Read Online A Field Guide for Heartbreakers by Kristen Tracy - Free Book Online Page A

periphery,” she said.There were five other tables with placards. STEVIE BLOOM: POET DINO WASHINGTON: PLAYWRIGHT DORIS MOSES: THE NOVEL SYD COVERT: EVERYTHING AMY ALLEN: CREATIVE NONFICTION Students continued to trickle in and join their workshop leaders. It looked like the program had about a hundred students. The nonfiction table was twice as crowded as the others. Veronica noted this.“If we’d gotten into that class, we’d have double the dudes.”“Our table doesn’t have any dudes,” I said.Veronica glanced around and bit her lip. “Our table has to have dudes. We’ve already met them.” She leaned into me and whispered, “They’re already on my wall.”“Right,” I said.I turned my attention to the faculty. I’d been researching them for weeks, and now here they were. I felt like I was glimpsing celebrities.“There’s the playwright,” I said, pointing to the table where Dino Washington sat with fifteen eager students.“That guy sucks,” Veronica said. “He was rude to my mom at a conference in Tennessee.”“What did he do?” I asked.“I don’t remember,” Veronica said. “Something involving a pineapple. It doesn’t matter. He’s a dramatist. Nobody respects those clowns.” She kept looking around.I think Veronica could pick up on my star-struck excitement, because she immediately tried to puncture my mood.“Here’s the deal: these people are not real celebrities and you shouldn’t treat them any different than bus drivers,” Veronica said. “My mom is the most respected writer here. After that, Amy Allen is the second-most respected.”I didn’t say it, but Amy Allen was actually more famous than Mrs. Knox. I’d heard an interview with her on NPR about her memoir, which had recently been turned into an HBO movie, Kicking Apart the Moon . It was about her turbulent affair with a former astronaut who suffered from a neurobiological brain disorder.“She looks so calm,” I said. “I can’t believe she held that astronaut hostage at that Taco Bell in Houston.” Veronica’s eyes bugged out with enthusiasm. “I know. She’s brilliant and insane.”“The poet guy is big too, right?” I asked.Veronica made a gagging sound. “Poets are never big. They’re basically miserable and poor and eat organic cows and avoid gluten and crap like that.”“There’s Doris Moses,” I said. “I heard an interview with her on NPR too. She’s fluent in six languages and does humanitarian work in Bangladesh.”“Dessy, turn off NPR,” Veronica told me. “That’s a total geek station. Besides, Doris Moses is a one-hit wonder. She wrote a novel about an alligator that ate, like, nine people in Florida, and then she ended up on the Today show and her book hit the New York Times best-seller list. Her whole plot totally ripped off Jaws . She’s been working on her second novel about a group of genetically mutated chickens for twelve years.” “That sounds interesting,” I said.“Dessy, don’t grow up to be a writer. Because when you live too much in your own head, you neglect the people you love and become an insulated wack job.”I doubted this was totally true. Because I felt that to become that way you had to have a fair amount of wack-job impulses already.“What about Syd Covert? He’s the director, right? I heard he’s a nice guy.”Veronica shuddered. “That guy offended my mom worse than the pineapple playwright dunce. Basically, we avoid him.”“Okay,” I said. I had no idea that the literary landscape was such a political place. I felt like I’d been dropped into a field of well-read land mines. “Let’s move in,” Veronica said.I followed her as she briskly threaded herself through the room. She took a seat right next to her mom. “What did you think of your first European pastry?” Mrs. Knox asked me.“It was flaky,” I said. “We’ll grab some groceries later. This climate always makes me crave quinces and crackers.”I stared at Mrs. Knox. I didn’t know