It’s Never Too Late to Look Again
Book 1 was about being told you’re too much. Book 2 is about something sneakier. In the foreword to Spicy Sal and the Alleged Gold-Digger, I wrote:
“The first book was about being told you’re too much. This one is about being decided on.”
You know the feeling. You walk into a room and, before you’ve said a word, the room has already made up its mind about you. This post is about that moment, and about what happens when we’re brave enough to look again.
Meet the Emerald Enigma
It’s two weeks after the Roast & Toast, and Jalapeño Street is finally calm. Then a glamorous stranger dressed in emerald moves in across from the pink Duplex. Her name is Anoushka. She has a Great Dane named Tara, a case of Rolexes and absolutely no interest in explaining herself.
When Sal tries some friendly small talk, it goes like this:
“So, what brings you to Spicyville?” “A car.” “And before the car?” “A road.”
Spicyville does what small towns do best. It whispers. A brand-new anonymous gossip column in the Spicyville Sizzle, written by someone calling themselves “Miss Information,” dubs her the “Emerald Enigma.” Three watches and no visible job later, the nickname turns into something much uglier: gold-digger.
My favourite line about how it happens:
“A sentence became a question. A question became a theory. A theory became something everybody somehow remembered as fact.”
Your brain decides in a tenth of a second
Here’s the part that blew my mind when I looked into it. In a 2006 Princeton study, psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov showed people photos of unfamiliar faces for just 100 milliseconds. That’s one tenth of a second. Then they asked them to rate traits like trustworthiness, likeability and competence.
The judgments people made in that tiny flash closely matched the ones they made with no time limit at all. Giving people more time mostly just made them more confident in what they’d already decided. As Todorov put it, “the link between facial features and character may be tenuous at best.”
So we judge fast, we judge confidently, and we’re often wrong. The good news? Todorov also pointed out that first impressions can be overridden once you actually get to know someone. That’s the whole story of Book 2.
The labels I wore
I didn’t write this book from a distance. At the end of it, in a section called “Unmasked: The Labels I Wore,” I listed the names that followed me growing up: The fat one. The gay one. The girly one. The dramatic one.
And I admitted something that’s hard to say out loud:
“I got funnier so you’d laugh before you judged. I got louder so you couldn’t say it first.”
Sal knows that feeling too. When the town starts in on Anoushka, he recognizes it instantly. He’s “spent enough of his life being reduced to the loudest thing someone noticed about him. Too much. Too dramatic. Too gay. Too visible.”
But here’s the uncomfortable truth I had to face while writing: the people who were labeled are very good at labeling. Being judged doesn’t make you immune to judging. As the foreword warns, “Spicyville gets it wrong in this book. So does Sal.”
The House of a Thousand Mirrors
The House of a Thousand Mirrors. Nobody asks what anybody else saw.
Halfway through the book, a travelling circus rolls into town, and with it comes the House of a Thousand Mirrors. I won’t spoil what anyone sees inside. I’ll just say each person’s experience is private, and nobody asks anybody else what they saw.
Mirrors are a big deal in children’s literature too. Back in 1990, education scholar Rudine Sims Bishop wrote that “books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined,” and that “when lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror.” Books let you see someone else’s life clearly, and sometimes they show you your own.
That’s what I want Anoushka’s story to do. For some readers, she’s a window: a chance to sit with someone the whole town decided on before she unpacked. For others, she’s a mirror.
How to look again
Spicyville learns this the hard way, but you don’t have to. A few things the book taught me:
•Notice the nickname. Labels often show up disguised as something cute or harmless. As salon owner April Tee tells the gossip crowd, “giving someone a nickname doesn’t make gossip anonymous.”
•Ask, don’t guess (or don’t ask at all). When Sal finally has a chance to grill Anoushka, he doesn’t. “Because if you wanted me to know, I figure you’d tell me.” She doesn’t owe him her story. She still gets coffee.
•Make room before you have all the answers. Sometimes belonging is as simple as an empty chair at the table, left there on purpose.
•Say the hard sentence. “I was wrong about you” might be the bravest thing a person can say.
Never too late
Getting someone wrong isn’t the unforgivable part. Refusing to look again is. I closed Book 2 with the lesson I’m still learning myself:
“You don’t owe anyone a performance to prove them wrong. And when you’ve got someone wrong, look again. It is never too late to look again.”
Spicy Sal and the Alleged Gold-Digger is coming soon. You can read the first chapter right now, free, no signup required. Keep your eyes open, darling. The circus is coming to town.
Stay spicy,
Spicy Sal
