“The French Riviera,” Nisha said slowly, as if all three words were new to her. “Agents make more than authors, don’t they?”
“Um, I think that depends.”
“Well, she gets fifteen percent of your money, right?”
“Yes,” Darcy sighed. She’d already had this discussion with Dad, who’d offered to negotiate the contract himself for a mere 2 percent of the advance. He was good at missing the point that way.
“And how many clients does she have?”
“Maybe thirty?” While writing her query letter, Darcy had dutifully googled them all. “Thirty-five?”
“Damn!” Nisha turned from the window, triumphant. “Fifteen percent is a seventh of a hundred percent, and a seventh of thirty-five is five. So Moxie makes about five times as much as her average author.”
“I guess.” Darcy was pretty sure that Nisha was missing something too. “But I think most writers make, like, zero dollars most years. Not that you should tell the parentals that.”
“My lips are sealed.” Nisha smiled. “But forget writing. When I grow up I’m going to be an agent.”
A squawk came from another room, and Nisha jumped up onto the big living room couch. “What the hell!”
“Relax,” Darcy said, remembering the email from Max, Moxie’s personal assistant. “That’s Sodapop. He’s a parrot.”
“Your agent has a parrot?”
The squawk had come from an open door, which led into a room crowded with a huge bed, a duo of oak valets heaped with clothes, and a covered birdcage the size of a gas station pump.
Max usually fed Sodapop while Moxie was away, but it would be Darcy’s job for the next two weeks. She approached the cage, and heard a feathery shuffling from inside.
She reached up and pulled the cover off. A brilliant blue bird with streaks of yellow and red in its tail gave her a cockeyed stare.
“Hello?” Darcy said.
“Want a cracker?” Nisha said from the doorway.
“Let’s try to avoid clichés.” Darcy held the bird’s stare. “Do you talk?”
“Birds don’t talk,” the parrot said.
Nisha shook her head. “That’s f**ked-up.”
“Don’t teach my agent’s parrot to swear.”
“Two dollars.”
“Whatever.” Darcy turned to survey the rest of the room. A half-open sliding door revealed a large black marble tub, and another door stood closed. She crossed to open it and peeked inside. “Oh, my god.”
“What is it, Patel?” Nisha was headed across the room. “Porn stash? Author dungeon?”
“No. It’s a . . .” Darcy tried to wrap her head around the space. “I think it’s a closet.”
It was as large as her parents’ bedroom at home. Two poles stretched from wall to wall on either side, bowed under the weight of dresses in plastic covers and suit jackets with tissue paper stuffed into their sleeves. Directly across from the door were ranks of glass-fronted drawers, with a bank of cubbyholes along the bottom stuffed full of shoes.
Darcy walked into the closet, peering through the little glass windows into the drawers. Each held exactly three shirts, neatly folded and with a white curl of cardboard keeping their collars stiff.
“Whoa,” came Nisha’s voice from the closet door.
“Look at these drawers,” Darcy said, close enough to fog the glass. “You can see what’s inside before you open them!”
She pulled on a handle, and the shirts rolled out with the shush of hidden little wheels. When she pushed, the drawer drifted slowly closed, pausing for a moment before shutting, as if an invisible hand guided its passage.
Darcy opened and closed the drawer again. The sound had the metal fizzle of ball bearings, like a bicycle wheel turning free, but less clicky.
The flattest part of her first chapter was Lizzie’s father’s superfabulous apartment in New York City. Darcy had assembled it from images in catalogs and movies, but now she had a real-life model.
How would she describe a closet like this in a single sentence?
“Rewrites are going to be fun,” she murmured.
“So where are you going to put your clothes?” Nisha asked. “Looks pretty crowded in there.”
“Doesn’t matter. I only brought T-shirts.”
“Seriously, Patel?”
“That’s what Mom did when she came over. No clothes from India except jeans and T-shirts, not a single sari. She waited till she saw what Americans wore, so she could fit in.”
Nisha rolled her eyes. “New flash: New York isn’t a foreign country. Plus it’s on TV all the time, if you wanted to find out how people dress here.”
“Those are actors. I want to dress like real people,” Darcy said, but what she really meant was writers. There were swarms of them here in New York. From what she could tell, the population of Brooklyn was at least 10 percent writers. With so many in one spot, there had to be a certain look they shared, a way of dressing and standing and moving. And once her agent (my agent, she repeated to herself, because thoughts didn’t count against her total) had introduced Darcy around, she would know that look. Until then, she wasn’t going to walk around dressed like some girl from Philadelphia.
So jeans and T-shirts it was, even if the plan had appalled her mother.
“So you have to pay rent, buy furniture, and get all new clothes. Good financial planning, Patel.”
“Yeah, I was wondering.” Darcy turned to face her sister. “Maybe you could make me a budget? I mean, you’re so good at that stuff.”
“Flatterer,” Nisha said. “Twenty bucks.”
A knock came from the living room.
“You let them in.” Darcy pulled out her phone. “I want to take some notes about this closet.”
“No way.” Nisha yanked Darcy out and shut the closet door. “If they see all those clothes, they’ll know where your fifteen percent went. And Dad’ll want to do all your contracts from now on.”
“Seriously,” Darcy had to agree.
* * *
As Nisha opened the apartment door, she extended a hand toward the living room windows with a proprietorial air. Darcy was pleased to see her parents’ dumbstruck expressions.
“My agent lives in the sky,” she murmured, too softly to cost herself another dollar.
Her father had Darcy’s suitcase in hand, and her mother was carrying something else—a garment bag.
Darcy took a step forward, blocking her way. “Wait. What’s that?”
“I thought you might need something other than T-shirts.” The words came out in a rush, over-rehearsed.
Darcy groaned, but her mother kept talking.
“Really, Darcy. I should never have told you that story about coming from India with nothing to wear. It wasn’t by choice. We simply didn’t have money for proper clothes. And the first thing I bought here was a cocktail dress.” Annika Patel smoothed the garment bag. “I thought you would want one just like it.”
“You thought I would want a cocktail dress from 1979?”
Nisha laughed aloud at this, and even Dad cracked a smile.
“Hush, girl.” Her mother unzipped the bag and held up the dress on its hanger. It was classic, short, and black. It was kind of perfect.
Darcy stared, admitting nothing.
“What do you think?” Her mother’s eyes were alight.
“Well . . . I do have this sort of party tonight.”
CHAPTER 6
THE PARAMEDICS WRAPPED ME IN shiny silver mylar, like the weightless blankets my dad used to bring on camping trips. They knelt to shelter me from the wind, and one gave me a hot thermos to hold.
But I couldn’t stop shivering. The cold had crawled too far inside.
My lips were cracked, my muscles brittle. I couldn’t feel my feet at all. When I tried to speak, all that came out was a dry rasp. My eyes watered with the sting of tear gas.
How long had I been lying dead in that sidewalk morgue?
One of the paramedics was shouting into a radio on her shoulder, another wrapping a blood pressure cuff around my arm. As it began to inflate, I thought the pressure would shatter me into splinters. I was made of ice.
An ambulance came to a skidding halt beside us. The rear doors opened, and a gurney hit the pavement, bouncing on dirty white rubber wheels.
“Can you lie flat?” someone asked.
I was in a fetal position, curled around the thermos. My muscles refused to thaw.
“Forty over forty?” shouted the paramedic taking my blood pressure. She shook her head, starting to inflate the cuff again. “Prep an adrenaline injection.”
I tried to say no. The heat inside me was building, my body coming back to life.
On a three count, the paramedics hoisted me onto the gurney. The world spun for a moment, and then I was inside the ambulance. It was crowded and swaying as we sped out of the airport. A needle glimmered among the blinding lights, as long as an ice pick.
“In her heart,” someone said.
They peeled the mylar blankets off me. Hands grabbed my wrists, prying my arms open. I tried to roll into a ball again to protect myself. My body was full of heat now, life flooding back. My lips still burned where Yamaraj had kissed me, and I didn’t need their spike in my chest.
But the medics were stronger, and forced me flat. Someone unzipped my hoodie, and scissors pulsed cold along my belly, slicing open my T-shirt. A fist raised up over my bare chest, clutching the long needle like a knife.
“Wait!” A plastic-gloved hand slapped down over my heart. “She’s at ninety!”
“Up from forty?”
“Don’t touch me,” I managed to say.
The three paramedics in the ambulance were silent for a moment. I heard the sigh of the blood pressure cuff deflating, and felt my pulse flowing back into my arm.
“Ninety over sixty,” the woman said. “Can you understand me?”
I nodded, and tried to speak again. She leaned closer to listen.
“What time is it?” I managed.
She pulled away, frowning, but glanced at her watch. “Just after two a.m.”
“Thank you,” I said, and closed my eyes.
Two hours since the attack had started. I’d been in the afterworld for only, what, twenty minutes? The rest of that time I must have been lying outside in that makeshift morgue, my body freezing.
More than all I’d seen and heard, it was coming back to life that made me believe in the afterworld. I could feel that I’d been somewhere else. The scent of a faraway place lay on my skin. I could see Yamaraj perfectly in my mind, and his taste lingered on my lips.
On the way to the hospital, one of the paramedics kept saying he was sorry, over and over. A strange calm had wrapped itself around me, but the paramedic sounded like a man in shock.
“What are you sorry for?” I finally croaked. My mouth was so dry.
“I’m the one who called you.”
I just stared at him.
“I couldn’t find a pulse. Your head wound didn’t look bad, but you had no respiration, no pupil response. You were so cold!” His voice grew ragged. “You looked too young for cardiac arrest, but I thought maybe you’d passed out on your back and the tear gas had made you vomit and . . .”
I finally understood. He was the one who had proclaimed me dead.
“Where did you find me?”
He blinked. “In the airport, with the other bodies. Everyone thought you were dead.”
“It’s okay,” I told him softly. “I think you were right.”
He stared at me, terror in his eyes. Maybe he thought I was going to sue him, or that someone would revoke his license over this.
Or maybe he believed me.
* * *
At the hospital there were beds lined up, a squad of doctors and interns waiting for the flood of wounded. But, as everyone soon realized, there was only one survivor. Just me, out of all those people.