Free Afterworlds by Scott Westerfeld Page B

her phone came up. “I’m tweeting this.”
    “Congratulations,” Darcy said. “On your book deal, I mean. Not on tweeting this.”
    “I’m so glad I found you! We’ve been looking for more sister debs.”
    “We?”
    In answer, Annie propelled Darcy across the room to meet three more debutantes from the Class of 2014. They were all as bubbly as Annie, most of them meeting each other for the first time in person. They’d been on an email list together for months, exchanging advice and gossip and ironclad rules of publishing, none of which Darcy had ever heard before.
    “If you don’t make a bestseller list in your first week, you’re doomed!” was one.
    “Blurbs don’t work anymore!” was another.
    “You should make sure that the quotable lines of dialogue in your book never exceed a hundred and forty characters!” seemed at best debatable.
    “Your website should get at least a thousand hits a day before your book comes out!” was the scariest.
    The strange thing was that the four of them seemed to be in awe of Darcy. They’d read about her deal in Publisher’s Brunch , and had gleaned how much Paradox had paid.
    “Do they, like, roll out a red carpet when you come to the office?” one of her new sisters asked. Her name was Ashley, and her novel was a dystopian set on Mars.
    “Not exactly,” Darcy said, laughing. When she’d come to New York in March to meet Nan and Moxie, all the carpets at Paradox had been industrial gray.
    “Maybe you can blurb me!” another of them joked, and Darcy didn’t know what to say to that. She was suddenly glad that Publisher’s Brunch hadn’t given her age. Her sister debs were all in their midtwenties at least.
    Again, the little black dress was feeling too big, as if Darcy were shrinking inside it.
    “Isn’t this fun?” Annie asked as she handed Darcy her third beer.
    “Sure,” Darcy said, staring at the drink warily. “But you guys all know so much. I haven’t really figured out anything yet. Like, what should I do to promote myself?”
    “Everything.”
    As that word twisted itself into Darcy, she drank carefully, casting her eyes around for Kiralee Taylor. Being teased by Kiralee and Coleman had been frightening, but it had filled Darcy with a prickly, shivery joy. Her sister debs’ zealousness was generating only formless terror.
    “Everything? As in . . .”
    “As in do you have a blog at least?”
    “Just a Tumblr. But I never know what to post. I mean, should I just talk about myself?”
    “We could interview each other!” Annie exclaimed.
    “Okay.” Darcy tried to smile. “First question: Do you really think it matters where my name falls in the alphabet?”
    “ Everything matters,” Annie said.
    There was that word again. As Darcy took another long drink to consider it, she spotted Kiralee, who was in the corner with a tall young woman who Darcy hadn’t met, both of them laughing as if nothing mattered. Maybe they would let her stand near them.
    “How old are you, anyway?” Annie was asking.
    Darcy hesitated, and the silence stretched until it was impossible not to make a joke of it. “My agent and I are keeping that a secret,” she whispered.
    Annie’s eyes widened. “Good idea! You can do a big reveal of your age. Like a cover reveal, but years!”
    Darcy could only nod. With her third beer under way, her feet seemed disconnected from the floor, as if gravity were sputtering a little. She’d always wanted to try Guinness, which contained something called “isinglass,” which sounded magical to Darcy, even if it was made from fish bladders.
    She realized that lunch had been hours ago, and dinner lay in a distant and uncertain future.
    “Excuse me a second,” Darcy said, and made her way across the room.
    Kiralee was in a corner of the bar by the jukebox, an old-fashioned one, almost as large as Sodapop’s birdcage and alight with red and yellow neon tubes. Some sort of liquid pulsed inside them, as if the jukebox were