Free Eye to Eye by Grace Carol

any subscriptions or anything. Thanks for calling.”
    The woman on the other end clears her throat. “Oh no, honey. You misunderstand. I’m calling about your manuscript, your novel, F: The Academy? You sent it to a friend of mine at Smith Alloy, who passed, but she sent it to me. I liked it a whole lot and would like to publish it.”
    All at once I’m trying to figure out everything she’s telling me. The manuscript I sent out after graduating Langsdale, sent out on a whim because Professor Lind, my Shakespeare professor, told me to, the manuscript that had exactly sixty polite, two-line rejection letters to show for itself, the manuscript that I had just thrown in a drawer and accepted as every writer’s first novel that never gets published—until you’re dead—was wanted by some publisher called Burning Spear Press. “Are you serious? This better not be somebody screwing around with me.”
    â€œNo,” Arianna Covington says, coughing slightly, “I’m not, uh, screwing with you. We’d very much like to publish F: The Academy. We think it’s exactly the thing for our press. We’re a new house, but we’re big, and we’re looking to publish promising up-and-coming writers.”
    And then I flip out on old Arianna. I scream. I carry on. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I barely hear what else she tells me, only that my book which, by sixty other editors has been called many things, from a boring meditation on class, to a humorless meditation on class, to a pointless meditation on class further marred by a tedious discussion about race, is something that Burning Spear Press is very happy to be publishing. Other boring stuff about contracts and money—surprise, not very much—is also mentioned. Then Arianna, in her charming accent, congratulates me once again and I can’t wait to tell everybody: Bita, Doris, Earl, my family. Yet there’s a lingering silence on the other end of the line that makes me uneasy. Damn. There’s a catch. There’s always a catch.
    Arianna starts out nice and sweet. “If you are familiar with our books…though, I’ve forgotten, you’re not…” She stammers all over the place.
    â€œYes?” Uh. Oh.
    â€œWell, Burning Spear has a very particular demographic. It’s a press that publishes exclusively African-American books by African-American women for African-American women.”
    â€œUh-huh.” It was starting to sound awfully claustrophobic, but I stayed quiet so she could keep talking.
    â€œSo, let me just be as frank as I can be, Veronica. We’re wondering if you’d be willing to make Dottie’s character black.”
    Dottie was based on Doris, but I was confused about the rest. “You mean dark? Like a villain?”
    Arianna pauses. “No. I mean black, like African-American.”
    I like old Arianna. She’s a crack up. “That’s funny,” I say. “I’m going to like working with you. You’re hilarious.”
    Silence.
    â€œYou’re joking, right?”
    â€œNo, Veronica. We talked about the book in meetings—we love it—but think it would read more smoothly, be more attractive to our readers, if Dottie was African-American.”
    Hmm. Was I getting punk’d or something?
    â€œAre you there, Veronica?”
    â€œKind of,” I reply.
    â€œWhat are you thinking?” Arianna asks, after a moment.
    â€œI’m thinking it’s the craziest thing I ever heard.”
    â€œListen,” Arianna says, in a gently urging voice. “Dottie can stay the same person—more or less. You just identify her as black and keep the book basically the same.”
    â€œI don’t know. It’s a weird change. I mean, part of the point was that Dottie’s white.”
    â€œImagine that she’s exactly the same, but just a different color. That’s all.”
    That’s all?