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I go to New York to meet with with my editors, because apparently that’s a thing I do now: I go to New York to meet with my editors. We eat hummus and talk about Revenge and the ALA conference and whether or not I’m on Twitter. We Discuss My Future. Afterward I wander up 5th Ave to meet Tom, who has been at the NCAA tournament all day and is therefore cheerfully drunk. “You’re fancy, Kate,” he keeps saying. “You’re legit.” It’s sixty-five degrees outside, and the sky is very blue.

I sold a book. I sold two books, actually, to a company you have probably heard of, and I’ve spent the last month trying to figure out what exactly to say about that: what’s the cool-kid way to tell people when your dream, quite literally, comes true? I’m stupidly, fall-on-my-butt happy. I’m humbled, which sounds lame. I’m weirdly embarrassed, I’m a nervous wreck, I still get coffee for middle-aged lawyers at work every day and in that way my life has changed not at all, except that my emotions are more out of control than they’ve been in years and years and I find myself doing things like crying at the Glee version of “Unpretty” when it comes on my Pandora on the bus. It’s good. It’s amazing. It’s just, like. Really new and scary.

On Friday night Sierra takes me for pickles and biscuits and the book club girls roll into town; we stay at a hilariously baroque-looking hotel in Midtown where a humorless man named Piotr checks me in. We wander Chelsea Market before breakfast and sit on the High Line for a while, tipping our faces up toward the sunshine. Lisa gives me party hair with the curling iron. Abbey buys four of the largest donuts I have ever seen. Meg spills blueberry juice all over her suitcase and we cram ourselves around the world’s tiniest table on Bleeker Street to listen to Hazmat Modine; there is a twenty-something girl trombone player in that band who immediately becomes my new hero, and I sit quiet and spellbound with my ankles curled underneath my chair.

At an indoor flea market in State College, Pennsylvania, I buy a set of antique green glass measuring cups, a smutty novel by Anne Rice, and a roughly hewn bar of Amish lard soap that smells distinctly animal in nature but promises to clear up both my face and any poison ivy I may ever get. R doesn’t buy anything, although she comes close with a box of dinosaur jelly jars from the 80s. R is getting her doctorate in psychology at Penn State, and she is absolutely bonkers for dinosaurs.

We do a 12-hour pub crawl with the people in her program, who are lovely, all of them from places like Memphis and Michigan and wearing funny hats, which is the theme. They’re impressed that we’ve been friends for as long as we have. “She was a bitch in high school,” R tells them, which is true. She hands me her beer to finish. “But she’s nice now.”

“Significantly less putrid!” I promise, although I’m actually not. I order a giant plate of nachos to compensate, both for the lie and for all the mean stuff I did when I was fifteen.

E comes to visit and brings, among other items, two mangoes, a bacon bar, and a pair of wax lips. We’ve got tickets to the Head and the Heart, to whom she introduced me over the summer and whose album, since then, has been on the kind of repeat normally reserved for August and Everything After in the fall of one’s sophomore year of high school. I’ve been listening to it a lot, is what I am saying: humming along while I make dinner, muttering the lyrics like a prayer.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4jFyOsY54M]

I’m not in fighting shape, to be honest. There’s something evil and muscular in nature happening in my neck that’s sent a white shooting pain up into the right side of my brain and down my arm for the last eleven days. My heart has recently been well and truly broken by something so infinitesimal and simultaneously so huge that I honestly just…never decided how to react to it.  And I’m two weeks out from the deadline for the biggest, most important project of my entire life.

“Study break,” we keep saying to each other, and ordering more beer.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N038B-DqLw&feature=player_embedded]

It’s a great show. A great show, all tambourine and screaming and a vocalist who is my lady hero, platinum-haired and fierce. I grin myself silly. I jump up and down. My neck, oddly, doesn’t hurt at all.

By ten-thirty we’re the kind of happily drunk that has me proclaiming, “I know where we can pee with no lines!” and marching us confidently into a dorm where I haven’t lived since 2006 (and where we can, for the record, pee with no lines). We eat cheese dip and sit on my stoop in the rain and tell each other stories. In the morning there’s a song I can’t get out of my head.

this morning on the train i sat across from a six-year-old boy with a black eye who was wearing batman sneakers and doing yoga. just hanging out cross-legged with his eyes closed, so quiet,  his small thumbs touching his small fingers.

then his little brother kicked him in the head.

felt right, somehow.

I’m overstimulated to the point where I want to color in a coloring book, which is a coping mechanism I was known to employ in college as if I had some sort of  serious developmental delay. I stop short of whipping out the Crayolas and instead spend the weekend holed up in my apartment mainlining soapy Canadian cop dramas and baking loaves of Lahey bread. Also, some cookies. Also, soup.

K and L coax me out with the promise of the Harvard Book Sale, but even there I buy five Baby-Sitters’ Club paperbacks (the originals, not the late nineties reissues; there was a point in my life at which I owned the whole series, and I want that feeling back). They girl at the checkout says: “Oh, yeah.” We meet Tom for brunch at the Station Diner in Newton where we eat large quantities of potatoes and debate the politics of v-neck t-shirts on men: a Glamour Don’t, in general, with sartorial dispensations for rock stars and firemen.

On Sunday we go to the mall, which is another thing I used to do to center myself in college, the incorrigible  suburbanite in me finding abject bliss in rows of Bath and Body Works lined up in color order and glass vases full of lip balm from the Gap. We eat at California Pizza Kitchen and I put my feet up on the dashboard, watch the water whiz by and make plans. At night I write some silliness on my laptop, scratching idly at a perpetual itch.

By Monday I am wrung out and happy. The sun feels yellow-warm on my face.

At home I lie on the lawn and chat to my mother, who sits in a rocking chair and smokes. I gossip. She listens to my problems, to one problem in particular, and repeats it back to me with a lucidity startling in its razor-sharpness. I have tried to explain this problem to no fewer than six people at this point, is the thing you have to understand here, and she is the only one who has been able to do that. Not to solve it. Just to say it back. I have forgotten that this is the miracle of her.

Yes, I say, and smile, pulling at damp blades of grass.

In New York I get what amounts to the best news of my young life and Sierra meets me at Columbus Circle to celebrate. We wander up the west side, warm and giddy; we eat french fries and nachos for dinner and drink a great number of sugary cocktails. Topics of discussion include: other people’s hipster weddings, our families, and whether or not she should cut off all her hair. I say, why not? At Prohibition the band is playing Redemption Song and a Dave Matthews tune I can’t remember the name of, only that I know it from a long, long time ago.

Don’t worry, I text Tom, when I get back to J’s apartment. I am very safe and awesome.

i like that the girl in the walgreens told me, “uh, i’m not hitting on you or anything, but i really like your outfit”

i like that it is so easy to teach pandora new tricks

i like that they are making a tragic love story starring mcadams + tatum, further proof that the secret works

i like ina’s classy icebox cake recipe with tate’s cookies and mocha whip

i like that i am going to nyc this weekend

i like when tom laughs really really for real

i like spending three days boogying with awesome hilarious ladies

i like everything about the voice and how it is a cooler, kinder, more interesting version of idol

i like 75 degrees and sunny

i like holding babies that are not mine

i like the jess lc necklace sierra got me for my birthday

i like that, by virtue of its sheer ridiculousness, the 1994 miniseries of the stand put a quick end to the terror incited in me by the book (although gary sinise was weirdly hot in it, i don’t even know what i’m saying but it’s true, i used to have a friend in high school who liked gary sinise and i made fun of her, i owe her an apology)

i like catching up on six weeks of new yorkers and tossing them across the room like a savage

i like that we are going to be fancy and check out the chihuly exhibit on friday

i like finding fresh ink cards i’ve never seen before

i like summer

i like whatever this is

nkotbsb @ fenway park, june2011