Plausibility–Project X

Project X ends with a fictionalized me going to see a fictionalized Tom, who is drinking freezing tea while sitting out front of The Church of the Holy Trinity, that Episcopal church by the homeless mission. Tomorrow.

They/we meet up tomorrow.

And I have been checking the weather all week to see if it’s going to be warm enough for them/us to meet outside and have an awkward conversation while he sits in a church-basement folding chair drinking his tea. It’s, at best, going to be in the mid-50s.

The thing about this type of fantasy that intrigues me is that I like feeling like I’m creating something that’s almost, not quite, implausible. Like you know it’s not real. That’s a given because there’s a werewolf. So, there’s a line, obviously, that the book crosses into “not-real.” But what I like is the discomfort of knowing we’re straddling some real/not-real line. Of course there is no werewolf. But did the Allens really have seances? (Yes.) Is there really a black dog that haunts the Almaville Cemetery? (No.)

Still, it’s funny–that line. Here I am all “Oh no! It’s going to be way too cold for them to hang out in the churchyard tomorrow!” As if there’s ever a plausible time when Tom and I would hang out in an Episcopal Churchyard hedging about werewolves. No one is going to be all “I totally would have bought that conversation except I know for a fact that it was too cold for them to have it.”