Booked Under Guard

The edges of my smile hurt from grinning so hard at the picture of my face staring back from the inside flap. "That's me," I squeaked. My eyes stung with tears. I would not let them spill, or I'd turn into a disastrous smear of mascara. I didn't need that. Not when I was about to be thrown in front of a thousand people and expected to look "put together" instead of like the hyper, distractible, graceless author I actually was. I had no interest in becoming a meme or a looping clip on somebody's Instagram, preserved forever as an author disaster. A laugh from my agent, Kincaid, came from behind me. She stood there smiling wide, the remaining copies of my book stacked in a big box in her arms. "You DO know an author's face usually ends up there when a book gets made," she said with a snorting laugh. My hands trembled while I held my writing - my mind made solid between my fingers, squeezing the book as I tried to take in how unreal all of it felt. "I wrote this." I blinked, half waiting for the book to vanish between one blink and the next. I was scared to glance anywhere else. Scared the book might disappear, the moment might dissolve, and I would end up back in my old room, waking in the bed of the one-bedroom apartment I had shared with three girls who all wanted acting careers. Their endless tap routines, monologue practice, and scale drills had pushed me to empty every coin from my Batman piggy bank (yes, I really owned one) into noise-canceling headphones. Those battered, glorious headphones preserved just enough of my sanity for me to piece words together, force them into paragraphs, and still have the energy to hope they might settle into a story somebody somewhere would read without hating. Then I finished... and decided it was absolute crap. I had produced a heap of crap, printed it, and ended up with a physical copy of that crap doing nothing except gathering dust in a display of shame-faced... well, shame. But here I stood, looking at a completely different book, and people out there clearly didn't see it as crap. They believed it mattered, and it carried my face and my name. "This is crazy." Kincaid lifted the book from my hands and set it on top of the stack she carried. She arched one brow at me, her brown eyes bright with gold, and I loved the way she always smiled, the dimples in her cheeks, the laugh lines that showed how much joy had filled her forty-five years. She had a steady, soothing presence in the storm my life had become after she turned into my agent five years earlier, yanking me out of writerly doubt and hurling me toward authorhood. I was still crowded with doubt, sure, but I had her, and I would always be grateful for that. She brushed her cropped black hair away again, though a few sleek strands slipped back across her left temple. "You know you do this every time." I trailed after her along the corridor.