“Humph!” The idiot. How hard could it be to sit down and write a story? Lisa stomped her way down the hall, feeling awkward for being in Ben’s house after saying something she knew would make him mad, as if the house itself were telling her she didn’t belong here.
“Hey, Lisa.” Tracy came out of Gene’s room. She had a rosy look to her cheeks, and Lisa suspected she and Gene had been kissing.
Gene came to the doorway, looking a little rumbled.
“Goodbye, my sweet darling,” Tracy said over-grandly. “See you tomorrow?”
“You’re going to school, right? See you there.” He looked a little grumpy as he closed his door, but that was Tracy’s problem, not hers.
“Humph!” Tracy said. “He can be such a jerk.”
“Tell me about it. I was just talking to Ben, and…” Lisa stopped herself. Really, it wasn’t Ben who had been a jerk. “Maybe I said some things I shouldn’t have.”
“That’s the story of my life.” Tracy shrugged, then headed down stairs.
“It’s just… he acts as if being a writer is such a big deal, but he doesn’t even write much.” Lisa caught up quickly. “At first he let me read his stuff, but now he won’t. It isn’t even all that good.”
“Did you tell him so?”
“No, of course not.” Tracy glared at her cousin. Tracy was a lot more likely to say something like that than Lisa. She hardly had the right to lecture about it.
“Still, I’ll bet there’s something about it that makes writing hard.” Tracy stopped at the base of the stairs to open the front door. She didn’t seem to have any problems with feeling awkward in this house. “Have you ever tried it?”
“Sure. All of us did. It was a class assignment last year.”
“Written anything since?”
Lisa thought about it. “No. Not really. But it wasn’t that hard. I could do it if I wanted to.”
“Uh huh.”
“What? You don’t think I can?’ Lisa followed her cousin across the porch and out to the sidewalk.
“No, no. I’m sure you can. If it’s just writing one or maybe two. I haven’t really tried it, but if it’s like writing songs then there’s a big difference between doing it for fun, and doing it when you’re serious about it.”
“Serious, huh?” Lisa didn’t get it, but that was par for the course with Tracy. “Well, I’m going to do it anyway. In fact, I’ll do better than writing a story. I’ll write a whole book!”
“Wow, a whole book?”
“Yeah. Then Ben can’t say anything about how hard it is to me.” She would do it, too. Just as soon as she figured out what the book would be about.
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