Page 14 of Script Swap (The Last Picks #11)

“We’ll take it from here” was the politest thing the sheriff said to me.

The rest of it was, well, energetic. Forceful. And full of explanations. Even after I told the sheriff my theory about the missing murder weapon.

When the sheriff finally let me slink away, Bobby was waiting under one of the old pines .

“You okay?” he asked as he opened the cruiser door for me.

I nodded.

“She’s stressed,” Bobby said as we drove out of the parking lot.

“She’s right to be mad,” I said. “I shouldn’t have opened that window.”

“I thought you told the sheriff the window was already open.” Bobby put up his hands. “Never mind. Retracted.”

We drove a while longer. We passed a rhododendron with massive pink blossoms, and a squirrel darted out in front of us (note: Bobby didn’t panic and slam on the brakes, the way I would have), and down in a wash, a pair of kids were shooting each other with Nerf guns.

“I know this is going to sound crazy,” I said. “But I can’t help seeing myself in him. And not because he was cast to play me and sort of looks like me.”

“He doesn’t look anything like you,” Bobby said.

Which was actually weirdly flattering. “But I get it, I mean, you have this dream, and you want it, but your parents want it even more than you do, and you’re still young enough that you believe if you stick it out, pay your dues, it’s going to happen.

It’s all going to work out. You’re going to be the lucky one, the one who beats the odds.

” I rubbed my forehead and leaned back. “God, it’s so much easier when you’re twenty. ”

Bobby rubbed my leg.

“I was standing there, and it was like—like I couldn’t think straight anymore.

Someone killed him, Bobby. And he was a kid.

I know I shouldn’t have done that, but I kept thinking about how someone had to find out what happened to him, and then I thought that even if the sheriff did let me help, it would be hours and hours later, and—and I knew not to do it, and I did it anyway.

Which takes me to my encore performance of: She’s right to be mad, I shouldn’t have opened that window. ”

And then Bobby Mai said the least Bobby Mai thing ever: “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I’m sorry, say that again.”

That earned me some slanted eyebrows.

“Kidding,” I said.

“If you need to talk, Dash, I know I’m not the best at expressing myself. But I can listen. And I can be there for you.”

“No, it’s okay. I mean, I didn’t even know Kyson. It was…just weird, I guess.”

“I didn’t mean Kyson.”

“You didn’t? Wait, what are you talking about?”

Bobby hesitated. “We can talk about whatever you want to talk about. Whatever you’re feeling.”

God, if I didn’t love him with every ounce of my little gay heart already. Bobby Mai, man of mystery—and reserve, and self-control—who was now inviting me to share my feelings with him.

I found his hand, still on my leg, and squeezed it. “I’m okay. Thank you, though. It means a lot to me that you asked.”

He didn’t look convinced, but he did let it drop.

The afternoon wasn’t any more of a success.

First, I tried to freak Keme out by telling him Slender Man stories.

(He said he wasn’t scared, but you could tell he was.) Bobby ruined it by texting me to ask what I was doing.

Then I tried playing Xbox. Halfway through a game of Fortnite , Bobby texted me, quote, to check in .

So, I went upstairs to our room. I tried to veg out with some mindless reality TV.

Love is Blind was always a hit. I’d started my second episode of the afternoon (the unfortunate couples were about to meet each other’s parents) when Bobby texted. Again.

How’s writing going?

I screamed into my pillow for a while.

But because I knew he would ask again and again and again , and because I couldn’t lie to him—at least, not straight to his face—er, straight to his phone?—I did the mature, sensible, responsible thing: I dragged myself downstairs to the den and pretended to work.

At first, the pretending looked unpleasantly close to the real thing.

I hadn’t been in here for days. Actually, now that I thought about it, it might have been more than a week.

Dishes had piled up. Crumpled papers littered the floor.

Nobody had picked up any of the Chips Ahoy wrappers.

It was patently unfair that Hemlock House hadn’t come with a phantasmagorical maid.

But, like I said, I was all about doing the mature, sensible, responsible thing: so, I cleaned up.

Here’s an interesting tidbit about writers: we might be the most slovenly human beings in existence (think Pig-Pen with his cloud of flies, but we’re in our underwear, and we’re living off grilled cheese and ramen).

BUT when it comes time to write, you’ll never find a group of people more determined to clean every bathroom, dust every baseboard, and wash every bowl, cup, and plate in the house.

Unfortunately, though, you can’t clean forever, and eventually, I had to sit down, grab my laptop and my favorite blanket, and pretend to work.

When I’d started revising a few weeks ago, it hadn’t been pretend.

In fact, it had begun as a rather serious attempt to fix my first novel, A Work in Progress .

I’d gotten a string of rejections from every agent I could find, and some of those rejections had come with a few short sentences of feedback.

So, the plan was simple. Revise. Send the manuscript out to more agents (if I could find any who hadn’t passed on it already). And then start writing something new.

I’d had good intentions. I’d created a spreadsheet. I’d organized all the feedback. I’d read through it. I’d highlighted. I’d annotated. I’d mapped out patterns. I’d isolated outliers.

And then, to keep things fun, I’d had my first panic attack in three years.

There was so much feedback.

So much wrong with this book.

But the big thing? What it all boiled down to? Will Gower—that’s my fictional detective—was unlikable. He was too selfish. He was too dark. He was too quirky.

Give him a dog. Give him a wise-cracking best friend. Maybe he needs a sassy grandma. (These are the kinds of suggestions high-paid literary agents offer, the ones at the top of their field.) Make him different was the bottom line. Make him better.

The problem, though, was that they weren’t wrong. I could feel it, now that I had some distance from the story. Something was missing. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Probably because I was a terrible writer, it turned out.

Every agent who had seen my story had hated it. Heck, they hadn’t even read the whole thing—just a few pages—and they’d still hated it. Because it was a bad book. It was a terrible book. It was a piece of, uh, crap.

And I’d written it. I couldn’t weasel out of it.

I couldn’t pretend it was somebody else’s fault.

I’d put off actually finishing a book for most of my life for exactly this reason: because I knew once I did it, I’d have to face the fact that I was incontrovertibly, indisputably, insufferably bad at it.

And what if it was still bad after I revised it?

So, it was easier to read Crime Cats (it’s my favorite website, and yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like, and you’re welcome), or play this new game I found called Catchimals , or scroll and click mindlessly for a few hours, kind of like staring into the cyber abyss.

( Catchimals is amazing, by the way. You catch these cute monsters and keep them on a farm and THEY HAVE BABIES—yes, it’s so amazing I lapse into Millie-speak.

Also, there are at least ten different major copyright and trademark violations going on, so I’ve got to play as much of it as I can before it inevitably gets taken down.)

What hadn’t been happening during my writing time over the last couple of months was, well, writing.

Not that anybody else needed to know that.

It was my time after all. I had steady employment.

I was making some money teaching a creative writing class at Arcadia College, and I must not have done a horrible job because they’d given me two sections for the summer.

If I kept this up, I’d get more and more sections, and eventually, I’d earn a living wage, and—

And then what?

Well, I wasn’t sure and then what . But sometimes, the best thing for everyone’s mental health was not to think about it too much.

Today, though, I found myself struggling to focus on Crime Cats (there was a riveting piece titled “Double Trouble” about a pair of naughty orange boys), or on Catchimals (I finally found a blazeblossom, which you feed to your Scorplume and Tundrake, and they make a baby Flufferno, and it’s pink and shoots fire out of its nose).

Instead, I was thinking about Kyson. And Terrence.

Sheriff Acosta wasn’t a dummy. She couldn’t ignore those pictures on Kyson’s iPad.

To me, the chain of events seemed unpleasantly clear.

Kyson had caught Terrence doing something he shouldn’t have been doing.

Kyson had then changed his lines during the play to scare Terrence.

(This had clearly worked since Terrence had looked like he was about to jump out of his skin.) And then, when Kyson confronted Terrence, Terrence bashed him over the head.

Yeah, that’s where the story fell apart for me.

I mean, I’d met Terrence. That was clue number one that he hadn’t killed Kyson. (For heaven’s sake, when we met, he’d been wearing a tabard.)

And yes, I knew that everyone was capable of murder under the right circumstances, but I couldn’t see how these were the right circumstances.

Yes, Terrence had clearly been upset by Kyson’s lines the night of the play.

And yes, blackmail could put anybody in the right frame of mind for some head-bashing.

I guess the bottom line was that something about the whole mess stuck in my craw. And I couldn’t stop thinking about that boudoir photo of Jonni.

I was still piddling around in the den (does that mean what I think it means? or is it more of a you-have-to-borrow-a-carpet-cleaner situation?) when Bobby came home from work.

He rapped on the door to the den, stuck his head in, and smiled at me.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“Oh, you know, wallowing in my own crapulence. Full disclosure, I stole that from The Simpsons. ” Sometimes, Bobby’s face doesn’t change, but you get this clear feeling that you’d better cut the ’tude.

“I mean, fine. Just wading through revisions. The never-ending story. Starring David Bowie with extra eyeliner.”

“That was Labyrinth . The Neverending Story had that dog that was also a dragon.”

“See, this is why I love you. Those muscles are a lie. There’s a noodley-armed nerd somewhere deep inside you.”

Bobby also knows when to move on. “Are you going to keep working?”

I looked down at my screen. I was going to have to buy a bigger barn because these Catchimals only had one thing on their minds.

“Uh, yeah. Kind of in the middle of something.”

He gave me that big, happy grin. “I’ll come get you when dinner’s ready.”

It wasn’t lying. Not really. I was—I was burned out.

I just needed some time.