Excerpt
Say It Out Loud
Chapter OneMy stories never begin in the right place.
In high school, when I first read the Meadow books, I started with the second one because the girl who told me about them in Spanish class misremembered the titles.
“Forest Dark,” she said with great certainty. “And then The Meadow.”
“I thought The Meadow was first,” I remember asking. “That’s why the fans are called Meadowers, right?”
She shrugged. “I’m just telling you,” she said, “that’s how I read them and it totally made sense.”
By then, I was fairly sure I was the last person in the world to read the books, the distinctive black-and-red covers seemingly on two desks of every class period at least. Popular was an understatement. It was part of the reason I hesitated to read them, worried they’d be too hyped and my expectations would be unreachably high.
So when I finally broke down and read them to escape the FOMO, I read them out of order. I immediately jumped into the middle of Arabella and William’s heartbreak, how vampire William split them up for months and months to protect human Arabella from his vampire family, from his nature, from himself, and then later realized I had been right about The Meadow being the first book.
It was the wrong order for the series, but the right order for me, because the wrongness of my timeline didn’t stop with The Meadow.
There had been Mom’s passing when I was in college—as unexpected as it was fast—and how the police had said she must have died moments after we’d said goodbye from my Thanksgiving break visit. She was near the door when they found her, just past the lopsided rug she had crocheted herself. They told me she was smiling, like the undiagnosed heart disease had snatched her out of existence before her lip muscles had time to register the loss of her.
Then there was graduating with, of all things, an English degree during a huge recession. I had intended to go into publishing. Mom always said I would flourish if I surrounded myself with books and the people who loved them. I wanted to be on an editorial track, to midwife other people’s books from mind to bound copy. And I wanted to prove to Mom—wherever she was—that this dream she believed in for me could still happen now that she was gone.
But because of the timing thing, it was destined to fail. After a year of trying and failing post-graduation to get so much as an unpaid internship I almost definitely wouldn’t have been able to afford—some with notes attached from well-wishing hirers that said things like, “If only you had graduated last year, we would have snapped you up in an instant!”—I counted my losses and took a job as a front desk manager for a chain of dental offices in Dallas disturbingly close to Mom’s old house. Like a homing pigeon returning to its deserted post bearing nothing but disappointment.
Even the podcast I started in retaliation against what was beginning to feel like a claustrophobic life was confirmation of being unlucky with timing. How I hit just off the mark enough for it to be popular but not mega-popular—too many podcasts already cramming the headphones and aux cords before I made it on the scene—but then being just right enough to attract the crappiest buyers. The ones who promised me royalties and performance fees would follow the measly two grand they used to buy the rights to the show, its title, and the theme before they ghosted me, replacing me with a YouTube personality to attract more listeners.
It’s my own fault, in a way, the podcast. I should have known better than to even try to deviate from normal, no matter how much it rubbed me the wrong way that my mother, if she were still here, would be so disappointed that my life is despairingly average. If she showed up like a Dickens ghost, she would probably do it in New York, haunting from building to building looking for a daughter she wouldn’t find because I just couldn’t swing it, our dream.
Juniper Green is many things, but extraordinary isn’t one of them. The extraordinary—the magical and ghostly and everything in between—I’ve learned, is best left to books.
Maybe my perpetual bad timing is a result of the magic leaving, too. Because lately (like, the last decade lately), I’ve wondered if I’m a step out of time, like somewhere in my life I sneezed too hard and blew myself backward or forward by a second or two and now I’m doomed to spend eternity trying to claw those moments back.
I’m always half a step too late, just off the mark. Finding things at the exact incorrect time, just tantalizing enough to feel real, but just wrong enough not to go the distance.
Which is exactly how it feels to be standing here in front of the sleekly modern recording studio nestled into the trees: Like I’m too late. Like I skipped a chapter entirely. It reminds me of that awful night in college, stepping out from stage left as a character in a play expected to know the lines that were never hers to begin with. Or more recently, the late-night Google searches of “Is it normal to feel this unfulfilled?” only to find lengthy articles about millennial exhaustion and think pieces about the caricature of the burnt-out gifted-and-talented kids as adults.
Of course this is nothing like that. If I stop and think about it, really think, I can trace the timeline that led me to this moment like fresh steps in snow: the podcast being just successful enough for me to quit my job, then selling the podcast thinking it would mean more work but instead finding it meant none, then the steadily rising rent in Texas combined with my inability to find another job forcing me to ask Dad if I could move in with him in Colorado for a little while to figure things out . . .
And of course I remember the email. The email. The one that was impossibly forwarded to my current inbox from my long-deleted On the Same Page podcast account. The one “personally” inviting me to come to an open audition for a high-profile dramatized audio series at—get this—Tatum Sound Studios.
Which is a ridiculous sentence all on its own, and not just because it’s almost certainly a scam to get me to pay money for audio equipment or something.
When I was a kid visiting Dad during the Colorado summers, Tatum was a singular school for all twelve grades, a row of tourist shops bookended by the local grocer and the half sporting goods, half junk shop that looked as old as the mountains that envelop the town, and a diner just off the road leading to the big ski resort towns.
The biggest thing that ever happened here was when they filmed one—as in the singular—post-wrap scene from the final film of the Meadow series in the mountains above Tatum. It wasn’t even a pivotal scene: It was a one-off dream sequence where Arabella looks at William through snow. Apparently, Tatum was conveniently blanketed at the time and both of the hotshot actors could get here no problem and thus, every single gift shop in town now lays claim to this factoid by selling Meadow gifts including william was here keychains.
Even still, I think the town probably only got, like, two tourists from the ordeal.
But even if I’ve been stuck somewhere outside the regular course of time, Tatum hasn’t.
I passed a Target on my way here. A Target. I used to have to beg Dad to drive me the hour into town just to have more than the two tampon options carried at Drew’s Drugstore. Now Tatum is town.
Even the electric chime that sounds above my head as I stand frozen in the cracked doorway of the sound studio sounds new and expensive and like progress, as if the recording studio belongs in LA or Chicago or a place where 99 percent of the citizens wear something other than cowboy-chic athleisure.
I really shouldn’t be here.
I’m thirty-two. Not twelve, not sixteen, not even twenty-one.
Thirty. Two.
It’s time to start acting like it and stop wasting my time.
