When she told us about what she saw, Margaret would say that she was sick, which is the only reason she would ever dream of missing a lecture, but we all saw her drinking her Chardonnay spritzers at the student center that night, made with seltzer she brought with her since the student center was not the sort of place that sold drinks with more than one ingredient. She was too much of a hypochondriac to drink if she truly suspected there was something wrong with her. And we had all heard her talk about how she couldn’t stand writers, or anyone, really, who got attention just for being strange, or different from everyone else. Like, if you had to try that hard, what was the point. Normal was underrated, she thought, even in fiction. She was a classicist, and if any of us had ever asked her, we feel confident she would have told us that her favorite book was something that even people who never take a single English class after high school have read, like Pride and Prejudice or The Great Gatsby. So if there was a lecture she was going to dodge for no other reason than pure lack of interest, “Postmodernism in the Wake of David Foster Wallace” feels like a pretty safe bet.
If we’re being fair, though, she was probably also tired by then. We all were. It was the second-to-last day of classes and lectures that term, and there was no small amount of information we had been asked to take in and process and turn into a measurable improvement in our writing. Maybe tired is the wrong word. Maybe small is better. Our heads had been filled with the thoughts and rules and revelations of the most brilliant writers in history, across numerous decades, and it wasn’t until we had them all put in front of us, side by side like that and in so short a chunk of time, that we realized how many of them there were. Even the great ones bled into a sea of other great ones, and it made us feel inconsequential, even if we were destined for some little bit of greatness ourselves. We had arrived on campus feeling closer to real writers than we ever had before, and now we saw how much work still lay ahead of us, and how much we still had to learn and how hard we would have to work. Small may be an okay word for it, but lonely might be even better, since the people in our normal lives who often made us feel bigger were still miles away, and considered us on some sort of low-glam vacation that we would have to make up for later with extra garbage duty or matrimonial attentiveness.
Poor Jibs’s loneliness was probably only made worse when she saw the two people out on the lawn lean into each other for a kiss that melted them into one lone figure, a silhouette cut out of the horizon. The room the pew sits in is so stuffy, so completely shut off from any fresh air, the windows around it having been painted shut for decades, or never meant to open in the first place, that you could see the particles moving in the air around you. The space felt like such a vacuum that it probably made what she was watching feel even farther away, on another planet or in a dream she once had instead of across only a hundred yards or so. She said she wasn’t sure if it was just that time moved slowly during the late-afternoon march toward dinner and the clink of ice in glasses, but it felt like they stayed that way for a while. Even after the kiss, their faces lingered just millimeters away from each other, she said, so that it was impossible to say where one of them ended and the other began. Neither half of the pair was ready to separate from the other, even if discretion or bashfulness or time kept them from giving that first kiss a twin.
Whatever else you want to say about Margaret’s writing, she knows how to hold a story. That night in the student center, she waited until the exact moment we thought she had told us everything there was to know before telling us that it was remarkable, how clearly she saw the two faces bent toward each other just after they finally pulled themselves apart. A true testament to just how powerful the light in Vermont is in the summer, without too many things to bend or break it or get in its way. She said the distance and the height did nothing to diminish the happiness on their faces or the weightlessness of their gaits as Jimmy and Hannah separated, and walked to their opposite ends of the campus.
* * *
Probably the only thing that could have distracted us from further speculation on both the confetti Simone had made of Jimmy’s work and what Jibs had seen was the graduation dance that was scheduled for the next night, the last night of the residency. Even we first-years knew that the last night was the best. There had been so much talk about it from the upper classes that we knew to anticipate the event without having experienced it. Finally getting to drink and listen and see firsthand all the things they had been telling us about made the night ahead of us and its events feel like some sort of milestone, instead of just another gathering of bookish nerds, which we all surely were, despite the many things that set us apart from one another. We took pleasure in ticking off all the customs and traditions we had been told to expect, because it made them ours, too, from the jam band that played the new graduates out to the kitschy, ironic tokens each student bestowed upon their favorite professor—one year it had been leis, another pinwheels.
After the graduation ceremony in the big, more formal auditorium you had to cross that field of wildflowers to get to, which was lit up with fireflies by the time you crossed back. After the speeches given by the visiting emcee—an NBCC-winning transgender essayist—and a student speaker elected by their classmates, this residency a poet who wore mismatched Converse sneakers in bold colors and had an arm sleeve of Sesame Street tattoos. After the last plate of a chocolate mousse far more traditional and far more edible than anything that had been served in the cafeteria all residency had been cleared, we all streamed back across campus to the student center for the farewell party.
We took up the spot in the student center our class had been occupying all residency, a lonely island of plastic booths in between the pool tables and the snack machines that overcharged. We weren’t sure if it was the spot first-years always got, or if it would be ours until we graduated and left it open for the incoming first-years, but we realized, settling into it that night, that we’d know soon, because we were almost done being the new guys.
We were feeling pretty good by the first sip of our four-dollar student center beers. A little wistful that we had to leave, but excited to see our families and roommates and lovers in the Real World, who were starting to feel like characters in a short story we had once read. The last workshop was the following morning, earlier than we might’ve liked, but after the wine we’d had at the graduation dinner, we were feeling confident about the opinions we had formed on the stories being workshopped, and those of us who were being workshopped were feeling so generous and warm toward our classmates, nestled into one another in formal wear that made us feel as if we had all just gone to prom with one another after ten days of fleeces and jeans and college T-shirts, that we weren’t even that concerned about what these friends might have to say about our work. We trusted them with it. Mostly, we were thinking we had made it. One residency down.
By the time Jimmy, Leslie, and Hannah walked into the student center we had given up on them ever arriving. We wouldn’t have blamed Jimmy for staying away. If his workshop had been even half as brutal as we’d heard, we might’ve stayed away ourselves. We were feeling so benevolent to this place and its people by then, and so optimistic about the things we would achieve before we left it for good, that we didn’t even hold their exclusivity against them, realizing only as the resentment dissipated that we’d had it in the first place.
The impenetrable borders of the triangle they formed suddenly felt like another tic of our class that we would think about when we were off campus, like Tammy’s stories about the strangest, drunkest client she had ever represented and Tanner and Melissa’s clumsy public flirtation, which still seemed sweet to us then. It felt like something that we were a part of, instead of something we were forced to stand outside of. More than anything, we admired Jimmy in that moment he appeared in the student center’s doorway, and are sorry we never got the chance to tell him. None of us said anything to or about him when the trio joined the fringes of our group. We tol
d ourselves later that it was only because we didn’t want to scare him away.
Penny took their arrival as her cue to start her speech about the brown box of T-shirts at her feet. Patrick Stanbury and Jamie Brigham started drumroll pounding on the table, making us forget the irritation we’d felt at the undertaking’s first email and meeting. Sarah Jacobs and Mimi Kim wahooed with their arms raised above their heads, the closest thing to cheerleaders any graduate program has ever had, making Robbie look over. Even in the dim student center lighting we saw him blush when his gaze lingered on Sarah a beat too long. Penny had less wine at dinner than the rest of us, but her too-alert eyes looked comfortable in her face for once, and strands of hair were starting to fall from her normally very-crisp braid. She looked prettier in the late-June student center light than she would when we pictured her later—she was the kind of woman memory wasn’t kind to. Leslie put two fingers in her mouth and whistled so loudly that some of the wildly drunk graduates turned around, and we felt the warmth of a hundred draft beers for her.
“Thanks, guys, thank you,” Penny began. “I don’t know about you all, but I find being on this campus inspiring.”
Lucas and Robbie whistled as if she had just taken her shirt off.
“There are so many people here who care about the same things you do, things that seem maybe a little indulgent, because they don’t always make money, or serve a practical purpose, or because the purpose they do serve is hard to measure. It makes it easy to forget about these things off campus, in Real Life. And being around other people who feel as committed to these things as you reminds you that these things really do matter, no matter how easy it is to lose sight of them when you go back home, to other responsibilities. And I know I don’t want to forget that in between now and next residency. And I’m hoping that maybe these T-shirts will help. To remind us why we came here and what we’re hoping to get out of being here.”
She took a T-shirt out of the box and held it up like some sort of flag as she scooted the box to the next person in the clumsy half circle we formed. On the back of the T-shirt, we saw, as we each grabbed a shirt out of the box, all of our names were listed. Tammy was just plain Tammy, even there. Penny’s name was first. Hannah’s and Leslie’s names were last. There was no ostensible criteria for the order of the names in between. The box had made it halfway around the group before anyone realized that Jimmy’s name had been left off entirely. Those of us who realized it looked back at Jimmy, who already had a T-shirt in his hand.
Leslie grabbed hers and Hannah’s and Jimmy’s T-shirts before Hannah had time even to put her hand on Jimmy’s left shoulder, the most intimate physical contact we can remember anyone having with him, other than the kiss, which only Jibs can verify. No one said anything as Leslie walked to the kitchen in the corner of the student center without looking back, though Penny kept looking over her shoulder nervously, as if Leslie were there collecting weapons. We felt a little sorry for Penny, horrified though we were at her oversight. None of us held it against her, even if we wouldn’t look at her while we waited for whatever Leslie was doing. The truth is that, if you’d never read Jimmy’s work, he was utterly forgettable, a boy destined to be left off rosters and T-shirts.
Leslie came back wearing her T-shirt, and tossed Jimmy’s and Hannah’s to them as soon as they were in range. When they turned to leave we saw the three neat rectangular holes on the back of all three T-shirts in exactly the same place on each one. They were neater than we would’ve thought Leslie capable of, so uniform across each shirt in size and location that they looked like computer em dashes. Two of them were where Leslie’s and Hannah’s names used to be, the third was where Jimmy’s should’ve been.
We can’t remember now the design we landed on for the front of the T-shirt, what motto we all finally decided we could live with, or even what color it was. Not realizing at the time how distinctly we would want to remember our time on campus, none of us saved our shirt, not even Penny, who probably no more wanted a reminder of her mistake than the rest of us. When we think about the shirt now, we see the three floating absences that, like Jimmy and Leslie and Hannah themselves, were somehow more vivid and undeniable than the presences they had replaced.
The floating absences got smaller as the three of them walked out of the student center to some lonely campus spot that only they know, but the image of their retreating backs still hasn’t left us. We don’t even have any guesses about where they went this time, and not even the high school junior, who had an opinion on everything, or Patrick Stanbury, who was so gregarious that he usually tracked down whatever detail or piece of information we were after just from breezy casual conversation with the maximum number of people possible, could say. And yet for all that we don’t know and probably never will, that moment of watching them leave and the absences that floated just after them, waving good-bye, is the only moment that all of us remember exactly the same.
* * *
Leslie’s story was workshopped the next morning. Every residency, there was one last workshop the Sunday morning after the postgraduation party. It went until noon, giving students two hours until the two o’clock deadline, by which everyone had to be off campus and pointed toward home, so the school could flip the dorms and get them ready for the undergrads again, wiping out any trace that we had ever been there. The hangovers alone made it nearly impossible for anyone to concentrate that morning, never mind the lists of things to pack and good-byes to make that we were all building in our heads and in the margins of almost-full-by-now notebooks. Some people thought it was lucky to go on the last day, because no one had the energy to be mean, or attack with any rigor. Others thought it meant your work got less real feedback.
Leslie was pretty much the only person who could’ve held our attention at that point, and not just because of how strange and dark her story was. All eight other students in the workshop arrived early, steaming coffees in hand, hoping to be there when she and Hannah arrived. We thought they’d wear the evidence of however they’d spent the night before. We thought they’d sit even closer than they normally did, chairs scooted in close, thighs touching under the table, whispering throughout class, lest anyone forget the degree to which they were more powerful than the sum of their parts. But when Blake Bowlin, a likable enough third-year in their workshop, walked into Sunset Cottage five minutes before class, Hannah was already there, marking up a copy of Leslie’s story with the cold, discerning eye she might’ve shown the work of a complete stranger. Leslie was the last to arrive, at ten o’clock exactly, which, to be fair, was early for her. She sat four chairs away from Hannah even though there was a seat empty next to her. Though we can’t say why, this complete lack of intimacy or even acknowledgment didn’t feel like a sign of any trouble between them—it felt aimed more outward, toward us, than at each other. Whatever had happened after they left last night, it was theirs alone.
This public estrangement wasn’t the only thing that had everyone sitting up straighter than the number of hours of sleep they’d had should’ve made possible. Most of the other people in the class had read Leslie’s story before it became an accepted fact that she wrote erotica. And it was only when they went to reread it that last, early morning of workshop that they knew enough to be surprised when no one got laid. It was as edgy and unsettling as anyone expected, but no one got naked. Her writing was unblinking and unsentimental. We were shocked, when we finally read the story ourselves, at how much it made us feel.
The story was about two American doctors in Africa, fighting the Ebola crisis. The female doctor is in love with the male doctor, and the male doctor is in love with the heroics of his being there in the first place. He does some unnamed thing to piss her off—the thing was referred to as “The Thing,” two capped Ts throughout—but what it is was never said. Every day, they’re in charge of zipping each other’s Hazmat suits before they go into buildings full of affected patients, and in the last scene the fema
le doctor intentionally leaves the male doctor’s suit partially undone, leaving him completely vulnerable to the disease. The last line is her watching him disappear through the doorway into a roomful of very sick people.
While the class waited for Professor Pearl to call everyone to order, Leslie wouldn’t look at anyone, but it didn’t stop everyone else in the room from looking at her. Her hair was so greasy it almost looked wet, gathered onto the top of her head in stringy clumps that met in a giant topknot and in between which you could see parts of her scalp so white they made her look vulnerable. Hygiene wasn’t much of a priority for any of us while we were on campus—you could get away with showering about as often as you did on a camping trip. We realized, looking at Leslie’s hair that morning, that none of us had seen it freshly shampooed, and we wondered if she had gone the entire residency without showering.
Maybe it was the hair, which made her seem downtrodden and small in a way that undermined her usual vibrancy, or the patches of scalp that had never seen the sun. Maybe it was that we still had no idea where she had spent the rest of the night before. Maybe it was that, reading her story that morning, it was better than anyone remembered from their initial read-throughs. Upon first read the other people in the class had admired it, they told us—it was unique without trying too hard to be strange—but it had confused them. But reading it after ten days with her, it made complete sense.
Reading it that first time, Leslie’s story hadn’t reminded them of anything or felt derivative of anything, but now it reminded them of her.
We Wish You Luck Page 10