Page 41 of I'm Not Done with You Yet

Everything stops spinning, and I’m suddenly hearing every word clearly, as though she’s speaking right in my ear. This is it, the reason I haven’t heard from her in so long.

“I wanted to, so many times. You can’t even imagine. But his parents heard about what happened at Oxford—of course they did—and they forbid me from having any contact with anyone from Pemberton. They made me sign all these NDAs; it was crazy.”

“NDA?” I can barely keep up.

“Nondisclosure agreement.”

“What—why?”

Thalia shakes her head. “Because of the family company, of course. It’s a huge media and tech corporation, so they need to uphold a good reputation. No scandals allowed. Not even for in-laws. Especially not forbulein-laws—bulemeans ‘white person,’ by the way. The direct translation is ‘faded.’ That’s what they call me. The faded person.” She snorts again.

“Thalia, that sounds terrible.” It’s a struggle keeping my voice even. In my mind I’m lining up all of Ivan’s faceless family members and stabbing them one by one. I can hear the wet thud of their bodies so vividly that it makes me lick my lips.

“Whatever, fuck them. I can’t believe I’m here with you. Tell me about yourself. What have you been up to?”

If we’d spent the last hour only talking about her brilliant debut, I wouldn’t mention my writing at all. But since she’s revealed her less-than-wonderful marriage to me, I feel like I owe it to her to reveal my less-than-wonderful career. “I’ve been writing, actually,” I say.

“Writing?” Thalia cries, delighted. “What do you write? Are you published? You must be! You were one of the best writers at that program.”

I shrug and take a longer swallow of champagne. It’s painful, revealing how unremarkable my life is. How, without the sheen of her brilliance, I have sunk into mediocrity these past few years. “Just a couple of lit fic.”

“Oh, I love that! I can totally see you writing lit fic. You’ve always been so deep.”

“Your book—A Most Pleasant Death—it sounds...” I wantto say that it sounds like it’s about us, but I have no idea how to say it without sounding completely desperate.

Thalia purses her lips and looks down on her lap. “Um, this may sound a bit crazy, but it was kind of inspired by us.”

A warm glow spreads from the middle of my chest all the way to my fingertips and toes. I almost burst into tears and hug Thalia, but somehow manage to stop myself and drink more champagne instead.

“I knew I wanted to write about our friendship for the longest time, but I just never had the right plot, or the right—I don’t know. I guess I just never had the guts to.” She gives me a sheepish grin. “So the years before I worked up the courage to writeA Most Pleasant Death, I’d actually been writing a few YAs.”

I snort. “Yeah, right.” I can’t see brilliant, deep, incredibly complex Thalia writing YA.

“No, really! Look them up. I wrote under the pen name Ali Pemberton.” She laughs. “Kind of on the nose, but what can I say? I missed our Pemberton days.”

She can’t possibly be serious, can she? But I take out my phone and Google the name, and sure enough, Ali Pemberton has published four YA books, and they’ve all done significantly better, especially the latest one. I look at the shiny “Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection” and “National Book Award Longlist” stickers on the cover of the latest book. Getting picked for those are a feat that most authors long for. Then I see the publication dates and I look up, wide-eyed. “These books were all published in the last two years.”

She nods, taking another sip of champagne.

“You published two books a year? That’s amazing!” Mostwriters chug along at a single book per year. Or rather, most writers are like me and struggle to come up with one book a year. Publishing schedules are geared toward releasing one book a year; a good pace at which to properly set up a known brand without putting too much of a strain on authors. But of course Thalia is too fast for such schedules, whereas I am the turtle, forever doomed to struggle to even keep up. Even if I were to miraculously finish a new book by next week, due to the slowness of publishing, the earliest it would hit the shelves is in two years’ time. Most people don’t know that it takes two years on average from the time a book is sold to a publisher to the time it’s available to consumers.

“It’s not so hard, once you get the hang of writing fast. If you want, we can do a few writing exercises to get your juices flowing,” she says. “I actually feel like the MFA course kind of screwed us over in that sense. They were so focused on writing flawlessly instead of writing fast. Such pretentious assholes.”

That shocks a laugh out of me, and I stare at her in wonderment, because how can a person like Thalia exist? I drain my glass and she refills it for me, and I’ve lost count of how many glasses I’ve had but I don’t care; I don’t care because I’m with Thalia and it’s just like old times.

“In fact,” Thalia says, “I’m going on a writing retreat tomorrow in the Hamptons. You should come. There are eight of us going, and we’ve rented an incredible house there. It’ll be good for you and me—we’ll do nothing but drink and write and I could show you all of my secrets.”

I know she’s talking about writing secrets, but I can’t help the thrill of excitement that shoots up the length of my spine. The way she’s smiling at me as though she’s talking more than just about writing.

“But—tomorrow? That’s too soon. I haven’t—don’t you have to, like, pay or something? Make reservations?”

She shrugs. “Sure, of course. But one of the few perks of marrying into Ivan’s nightmare of a family is that I do have access to a disgusting amount of money. Call it my repayment for having to put up with all of their shit. And as for rooms, don’t even worry about it; you can just stay in my room. It’ll be a bit of a squeeze in bed, but we’ll make it work!” She winks at me. Shewinksat me. I’ve stopped breathing completely.

“I can’t take that, Thalia, it’s too generous.” I would literally give up everything to be able to go on a writing retreat with Thalia where we would have to share a bed with each other after a day of wining and writing.

“Nonsense! You’re coming. Where are you staying?”

“Domino Inn in Brooklyn.”

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