Page 92 of Power Play

My phone had four messages waiting on it.

Maren: Are you alive?

Maren: I’m not asking. I’m establishing.

Maren: Ryan says Eli was at skate forty minutes early and stripped and retaped both sticks four times instead of three and Cole is running a theory

Maren: Delaney.

A fifth landed while I was holding it.

Maren: He left the group chat again, if that helps you place him emotionally

It did help.

Me: Alive.

Maren: Thank you

Me: I’m not saying anything else.

Maren: You don’t have to, you absolute coward, Kasperi already told the room that Kovac smiled at the bagels

I didn’t answer that one.

I showered until the hot water ran out, and I put on real clothes, and I sat down at the table with the laptop, and the cursor sat in the same place for a good while.

The heroine was in a hallway. She’d been there for days. I’d left her there before the sleepover because I couldn’t work out what she did next. Every version I tried had her saying a clever line, and the clever versions were all lies. Women standing in hallways didn’t have clever lines ready. A week ago I’d have argued the point. This morning I had sore wrists.

I deleted the clever version. I wrote what she actually did, which was hold still. She stood there and let a man look at her and didn’t fill the silence, because filling the silence was what she’d done in every room of her adult life and it was the habit she was trying to break.

It took one sentence, and it was the truest line in the document. Then the rest poured out, faster than my hands could keep up with. The patch of sun crossed the table and dropped off the far edge of it, and I never raised my head.

When I surfaced, my shoulders had locked and my hands ached, and there was more of the book on the screen than I’d ever managed in one sitting. I read it back. Reading it back had ruined every draft before it. This one survived it. It was better than everything in the stack behind it, and I knew why. Every page before it had been written around a hole, which was that I wanted a man who employed me and had decided to be a person of character about it instead. Character was death on the page.

There was no one to send it to, and I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. I’d never built the apparatus other people built, the agents and the queries and the plan, because building it would have meant saying out loud that I wanted to write books, and wanting it out loud was a step I had never once taken. Most mornings since I’d gotten here I’d written a page and hated it by dark.

I didn’t trash this one. I waited for the small cold hand at the back of my neck that said not yet, you aren’t ready, close it. It showed up. It was quieter than it had ever been. I saved the pages and left them alone and did nothing else, and that was more than I’d done with most of what I’d written. I made myself a sandwich and ate half of it standing at the sink, and the pages were still there when I was finished, and they were still good.

Iris came home in the middle of the day, and the house went from empty to occupied between one breath and the next. She banged through the front door at speed with a plastic ring she didn’t explain and a great deal to say about a dog named Mitzi.

“Mitzi is allowed on the couch.”

“Is she?”

“On the couch,” Iris said again, with no give in it at all, in the voice she used for matters adults had decided wrong.

She put her bag down in the dead center of the kitchen floor, which was her system, and went into the fridge headfirst. “Can I have the yogurt with the thing on it?”

“You can have the yogurt with the thing on it.”

She got it herself, because she got her own food now, and carried it to the table and started Mitzi again from the beginning with new material.

He got home after the skate. The truck pulled in, and I stayed where I was, in the casita with both palms on my table. I didn’t trust my face yet.

There was a long quiet. The fridge opened. Then his footsteps crossed the side hall, and he knocked with two knuckles and nothing else.

I opened it. His sunglasses were still pushed up into his hair. He’d brought the rink in with him, cold rubber and tape and the wet-canvas smell of the locker room, and it reached me before he said a word. He had tape residue in a gray ring around three fingers on the right. His keys were in his hand, not in the dish, and he put them in the dish first every day before anything else.