Page 2 of Seven Days in June

“I can’t thank you enough,” she gushed. “Really, your support keeps theCursedworld turning. I hope book fifteen lives up to your expectations.”

If I ever write it.The manuscript was due in a week, and paralyzed with writer’s block, she’d barely cobbled together five chapters.

Swiftly, she changed the subject. “So, does anyone readVariety?”

This was aRedbookandMartha Stewart Livingcrowd, so no.

“Exciting news broke yesterday.” Eva sat down her glass and clasped her black-manicured fingers under her chin. “Our wish was granted.Cursedhas been optioned for film rights!”

There were shrieks. Someone threw a witch hat in the air. A flushed blonde whipped out her iPhone and recorded Eva’s speech so she could post it toCursed’s Facebook fan page later. Along with several Tumblr and Twitter fan accounts, Facebook was a deeply important book-promo platform for Eva, where her readers shared fan art, gossiped, wrote obscene fan fiction, and debated casting decisions for the movie they’d fantasized about for years.

“I landed a producer”—a Black female producer, thank you, Jesus—“who really gets our world. Her last film was a steamy Sundance short about a real estate agent seducing a werewolf! We’re interviewing directors now.”

“Sebastian on film! Imagine?” swooned a faux redhead. “We just need a Black actor with bronze eyes. One who’s a good biter.”

“Eva, how do I ask my husband to bite me?” whined a Meryl Streep look-alike. This always happened, the sex talk.

“Arousal through biting is a thing, you know. It’s called odaxelagnia,” Eva divulged. “Just tell him you want it. Whisper it in his ear.”

“Odaxelagnia me,” slurred Meryl.

“Catchy,” Eva said with a wink.

“I’m stoked to see big-screen Gia,” said a husky-voiced brunette. “She’s such a fearless warrior. Sebastian’s supposed to be the scary one, but she’s killed armies of vampire hunters to protect him.”

“Right? The force of teen-girl passion could power nations.” With a twinkle in her eye, Eva launched into the mini-monologue she’d perfected ages ago. This part was still fun. “We’re taught that men are all animal impulse and id. But girls get there first.”

“And then society stomps it out,” said the brunette.

“Word.” Eva knew the pain was close. Before an episode, her mask slipped and the Black popped out.

“Look at history,” Eva continued, rubbing a temple. “Roxanne Shanté out-rapping grown men at fourteen. Serena winning the US Open at seventeen. Mary Shelley writingFrankensteinat eighteen. Josephine Baker conquering Paris at nineteen. Zelda Fitzgerald’s high school diary was so fire that her future husband stoleentire passagesto writeThe Great Gatsby. The eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley published her first piece at fourteen, while enslaved. Joan of Arc. Greta Thunberg. Teen girls rearrange the fucking world.”

An electrified hush fell over the group. But Eva was sinking. The pounding in her temples was sharpening by the millisecond. Sugar triggered her condition, and she’d been force-fed all those cookies. She knew better—but she’d been cuffed.

Absentmindedly, Eva snapped the rubber band she always wore around her right wrist. It was a pain distraction. An old trick.

“Remember when Kate Winslet escapes theTitanic?” asked the brunette. “And then jumps back onto be with Leo? That’s teen-girl passion.”

“I’d do that today to get to Leo,” admitted Lacey, “and I’m forty-one.” She was fifty-five.

“Just like Gia,” gasped a petite woman with a clip-on bun. “In every book, she fights her way back to Sebastian—despite knowing that when they have sex, they’re cursed to lose each other again.”

“It’s a metaphor,” said Eva, her vision blurring. “No matter how perilous the journey, it’s never over for true soul mates. Whodoesn’twant a connection that burns forever, despite distance, time, and curses?”

She didn’t. The thought of perilous love made her nauseous.

“Confession,” whispered a flushed blonde on her fourth glass of rosé. “My son plays Ohio State basketball, and I get so horny during games. To me, all those beautiful Black players are Sebastian.”

Speechless, Eva gulped down her seltzer.

This’ll be my legacy, she thought.I have friends organizing protest rallies and writing Pulitzer Prize–winningNew Yorkeressays on race in America. My own daughter’s so militant that she begged a cop to arrest her at the Middle School March on Midtown. But mycontribution to these troubled times will be inciting white women of a certain age to sexually profile Black student athletes who’d really just like to make it to the NBA in peace.

Then Eva’s head was seized by a thunderous hammering. She clutched the edge of her seat with trembling fingers, bracing herself for each blow. The world went fuzzy. Features were melting off faces like Dalí’s clocks; the competing perfumes in the room made her stomach lurch, and then the hammer slammed into her face harder and faster, aiming to maim, and she heard everything at a punishing decibel—the AC, clanging silverware, and merciful Christ, did someone open a candy wrapper in Connecticut?

They always escalated so fast, the ruthlessly violent migraines that had tortured her since childhood and baffled the most decorated specialists on the East Coast.

Eva’s eyelids started to droop. In a well-practiced fake-out, she raised her brows to look alert, shooting a dazzling smile at her audience. Looking at those bawdy broads, she felt the low-grade envy she always felt in a group. They were normal. They could do things.

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