That was my agent,’ I tell him. He sniffs under my desk and steps onto my futon, makes a few rotations on my comforter, and sinks down. I stroke his head. He has a new blue collar with pink letters on it. Ophelia, it says.

‘Ophelia?’ I say aloud and the dog lifts his head. Her head. Ophie. ‘All this time you’ve been a girl?’ She lays her big head back down on my thigh.

When I get to school on Friday, Manolo is out front waiting to greet the three visiting writers. I wait with him.

He looks down at the folded pages in my hand. ‘Nervous?’ he says.

‘I think you hired me just so you didn’t have to make this speech.’

The writers arrive all together in a beat-up Volkswagen. I recognize a great black cape coming up the path.

‘Victor Silva?’

‘Casey Peabody?’

He envelops me in his cape for a hug. It smells like Iris — garlic and Pernod. I introduce him to Manolo, and Victor introduces us to the other two, a young man with a shaved head and packed arm muscles and a woman in her fifties with an Irish accent. We bring them inside to Aisha and all go to the library where there is coffee and pastries and a place for their coats, though the muscular playwright is only wearing a black T-shirt and Victor Silva has no plans to remove his cape.

The students start arriving, not just ours but buses from other schools. This is another thing I haven’t understood: students from five other schools have been invited. They swarm in and are directed to the gymnasium. When I get there with the writers, the bleachers are full, and the overflow of kids are sitting cross-legged on the basketball court in a wide ring around the podium in the middle. We have to step through them to get to it. The writers sit in the chairs beside the podium, and Manolo steps