“Can I come over? I’m sure you’re busy, but can I come over? And just hang out?” Alice missed the twisty cord of the telephone in her room on Pomander, watching the pink flesh of her finger bulge through.
“You want to come here to New Jersey to hang out with my family?” Sam asked, incredulous. “I cannot stop you, and would be delighted. I personally would vote for alcohol, with grown-ups only, but you do you, baby.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can remember how to get there,” Alice said, and hung up the phone to map it.
It wasn’t complicated: Alice took the F to Jay Street, then the A to 34th, then New Jersey Transit, which felt like the subway but wasn’t. Alice liked long train rides. She was feeling too out of sorts to read a book—she’d stared at her bookshelf for almost twenty minutes, unable to decipher if she wanted a happy ending or science fiction or something with death on the first page—and so had turned on the latest episode of her favorite podcast, Shippers. The tag line for the podcast was The Reason the Whole Internet Was Invented, which was maybe a stretch, but Alice loved it—every week, the two hosts would talk about fictional characters who had not had a canonical romantic relationship, and then gab for upward of forty minutes about why they should have, how they would have, and so forth. Archie and Jughead, Buffy and Cordelia, Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie, Chris Chambers and Gordie Lachance, Tami Taylor and Tim Riggins. The couples weren’t always ones that Alice believed in or would have chosen, but the hosts were entertaining and so she always listened.
“Okay, okay,” said Jamie, one of the hosts, after the theme music played. “I’m excited about this. It’s kind of old-school, but not the most old-school we’ve ever done.”
“Today we are going to talk about the two books by cult author Leonard Stern, Time Brothers and Dawn of Time. Now, Jamie, what makes someone a cult author, and does that mean they’re in a cult?” Rebecca, the cohost, said.
Leonard had always been like that: liable to appear out of nowhere. A question on Jeopardy!, an answer in the crossword puzzle. He was even on an episode of The Simpsons, where he got into a fight with the guy who owned the comic book store about some Time Brothers memorabilia. Most people knew his name, and if they didn’t, they always knew Time Brothers, which had been an easy cheat for Alice at school when it came to making friends. She didn’t even have to say anything—news of a famous parent traveled quickly. Alice would be out of college before she discovered this was a bad thing and never led to an honest connection.
“Okay, so, before our imaginary call-in line starts to light up with a thousand of you complaining that we are about to suggest incest, first of all, no, and second of all, no,” Rebecca said. “In today’s episode, we are going to ship the hell out of the noncreepy Time Brother, Scott, who was played by Tony Jakes, and Dawn, who probably had a last name—Dawn Gale!—from Dawn of Time.”
A small electronic trumpet noise sounded in the background. “Scott and Dawn! Tony Jakes and Sarah Michelle! I love this pairing.” Jamie laughed at her own joke. “Okay, first of all, I want to acknowledge that it’s weird, but I can’t help it that in my brain, Dawn is Sarah Michelle Gellar, who is a real person in the world, like post–All My Children but pre-Buffy, and Tony Jakes does not exist, like, I couldn’t tell you one thing about him.”
“He has a horse farm, according to Wikipedia,” Rebecca added, clearly researching in real time.
“Right, a horse farm. Okay, so Tony Jakes has a horse farm, and has not been on-screen in, like, two decades, and according to this super-old profile I read in People magazine, he’s gay and also renovates houses. So he sounds awesome, and I love him.”
“Anyway, here’s what I like about Leonard Stern,” Rebecca said. “Do you know how old he was when he published his first novel?”
“Twenty-five?” Jaime guessed.
“Incorrect! Leonard Stern was thirty-eight years old! And he didn’t publish Dawn of Time until he was fifty-two!” Rebecca sounded triumphant.
“I love that,” Jamie said. “Snaps for late bloomers.”
“Seriously,” Rebecca said. “We should start a whole other podcast about people who really tap into their potential after forty. That’s a good podcast idea! Tweet at us if you agree!”
Rebecca and Jamie were still talking, but Alice wasn’t really listening anymore. She’d never thought about Leonard as a late bloomer. He had bloomed within her lifetime; how could it feel late? But hearing the numbers out loud, from strangers, it did seem notable. These two women were talking about these characters that her father had invented as if they were real, because they were. Sometimes people didn’t understand that—Alice wasn’t a writer, but she’d spent enough time sitting at dinner tables with novelists to understand that fiction was a myth. Fictional stories, that is. Maybe there were bad ones out there, but the good ones, the good ones—those were always true. Not the facts, not the rights and the lefts, not the plots, which could take place in outer space or in hell or anywhere in between, but the feelings. The feelings were the truth.