Literally Read online

  “I thought you weren’t coming,” I say before I can stop myself, and Elliot pulls his head back.

  “Well, here I am,” he says.

  I roll my eyes in response.

  “Elliot, right?” Will yells over the music. “Good to see you, man.” I shoot Will a look, but he doesn’t notice.

  Elliot casts a glance at me, and I force a stiff smile. They slap hands hello and are immediately engrossed in yelling over the music about how awesome the band is, because it’s actually comprised entirely of influential members of other great bands. I chew the inside of my cheek. I don’t want to seem difficult, but this just feels like all kinds of weird.

  Two songs later Will goes off to see if he can scrounge up some beers, and Paper Girl slows it down, slipping into a song I love, that I was hoping they’d play: “She’s the One.” Before I can stop myself, a high whoop escapes my lips, and several people in my vicinity turn to stare. But most of them aren’t judging; they’re smiling. We’re all fans. I turn to Elliot, an embarrassed hand over my mouth, my eyes wide, and he is chuckling, his whole face lit up. It makes me laugh, too.

  I face the stage again and let the music sink in. I close my eyes and sway, and that’s when I feel Elliot right behind me. Like, right behind me. My back is almost leaning into his chest, and I can feel his warmth on my skin. The music is liquid, pooling around us. He doesn’t smell like Will, like cedar and detergent. He smells like deodorant and an unwashed T-shirt. He smells like boy. He smells like Elliot.

  And the weirdest thought occurs to me. He smells … good.

  And then in an instant Elliot is laid out flat on the ground, and his hand is holding his skull. A drumstick is on the ground by his side, and the singer is yelling, “Sorry, bro!” into the microphone, before the band picks up the tempo again. And as quickly as it all started, it’s over, and I throw one of Elliot’s arms around my shoulders and haul him out of the room.

  “I can’t believe I got hit by a drumstick,” Elliot won’t stop saying, his voice grainy and tired, as I move my finger in front of his nose. I am trained for this. I took an EMT class last year. “When has that ever happened? Barry Gross is one of the best drummers of our generation. I worship that guy! He is my idol. My idol just hit me with a freaking drumstick!”

  “Shut up,” I say. “What’s your full name?”

  Elliot frowns, but obliges. “Elliot James Apfel,” he says.

  “How old are you?”

  “I am eighteen years old.”

  “What street do you live on?”

  “Oakwood Avenue.”

  I roll my eyes. “That’s where I live.”

  “Same thing,” Elliot grumbles.

  “What street do you live on, Elliot?” I ask again.

  “Fourth Avenue.” He sighs.

  “What’s the name of your band?” I ask.

  “Don’t have one.” He smiles. “Remember?”

  “You’re a pain in the butt,” I say, tilting my head.

  “I know.” He grins, and it all comes back to me for a second as I look down at him. That weird moment earlier, when everything felt like it was moving in slow motion. That moment I found myself standing close to Elliot, breathing him in—and liking it.

  “What happened?” Elliot and I both turn to see Will pushing his way out of the theater. “I got your text. Did you really get hit with a drumstick? Someone was talking about it at the bar.”

  Elliot just grumbles in response.

  “We had a slight accident,” I explain.

  “Annabelle,” Elliot interrupts. He looks so defeated, crouched against the building like that. “I wanna go home. I need Advil.”

  “Right,” I say, thinking. “The only problem is, you really shouldn’t drive right now, and I can’t drive stick.”

  “Whatever,” Elliot says. “I’ll get Sam to drive me back tomorrow and pick up the car. Good advertising for the shop.”

  “Tomorrow it might be towed.” I bite my lip.

  “You worry too much,” Elliot tells me.

  “You don’t worry enough,” I push back, and it comes out flirtier than I intend it to. Or did I? Suddenly, my stomach is fluttering in a way I don’t understand, and before I can figure out what any of it means, Will is offering to drive Elliot home. As he helps him off toward the car, I can’t help feeling like somehow, I ended up on a date with both of them.

  “I look like such an asshole,” Elliot says from his position on the couch, legs propped up, a bag of peas resting atop his head.

  “Good thing nobody cares,” I shoot back, coming out of the kitchen. I don’t know what I was thinking before, back at The Wiltern, but I’m trying to forget about it as quickly as possible. “I made you some coffee. You shouldn’t fall asleep for a few hours.”

  “Did you use the good beans?” Elliot asks petulantly.

  “I know the way you like it,” I reply, and I can feel Will watching me from his seat next to the TV.

  “I should probably get going,” Will says eventually. “Annabelle, can I drive you home?”

  I spill the coffee a little bit as I set it down, unsure of how to answer. I know what the correct answer is. It’s yes. Yes, you can drive me home because it’s 10:15 and it’s a school night, and also you’re a total babe who smells like magic and packed an extra sweater for me without even asking. And you also didn’t ask, “Do you need a ride home?” You asked, “Can I drive you?” because you are deliberate and you know what you want.

  The weird thing is, a part of me wants to say no. A part of me wants to stay here on the couch with Elliot, doing nothing at all, making sure he doesn’t fall asleep.

  But that’s crazy. I can’t do that, for a million reasons. Because of the message it will send to Will, and because it’s Elliot Apfel.

  And then Elliot answers for me. “You should go, AB,” he says. His brown eyes are surprisingly steady beneath the bag of peas, his voice level.

  “But what about your head?” I ask. “What if you fall asleep and die?”

  “My dad is here going through invoices in the garage. He’ll keep an eye out. And plus, there’s a new episode of Game of Thrones I still haven’t seen. I’ll be okay.”

  I bite my lip. I look at Will, who is checking something on his phone.

  “Really,” Elliot says. “Go.”

  For some reason, this hurts. It surprises me, a tiny pain throbbing just below my rib cage. It makes me swallow. It makes me unable to meet his eyes. Would it kill him to be the tiniest bit grateful? Maybe a simple thank-you for saving him and, I don’t know, an apology for ruining my date?

  Or, it occurs to me, that maybe I just want him to want me to stay.

  “’Kay,” is all I manage to say. “Feel better.” I grab my bag and walk out, and I don’t stop moving until I’m in the passenger seat of Will’s car. The magic cedar smell soothes me a bit, and when Will hops in next to me pulling a wool sweater over his head, a goofy grin on his face, the rest of the pain disappears.

  “Okay, I have two options,” Will says simply. “One: I could drive you home, which let’s face it, is a pretty sorry end to a Thursday night.”

  “Uh-huh?” I ask suspiciously.

  “Or two: You could tell me where a guy can find a decent ice cream cone in this town. Because I’ve been looking for days, and everything seems to be vegan, and I don’t even know how a person makes vegan ice cream.”

  At this I can’t help but put my hands over my mouth to hide my grin.

  “What?” Will asks. “What’s so funny?”

  “You’ve come to the right place,” I say in a tone that’s all business. In my family, we say a pint of ice cream doesn’t survive the night. I love it more than coffee. More than the newspaper. Maybe even more than running.

  “Thank God,” Will says dramatically. “Save me, Annabelle!”

  “Head straight on Fourth, and take a right on Rose,” I say. And leave Elliot far behind.

  And just like that, we’re off to finish th
e date we started.

  Apparently, Sea Salt Creamery has a patio now, lined with extra-sparkly twinkle lights. They didn’t last week, when I came with my dad. Now, here with Will, the effect is surprisingly romantic.

  “When did you get these?” I ask the waitress who drops off our sundaes.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugs, hardly looking at me. She reaches a hand behind her head to tighten her ponytail. “I know you said two scoops, but I gave you three.” She tilts her head and smiles at Will.

  I practically roll my eyes. Will might actually be perfect if he hadn’t ordered a banana split. I’ve long had a squishy-fruit aversion.

  “Everyone likes you,” I say as the waitress walks off. The waitress, the people behind and in front of us in line, even this young couple’s baby who wouldn’t stop crying, but turned totally Gerber when Will leaned over its stroller. “Everywhere you go, people, like, swoon.”

  “That’s not true,” Will protests. “And besides, everyone likes you, too.”

  “No, they don’t.” I shake my head. “I mean, people don’t hate me or anything; I’m nice, but they misunderstand me sometimes. Or I misunderstand them.”

  I bite my lip, and think about last week when Lee was showing off a new leather jacket she got for her birthday from Barney’s, and I told her I’d seen one exactly like it on the Boardwalk for forty bucks. Ava told me the point was to compliment Lee’s jacket. The point was not that she could have bought a cheaper one.

  “I like that you’re honest,” Will says. “I’m this nice because my parents taught me it’s how you have to be. But it means it’s hard to know how they actually feel about anything.”

  “Well, maybe I can teach you to be more of a jerk.” I smile.

  “And I can teach you to be a pushover.” Will grins. We meet each other’s eyes a moment, and I relish in the fact that I am on a real date with a real guy, and I don’t seem to have done anything awkward to mess it up yet.

  “So, I wanna talk more about Annabelle Burns, the journalist,” Will says.

  I give him a look over my cone. “You do?” Other than my parents, I’ve never had someone be so interested in me before.

  “I do.” Will nods.

  “What do you wanna know?” I ask.

  Will looks off to the side for a moment, thinking. “So you like stories, as long as they’re real?”

  I shrug. “Yeah, that’s one way of putting it. And I love to write. And edit. I love to take a group of words that just aren’t working in harmony and turn them into something readable and interesting. I’m not sure there is anything more satisfying in the whole world.”

  “I’ve never thought about words like that before.” Will chews on his spoon for a moment. “But you don’t like fiction?”

  I sigh. “It’s not that I don’t like it; I’m just not any good at it. And when it comes to reading, I prefer things that are actually real. Not made from someone’s imagination. Why are you taking Fiction, by the way?”

  Will scrunches up his nose for a second. “I guess I just thought it would be an easy class to come into at the last minute, after I transferred. But also, I thought it would be a fun challenge before I go off to college. See if I can really hack it.” He grins widely, exuding optimism from the tips of his toes to the top of his head. “But back to more important matters,” Will changes the subject. “You gotta have a bite.” He scoops up a giant spoonful of his banana split, and holds it out to me.

  “No thanks,” I say. “I’m not a fan of bananas.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Will replies, “since this is a peanut-butter sundae.” He gives me a weird look, and when I glance down, I am looking at a spoon with chocolate ice cream and a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup wedged into it.

  Now, this is genuinely weird. I was there. I heard him order it. I thought to myself, Yuck, bananas.

  Will is still waiting, and so is the spoon. “Quick, before it turns into a milk shake.” His words are insistent but his tone is patient as ever. But my heart is beating a little bit faster.

  “What’s wrong?” Will asks. I close my eyes for a second. My skin is prickling.

  I look up into Will’s eyes to try to explain, but something is different here, too. His hair? His face? I can’t figure it out, but perfect blue-eyed Will is just … not himself.

  And that’s when I realize he’s actually not. Perfect blue-eyed Will’s eyes are not blue right now. They’re brown like Elliot’s.

  My copy editor makes sure my characters don’t have blue eyes in one scene, and brown eyes in another, I hear Epstein say.

  If anyone needs any of their stories proofread, Annabelle’s your girl, I hear her say again.

  “What’s wrong with your eyes?” I ask Will.

  “What do you mean?” Will replies, and blinks. And when he opens them again they are blue as ever.

  He’s too good to be true, I hear Ava say. Sounds like he was made for you.

  “Annabelle?” Will asks, leaning closer. “Are you okay?”

  And then the craziest thought occurs to me. What if Will was made for me? Or not made, but … written?

  8

  TK’s Steakhouse

  I MUST’VE banged on the door of Rosewater Café & Bookstore sixty times, and am seriously considering breaking in, when Ava suddenly appears behind the glass, looking like she’s seen a ghost.

  “Where were you?” I ask, my voice bordering on accusatory as I push past her, forcing her to take a few steps back.

  “I was in the basement restocking,” she says slowly, as though she’s talking to the guy on the Boardwalk who sells portraits of John Travolta and only John Travolta. John Travolta as a deep-sea fisherman. John Travolta as Jesus. You get the idea. “We close at ten. What’s wrong? Take a breath.”

  I take several breaths, placing my hands on my hips, before waving the syllabus for Epstein’s class in her face. I ran all the way here, and now I’m out of breath. “I think she may have been telling the truth,” I say.

  Ava squints. “You’re gonna have to give me a little more than that.”

  I sigh. “Will. He’s so perfect, and he’s so organized, and we’re so similar, and he’s so into to me …”

  “You know that’s not wildly shocking, right? That he’s into you. You’re smart and beautiful and sure maybe you have the personal interests of a senior citizen, which is a little weird, but—”

  “That’s not it! Listen.” I run a hand through my hair. “Something has been off lately. Ever since Will got here. Sure, everything we have in common could be coincidence or fate or whatever, and his interest in me could be real, but then there’s Lucy Keating and what she said, and then there was the ice cream and the eyeballs—”

  “Still talking crazy,” Ava cautions me. “Back it up.” She sits on the counter, her legs dangling off. And I start from the beginning.

  When I finish telling her about what happened at the ice cream shop, Ava thinks. “Are you sure you weren’t just distracted? You know, by all his smoking hotness?”

  I raise my hands in the air. “But it was a banana split!” I exclaim.

  “You hate bananas,” Ava states. Like she is president of the Preservation of Annabelle Burns Society. I wait for her to say something else. To make sense of it all. To tell me everything is going to be okay.

  Instead, she nods carefully. “Weird.”

  “Weird,” I say.

  “Did Will notice the changes?” she asks.

  “Not only did he not notice the changes, it was like he rebooted himself,” I say. “Like he’d been programmed. And … there’s one more thing.”

  “What?”

  “I think Elliot and I had a … I don’t know. A thing? A moment? It’s hard to explain. There was something there tonight, between us,” I say.

  “What?” Ava shrieks, and she looks like she’s about to laugh. But she sees my face and stops. “No seriously. What?”

  And then it all just comes out in a rush. I tell her about how he
and Clara broke up, how he’s been giving me this attention, and how he just showed up at the show tonight when he wasn’t even supposed to be there. How funny that made me feel. How there was the energy, and then he got knocked out, and no sooner had that happened than Will showed up to save the day. When I finish Ava is just looking at me.

  “But you hate Elliot Apfel,” Ava says. “Just like you hate bananas.”

  “I know,” I say, and fidget with a bracelet around my left wrist. “Ava, what if she was right?”

  “Who?” Ava looks at me hard. “You cannot possibly mean Lucy Keating.”

  “But think about it. Will shows up, and he’s perfect. But every moment he’s not perfect … like when he offers me the wrong ice cream … he changes. Epstein told us all about copy editors fixing inconsistencies. Maybe that’s what I saw in Will’s eyes. Maybe Lucy forgot she made his eyes blue.” I realize this sounds insane. But … what if?

  Ava thinks for a moment. “Will does appear to be sent from heaven. I mean, if you asked my dad if you were a character in a book, he’d probably tell you anything is possible. He’s also usually high, but it’s food for thought.”

  Ava’s dad was a rock star in the 1990s, and now he runs a retreat center in Malibu. He lets Ava throw all her birthday parties there. We take over the whole camp and roast marshmallows and roll out our sleeping bags in the community center, under a big Buddhist statue.

  “But I mean, it’s not true, right?” I say. “Because that would be crazy. I am not actually the main character in a book written by Lucy Keating.”

  Ava shakes her head. “It’s not true, but I’ll indulge you. You fire up the coffeemaker in the café. I’m going to find every Lucy Keating book we have, and we are going to look at the facts. Your favorite. Except that this time, the facts are fiction. Let’s put those journalism skills of yours to good use.”

  Two hours and one giant pot of coffee later, I am standing in front of the chalkboard on which they usually write the specials. We’ve wiped it all off and at the top is written:

  IS ANNABELLE IN A BOOK?

  Below it the board is divided into two sections:

  YES / NO

  Ava leans back in a chair, her hands propped behind her head.