Love Story

by Jennifer Echols

  Summer put her chin on her fist and squinted across the table at Manohar. “What do you think this story is about, Manohar?” She leaned across me and said to Gabe, “Please excuse me for speaking out of turn, but I think this is important.” She turned back to Manohar. “You don’t think this story is about unrequited love at all, do you? You think it’s about getting laid.”

  “Yes!” exclaimed most of the men, while most of the women chirped, “No!” Gabe and Hunter, at opposite ends of the table, both scribbled across their papers without looking up. Hunter sat draped across his comfy chair as if the class discussed his writing every day.

  “Even when it’s so laboriously unsexy?” Summer asked. “There’s a lot more going on here. Hunter is smarter than that.”

  “You’re reading too much into it,” Manohar said. “He’s making fun of a certain other supposedly sexy story written for this class. He’s showing how clinical and predictable and unsexy it really was.”

  I opened my mouth to tell Manohar that I’d had enough. It was one thing for him to insult my story while we discussed it in class. It was too much for him to insult my story while we discussed someone else’s. He had already let me know he loathed my writing. I got it. Enough already!

  As usual, Summer beat me to it. “I’m not sure whether Hunter did this on purpose or if he even realizes he did it, but there’s a beautiful dichotomy between the language he uses for the two girls. The girl he’s with in the shower is described in anatomical terms, like an object. He even calls her ‘it’ once, near the beginning. ‘It does feel good.’”

  The room filled with the clatter of flipping pages, then a pause as everyone searched for the passage.

  “Noooo,” Manohar said. “He’s responding to the girl saying, ‘This feels so good.’ ‘It’ equates to ‘this,’ which means standing in the shower.”

  Summer talked over him. “The girl he’s trying to make jealous is never physically described at all. He conveys only his emotions about her. He loves her so much that he can’t even see her.”

  I had resolved not to look at Hunter while the class was discussing his story. I would not peek at him now to gauge his reaction. If Summer wanted to make more out of his relationship with me than was actually there, that was her issue, not mine. I had a vested interest in staying out of any further tangles involving this creative-writing class intersecting with my real life. To remind myself of this, I traced INTERNSHIP over and over on a scratch sheet of paper—not on my copy of Hunter’s story, which I would have to pass back to him.

  “Erin?” Gabe asked.

  In this shocking nanosecond, I thought Gabe was asking Hunter whether I was the girl he loved so much he couldn’t see.

  In the next horrible nanosecond, I realized my stupid mistake. While I’d daydreamed, everyone in the class had commented on Hunter’s story. Summer had forfeited her turn since she’d already responded to Manohar. Gabe was calling on me for my opinion.

  I sighed as the blood rushed to my face. Blood rushed to my face every time Hunter moved his pinkie in this class. Directly across from me, Manohar must think I had rosacea.

  “This was not my kind of story,” I began, running my finger along the edge of the first page. I snatched my hand away, realized I’d given myself a paper cut, and sat on my wounded hand. “I can’t love a story in which the characters don’t get what they want—”

  “Oh, I think he got what he wanted,” said Kyle. Other boys chuckled.

  I raised my voice. “—or don’t know what they want. We’ve all heard the existential blues a million times. That said … Hunter …”

  He looked up at me when I called his name. I would not say this to the class in general, speaking about him in the third person. This message was for him, and I wanted him to hear it.

  “I thought your writing was lyrical and descriptive but completely clear. I could see this setting in the sauna.”

  “Almost as if you were there,” Brian commented.

  “Seriously.” I held up my hand to shut Brian up without taking my eyes off Hunter. “It was the best story I’ve read for this class.”

  Hunter bent his head to scribble something on his story, a small smile tugging at his lips. “Better than yours?”

  The class shouted with laughter.

  Of course he would be an ass when I was trying to be nice. “As I said, this is not my kind of story. The other thing I would point out, though—”

  Everyone quieted and leaned forward, hanging on my words. They expected another performance like my entertaining response to Manohar about my own story.

  “—is that there’s no dialogue,” I finished.

  “There’s dialogue,” Brian said. “The girl says, ‘This feels so good’”—he couldn’t resist imitating the girl’s sultry voice—“and then the guy says—”

  “Yeah, she says something,” I broke in, “and then he says something. But the definition of dialogue is speaking together, trading ideas. These characters never do that. And the main character never exchanges a single word with the mystery girl who is so much more important than the shower girl.”

  “I thought Hunter wrote it that way on purpose,” said Kyle.

  “Maybe he did,” I said. “That choice has some artistic merit. On the other hand, having the important characters speak to each other and interact would have been more difficult to write. Maybe Hunter took the easy way out.”

  This time he looked up at me without smiling. At long last, he lifted his chin, opened his blue eyes, and acknowledged me across the table as if he finally heard what I was saying.

  “As long as there’s no dialogue”—I spoke directly to him—“no connection between the characters, nothing really happens in this story. It’s all in the character’s head, and there’s no action.”

  “Seems to me he got plenty of action.” This Manohar-like comment was made by a boy who hardly ever said anything in class. If even he felt it was safe to take potshots at me, belaboring the issue was pointless. I looked to Gabe, my signal that I was done.

  “Your turn, Hunter,” he called.

  The class was silent as Hunter finished writing a note on his story, or finished faking writing a note for effect. Then he grinned brilliantly at us. “Thank you for your comments. I was a little nervous about my first time”—everyone chuckled because he was so hilarious—“but it wasn’t nearly as painful as I thought. Your feedback will be helpful when I revise this story for my portfolio at the end of the semester.” He sounded like a human form letter.

  “Did you mean to leave out dialogue?” Summer pressed him. “Was it too hard to write, like Erin said?”

  He kept grinning while the smile faded from his blue eyes. “Gabe may take exception to this, but I feel that my contribution to class on the day my story is discussed is the story itself. Then you tell me what you think of the story, and I learn from that. I shouldn’t have to respond to your response. That’s not freshman honors creative writing anymore. That’s freshman honors psychology, and I don’t need any talk therapy.”

  “Maybe you do,” said Isabelle, beside him. “Maybe you wrote something into your story that you never intended. You could learn a lot about yourself from that.”

  “I always do exactly what I intend,” Hunter snapped.

  Thirteen people stared at him. Hunter did not lose his cool. I knew this from six years in school with him. Even his new friends knew this about him by now.

  He blinked, realizing what he’d done. The slow smile spread across his face again. He winked at Isabelle. “But thanks for the advice. I honestly appreciate the work all of you put into critiquing my writing.”

  * * *

  DISCUSSION MOVED ON TO ANOTHER CLASSMATE’S writing, but my mention of “my kind of story” generated another argument later in the class between Summer and Manohar about proper genres for the course. Class time ran over. I had to get up and leave before Gabe dismissed us, and even so, I was late for work at the coffee shop.

  N
o matter. Hunter’s story was all I thought about through my entire shift. I knew exactly what Summer was talking about when I walked into our room six hours later.

  “I’ve been telling Jørdis all about it.” She motioned me over to Jørdis’s bed with a pair of scissors.

  “My stable boy was blond,” I protested, taking the scissors and the magazine Jørdis handed me and settling in the pillows beside her. “If this girl is me, why doesn’t she have red hair and a face clogged with freckles? I’m not hard to describe.”

  “Exactly,” Summer said. “He couldn’t give her red hair. Everybody in class would know it was you. Nobody suspected he was the stable boy in your story because he hadn’t even shown up yet when you turned your story in. But this girl is you. It’s obvious. Since he was twelve, this girl has made him feel as if the earth stood still. He’s still a virgin because if he couldn’t have this girl in high school, he didn’t want anybody else. She even has your husky voice.”

  I winced. “Yeah, that screams sex, doesn’t it?” I had taken exception to the husky voice description. Just because I was an alto didn’t mean he had to make me sound like a cougar.

  “So?” Summer insisted. “How can you ignore the fact that he’s talking about you?”

  I wasn’t ignoring it. I realized he was talking about me. I also knew he wasn’t serious about any of this. If he’d really felt this strongly about me, he would not have stolen my fortune.

  No use explaining this to Summer, though, because she would find a way to twist the theft of a hundred and forty-seven horses into a romantic overture. I shook my head. “Even if the girl were me, the guy in the story isn’t Hunter. The guy in the story knows all about anatomy.”

  “Hunter is taking anatomy,” Summer said.

  My scissors stopped their progress across the magazine page, and the metallic scrapings of Summer’s scissors and Jørdis’s filled my ears like alarm bells. I forced myself to start cutting again before they noticed I’d stopped. “No, he isn’t,” I told Summer. “He’s a business major. Why would he take anatomy?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted, “but I saw his anatomy book on his bed when I went to Manohar’s room yesterday.”

  “And why did you go to Manohar’s room yesterday?” Jørdis asked with as much innuendo as her Danish accent would allow.

  “Oh, it was nothing like that,” Summer assured her. “I was passing in the hall outside his room—”

  “Because you just happened to find yourself three flights up on a men’s floor for no apparent reason,” I played along.

  Laughing, she put her hand over my mouth. “—and he called me inside because he was making mulligatawny and wanted me to sample it.”

  Jørdis and I cracked up, careful to move our sharp scissors aside before we doubled over laughing on the bed. Summer smiled ruefully at us.

  Finally Jørdis managed, “You sampled his mulligatawny! Was it good?”

  “It was okay,” Summer said. “I would have to get used to it.”

  That made Jørdis and me laugh harder. Coughing through it, I asked Summer, “Are you going to sample his mulligatawny again?”

  Still smiling, she shook her head. “Sometimes mulligatawny is just mulligatawny”

  “Oh,” Jørdis and I said together. I was disappointed that Summer hadn’t made progress in her romance with Manohar. I wished I could send her on another mission, since she seemed to need an excuse to justify making a move on him, but I didn’t dare. If Manohar had been as mad as Summer said about being manipulated regarding the stable-boy issue, I didn’t want to push it. Gabe hadn’t called me into his office for a stern talking-to by now, the third week of class. Maybe I’d dodged a bullet.

  “Anyway,” Summer said, “Hunter’s taking anatomy. Everything that happened in the story is exactly like what really happened at the beach party. That means he’s hot for you, Erin.”

  “That also means he slept with that blond girl,” I pointed out.

  “If he did, at least he wants you to watch,” Summer said.

  “I need to find a way to read this story,” Jørdis said.

  “But he didn’t sleep with that girl,” Summer said, dismissing the idea with a wave of her open scissors. “Remember, he left the party with you and Brian. He and Brian came back. I saw the blond girl a few more times, but never with him.”

  “Who left first?” I asked. “I could hear the music all the way down here. You had your argument with Manohar and left a couple of hours before the party shut down. Hunter had plenty of time to hook up with her. Looks like he did.”

  DEEP IN THE NIGHT I WOKE. I had lain in bed for a long time without realizing I was awake. Finally something made me roll over and peer out the window nearest the head of my bed, onto the dusky street, just in time to glimpse Hunter returning to the dorm.

  He was one floor down, several steps away from the front stoop, and the crisp red leaves in the trees cast him into the shadows of the streetlights. But I knew him by the way he moved. His overcoat was open to reveal jeans and a casual but expensive shirt underneath.

  Overcoat? It was hardly fall, not cold enough—but glancing at the clock on my filing cabinet, I realized it must be plenty cold for him to need this extra layer in the stillness at four thirty in the morning. The wind caught the back of his coat and whipped it behind him as he grasped the stair railing with one hand. He swung himself onto the stoop, as if expending his last bit of energy would be worth the trouble because it would get him to bed that much faster. I knew the feeling.

  He had disappeared under the awning now. Through floors and walls, I caught the faintest whisper of his fingers on the buttons as he punched the combination into the lock, then the groan of the door opening for him. He shut it quietly—which I wasn’t expecting. I’d never noticed the way he opened and closed doors when other people were asleep, but he’d caused me so much trouble personally that I expected the door to slam. It did not. I hardly registered it closing before my ears picked up his steps on the staircase—fast at first, still excited about going to bed, slower as he reached my story.

  He was as near as he would get to me now, sliding around the second-story banister on his way to the next staircase, leaning his weight into it, his exhaustion overcoming him. If I jumped out of bed and dashed through Summer and Jørdis’s room and burst into the hallway, I could catch him. His sleepy blue eyes would widen in surprise, then narrow again when he saw it was me.

  And then he was gone, shuffling up the first few steps of the second staircase with renewed energy, slowing as he reached the top. A pause as he circled the third-story banister.

  The faintest footsteps now, slowing as they faded. A squeal as he opened his own door on the fifth floor. A thump as he shut it. Open and shut, done and over.

  I closed my heart to him then. I thought I had succeeded in forgetting him ten times over. Each time I was mistaken. He managed to find his way into my heart again and sabotage it from the inside. This time was the last. In the dead of night he had gone to visit that blond girl, and now he had come home.

  7

  My next story was due the following day. I could have written one accusing him of sleeping with that girl. But I’d never intended to call him out in the first place, and I certainly wouldn’t write another story about him now.

  Trouble was, I’d lost my taste for writing romance. At least, for these people to read, and Hunter to smirk about, and Manohar to make fun of. My laptop and I still played Cupid on break at the coffee shop and during any luxurious hour I could spare on the weekends, writing and people-watching in the park. But that was for me, not to show.

  For class I wrote a story about a girl dealing with some unnamed tragedy by closing herself in the closet of a huge, empty house, with her evil unnamed authority figure clomping around in the hallways, sending the servants to check on the girl in the closet, never venturing inside herself.

  Two weeks later, my next story was about a seventh-grader obsessed with the idea that if
she won the middle school spelling bee and made it to the next round, she would see her absentee father in the audience. He had finally come for her! But she never made it to that round because she spelled desertion with a double s.

  Maybe I was trying to tell Hunter a little about myself with these stories, and apologize in a very roundabout way for not connecting with him in high school. Typically, I couldn’t tell if he was affected by them or not, because in class his comments were blandly supportive, and on paper he wrote helpful technical comments. Sigh.

  But I thought these stories moved me closer to the publishing internship, if Gabe had any sway. He seemed excited about them during class. He wrote in pencil in the margins that he saw me taking chances and growing as a writer. My classmates seemed impressed with the stories, too, and discussed them animatedly and invented deep bullshit meanings for what were essentially pages out of my middle school diary. I was surprised and disappointed that my classmates liked these stories so much, because I hated them. At this point I decided everybody in the class must be clinically depressed.

  A few weeks later, the girls in class, even Summer, giggled behind their hands at how much they looked forward to Hunter’s sexy stories. But it seemed to me that his fortune-teller story was just installment number two of “Anatomy Unit on the Reproductive System.”

  And his story was not his way of hinting that he liked me. Neither was the fact that he sat on Jørdis’s bed one Friday afternoon when I cruised through wearing my belly-dancing outfit. Yes, I was a little self-conscious about walking down the street in it, and my grandmother would die, but with my jacket over the top it didn’t look significantly weirder than some of the other oddities New Yorkers wore in public. I was very self-conscious about wearing it in front of Hunter.

  “Hullo, Erin,” Hunter said without looking up from his cutting.

  “Hullo, Hunter,” I said without slowing down. I stepped into my own little bedroom and pushed the door until it was open only a crack.