IF PIKE PLACE Market really is haunted, the ghosts would be out right now. I feel a little ghoulish myself as I slump through downtown, past the commercial district and along the waterfront. It’s colder out here. Windier.
I hug Neil’s hoodie tighter around me, wishing it belonged to anyone but him. It’s annoying that it still smells good. Curse you, good-smelling hoodie I can’t take off without freezing.
My feet ache from all the walking. I parked at the market, which was empty, the shops long closed, but then I needed to clear my head and figure out what the hell happened and what the hell I’m supposed to do now.
I must be obsessed with Neil McNair because even with him gone, he’s all I can think about. The worst part of it is this: he wasn’t wrong.
That success guide is four years old. Just because I’m not 100 percent who I wanted to be at that age doesn’t mean I’m not successful. Deep down, maybe I’ve known that all day, but the guide was such a comfort to me, the idea that I still had a chance to cross something off.
Nothing about today, about tonight, went as planned, and until our fight, it was okay. Great, even. I’ve clung to my fantasies and convinced myself the reality can’t measure up.
I allow myself to think something I never have before: What if the reality is better?
I just… don’t know how to fix this about myself. This flaw, Neil called it. If I manage to finish Howl by myself, then we’re done competing forever. He goes off to New York and I go off to Boston, and if we see each other in Seattle when we’re home on breaks, maybe we’ll have a moment of sustained eye contact, a nod, and then a quick glance in the opposite direction. If something happened between us, he would be just another thing that ends after high school. Our schools are more than four hours away from each other. (I looked it up earlier.)
I want to tell Kirby and Mara, but I don’t know if I can put what happened into words yet. And despite everything else, I’m glad I got onstage and read my writing. Another thing Neil McNair is inexorably tied to.
Fuck it.
I whip out my phone and hit the familiar icon on the home screen.
“Rowan?” My mom picks up after the third ring. They always celebrate deadlines the same way: getting incredibly wasted. They keep a bottle of twelve-year-old scotch in their office for these occasions. “It’s late. Is everything okay? We just opened the scotch—”
“I’m writing a book,” I blurt out.
“At this very moment?”
“No—I mean, I’ve been working on it for a while.” I chew the inside of my cheek, waiting for her reaction. There’s some shuffling in the background, and I can tell she’s put me on speaker. “It’s a romance novel.”
Silence on the other end of the line.
“And I know they’re not your favorite, but I really love them, okay? They’re fun, and they’re emotional, and they have better character development than most other books out there.”
“Ro-Ro,” my dad says. “You’re writing a book?”
I nod before realizing they can’t see me. Ugh, talking is hard. “I am. I—might want to do that. Professionally. Or at least I’d like to try.”
“That’s incredible,” my mom says. “You have no idea how cool it is to hear that.”
“Yeah?”
She laughs. “Yes, the fact that having us as parents hasn’t ruined the writing magic for you? That’s kind of awesome, if you think about it.”
And maybe it is.
“It’s a romance novel,” I say again, in case they didn’t hear me the first time.
“We heard you,” my dad says. “Rowan, that’s”—a pause, and some exchanged murmurs between them—“I’m sorry if we ever gave you the impression we thought it was… a lesser genre. Maybe it was because you started reading them so young, and we thought it was this cute, funny phase you were going through.”
“It wasn’t.”
“We know that now,” my dad says.
“I love what you do, and I love those books,” I say. “And I know I have a lot to learn, but that’s what college is for, right?”
Predictably, my dad laughs at this non-joke.
“Full disclosure,” my mom says. “We’re both a little tipsy. But we’re so glad you told us. If you ever want either of us to read it, we’re more than happy to.”
“Thank you. I don’t know if I’m there quite yet, but I’ll let you know.”
“Are you doing all right? You won’t be out too late, will you?”
“We’ll probably be asleep by the time she gets home,” my dad says, “if the scotch does its job.”
My mom lets out a low whistle. “This is almost as bad as what happened after that D. B. Cooper book. I think that was whiskey, though.”
“The what?” I ask.
“Riley tried to solve the D. B. Cooper case in one of the Excavated books,” my mom says. “Do you remember? We were so upset when our editor didn’t want to publish it. She didn’t think it was kid-friendly.”
“D. B. Cooper… That was a Seattle thing, right?”
“You don’t know the story?” And when I tell her no, she explains it to me.
This is the legend of D. B. Cooper: In 1971 a man hijacked a Boeing plane somewhere in the air between Portland and Seattle. He asked for $200,000 in ransom and parachuted out of the plane… but was never found, even after an FBI manhunt. It’s the only unsolved case of its kind.
I’d read the book in manuscript form, but must have forgotten about it when they had to shelve it. And Neil wouldn’t have known about it either.
“We even worked with the staff at the Museum of the Mysteries,” my mom says. “That creepy old building downtown?”
“It’s just as creepy on the inside,” my dad says. “And weird, too. It’s half museum, half bar. So they keep it open late.”
Suddenly, everything clicks into place. God, I love my parents.
“Rowan?” my mom says, with enough urgency that makes me think I must have zoned out. “Rowan Luisa, when do you think you’ll be home?”
“I probably won’t be too much longer.”
“Have fun,” my mom says, and they start giggling again as we hang up.
The Museum of the Mysteries. If I still cared about Howl, I’d get this view clue and then go there. Good to know, I guess.
I blow out a breath. They know, and Kirby and Mara know, and when I start classes in the fall, this could be what I tell my new friends too. I’m writing a romance novel.
The Great Wheel glimmers against the night sky. I’ve never actually been on this Ferris wheel. The name is no joke. When it was built, it was the tallest Ferris wheel on the West Coast, and the idea of being so high up scared me. But tonight its lights draw me closer, and I wonder why I was ever afraid of it.
“Last ride of the night,” the guy at the ticket booth says after I hand over my five dollars. “You’re just in time.”
A minute later, my feet are off the ground.
The air is cool against my face, and down below, the water is black and serene. A couple cars above me, two teens are laughing and taking selfies. A couple cars below me, a father is trying to calm a too-rowdy child.
“Don’t you dare rock this seat, Liam,” he says. “Liam… LIAM!”
I am on a Ferris wheel at midnight. It would be extremely romantic if I weren’t alone.
This whole day, I’ve felt on the edge of so many things. In high school, I knew how to do everything and how it should all make me feel. There’s a comfort in challenging Neil because there are only ever two outcomes: he wins, or I win. A routine. A security blanket.
I’ve lived here my whole life, but I’d never been on the Great Wheel. I’d never almost broken into a library. I’d never experienced Seattle the way I did tonight, but it’s not just the setting. Bit by bit, today forced me out of my comfort zone. The end of the game means the end of high school, and while there’s plenty I romanticized, there’s so much I’ll miss. Kirby and Mara. My classes, my teachers.
Neil.
“Oh my God,” someone says, breaking my concentration. A woman’s voice. “Oh my God!”
The voices are coming from the other side of the wheel. It’s not a scared-sounding oh my God. It’s the good kind.
“She said yes!” Another woman’s voice.
Everyone on the wheel breaks into cheers as the couple embraces. If that’s not romance-novel-worthy, I don’t know what is.
I want to leap fearlessly into whatever is next for me. I really do. And it’s not like I have a choice—I’m not going to sit on top of this Ferris wheel for the rest of my life. I mean, the guy said I’m the last ride of the night, so quite literally, it’s not an option. I’m just terrified of falling, of failing, of not being able to catch myself.
My car stops at the top. It’s so fucking beautiful, my lit-up city, that I’m going to be a tourist and take a picture. I unzip my backpack and reach for my phone, my fingers grazing a familiar hardcover.
My yearbook.
Slowly, I pull it out of my backpack, hands trembling as I turn to the back pages. He didn’t want me to read it until tomorrow, but fuck it, it’s tomorrow, and I’m desperate to know what it says.
I have to flip around to find it. Two pages in the back were stuck together, and that’s how he managed to find some space. There’s my nickname in calligraphy, and—woof, it’s long. My eyes dart around at first, struggling to focus on any single word. What I’m hoping is for some reassurance that I haven’t fucked things up beyond repair, though of course he wrote this before our fight. Still, it feels like a life preserver.
So I inhale the cold night air, and then I start reading.