Chapter 151: words that belong to me

Chapter 151 — Words That Belong to Me

Nora had a pencil behind each ear and a third in her hand when Roxanne arrived at the workshop room the next afternoon, which was how Roxanne knew she was excited.

"Have you seen the announcement?" Nora asked, before Roxanne had taken off her coat. "The Winter Arts Evening. If the magazine takes my story, they might read an extract aloud."

"Mr. Ellery forwarded it to me."

"You should send something." Nora said it quickly, as though she had practised. "I mean, you don’t have to. But you should."

Roxanne pulled out a chair. "I’ve been thinking about it."

"What would you write about?"

Roxanne opened her mouth and found nothing there. She had spent two days turning the idea over, and she had never once asked herself the obvious question. "I haven’t got that far."

"Write about something you know well."

"I don’t want to write another story about betrayal or rejection. I’ve lived that one. I don’t need to type it up."

"Then don’t write about what happened to you."

Roxanne stared at her. "That is a surprisingly obvious solution."

"I’m full of those."

"Clearly. It must be exhausting."

Nora grinned and went back to sharpening a pencil that did not need it, and Roxanne laughed all the way through the session.

That evening she sat cross-legged on her bed with the laptop on her knees and opened a blank document. The cursor blinked at her like a small, patient accusation.

She typed a sentence. The rain had not stopped for three days. She deleted it, because it sounded like the opening of a very sad novel. She tried something sharp and clever about a girl walking into a ballroom, and deleted that too, because it was exactly the sort of ballroom she had once walked into.

A fantasy, then. A young princess who refused an arranged marriage and rode away at dawn. She wrote two paragraphs before she recognised the princess’s jaw, and the particular way she lifted her chin, and she shut the laptop halfway.

The room was quiet. Isla’s bed was still empty, neatly made, waiting for her. Roxanne looked at the thin line of light between the lid and the keyboard and understood what she was doing wrong. She was treating it like an assignment, something to be finished perfectly and handed in. Nobody had asked her for perfect. Nobody had asked her for anything at all.

She went to bed, and was surprised to find that she did not feel like a failure. Only like someone who had not found the door yet.

The next afternoon she took her notebook to the courtyard, mostly to be somewhere that was not her room. The sky was pale and high, and the students crossing the grass looked like figures in someone else’s story. Two friends argued about whose turn it was to buy lunch. A couple shared a pair of headphones, one ear each, walking in step without noticing. A boy sprinted past with a book falling out of his bag every third stride, and went back for it twice.

Roxanne wrote none of it down. She only watched, and that was a relief in itself.

On a low bench near the fountain, a younger girl sat bent over her lap with a tangle of fine silver chain in her fingers and the look of someone trying hard not to cry in public. Roxanne hesitated, then crossed the grass.

"Is that a clasp you’re missing?"

The girl looked up, startled. "It fell off. It’s somewhere in the grass."

Roxanne knelt and combed her fingers through the cold blades. It took four minutes and a great deal of dirt before she found it, a tiny silver circle caught against a root. She held it out on her palm.

"Oh." The girl closed her fist around it. "Thank you. My sister made this, before she left for her first term at the northern academy. I wasn’t going to lose it the week she’s gone."

"It’s a good bracelet."

"It’s a bad bracelet," the girl said, with dignity. "She’s terrible at knots. But it’s mine."

She hurried off, fastening it as she went. Roxanne stayed on her knees in the grass, brushing soil from her hands, thinking about a chain of badly tied knots and the person who had tied them. A small object with a whole person inside it.

She opened her notebook at last and wrote one line. Things hold on to people when people can’t.

She needed a book on writing, so she went to the library, where the radiators ticked and the light fell in slanted bars. She was running a finger along a shelf of craft manuals when a quiet voice behind her said, "That one is dull. The one beside it is better."

Roshan stood with a book under his arm. His eyes went to the notebook in her hand. "Are you working on something?"

"For the Winter Arts Evening." She took down the book beside the dull one. "I’m trying to write something of my own."

"About what?"

She told him about the bracelet, and the box of objects she had begun to imagine, a grandmother’s things and a girl who thought they were worthless. Several memories at once, she explained, each object carrying a different one.

He listened without interrupting. "You might choose one object," he said, "rather than connecting them all. A single thing can hold more than a collection, if you give it room."

It was a good suggestion, and she knew it, and she felt the faint, familiar prickle of being advised. "I appreciate that. But I can manage my own writing."

"Of course." He said it so easily that the prickle vanished. He inclined his head, adjusted the book under his arm, and left her to the shelf without lingering, without a single word to make the moment about anything else.

She stood there a moment holding the better book. Then she took it to a table and began to read.

That evening she wrote. The story came slowly, then less slowly. A girl inherits a shoebox from her grandmother, and inside are a chipped teaspoon, a bus ticket, a button, a folded recipe nobody could cook from. The girl decides at once that the box is full of nothing. Then she picks up the teaspoon and remembers her grandmother stirring tea with it, tapping the rim twice, always twice, and the whole afternoon comes back like a smell.

Roxanne had spent two days trying to make every sentence impressive. Tonight she stopped. She wrote plainly, the way she would tell it to Isla across a dark room, and the sentences quit fighting her. By eleven she had a rough opening of six hundred words. She read it through, winced twice, and sent it to Nora before she could improve it.

The reply took four minutes. I like it. The teaspoon is perfect. But what happens next? I NEED to know.

Roxanne laughed out loud in the empty room. She decided that was a good sign.

Another message followed. Would you be comfortable sharing it with the workshop? Just an excerpt.

Roxanne’s thumbs hovered. Writing it was one thing. Letting other people read it felt different from performing someone else’s lines, because there was no character to stand behind. It was only her, in black letters.

She typed, Maybe an excerpt, at the next session, and sent it before she could take it back.

Then she opened the document and read the first paragraph once more. It was not perfect. A few of the sentences leaned on each other. But she did not hate it, and that, she thought, was new.

She was reaching for the lamp when her phone lit up again. Liam.

I’ve been thinking about your writing career.

You have a writing career now? she typed.

Obviously. I’ve decided to become your first fictional victim.

She laughed, and was about to answer when another message arrived.

Actually, I have a question. If you were writing a character who always makes everyone laugh, how would you show that he’s not always happy?

Roxanne looked at the screen. She waited for the follow-up, the grin, the line about capes. It did not come.

For once, Liam’s question did not sound like a joke.