“No. Thank you,” Simone said, making it clear that the two sentiments were not attached, and the no was a hard one. “I like the quiet to work. Is there any other way to get into the room?”
Linda handed the key back to Simone lazily, at a pace that said it was all the same to her, which it was, never mind that the key was worthless. “I can radio security to meet you at your room. They have a master key that will get you in.”
Once she finished saying this she looked back down at her cross-stitch, the matter now closed.
“Well, that would be good, but it doesn’t entirely solve my problem.”
That Linda was a good enough soul to teach Leslie a skill as fine-tuned as cross-stitching, but not good enough to humor two cross-stitching interruptions for a single problem she did not consider herself responsible for creating, was evident on Linda’s face when she looked up. She was polite, Linda’s smile said, not an idiot.
“Well, now, sugar, I suppose you could just leave the room unlocked until we can track down the spare key, or someone else reports a wrong key. You can lock the door from the inside, manually, like you do a bathroom, so you’d feel safe at night. It would just be a matter of leaving it open when you’re away. So just don’t leave anything of value in there.”
That would’ve been the end of the exchange if Leslie hadn’t spoken just as Simone finished opening and closing her mouth several times in a row. “I know it’s not ideal, but in a place like this, with everyone as friendly as they are, what bad could possibly come of it?”
Joni said Leslie didn’t look up when she said it, still apparently too invested in her cross-stitching to give the matter much thought. The funny thing, according to Joni, was that Leslie’s needle didn’t move once the whole time Simone was in the room.
* * *
Penny had picked a classroom in the red barn for her meeting about our class gift, denying us the sunlight and the grass this time, perhaps hoping we would be less distracted, but really only giving us one more thing to hold against her. The dragging, pouty postures with which we all arrived at the small second-floor room on the morning after we received Penny’s email—once again a disaster of exclamation points and passive aggressions—immediately fell away when we saw that it was Leslie at the front of the table where the professors usually sat. Her hands were folded crisply in front of her in a way that seemed to poke fun at the sloppy lines of her wardrobe. Our surprise turned to relief when we saw Hannah sitting just to her left, confident that if this was some sort of joke Leslie was telling at our expense Hannah wouldn’t be there.
Leslie didn’t begin until Lucas and Robbie arrived five minutes late. She indicated that they should shut the door behind them with a single swoosh of her wrist, a call Lucas and Robbie fell over each other in a race to answer, partly because Leslie was a pretty girl, and partly because there was no activity they were incapable of turning into a competition.
“All right,” said Leslie, as soon as they were both sitting again. “I promise I’ll keep this brief. I know nobody wants to be inside on a day like this, and I think I speak for all of us when I say there are better things to be doing around here.”
She paused then to give us a chance to fill the room with small, polite gestures of agreement, but we were all too shocked to move. This was by far the most number of words Leslie had ever spoken directly to us.
“Penny over here called us all together because she thinks we should give Pearl some sort of gift to commemorate his retirement.” Leslie threw her head forty-five degrees in the direction Penny was sitting without making any sort of complicitous eye contact. “I think she’s right. I mean, you guys have seen the schedule—everyone’s making a big to-do about this being his last term and everything, and we don’t want to look bad by comparison, right? So anyway, I have an idea, and rather than facing the whole too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen problem we had with the class motto a few terms ago—no offense, Pen—I thought I’d just execute it myself with a little help from all of you.”
At this use of a nickname, however clumsy and off the cuff, Penny did smile, and was immediately prettier for it. Later we would wonder if she had really reprised her committee role on her own, or if Leslie had made her do it. By then Penny was so happy to have been part of an alliance that didn’t include a teacher that she wouldn’t say whose idea it had been.
“The thing is, I really like Pearl,” Hannah said, the first formal indication that she was part of this plan as well, though we had assumed as much. She waved a hand at Leslie. “I think we both do. I mean, you guys know how it is here—there are some really good teachers and some hacks, and you never know which type you have until well into the semester, and Pearl was one of the best that term I had him. I really think I became a better writer.”
“Yeah,” said Leslie. “Exactly. So we wouldn’t even mind doing the extra work of putting it together. And we’d want you guys to have some representation even if we’re the ones doing the heavy lifting, so I’d just need two things from you—twenty bucks and one to two thousand words of your best work.”
A few hands were raised at this mention of our work, which almost always bred questions and insecurities, no matter the context, but Leslie ignored them.
“It can’t be one or the other. Not because you’re, like, paying to be part of the project, but because you’re either in this or you’re not, you know?”
By then we had it together enough to nod that we did in fact know what she meant, and we had no sooner given our bobbed consent than we realized Leslie was standing and heading for the door behind us. Hannah started reluctantly gathering her things to follow, ready to go, given that they had said what they came there to say, but not entirely pleased to be rushed. It seemed cruel that just as we were beginning to truly understand how noteworthy what was happening in this room was, it was ending.
“So, yeah,” Leslie said. “Just PayPal or Venmo me the money—you have my email address—and send me any questions you have about the writing samples, which I’m sure you’ll have. That is what people seem to like to do here—ask questions.” This last part was the closest she came all morning to mentioning Simone—queen of pretentious, unanswerable questions asked from the chair on high—though none of us would make the connection until later.
Leslie was about to reach out for the doorknob to open it when Hannah put a hand on her shoulder.
“Leslie.”
“Oh, yeah,” Leslie said, not needing any further clarification. “And we should have a party.” She said this like it was any less strange than her speaking in tongues would have been, like it was something she suggested all the time. “I mean, our time at this place is almost halfway over, and we can’t leave all the fun to these invading academics and wannabes, you know? I know we haven’t exactly been raging since we started here, but I have a hard time believing they know more about how to throw a party than we do. So in a few nights, let’s say, I don’t know, the fourth night of the residency, to get a jump on the midweek slump, let’s meet at Lefferts Field at dusk.”
“You don’t have to bring anything,” Hannah said. “We’ll handle it all. We’ll make it a bonfire. I think Lefferts would be a really spectacular spot for a bonfire, don’t you think?”
And with that they both turned back around and left us, before we had time to ask any questions of our own.
* * *
When they tired of the boring, groundwork-laying portion of the operation and decided it was time to actually strike, they started with her chair.
They picked the welcome orientation, which might’ve seemed like a throwaway event, but was actually the one thing everyone went to. By that June we could have recited the orientation spiels by heart: the warning against illicit drugs that was almost insulting in the extent to which it was empty, the reminder about how many students could be present in one room before it was a fire hazard, and the hours the cafeteria woul
d be open. But we were eager to see all the faces that we had come to campus looking for in one place. That June orientation was a particularly happy one for us third-termers. We were halfway through, a half that had girded us and prepared us, we liked to think, for what was still ahead. We had known which teachers to request for this term, and which ones to avoid. We were starting to find ways to employ the rules and prohibitions our professors reminded us of again and again without stripping our stories of what made our writing uniquely, exclusively our own. Discovering these tricks had felt a little like cheating, even though it had already occurred to some of us that this had been what our professors had hoped of us the entire time. We had at least one story that we felt confident we could include in our final graduation thesis, which required a hundred pages of polished, professor-approved fiction.
We’d had some of this acquired wisdom that second term, in January, but there was some strange, supernatural benediction from the weather that January residencies lacked. We weren’t sure if it was our imagination, or if the sun really had already kissed us in the one half-day we had spent romping through what now felt like our own personal corner of Vermont. That first morning of the welcome orientation, we were starting to smile the kinds of smiles that give you crow’s-feet and make your cheeks look round in pictures.
We were too busy waving to one another across the auditorium, or, if you were Lucas and Robbie, making half-perverse gestures to the girls they were after that term, to notice that Hannah and Leslie were sitting in Simone’s chair. Like all of the others in the auditorium, it was a small, hard chair, uncomfortable even when occupied by only one person, despite the elevated status and sanction that Simone’s repeated use of it had bestowed. They each sat balanced on the edge of one half of the chair like the two-headed monster they were.
Simone’s reaction, at first sight of them, could not have been any more dramatic if they actually had been some grotesque fairy-tale creature. When she was about five feet away from them, she looked up from the stack of papers she had been riffling through and pulled back physically when she saw that her throne had been breached. Even those of us close enough to see her look of horror knew she wasn’t going to say anything. She couldn’t. She was supposed to be one of the nice ones, after all. She couldn’t possibly mind finding somewhere else to sit just this once. Seats weren’t officially assigned. Everyone else sat in a different spot each night. It was a wonder someone hadn’t taken it unknowingly sooner. She couldn’t begrudge two students, whom she was there to serve, really, a place to sit. She took a seat one level and two rows farther down—squarely in their line of sight—offering herself as prey as surely as the black mouse who runs out across the snowy field in front of an owl’s favorite tree.
They waited until Linda took the podium to introduce the new head chef of the cafeteria to begin. The noises they made were an unmistakable nod to Simone’s verbal acknowledgments of the points and beautiful lines that speakers and readers made and read each night. Coming from where they did, it was that much easier to place where we had heard these noises before. We all mmm-hmmmmed and ahhhhed throughout the presentations the auditorium saw—it was a common MFA courtesy, at least at Fielding—but Simone was a woman who liked to be heard above the crowd. Leslie and Hannah’s version of it was no more discreet than Simone’s, but there was something hard in their imitation. Something violent. It almost sounded involuntary, compulsive, but the extent to which they were in sync betrayed how premeditated it must have been. It was aggressive enough that while the rest of us didn’t dare look back and risk encouraging them, making ourselves complicit or, worse, descending into laughter we’d never regain control of, we did silently elbow one another with wide eyes and tight, closemouthed smiles that didn’t hide the real, bursting levels of naughty joy we felt. Only Simone looked back. It was clear she couldn’t help it. We almost felt sorry for her, looking as small and ordinary as she did down in her less prominent, mortal seat, turning up to face whatever this was.
They were relentless in their noisemaking. They oohed when the student activities director announced that yoga had been added to this term’s list of classes available during free periods, and mmmmmed when the president of the graduating class got up to say a few words about the graduates’ class gift. Sometimes it was in unison and sometimes their hums leapt out in solos that almost sounded louder than their combined force. Other than a few pointed looks from nearby faculty members, no one reprimanded them, and we were reminded once again how powerful plain old human audacity can be. It’s hard to reprimand someone for doing something so strange that it hasn’t been expressly forbidden. That Jo Ann Beard was in the third row of the auditorium and Geoff Dyer was two chairs away from the girls incited these faculty members’ anger, making their pointed looks sharper as the orientation wore on, but also made that anger completely agency-less. They couldn’t afford to make any more of a scene than the girls already were.
Simone looked back and up at them every time, too startled for her looks to be challenging. She forgot, each time, that her reputation required that she smile at them, so that the gesture was clearly empty by the time she thought to make it. The third time Simone looked back, Leslie actually waved. It wasn’t difficult to see that Simone was rattled, trying hard to keep her gaze straight ahead but helpless to stop herself, like the jilted lover who spots her ex in the wild with the woman he’s upgraded to—breezy, I’m over it body language with I’m already crying about this on the inside eyes.
She should’ve tried harder. She should’ve bit her lip and squared her shoulders and lied. It was really over that first day, when they realized they had her. It’s almost disappointing how easy it was.
We get it, though. This isn’t the undergrad program or summer camp that it sometimes feels like. Even the babies among us are old enough to have lost people and walked out on places we could never return to and said things we couldn’t take back, no matter how good or bad each of us is or was at translating these things into words on a page. We’ve all felt things so strongly that no part of our bodies will lie about it, even if it might be better if they could.
We know, too, that feeling Simone must’ve had that last time she turned around and saw that Leslie and Hannah were both staring at the dead center of her back without betraying any of the emotion she was, their pretty faces slack. We had all felt our stomach pits bloom at the first indication that the price for some random, lonely sin that we thought had been overlooked or forgotten would be larger than the amount we had budgeted.
We knew that sometimes the world would let you take without giving anything back and that other times, well—other times the world had something entirely different in mind.
* * *
On the third day of the residency, there was a cocktail party at dusk to celebrate Pearl’s forthcoming book, and to wish him well in retirement. Everyone was there, even Jiles Gardner, who rarely made it to anything but workshop. It was one of those slow, sunset-cocktail affairs at which the dropping sun promises to keep pace with your drinking, and you can’t seem to turn around without someone topping off your glass, the kind of event more common at five-hundred-dollar-a-night hotels than on campus lawns. Being part of the student body this residency, we were starting to discover, was better even than being one of the spoiled, entitled undergrads. Certainly there was more champagne. Even the middle child has a wedding day.
We tried to rise to the occasion. Patrick Stanbury stood talking to Carter, who was holding a tray of champagne flutes. The impossibly tall figure Patrick cut was even harder not to notice now that he wore a pressed collared shirt that hung on him with the formality of a three-piece suit and only made us love him more. Carter kept reaching over to try to button Patrick’s top button to hide the top of the lettering on the T-shirt beneath, putting his champagne charges in a precarious position that would have worried us if we didn’t feel confident that there was plenty more of it. Tammy kept walking up and
down the length of the food table, grabbing generous portions from the towers of shrimp the pink of baby-girl nurseries and circles of cheese so richly stinky you could smell them from feet away. She stopped only to ask people if they had tried this or that with half-masticated wads of whatever it was still in her mouth. Jibs stood at the periphery, trying not to reveal how delighted she was to be at an event like this, complaint beyond even her.
At the center of it all was Leslie, her Cyndi Lauper hair as blond as it had ever been, in a silk slip dress the color of a fresh head wound. That her last shampoo job was on at least its third day and that she had paired the dress with purple high-tops might’ve made people less familiar with Leslie think the dress was an afterthought, something she just had lying around. We knew her well enough to notice that the dress still had the folds from the box it had been shipped to campus in from whatever high-end department store it had been summoned. We kept looking over at her, waiting for her to do something to undermine the glamour of it all, like stick a cocktail shrimp in the clutch that even Tammy recognized as expensive. That Hannah, with whom she had arrived, was circulating separately, making friendly, noncommittal chitchat with the rest of us, only made us more unnerved. Though we had little actual evidence to confirm it, we liked to think that Hannah often kept Leslie from going beyond the limits she was constantly testing.
Leslie had just said something to the non-Carter champagne waiter that made him laugh and hand her a second glass of champagne when Professor Pearl approached her, so she had two glasses to raise toward him in greeting. The waiter took a step back to let them talk.
“Leslie,” he said, nodding. “You look well.”
“Well, free champagne looks good on everybody,” she said. “Speaking of which. Here.” She held out one of her flutes to him, which he declined with a smile.
We Wish You Luck Page 18