by Non Pratt
Susan rushed to the window and looked out into the wild October night. Esther looked over her shoulder at the corridor behind them and wondered why Daisy hadn’t just snuck down the stairs.
“She’s in deeper than we thought,” Susan said. “We’re going to have to extract her from each society, meeting by meeting.”
“You mean . . . ?”
“One of us has to go with her to Nicolas Cage Club.”
Daisy had already crossed the road and was heading in the direction of Halifax Hall, where the Nicolas Cage Club was holding a showing of Con Air. All members had been instructed to come dressed as their favorite version of Nicolas Cage, and Daisy was wearing a hideous silk shirt she’d found in a charity shop and a brown jacket borrowed from McGraw. She did not really know whether Snake Eyes Nic Cage was her favorite, but it was certainly the easiest to dress up as.
There was a tap on her shoulder, but when Daisy turned, it was her assailant who yelped in terror.
“Esther?”
“Daisy?” Esther reached out to touch the round glasses that Daisy had set over her mask. “Where the hell did you get the mask from?”
“They attached it to the e-mail. You get a new mask for every meeting.” Daisy glanced at her watch. “I’m going to be late . . .”
“You don’t have to go.”
“But what if people who really like Nicolas Cage are my type of people?” Daisy hurried up the path to the front door.
“Then you’d probably already like Nicolas Cage, too . . .”
“Maybe I do, and I just don’t know it?” Daisy pressed the buzzer for Room 34, and almost immediately a voice came out of the intercom.
“Password.”
“Put the bunny back in the box.”
“Oo-er . . .” Esther was so busy nudging Daisy that she almost missed the door buzzing open. “Are you sure this isn’t some other kind of club?”
“Esther!” Daisy was glad her mask hid her blush. “It’s a quote from Con Air.”
“A film that you’ve never seen . . .”
“I’ll see it tonight.”
“You are very determined to like Nicolas Cage, aren’t you?” The two of them spotted the door to number 34 at the same time, and they ground to a halt. Plastered across the wood was a range of Nicolas Cage faces, googly-eyed and shouting, each more manic than the next. It was almost impossible to pick out a single face, and one was left with the overwhelming horror of being swallowed up in a vortex.
“And you’re determined to give this club one last go before you decide whether it’s for you?” Esther asked, eyes averted from the many faces of the Cage.
Daisy nodded.
“Well, then.” Esther looped her arm through Daisy’s. “If it were anyone other than you, I’d have jumped out that window and run all the way home by now. Let’s go put this bunny in that box. And get you out of this club.”
6
THE FINAL HURDLE
The plan was going well, and, between them, Esther and Susan had successfully extracted Daisy from almost every society she’d signed up for. Esther had been in charge of any meetings during the morning or early afternoon—Susan’s course didn’t allow time for daylight hobbies—and Esther’s shameless ability to make a spectacle of herself was working out well. There were few people one could rely upon to willfully misunderstand the ethos of the Paper Clip Fanciers by loudly declaring a sexual attraction to stationery and rubbing herself up against a display of pastel-colored bulldog clips, moaning sensuously and shouting, “Daisy! Thank you so much for enabling my erotic predilections by inviting me to this orgy!”
Daisy had been ejected from the club, and an e-mail with Esther’s photo attached had been sent out to every stationery store in Sheffield warning employees not to let her in.
Leaving embarrassment to Esther, Susan favored overly competitive involvement and anarchy. She’d entered the opening game of the Snap Soc meeting with such aggression that she’d broken someone’s finger and started a bar fight, from which she and Daisy were forced to retreat through the beer cellar and out onto the street. Shortly after, Daisy received notification that she had been removed from the Snapchat group and would not be privy to the locations of further meetings. The same technique had worked flawlessly for Pokémon and Anarchic Croquet. Apparently, anarchy didn’t stretch to Susan dousing a croquet ball in gasoline, setting it alight, and attempting to smash it through the window of a nearby bank while screaming, “TAKE THAT, CAPITALISM!”
That morning, Daisy had sung her last four-part harmony with the Barbershop Babes, played her last chip at the Poker Soc, and supped her last goblet of mead over lunch with the Medieval Reenactment Org. A few things she would miss, like the excuse to wear a straw boater and the feel of crushed velvet, but some things were better enjoyed as a fleeting memory, rather than a weekly commitment. (Plus, she wasn’t entirely sure the members of the Medieval Reenactment Org would let her back in after one of the less noble knights had suggested that Susan had the comely shape befitting a serving wench and had promptly been informed of exactly where he could relocate his lance.)
Only one society remained, one that both Susan and Esther would attend that night. Apparently, they didn’t trust Daisy’s judgment even when it came to yoga. It didn’t matter how much Daisy waxed lyrical about the two beginner sessions she’d attended; they were skeptical. As Susan had pointed out, a society called “The Yogic Brethren of Zoise” was distinctly on the strange side, and all Daisy’s arguments trying to persuade them otherwise somehow only seemed to cement her friends’ conviction to extricate her.
Daisy’s afternoon had been spent pleasurably enough contemplating Iron Age settlements. As she took her time packing away her notes, Reggie shuffled over to lurk at the end of the row.
A moment later, he coughed.
“Reggie, if you want to talk to me, just say, ‘Hey, Daisy.’”
“Oh, er, hey, Daisy.” When Reggie smiled, his whole face creased up, and you couldn’t help but join him. Sliding her notes into her bag, she zipped it up and slipped it over her shoulder, falling into step with Reggie on her way out of the lecture hall.
“I like your T-shirt,” she told him. Daisy always liked what Reggie wore. He seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of humorous slogan T-shirts. Today’s said: Archaeology? I dig it.
“I was thinking about starting a regular post-lecture social,” he said. “Would you like to be the first member of the Beer Time Team?” He held the door open for her, and Daisy followed the rest of the class down the stairs.
Daisy did fancy it, but Susan and Esther had made her swear on Baby Gordon’s life that she wouldn’t accept any social invitations until she’d freed herself from the clutches of the ones she’d already accepted.
“Sorry, Reggie,” Daisy said, giving his arm a consoling pat. “I’m trying to scale back my socializing at the moment. Maybe next time.”
That afternoon, Esther had Creative Writing. It was a module that she’d been approved for at the start of term, but the first scheduled seminar had fallen during one of her many personal crises, and when the tutor had asked everyone to hand in what they’d been working on, she’d been forced to submit a page crammed full of lovelorn song lyrics and doodles of broken, bleeding, pulpy hearts.
An inclination to idleness wasn’t the only reason Esther had been reluctant to return.
So far she’d missed five out of six classes, but the whole point of this module was to leave students plenty of time to explore their own writing, and she’d pffted away Ed Gemmell’s concerns that she might have been taken off the course.
Dressed in her sports gear, ready to work up a mild perspiration doing yoga, Esther stopped by the university bookshop to grab a copy of her favorite book for the purposes of discussing “the nature of the reader experience,” then made her way to the seminar room. Strictly speaking, her favorite book was Lady Boss by Jackie Collins, but that wasn’t exactly literary, and she’d liked Frankenstein well enough
when they’d read it in school. Besides, there was no author more extra than Mary Shelley.
The building in which the seminar was held was about as inspiring as a block of offices. Esther could almost feel her muse withering with every step she took up the three flights to get to the right floor, then dying completely when she turned down a corridor lined with fluorescent lights and linoleum. When she pushed open the door to room 31B, it took a second for her eyes to adjust to the relative darkness within before she saw that thirteen students and one proper grown-up had turned to stare at her.
“Ah, er . . . hello?” The tutor was Dr. Cordoba—dad age but pretending not to be in a V-neck sweater and scruffy hair kind of way. “If you’re looking for fourteenth-century Spanish literature, that’s one floor up. Don’t let the name Cordoba confuse you.”
There followed an echo of a chuckle among the students, as if they’d laughed louder the first time he’d said this.
“Actually, I’m here for Creative Writing.” Esther closed the door behind her and searched the room for a seat that didn’t exist. “Esther de Groot? I was approved for this module at the start of term.”
“I see.” Dr. Cordoba raised eyebrows as shaggy as his hair. “And yet this is the first time you thought to attend?”
It was unusual for anyone to forget Esther, but she wasn’t exactly rocking the usual full-gothic aesthetic (although her leggings had a token ram-skull print).
“Actually, I came to the first seminar, but I’ve had some, er, personal issues . . .” Her voice trailed off as something clicked in Dr. Cordoba’s recall. His eyebrows dropped, and a look of mystified horror washed across his face as he no doubt recalled her paper. “. . . issues that have since been resolved,” Esther continued. “No more drama for me.”
“Well, the drama department’s loss is our gain, I’m sure.”
Esther laughed exactly one second before she realized it wasn’t a joke.
When Cordoba started talking once more, Esther sat down gratefully in a chair that one of the boys had pulled in from the side of the room and took stock of the people sitting around the U-shaped arrangement of tables. A couple of people she vaguely recognized from the Prose lectures looked at her with all the welcome that antibodies might bestow upon an invading virus. Someone she and Ed Gemmell referred to as “Thesaurus Boy” for the ridiculous way he phrased questions during lectures gave her a nervous smile, and next to him . . .
Esther’s heart stopped.
It was a long walk back from visiting her CAS patient, Mrs. Doherty, but Susan had missed the bus, and it would be quicker to walk than wait for the next.
Also, walking would mean she didn’t have to spend any more time with the student she’d been paired with. Milo was the sort of person who thought he knew everything and didn’t shut up about it. Susan had been forced to endure ninety minutes of him going on about the various genetic factors linked to gestational diabetes instead of listening to Mrs. Doherty, who actually had gestational diabetes. As Susan had to point out to Milo when Mrs. Doherty had left the room to make them a cup of tea, the point of students visiting patients wasn’t to pontificate about their clinical knowledge but to interview the patient about what it was like to live with a diagnosis.
It was supposed to be a civil warning but had ended with Susan threatening to give Milo a taste of what it might be like to live with a diagnosis of having been punched so hard in the testes that they retreated back into his body cavity.
Hurrying through a gap in traffic, Susan narrowly avoided getting hit by a cyclist with an impressively profane vocabulary. The streets were lethal, and even if she ran all the way into town, she’d still be late.
And with her lungs, running wasn’t exactly an option.
Not wanting to hold the others up, Susan took her phone out to message Daisy.
In the last half hour, Esther had developed reader relationships with The Catcher in the Rye, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (who knew George Orwell has written something other than 1984 and Animal Farm?!), and The Lord of the Rings without ever having read a single sentence. None of them were relationships she wished to pursue, and she’d spent most of her time pretending not to stare at the girl next to Thesaurus Boy. Although there was so much for Esther to stare at. The perfect fade of her green eyeshadow and the precise taper of her eyeliner. The skull-and-crossbones stud in her tragus and the line of sharp black studs, like rotted teeth, nibbling the length of her ear. The wolf print of the knotted scarf holding her hair off her face. Her shirt, her nails, her jewelry . . .
Esther had never seen anyone so cool in her life.
Despite Noor’s assurance at Halloween, Esther hadn’t seen Goth Girl in any of the lectures she’d managed to attend in the last ten days, and she hadn’t anticipated seeing her now. If she had, Esther might have worn something a little more lively (or deadly) than a plain black hoodie, minimal makeup, and no jewelry. If she wanted to impress, she’d have to do it with her mind.
When a boy called Da Vinci, who clearly considered himself to be edgy, started reading out loud from American Psycho, Esther yawned. Loudly.
“Sorry,” she said, sounding anything but when everyone turned to look at her. “Conditioned response to anything that considers itself shocking.”
Edgelord Da Vinci looked set to explode.
“Dude. It’s been made into a movie. I’m not saying it’s not great literature, but if your only relationship with American Psycho is the desire to be shocked, then how are you really engaging with what the author intended?”
There was a stunned kind of silence in the room, the kind Esther reveled in. She’d forgotten how much she enjoyed the role of provocateur. Back when she was an amateur, she might have played the American Psycho card, but Esther had long since turned pro.
“Interesting that you should bring up the notion of authorial intent when this discussion is focused on the reader,” Dr. Cordoba said, but he didn’t look displeased. “Does it matter what Easton Ellis intended? Should it matter?”
There was a murmur in the room as Da Vinci closed his book and gave Esther a mutinous look. She blew him a kiss.
“Esther”—Dr. Cordoba reeled her into the conversation—“it’s clear from this that you’re someone who places great importance on the nature of the author-reader relationship.”
She hadn’t until then, but Esther could work with that. After all, she’d brought Mary Shelley to the table.
“Surely all literature is a communication from the author to a reader, and therefore every reading, whether we wish it to be or not, is a tacit acceptance of this contract?”
Back in Tackleford, a casual “tacit acceptance” might have been enough to impress the rest of the class into agreeing, but had Esther attended more of her course-mandated seminars, she would have discovered that university debates were not so easily concluded.
From the far end of the table, with a voice like soil scattering over a coffin, Goth Girl spoke up.
“Surely one can hypothesize that literature is a construct of lies, and therefore one cannot trust the concept of authorial intent? Even if one were to argue that an author can make a statement of their intent—in a foreword or an interview—the truth of such a statement is in and of itself a lie.”
Esther had been in and of itself-ed!
“Would you care to expand on that, Vectra?” Cordoba said.
Her name was Vectra. Could she be any more awesome?
“The mechanics of intent, action, and reception are complex, but you’re asking us to draw a straight line from intent to reception without taking into account how a person goes about writing. Any examination of our reaction to a book for the purposes of finding our identity as readers should be taken in isolation.”
So many words arranged in such complicated syntax. Esther was out of practice and could no longer translate intellectual doublespeak fast enough to provide a counterargument.
The discussion was over. Vectra had won, but maybe that was for the be
st. People felt happy when they won, right?
Esther met her eye and gave an “all’s fair” kind of smile that wasn’t returned.
“Vectra makes a compelling point. From now on, we will disregard whoever authored your favorite books. I want to hear about how you interacted with the story only. And where better to start than with a book that was famously published anonymously by the author herself, arguably because she knew that the perception of who she was would negatively affect the critical reception . . .”
Everyone was looking at Esther, who in turn looked down in despair at the cover of Frankenstein.
“Esther, please tell us what is so special to you about your relationship with Mary Shelley’s seminal novel.”
Esther wished she’d been honest enough to bring Jackie Collins.
Having secured an empty table with nothing more than a mug of fruit tea, a book, and her phone for company, Daisy had presented too vulnerable a target amid the post-lecture frenzy of the coffee shop. Her spare chair and 80 percent of the table surface had been annexed by a group of History students, one of whom kept turning to glare at the side of Daisy’s face as if she were the interloper.
Daisy looked wistfully at the message on her phone from Susan asking for the address of the yoga place and saying she’d meet Daisy there. If Susan were sitting here, those History students would have yielded the table for six and offered to buy them fresh drinks in reparations.
As it was, Daisy was faced with the dilemma of eking out the last cold mouthfuls of her tea or risk losing her seat if she stood to order another.
She’d have to find a way. Esther wasn’t due out of her Creative Writing seminar for fifteen minutes. If Daisy needed to defend this table for longer, she could do it. For Esther.
“Excuse me?” Daisy used her quietest and most polite voice. “Could you save my seat for me while I get another drink?”
The History student she asked nodded, and Daisy wondered whether she hadn’t been unkind in her judgment. But when she came back to her table, all her things—the book she’d been reading, her hat and gloves—had been heaped on her chair, and the table had been shuffled across the aisle and assimilated into the History students’ territory.