Page 155 of Story of My Life
“No.”
“You didn’t promise an agent the first few chapters?”
“Still no.”
“Perfect! Don’t worry about anyone else and what they’re gonna think. Tell the story you want to tell. And when it’s done,thenyou can start worrying about what a bunch of strangers are going to have to say.”
“What if it’s…bad?”
“Bad?”
“Like fucking trash that never should have existed in the first place.”
I grinned. “You already sound like a real author.”
He shook his head. “No way. There’s no fucking way this is ‘part of the process,’” he insisted, throwing air quotes in my direction.
“Hate to break it to you, but it most definitely is. Most first drafts are flaming dumpster fires. But once you have the dumpster fire, you can do something about it.”
Levi scratched irritably at his eyebrow. “So you’re saying it should be painful and cause me to doubt myself with every word I write?”
“That’s generally how my process works.”
34
THE FIGHT(S)
CAMPBELL
I’m tellin’ya. All you gotta do is jiggle that handle thingy and the frothed milk’ll spit right out,” Gator Johnson said, pointing at the espresso maker behind me.
“And I’m tellingyou, I don’t care. If you want a mocha frappe fuckoccino, you can go someplace else.”
“Leave the boy alone,” Gator’s wife, Lang, told him as she dumped their weekly provisions on the counter.
Gator was a grizzled bumpkin with a rural Louisiana accent and a comic book collection. Lang was an outspoken, Connecticut-boarding-school-educated high school principal who came from a wealthy Vietnamese family who made their fortune in advertising. No one knew how they’d ended up together, let alone what made their twenty-plus-year marriage work.
“Well, he doesn’t have to be such a grump about it,” Gator complained.
Lang patted her husband’s shoulder. “Maybe he doesn’t like that his brother is on a date while he’s stuck minding the store.”
“Which brother?” I asked, as I rang up the two frozen ice pops the couple would enjoy on their way home.
“Levi just showed up at Rusty’s with that romance novelist,” Gator said, turning his phone screen so I could see the photo posted on Neighborly.
I dropped a can of soup on my foot.
Hazel and Levi were leaning in over a table, it looked like they were sharing a beer, and my brother, the emotionless robot, was fuckingsmiling. Levi reserved smiles for only the most amusing occasions. Like the time Gage ran face-first into Mom and Dad’s glass patio door.
I suddenly wanted to ram his face into a glass door.
My phone vibrated in my pocket in several successive bursts. News traveled fast.
I stonily hurried through the transaction and the bagging. Lang was looking at me like I’d sprouted bat wings.
“What?” I demanded, accidentally shoving my fist through the bottom of a paper bag for the second time.
“You seem…stressed,” she observed.
