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fight weekend

At nine thirty in Las Vegas I am about to die of exhaustion and bad hair but Maria says absolutely not, it is nine thirty in Las Vegas, go change your clothes, and twenty minutes later we are whizzing down the strip to the Bellagio, where she knows of a caviar bar she thinks we should try. Maria is the kind of person who knows things like that, who has friends in every city we visit, pulling stories like so many fancy dresses from the depths of her Mary Poppins bag.

“We’re on book tour,” we keep explaining to taxi drivers and front desk clerks, to bartenders at dimly-lit hotel restaurants. Next to us in Nashville is a wedding party doing one round of Jaegerbombs after another. “We write YA novels.”

In California the girls at Archbishop O’Dowd visit ask the best questions anyone has ever asked me; there’s a fire drill and we stand on the football field in the April sunshine talking about college, talking about the books they like to read. It makes me want to go teach high school. It makes me want to write about high school with a truer heart.

 

(It turns out I like caviar a lot; or, more accurately, I like toast points and food that is also an activity, and I happily assemble the world’s tiniest, most intricate late-night dinner, trying not to spill capers down my dress. Everyone else is here to see Mayweather and Pacquiao beat each other to smithereens, all the girls in stilettos and glitter. I hook the heels of my boots around the rungs of my barstool, take it in.)

We are tired and rather slaphappy; we make our own excellent time. At a Hilton in Tennessee I plug in the iron and an actual flame shoots out of the wall; when I tell her about it both of us double over cackling even though it isn’t actually all that funny, totally uncontrollable, geysering up. “I could hear laughing you all the way upstairs,” Susane reports. Susane’s fans are the kind who drive seven hours to see her and I am humbled by the gentleness of her heart, by her generosity. We get cupcakes for her birthday and have them delivered to the bookstore, all of us singing in the children’s section of the Barnes and Noble, making a wish.

In the morning there’s a 4:30 wake up call, still dark, the whole city shining out the window of the thirty-fourth floor. I drag my suitcase down to the lobby, watch the rest of the world trickling in.