Fangirl

hangnail-wounded—but still.)
    “Have you thought about introducing me to your parents?” she asked.
    “Yeah,” he said. “I figured you’d go with me to my sister’s wedding.”
    “When is it?”
    “May.”
    “We’ve only been dating for three and half weeks, right?”
    “That’s six months in freshman time.”
    “You’re not a freshman.”
    “Cather…” Levi hooked his feet on her chair and pulled it closer to the bed. “I really like you.”
    Cath took a deep breath. “I really like you, too.”
    He grinned and raised a hand-drawn eyebrow. “Can I drive you to Omaha?”
    Cath nodded.
     
    “That does it,” Simon said, charging forward, climbing right over the long dinner table. Penelope grabbed the tail of his cape, and he nearly landed face-first on a bench. He recovered quickly—“Let go, Penny”—and ran hard at Basil, both fists raised and ready.
    Basil didn’t move. “Good fences make good neighbors,” he whispered, just barely tipping his wand.
    Simon’s fist slammed into a solid barrier just inches from the other boy’s unflinching jaw. He pulled his hand back, yelping, still stumbling against the spell.
    This made Dev and Niall and all the rest of Basil’s cronies cackle like drunk hyenas. But Basil himself stayed still. When he spoke, it was so softly, only Simon could hear him. “Is that how you’re going to do it, Snow? Is that how you’re going to best your Humdrum?” He dropped the spell with a twitch of his wand, just as Simon regained his balance. “Pathetic,” Basil said, and walked away.

    —from chapter 4, Simon Snow and the Five Blades, copyright © 2008 by Gemma T. Leslie

 
    TWENTY-SIX
    Professor Piper held out her arms when Cath walked in. “Cath, you’re back. I wish I could say that I knew you would be, but I wasn’t sure—I was hoping.”
    Cath was back.
    She’d come to tell Professor Piper that she’d made up her mind. Again. She wasn’t going to write this story. She had enough to write right now and enough to worry about. This project was leftover crappiness from first semester. Just thinking about it made Cath’s mouth taste like failure (like plagiarism and stupid Nick stealing her best lines); Cath wanted to put it behind her.
    But once she was standing in Professor Piper’s office, and Professor Piper was Blue Fairy–smiling at her, Cath couldn’t say it out loud.
    This is so obviously about me needing a mother figure, she thought, disgusted with herself. I wonder if I’m going to get swoony around middle-aged women until I am one.
    “It was really kind of you to offer me a second chance,” Cath said, following the professor’s gesture to sit down. This is when she was supposed to say, But I’m going to have to say no.
    Instead she said, “I guess I’d be an idiot not to take it.”
    Professor Piper beamed at her. She leaned forward with an elbow on the desktop, resting her cheek against her fist like she was posing for a senior picture. “So,” she said, “do you have an idea in mind for your story?”
    “No.” Cath squeezed her fists shut and rubbed them into her thighs. “Every time I’ve tried to come up with something, I just feel … empty.”
    Professor Piper nodded. “You said something last time that I’ve been thinking about—you said that you didn’t want to build your own world.”
    Cath looked up. “Yes. Exactly. I don’t have brave new worlds inside of me begging to get out. I don’t want to start from nothing like that.”
    “But Cath—most writers don’t. Most of us aren’t Gemma T. Leslie.” She waved a hand around the office. “We write about the worlds we already know. I’ve written four books, and they all take place within a hundred and twenty miles of my hometown. Most of them are about things that happened in my real life.”
    “But you write historical novels—”
    The professor nodded. “I take something that happened to me in 1983, and I make it happen to somebody else in 1943. I pick my life apart that way, try to understand it better by writing straight through it.”
    “So everything in your books is true?”
    The professor tilted her head and hummed. “Mmmm … yes. And no. Everything starts with a little truth, then I spin my webs around it—sometimes I spin completely away from it. But the point is, I don’t start with nothing.”
    “I’ve never written anything that isn’t magical,” Cath said.
    “You still can, if that’s what you want. But you don’t