I talked to Talia about it after school. “I really have to do something. Cecilia is depending on me.”
I said it, even though she didn’t know there were two Cecilias depending on me now.
Talia and I sat down on the sidewalk, leaning against the school while we waited for our parents. “I mean, my cousin is a flight attendant,” she said. “I could ask her about flights to New York or something.”
“I don’t know. I need to think.”
“Hmm.”
We sat quietly, and Talia started tapping her thumb against the concrete. She had this weird, funky rhythm she would tap out whenever she was thinking.
“Hey, how did that poem go?” I said. “The dead white dude one?”
Talia stopped tapping. “It went … okay, actually. I think.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Mr. Gradey gave me another sonnet to read, but this time it was Shakespeare, and it was … good.”
“He read your poem and then gave you more sonnets?”
“Yeah, because Shakespeare was sort of making fun of sonnets, too. At least in this one. It’s about how … well, it starts, My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.”
“Not like the sun?”
“Yeah, weird, huh? He even talks about her stinky breath.”
“Seriously? In a love sonnet?”
“Yeah. I know. But it’s still a love sonnet.”
I saw our blue van pull up, and Mom waved to me. I scooped up my backpack.
“I have an idea,” Talia said. “Have you checked his Twitter?”
“Twitter?”
“Yeah, the editor guy. I bet he has a Twitter account.”
I slapped my hand on my forehead. “Oh duh! How could I not think of that?”
Sometimes when my mind spun circles around one bright idea—when I got into tunnel vision mode—I had a hard time seeing the other options and strategies, like they were hiding in the shadows, away from the glare of the sun.
“I’ll check it right when we get home,” I said, running to the car.
“Update me tomorrow,” Talia said.
As soon as we got home I said a mega-fast hello to Nonny (who was lying down on the couch—she’d been doing that a lot the last little while) and bolted to the computer in my room.
Mr. Trent Hickman did have a Twitter account. Of course he did.
I spent about ten minutes scrolling through his Twitter page. He tweeted about submissions, about his cat, and there were also a remarkable number of quotes from some writer called Ayn Rand. At first I felt excited scrolling through his tweets, like looking down the key of a treasure map. Then after more about cats and more about Ayn Rand, I started losing momentum. What was I expecting, anyway? What exactly was it that I was looking for?
Then I saw it.
A tweet from last September:
New conf schedule up on website. Come see me if you’re in NY, FL, TX, or CO!
CO. I’d never been so excited to see those two letters in my entire life.
I clicked so fast on the link that I nearly dropped the mouse. It led me to the calendar page of Mr. Hickman’s personal website.
The Texas and Florida events were past. So were a couple in New York, but he still had another one at NYU at the end of the year.
And he was coming to the University of Colorado in Boulder. In January.
It was too perfect. Nonny’s baby name, now this.
I about kicked myself in the head for not seeing this before. For not thinking about checking it out earlier. But it wasn’t too late.
All of this was meant to happen. I could do this one thing for Cecilia Payne, and she’d be the centerpiece of this deal that would make a happy home for Nonny and Thomas, a perfect, healthy baby. This was my sculpture, the universe I was molding for my sister and her little family. What could be more important—what was I here in my universe to make but this?