Page 46 of The Last Book Party

I scanned the pages of Henry’s novella in disbelief. There was a lonely protagonist, trapped in the colony. A handsome adolescent boy. I scanned the pages, flipped to the last chapter, to the girl’s disappointment, watching from up high in the tree as the boy she loved walked down a long path through the lush jungle. I was so confused. I couldn’t figure out how Henry could have known the story in Jeremy’s novel—before I realized that was impossible.

I ran downstairs and outside to find Jeremy leaning against one of the Adirondack chairs. When he saw me approaching, he smiled, until I got closer and his expression changed from happy to wary.

“You stole the story!” I said, my heart pounding. I was so outraged and disappointed.

Jeremy blanched. He glanced at the journal in my hand.

Folding his arms and stepping back, he said, “I didn’tstealanything.”

“No?” I flipped through the pages, barely able to speak clearly. “Not the girl with leprosy? The boy she loves? An impossible love affair? From what I’ve read, it’s the same story.”

“Calm down,” Jeremy said quietly.

A bearded man in a long dark coat and a convincing-looking wooden leg hobbled toward us. “Have you seen Joan?” he asked. “She’s dressed like a whale. Can’t find her anywhere.”

Jeremy shook his head and grabbed my wrist, pulling me farther from the house, halfway down the sloping lawn that led to the tennis court. He turned slightly before stopping. He was on higher ground than I was. His grip on my arm was tight. “My book is nothing like Henry’s,” he said, towering above me. “I used the scaffolding of it, that’s all. It’s totally different—not to mention the fact that his writing is completely wooden.”

“Wooden? What does that matter?” I said, stepping up the hill to be on even footing with him. “You can’t write the same essential story and pass it off as your own.”

Jeremy smirked, which made me too angry to follow his convoluted explanation that he’d only taken the “kernel” of an idea, keeping its essence but cultivating it until it was something completely different.

“It’s more than a ‘kernel,’” I said, my voice rising. “It’s plagiarism.”

“It is not plagiarism. I ran with his idea and made it better.”

“You changed Hawaii to Nepal, as if that makes it all OK,” I said. “Are there even leprosy colonies in Nepal? Come to think of it, did you even go there? Or was your trekking adventure a lie too?”

“Yes, I went to Nepal.”

Jeremy tried to grab the novella from me. I pulled it back. “Don’t!” I cried.

“Artists riff on the same images all the time,” he said. “Think of all the still lives in the world. Some are good, and some are hideous, but no one says, ‘You stole my idea of painting a bowl of fruit.’”

“That’s just dishonest, Jeremy. This is different—you and Henry didn’t see the same thing and conjure it differently. You took what was his.”

Jeremy shook his head.

“All he had was plot, and plot is fair game. Writers use the same stories all the time and no one cries plagiarism. Look at Shakespeare. He stole almost all of his plots.”

“Now you’re equating yourself with Shakespeare?”

“I’m not,” Jeremy said emphatically. “I’m just saying that Henry came up with a good idea that he executed poorly. I think he’s embarrassed by that novella, which I’ve never even heard him mention. It’s probably the reason he went into journalism.”

I saw a flash of white in the woods at the edge of the tennis court and heard Franny’s low laughter. Jeremy followed my gaze. For a few seconds, we paused in our conversation as we watched Franny and Lil scrambling off together into the woods. Jeremy shook his head like he’d seen this all before. “They can’t keep their hands off each other.”

I wasn’t ready to change the subject. I sank onto the grass, the novella in my lap. Jeremy sat beside me. I asked when he’d discovered it. He told me it was during his freshman year at Vassar, when he met Franny in Truro for Thanksgiving break. Henry had encouraged him to read widely from his library and to borrow anything.

“So you helped yourself to his story?”

“It stayed with me, and so I reimagined it.”

Jeremy looked at me as if he was waiting for me to agree with him, to soothe the part of him that, deep down, must have known that what he’d done was wrong. I asked if Henry knew what he had done. Jeremy said, “Not yet, but I’m going to tell him. Maybe tomorrow.” His face was solemn. And then I remembered the flea market.

“He already knows what you did,” I said quietly.

Jeremy looked confused.

“I told him.”

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