She’d thought Reagan had to work tonight. That was the only reason Cath had come home. But she didn’t have to stay here. She was going to meet Nick at the library later anyway.…

Cath pretended to get something she needed out of her desk. A pack of gum.

“Okay,” she said, “I’m taking off.”

“But you just got here,” Levi said. “Don’t you want to stay and talk about the symbolism of Johnny’s relationship with Ponyboy? And the struggle between Sodapop and Darry? Hey, do you think there’s such a thing as Outsiders fanfiction?”

“I’ve gotta go,” Cath said, trying to say it to Reagan. “Meeting somebody.”

“Who are you meeting?” Levi asked.

“Nick. My writing partner.”

“Oh. Right. Do you want me to walk you home later?”

“Nick’ll probably walk me home,” she said.

“Oh.” Levi brought his eyebrows together, but still smiled. “Cool. Later.”

She couldn’t get away from him fast enough. She got to the library and wrote a thousand words of Carry On before Nick showed up.

* * *

“Shut that thing down,” Nick said. “You’re corrupting my creative centers with static.”

“That’s what she said,” Cath said, closing her laptop.

Nick looked dubious.

“It was sort of a metaphysical ‘that’s what she said.’”

“Ah.” He set down his backpack and pulled out their notebook. “You working on your final project?”

“Indirectly,” Cath said.

“What does that mean?”

“Have you ever heard sculptors say that they don’t actually sculpt an object; they sculpt away everything that isn’t the object?”

“No.” He sat down.

“Well, I’m writing everything that isn’t my final project, so that when I actually sit down to write it, that’s all that will be left in my mind.”

“Clever girl,” he said, pushing the open notebook toward her. She flipped through it. Nick had filled five pages, front and back, since they’d last met.

“What about you?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I might turn in a story I worked on this summer.”

“Isn’t that cheating?”

“I don’t think so. It’s more like being really ahead of schedule.… All I can think about right now is this story.” He nudged the notebook toward Cath again. “I want you to read what I did.”

This story. Their story. Nick kept trying to call it an anti-love story. “But it’s not anti-love,” she’d argued.

“It’s anti- everything you usually find in a love story. Gooey eyes and ‘you complete me.’”

“‘You complete me’ is a great line,” Cath said. “You wish you came up with ‘you complete me.’”

Cath didn’t tell him that she’d been writing love stories—rewriting the same love story—every day for the last five years. That she’d written love stories with and without the goo, love-at-first-sight stories, love-before-first-sight stories, love-to-hate-you stories.…

She didn’t tell Nick that writing love stories was her thing. Her one true thing. And that his anti-love story read like somebody’s very first fanfic—Mary Sue to the tenth power. That the main character was obviously Nick and that the girl was obviously Winona Ryder plus Natalie Portman plus Selena Gomez.

Instead Cath fixed it. She rewrote his dialogue. She reined in the quirk.

“Why’d you cross that out?” Nick said tonight, leaning over her left shoulder. He smelled good. (Breaking news: Boys smell good.) “I liked that part,” he said.

“Our character just stopped her car in a parking lot to wish on a dandelion.”

“It’s refreshing,” Nick said. “It’s romantic.”

Cath shook her head. Her ponytail brushed Nick’s neck. “It makes her seem like a douche.”

“You have something against dandelions?”

“I have something against twenty-two-year-old women wishing on dandelions. Stopping the car to wish on dandelions. Also, the car? No. No to vintage Volvos.”

“It’s a character detail.”

“It’s a cliché. I swear to God, every surviving Volvo produced between 1970 and 1985 is being driven by quirky fictional girls.”

Nick pouted down at the paper. “You’re crossing out everything.”

“I’m not crossing out everything.”

“What are you leaving?” He leaned over more and watched her write.

“The rhythm,” Cath said. “The rhythm is good.”

“Yeah?” He smiled.

“Yeah. It reads like a waltz.”

“Make you jealous?” He smiled some more. His eyeteeth were crooked, but not bad enough to get braces.

“Definitely,” Cath said. “I could never write a waltz.”

Sometimes, when they talked like this, she was sure they were flirting. But when the notebook closed, the light always went off in Nick’s eyes. At midnight, he’d rush off to wherever he always rushed off to, probably to wrap a beer around a blond girl’s waist. To kiss her with his twisted eyeteeth showing.

Cath kept working on the scene; a whole new conversation took shape in the margin. When she looked up, Nick was still smiling at her.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, laughing.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just … It’s crazy that this works. Between you and me. That we can actually write together. It’s like … thinking together.”

“It’s nice,” Cath said, meaning it. “Writing is lonely.”

“You wouldn’t think we’d be on the same wavelength, you know? We’re so different.”

“We’re not that different.”

“Totally different,” he said. “Look at us.”

“We’re both English majors,” Cath said. “We’re both white. We live in Nebraska. We listen to the same music, we watch the same TV shows, we even have the same pair of Chuck Taylors—”

“Yeah. But it’s like John Lennon writing with … Taylor Swift instead of Paul McCartney.”

“Get over yourself,” Cath said. “You’re not half as pretty as Taylor Swift.”

“You know what I mean.” Nick poked her in the arm with the end of his pen.

“It’s nice,” she said, looking up at him, still not sure if they were flirting—pretty sure she didn’t want them to be. “Writing is lonely.”

There wasn’t time for Cath to write a page of her own in the notebook. She and Nick spent the rest of their night in the stacks, revamping his section. The Volvo became a rusty Neon, and the dandelion detail blew away completely.

At eleven forty-five, they packed up. When they got to the library’s front steps, Nick was already checking his phone. “Hey,” Cath said, “do you feel like walking past Pound Hall on your way to your car? We could walk together.”

He didn’t look up from his phone. “Better not. I need to get home. See you in class, though.”

“Yeah,” Cath said, “see ya.” She got out her phone and started dialing 911 before he’d disappeared into the shadows.

* * *

“Dad? It’s Cath. I was just calling to say hi. I was thinking about coming home this weekend. Give me a call.”

___

“Dad, I’m calling you at work now. It’s Thursday. I think I’m gonna come home tomorrow. Call me back, okay? Or e-mail me? Love you.”

___

“Hey, honey, it’s your dad. Don’t come home this weekend. I’m going to be gone all weekend at the Gravioli shoot. In Tulsa. I mean, come home if you want to. Throw a big party. Like Tom Cruise in … God, what is that movie? Not Top Gun—Risky Business! Have a big party. Invite a bunch of people over to watch Risky Business. I don’t have any booze, but there’s still some green bean casserole left. I love you, Cath. Are you still fighting with your sister? Don’t.”

* * *

Love Library was busier than normal that weekend; it was the week before finals, and everybody seemed to be digging in. Cath had to roam deeper and deeper into the library to find an empty study carrel. She thought of Levi and his theory that the library invented new rooms the more that you visited. Tonight she walked by a half-sized door in a stairwell. The sign said SOUTH STACKS, and Cath would swear she’d never seen it before.

She opened the door, and there was an immediate step down into a normal-sized hallway. Cath ended up in another siloish room, the mirror image of Nick’s; the wind was even blowing in the opposite direction.

She found an empty cubicle and set down her bag, taking off her coat. A girl sitting on the other side of the gray partition was watching her.

The girl sat up a little, so that Cath could see she was smiling. She looked quickly around the room, then leaned forward, holding on to the cubicle wall. “I don’t mean to bother you, but I love your shirt.”

Cath glanced down. She was wearing her KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON shirt from Etsy, the one with Baz and Simon’s faces.

“Oh,” Cath said, “thanks.”

“It’s always so cool to meet somebody else who reads fanfiction in real life.…”

Cath must have looked surprised. “Oh my God,” the girl said, “do you even know what I’m talking about?”

“Yeah,” Cath said. “Of course. I mean, I think so. Carry On, Simon?”

“Yes!” The girl laughed quietly and looked around the room again. “That was almost embarrassing. I mean, it’s like having a secret life sometimes. People think it’s so weird.… Fanfiction. Slash. You know.”

Cath nodded. “Do you read a lot of fic?”

“Not as much anymore,” the girl said. “I was an addict in high school.” Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she was wearing a sweatshirt that read VERDIGRE FOOTBALL—FIGHT, HAWKS, FIGHT! She didn’t look like a creepy shut-in.… “What about you?” she asked.

“I still read a lot…,” Cath said.

“Magicath is my absolute favorite,” the girl interrupted, like she couldn’t hold it back. “I’m obsessed with Carry On. Have you been keeping up?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s been posting so much lately. Every time there’s a new chapter, I have to stop everything to read it. And then read it again. My roommate thinks I’m crazy.”

“Mine, too.”

“But it’s just so good. Nobody writes Simon and Baz like Magicath. I’m in love with her Baz. Like, in love. And I used to be a major Simon/Agatha shipper.”

Cath wrinkled her nose. “No.”

“I know, I was young.”

“If Agatha actually cared about either of them,” Cath said, “she’d pick one.”

“I know, right? When Simon broke it off with her in Carry On—such a good scene.”

“You didn’t think it was too long?”

“No,” the girl said, “did you?”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“I never think the chapters are too long. I just want more and more and more.” The girl waved her hands in front of her mouth like she was Cookie Monster eating cookies. “I’m telling you, I’m obsessed with Carry On. I feel like something big is about to happen soon.”

“Me, too,” Cath said. “I think the Mage might turn on Simon.”

“No! You think?”

“I’ve just got a feeling about it.”

“It killed me how long it took Simon and Baz to get together. And now I’m dying for them to have a big love scene. That’s my only complaint about Carry On—not enough Simon/Baz action.”

“She almost never writes love scenes,” Cath said, feeling her cheeks pink.

“Yeah, but when she does, they’re hot.”

“You think?”

“Um,” the girl laughed. “Yes.”

“This is why people think we’re crazy perverts,” Cath said.

The girl just giggled some more. “I know. Sometimes I forget that there’s still a real book coming out—like, it’s hard for me to imagine that the story is going to end any other way than the way Magicath writes it.”

“Sometimes…,” Cath said, “when I’m reading canon, I forget that Simon and Baz aren’t in love.”

“Right? I love Gemma T. Leslie, I always will—I feel like she was this major force in my childhood—and I know that Magicath wouldn’t exist without GTL. But now, I think I love Magicath more. Like she might be my favorite author. And she’s never even written a book.…”

Cath’s jaw was hanging slightly open, and she was shaking her head. “That’s crazy.”

“I know,” the girl said, “but I think it’s true.… Oh my God, I’m sorry. I’m talking your ear off. I just never get to talk about this stuff in real life. Except to my boyfriend. He knows what a freak I am about it.”

“Don’t apologize,” Cath said. “This was cool.”

The girl sat down, and so did Cath. She opened up her laptop and thought for a minute about Professor Piper, then opened up the latest chapter of Carry On. Something big was about to happen soon.

* * *

“Dad, it’s Cath. Are you back from Tulsa? Just checking in. Call me.”

___

“Dad? It’s Cath. Call me.”

___

“Hey, Cath, it’s your dad. I’m back. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. Worry about school. No, scratch that, don’t worry at all. Try not worrying, Cath—it’s an amazing way to be. Like flying. Love you, honey, tell your sister hi.”