The Almost Truth by Eileen Cook

say.
    “How did things go with your aunt?” Chase said, looking over the options on the leather menu before giving his choice to the waiter.
    My mind went blank. I couldn’t remember what Brendan had called her. This was the problem with lying to someone: keeping it straight. “Um. She’s good.” I stared down at the menu as if it were a tricky calculus problem to be solved.
    “Hey. They have fritoles for dessert. Have you had those?”
    Not only had I not ever had one, I wasn’t even sure what it was. But for all I knew, rich girls ate them all the time. I made a noncommittal noise.
    “I spent the winter in Venice a couple years ago, and during Carnevale I must have eaten a thousand of those. I’ll bet I gained twenty pounds in fried dough, raisins, and pine nuts. I haven’t had one since then. Have you ever been to Venice in the off-season?”
    I loved how he assumed I’d been to Venice at all. “No, I haven’t.”
    “It’s amazing. I love the city at any time. How can you not love a place where they once called their currency a sequin?” He laughed. “The city is totally different in the winter. It’s cold and damp. The place isn’t packed with tourists, and the streets fill with fog and make it feel like the city’s been cut off from the rest of the world. It seems possible you could turn a corner and find yourself several hundred years in the past.”
    “It sounds perfect.” I made a mental note to add Venice to my list of places I wanted to go someday. “Did you go with family or friends from school?”
    Chase flushed. “It’s stupid. I went by myself over winter break because I had this idea that I was going to write a book. I think I thought I was a modern-day Byron or something. I was going to write the great new American novel. I rented an apartment overlooking the Grand Canal in Salute-Punta Dogana. Ibrought my laptop, arranged for this local woman to bring me meals, and sat down ready to bleed onto the page.”
    I absolutely loved that he’d done this. It was the most romantic thing I could imagine. I didn’t know anyone who had just up and rented an apartment in Europe to do anything, let alone write a book. “What happened?” I asked, leaning forward.
    Chase laughed. “Turns out I had nothing to say. I started wandering the streets, drinking cups and cups of espresso in these small cafés, anything to avoid just sitting there at the desk. At first I told myself that I was soaking up the atmosphere, ‘letting my muse find her way’ kind of thing. Eventually I realized I wasn’t fooling anyone; I wasn’t a novelist.”
    I felt the absurd urge to defend him. “You might be. You can’t expect that you would just sit down and write a novel. It’s the kind of thing that takes practice. You wouldn’t expect to sit down at a piano and start playing Mozart. Why would writing be any different?”
    “I think I liked the idea of being an author more than I wanted to write. My problem is, I’ve never been really good at anything.”
    I opened my mouth to protest, but he raised a hand to stop me.
    “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not fishing for a compliment. I’m good at a lot of things. Good student, decent at lacrosse, I make a pretty good omelet, but there’s nothing that I’m really good at. You know what I mean? Like, really good.”
    “Like, the reason you exist,” I said.
    “Exactly! I wanted to have something that was my passion. Some big grand point to my life. It seemed like everyone I knew had something. They wanted to be rock stars, or get into medical school, or this one girl I dated in high school desperately wanted to be the next Martha Stewart. She had binders full of all these recipes and craft ideas. She would videotape herself pretending to do show segments on things like quilting teapot cozies out of old baby clothing and put them up on the Internet.”
    “Wow. She sounds intense.”
    “Tell me about it. She made great cookies though,” he said with a smile.