Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [69]
Zoë had been in the living room for the last two hours, lying on the floor with her feet propped on the couch, lazily talking to Everett, the last of our guests. I’d left them alone when it became obvious the three Red Bulls he’d had were not going to wear off anytime soon. In my room, I’d listened to their occasional bursts of laughter, irate with Zoë and annoyed with Everett for delaying my opportunity to let her know.
I was sitting in bed reading when she came in.
“I will be full until Thursday.” She threw herself long-ways across my bed, setting her head in my lap. “Everett is hilarious. Have you heard his theory on Sixteen Candles and adolescent rite of passage?”
Her spontaneous kindness, a stark departure from her general attitude toward me in the last week, only made me angrier.
Peering up, she caught my expression and stopped. “What’s wrong?”
“I want to talk to you.”
“Something the matter?”
“You wrote about me,” I said.
“What?”
“You used me,” I repeated. “In your article.” I picked up the magazine and read the first paragraph aloud. Her back stiffened. “You wrote this about me. And, to be honest, I don’t exactly appreciate it.”
Zoë sat up. Staring at the bedspread, she said with carefully checked frustration, “I don’t understand what the problem is.”
“You can’t just write about your friends in national magazines and not expect them to be upset!”
“I didn’t write about you. I was inspired by you. There’s a difference.”
“You’ve humiliated me in front of everyone we know.”
She laughed disbelievingly. “No one we know is going to read that stupid magazine. It’s UrbanStyle!”
“Oh, really?” I counted on my hand: “What about Valerie, Eli, Everett. This article’s made you a local celebrity.”
She stood up. “You’re totally overreacting.”
I followed her to the living room, where she began stacking plastic cups from the coffee table and smashing them down into the wastebasket.
“I want to talk about this,” I insisted.
She raised her eyebrows, passing me for a second round through the living room for the paper plates. “So talk.”
“Did you have to use me as a case study? Couldn’t you have dug up something more profound from your own life? Why me?”
She smashed the paper plates down in the trash can, then threw up her hands. “I don’t know! Why do writers ever do what they do? It just came to me. It’s not like I sat down with the intention of publicly humiliating my roommate and best friend.”
I was surprised to hear her say “best friend.” It made me think of elementary school.
She stepped into the trash can, pushing the discarded plates and cups and napkins down with her glitter-bedecked sneakers. “Writing doesn’t work that way, and you know it.” She stomped her foot on the ground to shake off the debris. “You sit down, you start to write, and things from life just creep in. It’s not on purpose. And it’s not like I used your name or anything.”
“My housemate,” I repeated. “Great cover. How many of those do you have again?”
“You know, I really thought you were different from this,” she said. “I thought living with another writer would be good for me.” She marched past me, stacking the bowls beside the couches. “You’ll have to forgive me, but I had all these crazy ideas that we would be sitting around talking about books and ideas. That we would be up late, editing each other’s work, brainstorming characters, throwing ideas back and forth—and sharing them. It’s not like there’s a copyright on creativity. I say something, you use it; you say something, I use it. That’s the way it works.”
She threw the dishes into the sink.
“Let’s not go there,” I said. I felt her anger snowballing, gathering debris from every minor disagreement and artistic difference. “That’s not what we’re talking about.”
“That’s what I’m talking about.” She threw the cake pan into the sink over the other dishes, sprayed it with a zigzag of dish soap. “I don’t see how everything between us has to be a competition.”
“When have I ever competed with you?”
“I stand up for you, you know,” she went