Page 6 of Story of My Life
She was not wrong.
“Well, your great ass pants make you mean,” I informed her. “We have books, right?”
“The publisher delivered them this morning.”
“How many?”
She hesitated for a half second too long. When you knew each other as well as we did, a half second was all it took. I jumped in front of her, and she ran right into me. “Ow! How many, Zoey?”
“Fifty.”
I could feel my eyebrows taking flight. Shit. My eyebrows. I should have taken the tweezers to them, but it was too late now. “Fifty as in five-zero?”
Zoey shook her head, and her curls bounced in irritation. “I knew you were going to freak out.”
“I’m not freaking out,” I insisted in a high-pitched Muppet voice of panic.
She stepped around me and kept walking. I kicked it into a jog to keep up and found myself winded in ten feet. Damn. When was the last time I’d gone to the gym?
“Need I remind you that your RSVP was last minute?” she said over her shoulder.
“Yeah, but there are six hundred people here! What if we sell out in the first hour?”
“Then you can sign body parts and small children.” She used her great ass to open a door that saidemployees only.
“I just don’t want to disappoint any readers.” I also didn’t want to think about what it meant that the publisher could only scrounge up fifty copies for me.
Zoey shot me a baleful look.
“Fine. I don’t want to disappoint readers any more than I already have.”
“That’s the spirit.”
The signing was in Ballroom C, a standard hotel ballroom with gold fleur-de-lis carpet and movable panel walls. Author tables ringed the perimeter of the room and ran down the center in two straight lines.
“Wow. This is huge,” I said, scanning the space as I followed Zoey.
We threaded through the crowd of authors and assistants putting the finishing touches on their tables. Everyone seemed to be dressed to the nines, which made me feel even frumpier in my jeans, sneakers, and loose sweater than I had in the mirror this morning. There were walls of balloons and streamers and roll-up banners with candy-colored phrases likeenthralling alpha heroesandmelt-your-face-off steam.
“When did everyone get so good at marketing?” I wondered out loud.
“There’s a good mix of indie authors here. They’re damn good at branding. And you can thank social media for the rest. Scroll Life revolutionized the way books are sold,” Zoey said, waving to one of the booksellers as we rolled past their booth.
“What the hell is Scroll Life?”
She sighed. “Sometimes I just don’t know what to do with you.”
I felt like Rip Van Winkle just cracking open my eyes after a long hibernation. I scanned the ballroom for familiar faces but didn’t spot any. Everyone looked so…young. So energetic. Was I the only tired, cranky OG author here?
“What’s with all the shirtless guys?” I asked as we passed a booth with not one but two six-packed men.
“Cover models,” Zoey explained as she pulled her suitcase to a halt in front of a table crammed in between a dark, gothic romance novelist with awesome Elvira hair and a young rom-com author dressed as a squirrel. The squirrel waved. I waved back.
“Wow. I can’t believe I’ve been missing out on this for all these years.”
“Another thing we can blame on Jim,” she said, positioning the suitcase in front of our empty table.
I froze, the air locking up in my lungs. She winced.
