just a body in the world moving forward

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.