It was shocking, in the end, how well they knew us. Not a single one of us left that clearing, or looks back on the day, with even a hint of resentment, or that crippling feeling of being misunderstood, even in the art form we had undertaken to help clarify to the world what we felt and thought. Though we did all later confess that we were secretly afraid that we would be the only ones for whom there wasn’t a book. We just couldn’t imagine that Hannah or Leslie had thought about us long enough to have any idea what we read or who we wrote like. It was a fear that gripped each of us until the very moment we saw our names on the title pages of books that rose in our estimation the moment we saw ourselves in them.
Even now, knowing what we do, it’s flattering to think of this day—of the amount of time they must have put into it, both immediately before, buying the books, many of which were rare or expensive first editions, and all the days before it, to have any idea of something as personal as which authors we loved, or might. It’s still irresistible, the idea that we meant anything to them, given how much they meant to us. How much they mean to us still.
None of it had anything to do with us.
Because they were on the volunteer committee, Leslie and Hannah knew Simone’s room was in Lefferts Cottage in the middle of Lefferts Field, and that she was the only person to have a room in the otherwise empty residence hall. There were rumors that Simone had requested the empty building so that there would be room for all her city guests, who were scheduled to arrive for the residency’s final events and feting. This gossip gave only more credibility to other rumors, about the announcements those final events would hold, but only the girls had any insight into housing matters. Leslie waited until it was just dark enough that we needed the Christmas lights to do more than set a tone to suggest that we get to work on the bonfire. She said this like she had just then thought of the idea, her voice uncharacteristically breezy. Simone wrote to classical music—she recommended it to all her workshops, claiming it had lent itself to the timelessness of her work—so she wouldn’t have heard our merrymaking, but there would be no missing a fire the magnitude of which the girls had planned.
Buoyed as we were by the books tucked in our bags, and still feeling misty-eyed about the generosity of what Leslie and Hannah had planned for us and maybe even feeling a little guilty that we might have misjudged them, we set about the task with relish equal to the one Leslie had shown at our incorrect guesses. We were so busy lugging wood, ignoring the splinters that inevitably jammed their way up under nails, and the smears of dirt and bark that were starting to stain the only set of party clothes we had packed for the entire residency, that the long list of rules we were breaking didn’t immediately occur to us. We didn’t think about the notice we had all read in the handbook, and which had been read to us at each of the three welcome orientations we had now attended, about how matches and candles and lighters were prohibited in any of the living residences, and that smoking was a strictly outdoor business everywhere on campus. We tried not to let our minds get too close to the surprisingly fierce language the administration had used in their email about the bonfire Leslie and Hannah had lit anonymously in Adam’s Square at the end of the residency before—the administration normally treated us like a favorite, prized student, respect and admiration apparent in their syntaxes and tone, which had been absent enough in this one particular dispatch that we all should have remembered it six months later. We tried hardest of all not to think of the two senior undergraduates who died in a fire that had been started by a joint someone had tossed in the bushes outside the main residence hall back when the school was still a women’s college, even though we all loved the ghost stories that the incident had borne.
In far less time than it had taken us to correctly identify the books intended for us, we had gathered a pile of wood so towering only a dozen people or more could’ve built it, and would ignite a bonfire of comparable magnitude. We had all been dragging our kindling finds to Leslie’s feet, which she encouraged by not moving from her spot once we started bringing them to her, and it was only once we had finished and stepped back to admire our work that we saw how close to the building the pile really was. When Jenny Ritter, who had spent a not insignificant portion of the last six years of her life reminding actual children not to play with matches, wondered out loud what the rest of us had been thinking—if the pile wasn’t too close to the building, and should be moved—Leslie made a pish-posh nonsense noise.
She raised her hands dramatically overhead, as if trying to distract us from our worries, or wave them away. She looked like a third-grade teacher on a field trip, eager to regain the attention and control of her class. “All right, guys,” she said, pulling one oversize match from the front pocket of her overalls, “who wants to do the honors?”
Despite the handbook warnings and the dead girls and the January email that had felt like it was scolding us as much as it was scolding Hannah and Leslie, we all raised our hands without hesitation, both instinctively and fully committed. When Leslie took a full five seconds to scan all our faces, making it clear she wasn’t choosing at random, before extending the match to Margaret Jibs, we might’ve been a little hurt, or even started to doubt that she knew us as well as the books had made us think, given how unworthy a recipient she had chosen for what suddenly seemed like an honor. Now that we knew the girls had been paying more attention to us than we had ever dared to hope, we wanted to know what it was they had seen. This was the night we started to think of ourselves as characters in the story they were telling, however peripheral. And we were eager to know what roles they had planned for us.
But there wasn’t time for that yet. Jibs made quick work of the task she had been selected for, and the pile went up in flames with such angry velocity and blinding magnitude that we would later wonder if Leslie had doused the wood in the field with lighter fluid before we arrived, though even the most convinced theorists would concede they hadn’t smelled anything.
Later, Mimi would say that when the face first appeared in the window, she assumed it was another surprise that Leslie had conjured just for us. Some whimsical, half-real, half-pretend creature that only Leslie’s brain was capable of creating.
Though Mimi’s thought hadn’t occurred to us, we recognized the feeling she was talking about—excitement and anticipation, maybe even a little bit of wonder—and remembered having it, out there on the edge of where the campus met the woods, even if only for a moment before anxiety replaced it. It didn’t take long to see that the face in the glass was very much human, and very angry. Or agitated, at the very least, stimulated to the highest degree of unhappiness even if the face didn’t yet know what precise form that unhappiness should take—fear or anger or sadness. We all pinpointed whom the face belonged to before it had time to express its decision.
Simone.
We all turned and ran at the same time. We ran in such a blinding, desperate state of panic that we didn’t notice anything other than the heavy thud of our hearts and the dryness of our mouths. It was all we could do just to watch for debris in front of us, and stay on our feet. It was only later, when we were safely in the lounge of the third-term dorm building most of us were staying in—too scared of being fingered for the crime we had just unwillingly committed even to show our faces in the student center—that Jordan commented how strange it was, the last thing he had seen in the clearing. Loath as he was to do anything to jeopardize his good standing with the faculty, Jordan was also a good enough guy that he stayed behind to make sure the rest of us got away safely before taking off at the sprint he was capable of, the all-American titles of his college career resurfacing all these years later, ghosts every bit as present as the dead girls. So he was the last one to flee the scene. He made us press him on what he had seen that was so strange, of course.
“Leslie went in the opposite direction of the rest of us, closer to the window Simone was looking out of instead of as far away as she could
possibly get.” Jordan ran his hands through his hair as he said this—a tic he’d had as long as we’d known him—even though they were covered with dirt and ash, his normally pristine nails black. We all took a moment to wonder how the fact that his hands were literally dirty should be worked into the story later.
None of us believed him. Jenny Ritter said even her six-year-old would know better than that, and Tammy said that while Leslie was probably crazy enough to get off on an insanity defense, she wasn’t dumb enough to come right out and tattle on herself for so expellable an offense. But Jordan said he saw it as clear as his hand in front of his face. He said Leslie walked up to the window until her face was so close to it her lipstick might’ve left marks on the glass if she had been wearing any. He said she was mouthing something. Two lone words, again and again. He said that at first Simone ignored her, looking past her, at all the fleeing people, curious, and probably alarmed, at whatever they were running from. He said at first he couldn’t make out what Leslie was saying, and that it was only when Simone started freaking out that he realized what it was. We couldn’t imagine any two-word combination stronger than fuck you, and Simone wasn’t the type to get worked up about something even as aggressive as that, and we said as much.
“No,” Jordan said. “‘Get out.’”
It was so far off from what we were imagining Leslie chanting by then, over and over, that at first we thought Jordan meant Oh, get out of here, no one would put up with someone saying fuck you to them. Certainly it would have warranted the reaction I saw. When his words were met with only blank, noncomputing faces, he clarified.
“That’s what she was saying, again and again. ‘Get out.’ With her mouth only, not with actual words, and Simone thought she meant to get out of the building, I think. Because it was on fire. She started to panic because she thought Leslie was telling her she needed to get out, and quickly.”
Apparently Simone tried to open the window, but, like so many of the other ancient windows across campus, it was painted shut, which is when Simone really became unhinged, according to Jordan.
“Has anybody read her novel?” Penny asked. “Simone’s, I mean.”
Penny so rarely spoke when she hadn’t been the one to organize the event she was speaking at that we all flipped our heads in her direction as quickly as if she’d just handed over some missing piece of the story that explained Leslie’s actions, which we were still a few moments away from realizing that she had.
“You’re the only one who reads the books of the faculty members they don’t have,” said Jibs in a voice so snooty it reminded us of how we had felt when Leslie picked her to light the match.
“It’s about a small town that’s just had a string of fires,” said Penny, impressing us by ignoring Jibs.
“Uh, no, it isn’t.” Robbie took no small pleasure in this correction. “It’s about a bunch of blond chicks getting stabbed while they run through the forest in slow motion.”
“That’s the movie,” Penny said, still undeterred. “They aren’t stabbed in the book. They die in fires someone started intentionally. I mean, it’s still young girls, and they’re still the ones who narrate the story. The dead girls, I mean, from the grave. But in the book, it’s fire.”
Without Penny or anybody else having to say it, we knew that this meant fire was high on the list of things that kept Simone up at night. We all wrote about our biggest fears in our work, inevitably—sometimes intentionally and sometimes against all efforts to the contrary.
It’s why none of Hannah’s protagonists would ever have mothers, and Leslie’s characters might eventually fuck in the parts of her stories past the samples she gave us to workshop, again and again, and in detail that made even the married accountants among us blush, but none of them would ever be in love, even when they said they were. The same reason that the wayward sons and daughters in Pearl’s novel never did make it home. We also knew that Leslie knew as much about what made people write the things they wrote about as anyone, and that Penny was probably not the only one in our class to have read Simone’s novel.
“I don’t know about all that,” said Jordan, who was eager to get to the end of his story, used to juries who weren’t allowed to interrupt him. “But I know that Simone worked herself into a complete fury, looking this way and that for who knows what. She looked like a woman who had lost her mind and didn’t know which way to run after it. It was a good few head turns before I turned to see that she was finally making her way toward the door.”
Jordan said the last time he stopped in his pursuit of the rest of us to turn around, Simone had made it out to the clearing—past the door that she couldn’t lock, and the eight lonely rooms that stood empty between her and the closest exit, past the plaid couch and baby grand piano of the common room. By the time she got far enough outside to see that the flames had been part of a planned—and controlled—fire, she was as agitated as she had been on the other side of the window, still searching frantically for some invisible person or thing for clarification, but now because she couldn’t understand why Leslie had made her think she was in danger, or where she had gone. The fire was out by then, so thoroughly doused that not a single spark or ember still burned. And Leslie was gone, so completely disappeared into thin air without a trace that even Jordan hadn’t seen where she went.
* * *
By now Simone must have been really starting to panic, because she wasn’t at the next evening’s event. Though it wasn’t held expressly in her honor, her book was part of the general elevated buzz of the term, and our campus guests were certainly expecting her, if not eager to talk to her. She would normally rather be caught reading a mass market erotica novel than keep these people waiting, we knew. Just as we knew they started the event late because they were waiting for her to arrive. Pearl kept looking off in the direction of Lefferts, then back at the gathering crowd. It didn’t occur to us until much later that it was also the direction of the housing for visiting guests, and that it might have been his daughter he was hoping to spot on the horizon. Guests had been arriving steadily for the last day or two. We didn’t know much more about his daughter than we had that first term—we would eventually learn her name was Ana—but it did seem like Pearl spent this term waiting for some happening or arrival outside of Leslie and Hannah’s machinations. But who’s to say what hopes each person pins on their fugitive balloons as they ascend. Everyone knows if you say them out loud, they won’t come true.
Pearl finally gave the okay nod for the program to commence at fifteen past the hour.
None of us knew what to expect of the event, which was held out on the main lawn. It was listed in our schedules as simply “20 Years: A Look Back.” When we were still out on the distant edge of the lawn it became clear that we were going to be watching something—a giant movie screen had been put in the center of the lawn, drive-in-movie-theater style, with white wedding ceremony chairs where the cars would’ve gone. Maybe it was the absence of a bar table to the right or left of the screen, or maybe it was the formality of the chairs’ arrangement when we’d been looking forward to idle chitchat with one another, rather than another presentation that would demand the silence and mental isolation that our days were already so full of. But we realized, seeing the screen, that we were starting to feel antsy at the festivities we were awash in instead of anticipatory, restless instead of eager. We were reminded that there was a danger of staying too long at the party.
Once everyone was settled and the sea of chairs was completely full, with a row or two of people standing behind it, Pearl gave one last anxious look toward Simone’s residence building out on the wilds of campus. Seeing not even a trace of a distant figure approaching, or any indication that there might be one soon, he signaled to the two undergrads who tended the AV needs above and beyond the grasp of a bunch of writers, and the screen jumped to life.
It started as a montage of program graduates’ accolade
s—grainy black-and-white photos of writers from their dust jackets next to compilations of praise for their master works, and action shots of graduates with other noted writers, in one case even President Clinton. There were shots of graduates holding up their National Book Award finalist medals, and other, lesser trophies, and even tabloid-esque pictures of authors at the Hollywood premieres of the movies that had been adapted from their books. It was a little self-satisfied, we all recognized, and maybe a little desperate in its aim to impress the better-dressed, more professional-looking members of the crowd, but even though none of our books would be featured in the video because none of us had so much as a first draft of a novel, it revived us, lending more effervescence than even the priciest champagne could have, giving us more evidence that good things came of the course we were on. That people who had been where we were had ended up exactly where we wanted to go. We took comfort in the perfectly straight lines of wooden soldiers that the chairs we were sitting in made. There was order here, and logic—A led to B. Do the work and end up where these people had.
We were all so busy imagining what the review excerpts about our own work would say when it was us illuminating the empty lawns of Vermont, and what we would wear for our own author photos, and whether we would smile in them or not, that we didn’t notice right away when the video shifted its focus from accolades to memorials.
We were three ghosts in before they flashed one that we all recognized—one of the founding poets of the program, who had won the Pulitzer just before ceding to the cancer she had been battling for years without telling anyone—tipping us off to what this portion of the montage would contain. We had barely had enough time to adjust our postures and resting faces accordingly, somber now instead of buoyed and hopeful, when Jimmy dropped in. He appeared on the screen so much bigger than he ever had in life, at the very moment that we had forgotten about him, or stopped equating whatever it was the girls were up to directly with his absence. He looked like a normal boy in his picture. It made us remember that so many of his haunted qualities were in the way he carried himself. That he had been born just like any of us, and that it was but for the grace of God or whatever else the world ran on that we hadn’t ended up like him.
We Wish You Luck Page 20