It was not enough for the Countess Ravishia to have besotted every eligible man in Wrathlust. She also put considerable effort into undermining the romantic hopes of the other noblewomen. As, for example, when she had Lady Horcroft’s secret lover beheaded for failing to doff his cap.
— from Wrathlust Hollow by Carmelita Woldstonecraft
How long does it take to write a book?
I figured if I wrote ten pages a day, I could finish in a couple weeks. But that night I stalled out at three pages. I’d used up all the obvious, easy-to-find stuff on the web, and I kept getting stuck trying to organize the book. Like, should I do short chapters, or long sections, or break it up by topic, or what?
I needed a model, so I ran downstairs and went through the bookshelves in the living room. Nothing but novels and history books. No self-help.
I found my dad on the screen porch working a sudoku and smoking one of his pipes.
“You know you’re committing slow-motion suicide, don’t you?” I said. I’d been bugging him about his pipe smoking for years with little effect.
“How’s it going, kiddo?” he asked with a smoky grin.
“Do we have any of those books around? You know, about how to become a better person and stuff.”
He set down his puzzle and peered at me over the tops of his reading glasses. “Could you be more specific?”
“Like Mom reads. Like that one she was reading about understanding teenagers? Or the ones about living fearlessly and discovering the power within?”
“Self-help books?”
“Yeah. I can’t find any.”
“Check the basement,” he said. “Your mother recently thinned out the bookshelves. I think she plans to donate all her self-help books to the church rummage sale. She read a self-help book that told her self-help books were worthless.” My father has a very dry sense of humor. “What do you need help with?” he asked.
“I’m looking for guidance,” I said. “I think I might skip college.”
It’s hard to describe what happened to his face just then, but it must have hurt.
“Just kidding!” I said quickly.
He closed his eyes, put his hand over his heart, and took a deep breath. “Adam, don’t do that!”
“It’s for a school project.” Giving him an all-purpose answer that would not require explanation.
“I see. Well. Good luck with that.”
I found the book box under the stairs and sorted through it. I had hit a self-help gold mine. Titles included Understanding Your Teenager, The Power Within, Finding God in Everyday Life, Sex After Fifty — just the title of that one practically made me hurl — and Meditations for Parents Who Do Too Much. I paged through them. The problem was, they were all different. Some of them were full of quotes from famous people, and the author would riff on the quote. Some were like instruction manuals, some were more like exercise books, and as for Sex After Fifty — believe me, you do not want to know. The one that interested me most was a slim hardcover book called Questions for Elton.
Questions for Elton was a bunch of questions that the author, a nerdy-looking guy named Noah Silverman, asked this old coal miner named Elton Gumm, who was dying from black lung. I thought most of the questions were pretty stupid — stuff like “Are you afraid of dying?”
The correct answer, of course, is “Well, duh!” But Elton Gumm manages to go on for five or six pages on the topic. So it was a really dumb book overall, but I liked the question-answer format.
It looked totally poachable.
Chelsea Whalenburg was outspoken to a fault, afraid of no one, and friendly with Blair, which made her the perfect tool for my nefarious purposes. My only problem was that I didn’t really know her. And she scared me a little.
It was two days before I found my chance to get Chelsea alone. I spotted her after school, after the buses had left, leaning against an aging SUV in the student parking lot with her arms crossed and a tight frown on her face. She looked about as approachable as a pissed-off water buffalo. I took a deep breath and headed toward her. Her eyes flicked at me, then went back to staring at the school building. I was no part of her current reality.
I walked as if I was heading for the other end of the parking lot, but when I passed by Chelsea I stopped, as if paralyzed by a sudden thought.
“Hi, Chelsea,” I said.
She looked over at me, surprised.
“Hey,” she said. She didn’t even know my name.
“Waiting for somebody?” I asked.
She didn’t say anything, giving me the look of suspicion and distrust I deserved.
After a few seconds she said, “I’m waiting on that fool Andrew James. He’s supposed to give me a ride home, only he’s not here.” She kicked the fender of the SUV with her heel. “I guess I should’ve taken the bus.” She went back to staring at the school with an intensity that almost made me believe she could see through brick. “I’m gonna have that boy’s balls.”
Did I say she scared me a little? I lied. She scared me a lot. Chelsea had a reputation for saying whatever was on her mind, which was a little scary, but the main reason she scared me was because she was black. I wasn’t scared of her blackness exactly, it was more like I was scared I’d say something stupid, or look at her wrong, and she would despise me for being a suburban white-bread ignoramus, which was pretty much true.
“You got a car?” she asked, sliding her eyes in my direction.
“Sorry,” I said.
She looked away, losing all interest in me.
I decided to take the plunge. I said, “Pretty weird about Dennis and Blair, huh?”
Her forehead wrinkled. I gave her a few seconds to catch up.
“Dennis who?” she asked.
“Dennis Long? Always staring at Blair?
“Oh. Him.” She retained her puzzled look, waiting for more.
I let her wait.
“What about them?” she finally asked.
I shrugged like it was really nothing, then said, “I guess they’re going out or something. The odd couple.”
Chelsea laughed and went back to staring through the brick walls of the school. After about three seconds she looked back at me. “Seriously?”
“That’s what Dennis says. He says she’s hot for him. She’s been calling him.”
“Blair? Calling him?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, that’s what he says. I guess she’s really into him.”
Chelsea gave me a you-must-be-out-of-your-mind look. I decided to slather on another layer of unlikelihood.
“So, does Blair really have a birthmark shaped like a bunny rabbit on her butt?”
Chelsea shook her head, not quite believing she was having this conversation. “I’m in her gym class, and I never saw no bunny on her ass. Not that I was looking. Who told you she had a bunny on her ass?”
“I’m pretty sure it was Dennis,” I said.
It’s not as if I didn’t know I’d done something heinous and vile. I knew. But in the larger scheme of things (my best friend’s happiness being of overriding importance), I felt that my actions were defensible. Anyway, that would be my justification.
But it took me quite a while to get the nerve up to call Emily. In the end, I decided to spare her the details of what I had done.
“I am giving you the gift of deniability,” I said when she answered the phone.
“Oh, good,” she said, “I was hoping for diamonds, but deniability, well, what girl doesn’t want deniability?”
“Believe me, you might need it,” I said. “I have performed a service for you. The Blair problem has been dealt with. Dennis is yours for the taking. Or he will be, once the shit hits the fan.”
“What shit?” she asked. “What fan?”