When he’d disappeared through the doorway, the grin Summer had worn for him dropped away. She pointed at me again. “I am not through with you.”
“I can tell!”
We crossed the classroom threshold and bounced into our chairs. We couldn’t slip into them because they were huge and upholstered. Pulling them out and dragging them back up to the table caused a commotion in the quiet room. Even the noisy guys across from us had hushed with the entrance of Gabe. Now they watched us reprovingly, as if we were five-year-olds playing jacks in a church pew at a funeral.
Ignoring the noise, Gabe said a few words about appreciating those of us who had been brave enough to share our stories first. As if we had volunteered for this. He shuffled through the stapled stories in front of him, making sure all three for the day were there. He had said during the first class meeting that nowadays, writing students were paranoid about sharing because they were afraid someone would nab their work and publish it on the internet. So our instructions were to place one copy of our stories on reserve in the library for the other students to read. Then we brought copies for everyone. The class made notes during the discussion and passed the copies back to the original author. I couldn’t wait to read my classmates’ glowing praise.
“These stories have a natural order and flow nicely from one to the next,” Gabe was saying, “so let’s start with—”
There was a knock on the door.
I heard my sigh again in the stillness of the regal classroom. This one was not a sigh of satisfaction but a sigh of what-species-of-tree-slime-dares-knock-on-the-door-at-a-time-like-this.
Gabe got up from his upholstered chair. This was not instantaneous because of the weight of the chair and the girth of his own belly beneath his La Jolla T-shirt. He opened the door a crack and talked in a low tone to the interloper. Summer and I were closest to the door. We couldn’t look over our shoulders and stare at Gabe without being obvious, but we could hear most of what was being said. The interloper wanted to transfer into our class. Gabe was telling him we did have space for one more, but a creative-writing class was a family unit, and before the interloper joined, the other students would need to approve. The interloper said he was sure that would not be a problem.
I recognized his voice. Or rather, I recognized the tone of his voice. The Indian dude was cocky, but the interloper’s cockiness would make the Indian dude look modest in comparison.
“Are you okay?” Summer whispered, managing to make even those breathy words sound high pitched. “Are you that worried about the class discussing your writing? You look really pale all of a sudden. I mean, you’re already pale, but it’s like your freckles have faded.”
A dry “Thanks” was all I could manage. I was not okay. I was gripping the edge of the carved table so hard, I would not have been surprised if my fingers snapped off.
The interloper was my stable boy.
And I could not let him read my story.
2
“We have a new student,” Gabe announced, closing the door. He pulled out his wingback chair at the head of the table and sat down. “A potential new student. He’s out in the hall drawing a horse. In the meantime, where were we?”
I did not care where we were. Gabe reviewed the rules for critiquing the stories. I should have cared, but in my mind I was out in the hall with Hunter Allen, jogging his elbow so he messed up his horse.
All of us had drawn a horse as a creativity demonstration on the first day of class. Gabe’s point, I think, was that each person had a unique perspective and something to bring to a creative-writing group. The cocky Indian guy definitely had a unique perspective. He had drawn a horse’s ass. Summer had drawn the underside of a horse—inaccurately. It seemed to have no gender, or at least no genitalia, like a Barbie or a Ken doll. But it was a perspective I wouldn’t have thought of, and I was impressed with her. I was not an artist, but I had tried my best to capture a horse in motion, not in a race of some human’s devising, but running for the sake of running, a horse being a horse. I had loved looking out my bedroom window first thing in the morning with the mist rising from the bluegrass, watching the yearlings race each other when nobody was betting, because that’s what horses did.
I crossed my fingers that Hunter would draw a horse the class wouldn’t like.
“And that’s how our in-class critiques work,” Gabe said. “We need to be sure we understand this process up front. The classroom dynamic is very important.” He looked around the table as he said this, eyes lingering on each student in turn like a seasoned writing instructor. He’d probably been teaching writing part-time at the junior college in So-Cal for years to finance his surfing addiction. “You need to trust one another in order to do your best work. Once the classroom dynamic goes sour, it’s almost impossible to sweeten. Are there any questions?”
His eyes rested on me, as if I had been daydreaming. Who, me? I actually did blush because I wanted Gabe to think well of me. The college arranged for the outstanding freshman honors creative-writing student from the fall semester to work as an intern for one of the major publishers during the spring semester. That could be my foot in the door for an editorial job when I graduated, even publication of my own novel someday. Plus it paid more for fewer hours than my current coffee shop job, which was killing me, and I would not have to work standing up.
Gabe didn’t look like the type of guy who would have a lot of sway over a publishing internship committee, but after the decision makers reviewed my portfolio, they might ask him whether I was easy to work with. Maybe getting along with other authors was the most important criterion. Then again … whoever heard of authors getting along with each other? Look at Hemingway and Stein, or Hemingway and Fitzgerald, or hell, Hemingway and anybody.
Another knock sounded at the door, and in walked my stable boy—sans the riding jacket and breeches. His eyes were an intense blue, exactly the color of his polo shirt. He could have been accused of vanity, wearing that color on purpose, except that his disheveled appearance made it clear he didn’t care about that sort of thing. Except he did. His dishevelment was carefully planned.
I waited for those eyes to meet mine. Of course he saw me. I had long red hair. I practically glowed in the dark. And as he stood before us at Gabe’s right hand, he met everyone’s gaze in turn, just as Gabe had, working the room. Everyone’s gaze but mine.
“Tell us your name,” Gabe said to Hunter, “and why you want to be in this class. Be convincing. This is your big chance.”
Hunter nodded. “My name is Hunter Allen.” Most college freshmen would have mealymouthed their way through this self-introduction, but Hunter embraced it as if he were on tour promoting his self-help DVDs. “I want to be in this class because the other freshman honors creative-writing class I’m in conflicts with my chemistry class. I can’t be in two places at once, a concept that seems beyond the grasp of this institution of higher learning. My schedule is fucked up.”
A guy snorted laughter because Hunter had cussed in class, and several of the girls gasped. Hunter was testing Gabe. Hunter liked to test people.
Gabe passed the test. He didn’t raise an eyebrow, just sat with his chair pushed back from the table, gazing at Hunter, giving him the floor.
“Also,” Hunter went on, “my roommates Manohar and Brian”—he gestured to the Indian dude and his friend—“told me this class wasn’t full, but it did have lots of beautiful women.”
Now all the guys burst into laughter, and one of the girls on the other end of the table exclaimed, “You’re in!”
Summer turned to me. “I heart this person.”
“You would,” I muttered. Girls always did. Including me.
“Your horse, sir,” Gabe said.
Hunter handed Gabe a sheet of paper. He had the nerve to give us a grin over his shoulder and salute us with two fingers as he left the room again.
Gabe examined the paper, then held it up for us to see. Everyone leaned forward, squinting. It was a hor
se’s tack—bridle, reins, saddle—all placed as if a stable boy had put them on a horse. There was even a broom for manure. Only the horse was missing.
It was a message. To me. He’d been teased about being my stable boy for the last six years at our school, and finally he was out from under me. He did not want to be called a stable boy anymore.
He was not going to like my story.
“All in favor of Hunter Allen joining the class,” Gabe said, “raise your hand.”
Everybody in the room raised a hand except me.
Summer turned to me and asked out loud, “Why aren’t you raising your hand?” Afterward Summer and I were going to have a talk about subtlety and secrecy, because damn.
I said, “I think we have enough students already. It’s an honors class and we’re trying to keep the class size small. It’s capped at twelve.”
“It’s capped at thirteen,” Gabe corrected me.
“It ought to be capped at twelve,” I said. “And we’ve already arranged the schedule for discussing our stories.”
I could feel Summer staring at the side of my face. “Are you on crack?”
I raised my voice over the guffaws of the guys across the table. “I am working my way through college, and I am concerned about getting the best value for my hard-earned money.”
Summer gave up on me and turned back to Gabe. “Can I have Erin’s vote?”
“No,” Gabe said.
“Then can I vote twice?” asked Brian.
The class tittered. Manohar gave Brian a look of outrage.
“Because he’s my roommate!” Brian exclaimed at Manohar. “Just because I’m gay doesn’t mean I like men, perv.”
Hunter opened the door and leaned into the classroom. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear any of that.” He backed out again and closed the door.
“She’s outnumbered anyway,” Gabe said. “Looks like we have a thirteenth student.” He glanced at me and pursed his lips, perplexed. Then, amid a smattering of applause from the class, he scraped back his weighty chair and went to the door to let Hunter in. Violins screeched repeatedly, as when the heroine is about to get stabbed in a horror movie, but I don’t think anybody heard them but me. The violins were drowned out by the escalating applause as Hunter followed Gabe into the room. Gabe sat at the head of the table and gestured toward the only empty chair, at the foot.
As Hunter rounded the table, he paused to put out both hands and slap Manohar and Brian simultaneously in the back of the head. “You didn’t warn me about the horse.”
Brian lunged after him from his chair. Hunter instinctively sped up, jogged a step, then slowed to his customary saunter. He collapsed into the comfy chair at the end of the table as if the whole episode had taken a great deal out of him. Leaning over one armrest, he eyed the girl on his right from underneath the blond hair in his eyes and said loudly enough for the whole class to hear, “I’m so glad to be here.” Guys laughed, girls giggled, and the entire chemistry of the quiet classroom had changed from scared freshmen to friendly writing class, just because Hunter had joined us.
Gabe was busying himself with administrative duties again. Copies of the stories had to be found for the additional student. The dude whose story we were reading today, Kyle, didn’t have an extra copy of his story for Hunter. Neither did the other girl. I did, but hell if I was volunteering that information. No matter. The girl sitting next to Hunter, Isabelle, had already read the stories in the library, like we were all supposed to, and she slid her copies in front of him.
“I explained this,” Gabe said, “but it bears repeating. When your story is being discussed, you are not to join the discussion. Creative writing tends to be very personal. We are more defensive of it than we realize. If you were allowed to respond to everything your fellow writers said about your work, discussion would quickly break down into an argument. You’ll have a chance to respond to the critique, but only at the end.”
Gabe was still talking. He was saying that we would discuss Kyle’s story first, then the girl’s. Ten minutes before, I would have been relieved that I wasn’t absolutely first, but now the delay meant two-thirds of a class period of torture until Hunter read my story. I pretended to turn my attention to Kyle’s story in front of me, but out of the corner of my eye I watched Hunter. He shuffled through the three stories. Paused over one, examining the title. Or the byline. Slipped it out of the stack and put it on the bottom.
I TRIED TO RESPOND INTELLIGENTLY to the first two stories. I had read them in the library and made notes on them. They were not to my taste. Kyle’s story was told from the point of view of a wolf whose ecosystem was disappearing, an environmental apocalypse tale, although I could tell from his description of the forest and his accent in class that he’d rarely explored past the boundaries of Brooklyn. The girl’s story was about an old man sitting in a café and mulling over his regrets about things left undone in his life. I would have gone to sleep if the man hadn’t been taking in so much caffeine. But constructive criticism was part of this class and part of our grade, so on behalf of the writing community and my internship, I did my best to say something helpful in a shaky voice that told Hunter my heart was doing acrobatics in anticipation of my turn.
Finally everyone slid “Almost a Lady” out of their short stacks and put it on top. My stomach dropped as if I’d just crested the tallest peak on a roller coaster and was about to barrel down the other side. Hunter’s head was bent. If he hadn’t been reading my story before, now he was.
“Manohar,” Gabe said, “why don’t you get us started?”
Manohar glanced up at me and smirked.
Uh-oh.
“First of all,” he said, “I wanted to check something. Am I reading this right? Did this Captain ‘Vanderslice’”—he made finger quotes—“get his family jewels shot off in the war? Isn’t that stolen directly from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises?”
“I beg your pardon,” I said haughtily. “That’s like saying you can’t have somebody cross the street in your scene because James Joyce wrote about somebody crossing the street one time. All of literature and only one character can get shot in the nuts?”
Everyone around the table leaned in. I focused my anger on Manohar, but I could see the other students in my peripheral vision and feel them as the air in the room got hot. Only Hunter lounged in his rich chair, reading my story, cool as ever.
“Now you’re using the term ‘literature’ very loosely,” Manohar said, with more finger quotes. “It reads like a romance novel.” He tossed imaginary long hair over his shoulder. “‘She saw him from across the room and knew he was the one for her, the stable boy.’”
“Do you read a lot of romance novels?” Summer asked him.
Several guys hooted with laughter. I would have smiled, too, if I had not been on my deathbed.
Manohar turned bright red, but he was laughing. “I—,” he began.
Summer was not laughing. “Because you would base that judgment on something, right?”
I felt bad that she was talking out of turn instead of me, disobeying Gabe on my behalf. On the other hand, she was a lot cuter than me, and harder to be angry with. Manohar only tilted his head while she ranted.
“Everybody knows how a romance novel goes—,” he began again.
“Not if they’ve never read one, they don’t,” she insisted.
He talked over her. “All I’m saying is that there’s no place for that kind of crappy writing in an honors creative-writing class.” His voice rose at the end of his statement because several girls gasped when he said crappy. “I know I’m not the only one in this class who thinks so. You’re not supposed to write a romance novel for an honors creative-writing class.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said, trying to keep my voice even, wishing the angry tears out of my eyes.
“How could you miss it?” he insisted. “In high school, didn’t people make fun of you for writing romance novels? Even for reading them?”
&
nbsp; “Of course they did.” My hand pounded the table. Everyone jumped, including me. I removed my hand from the table and sat on it. “My mistake was assuming that when I got to college, people would not be such assholes. Heaven forbid I pursue a career writing romance novels. Romance is only fifty-three percent of the paperback market, and I would hate to earn a steady income while the rest of you are living in your parents’ basements, writing novels about dead wolves—”
“Hey!” Kyle exclaimed.
“—getting rejected from The New Yorker, and cutting yourselves.”
Two boys on the other side of Summer laughed together. I could see them over her head. One of them said a little too loudly in a faux drawl more reminiscent of Tennessee than Kentucky, “Heaven forbid!”
“You’re assuming this is publishable,” Manohar told me. He’d seemed cocksure before, a superior intellect cutting down a Southern girl in class. Now his black brows pointed down in a V. “This is not publishable. You could read it out loud and make a drinking game out of knocking one back every time it says bosom. And I don’t think any story you turn in for an honors creative-writing class should contain even a single instance of the word nipple.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I shouted over the laughter, “but there’s nothing in the syllabus for this class that says we can’t write nipple.”
“Because that’s understood!” Manohar exclaimed.
“Is it?” I asked. “Maybe you’re just bothered by nipple personally.”
“Everybody is bothered by nipple,” he said, karate-chopping the thick table with each syllable. “Serious writers know this. You would not find a nipple in The New Yorker.”
“She didn’t write this story for The New Yorker,” Summer said.
Manohar gestured widely with both arms. He hit Brian in the chest and didn’t seem to notice. “Exactly!”
I shook my head. “I don’t think this is about my story at all. I think it’s about you, Manohar. I can tell that reading this story made you uncomfortable, and I wonder why that is. Either you’re a very curious virgin, or you want a stable boy of your own.”