We Wish You Luck

by Caroline Zancan

  We were so surprised to see Jimmy’s face that we didn’t immediately think to look over at the girls, as if they had somehow been responsible for it. They seemed to us, by then, capable of anything. It was clear when we finally did look at Hannah that the picture was as much a surprise to her as it was to us. The thing we remember about that night was not that seventeen Fielding alums’ books had received rave reviews in the New York Times Book Review or that eight of them had been optioned by major Hollywood studios, or that two of our alums had been MacArthur “geniuses” in the last ten years. But Hannah’s face when we looked over.

  She was just so happy to see him again.

  There can’t have been too many pictures of Jimmy in the world—he wasn’t on Facebook or any of the other social media platforms, and a Google image search of his name didn’t turn up any pictures that were actually of him. Even Hannah’s album named after him had been a picture of her. It was probably the first time Hannah had seen him since the last. We might’ve expected tears, or anger, or the furtiveness we had come to associate with the girls since January, but there was none of it. It was a face wide open. And when we feel guilty now about all that happened—when we’re tempted to think of it all as a series of vengeful acts or anger or sadness turned to poison the way it will often turn—we’re quick to remember Hannah’s face at that moment. There was something good in the middle of all this, too—that thing a human face does when it recognizes some rare or sacred thing its owner has been so long without that they thought it might be gone forever. Maybe it’s hope. Maybe it’s relief. Maybe it’s love. But whatever it was, it was there on Hannah’s face that night, and surely wrapped up in all that happened before and after it.

  The moment couldn’t have lasted more than five seconds. As quickly and unexpectedly as he had arrived, Jimmy vanished, and was replaced by a Tribeca firefighter who had graduated from the program two years before dying at Ground Zero; his widow would write a New York Times bestselling memoir about him. Leslie tsked loudly when Jimmy’s photo faded out, as if someone had committed some social faux pas or interrupted some important point she had been in the process of making. We knew this meant she had been glad to see him, too.

  Two dead alums later, the video’s music turned an upbeat corner, signaling its entry into candid shots that were meant to be intimate and goofy, and we all shifted in our seats and adjusted the hems of our skirts and the knots of our ties one last time. Tanner and Melissa sank into each other contentedly despite having bickered publicly all week, and Bridget Jameson turned and smiled when Tammy exclaimed happily at a picture of herself roasting a hot dog at The End of the World next to a trio of stray cats. Patrick Stanbury looked over his shoulder to nod at Carter, two seats down, acknowledging that he, too, was hoping for a shot of the two of them playing basketball at dusk. We all perched forward even more eagerly than we had during the accolades portion of the video, the better to identify our own faces among the floating images, happy at the possibility that we might hold a spot in this night, and in the history of this place.

  * * *

  Simone’s missing key never turned up, of course. Missing things turn up only when they’ve been misplaced, not stolen. Simone must’ve known better than anyone that the more nefarious the reason for a thing disappearing, the less likely that it will ever reappear, which had probably been keeping her up in the small hours of the night by then, out there on one of the most remote edges of an already desolate, haunted place, a burned-out hole in the ground outside her window.

  It’s impossible to say whether Leslie and Hannah chose to make use of their hot property on the day they did because of the looming storm that everyone was talking about—one that was supposed to be so big and unrelenting that even a bunch of writers felt okay doing something as ordinary as talking about the weather. Maybe it was just luck. Throughout that entire June term it did seem like if the gods were out there, they were watching, making things just a little easier for the girls to do what they did, and a little more impossible for Simone to dodge it with any grace. But maybe we only remember it that way.

  It was almost four by the time Simone got in the shower the afternoon after the memorial, an act less fugitive than it would have been for anybody else, given that she was maybe the only person on campus who showered every day. It was the beginning of that quiet stretch before dinner, quieter than usual that afternoon, since the storm had sent everybody into their rooms. The thunder was still distant rumbling by the time she had turned the hot water off and the mirror had started to bead, but the sky was gray enough that we all minded the warning implicit in the rumblings. In our own dorm rooms across campus, we closed our doors behind us and rifled through our things for granola bars and jars of peanut butter that would sustain us if even the hundred-yard walk to the cafeteria became unpassable. There would’ve been no one out—on campus or in the dormitory hallways—to take Simone’s towel from where it hung between the door to her shower stall and the door to the communal bathroom. But when she reached for it, still humming whatever private tune she hummed under her breath as she rinsed the last of the expensive conditioner out of her expensive haircut, it was gone all the same. She probably kept reaching, her perfectly manicured grasp becoming more and more frantic before it drooped in acceptance of the fact that the towel really wasn’t there.

  We don’t know if she pulled down the shower curtain she probably still wishes had been more opaque to fashion it into the clumsy toga she eventually wore for her journey across campus right away. We don’t know if she already had it when she made that first dash back down the hall to her room, or if she did it naked, counting on the door she had left open being unlocked, which it wasn’t, of course. Lefferts Cottage was likely as empty that afternoon as it always was, so maybe she just made a run for it, but that doesn’t seem in keeping with the guarded, private woman we remember. We don’t know if she was literally naked, or if she only felt like she was, when she pulled down the two sheets of paper that had been taped up to her unbreachable door: a page of poetry that Jimmy had sent her in one of his workshop packets and a Xeroxed page from her forthcoming book—the two uncomfortably similar lines from the two very different pieces of writing underlined in the exact same shade of red.

  We don’t know if she realized at only that moment what she had done—if what had felt like inspiration revealed itself to be something darker, or if all she felt, other than the breeze of the still empty hallway, was pure, physical panic at having been caught.

  What we do know is that when she returned to the bathroom to cover herself she found two more sheets with a different set of matching lines underlined in that menacing shade of red she was probably really starting to hate by then. By the time she had the shower curtain wrapped around her as secure as possible using only the materials she could find in the bathroom, the sheets of paper were everywhere, leaving a trail even someone as confident and unflusterable a person as Simone would have no choice but to follow.

  We all love the part of the story that comes next, and not only because everyone loves that moment in any story when it starts to look like the good guys might actually have a chance, underdogs though they may be. Even better when it’s a true story, and it starts to look like it might be that one in a hundred times that David actually fells Goliath, which he so rarely does in real life. We still counted Hannah and Leslie as the good guys, even if they were the only ones who broke any rules or acted with any overt malice.

  We still think of them that way now, and hope we’re telling this story in a way that makes you see it that way, too.

  We also love this part because we were all there to watch it. The quad that Simone scampered across after she left her lonely Lefferts hideaway is the quad that our third-term housing clustered around, which was part of the point. For this to be as humiliating as they intended it to be, Leslie and Hannah needed witnesses. Which means we’re not only the keepers or tellers of this turn in the s
tory. We’re part of it. They could’ve made the trail that forced her out of her self-made seclusion lead anywhere. We like to think leading her from Lefferts all the way to us was no mistake, and that both girls, different as they were, were too savvy and meticulous in everything they did for that to be an accident.

  We had seen other pieces of all this firsthand, of course—Hannah’s outburst at Simone’s reading, their big exit from the first graduation party in the student center. But it had felt then like we were reading their most private thoughts, hand-scrawled across journal pages. Even the bonfire staring contest had ultimately been between Leslie and Simone alone. But here, now, it felt like they were inviting us in, telling us a story they had written just for us.

  We all remember what we were doing when we looked out to see Simone’s tiny figure stumbling its way across the path the blowing papers dictated. Melissa Raymond was pacing back and forth across her dorm room in tiny steps that didn’t suit her agitation, but were all the size of the room could accommodate, talking on the phone with her off-campus boyfriend, who had a lot of questions about the number and duration of times she had seen Tanner Conover that day, and the day before, for that matter. When she looked up and out at the quad she said “I have to go” in a voice so firm and certain that her boyfriend knew it was in response to something bigger and more important than her affair with Tanner ever would be. He didn’t even object when she hung up on him without another word, but did call back later to find out what in the world had happened or what she had seen. Mimi and Sarah looked up from the fashion magazines they had hiked into town to buy. The pages were so glossy and shiny compared to everything else on campus, they didn’t mind that all the issues on sale at the one grocery store in town were a month out of date, and that both of them had already flipped through sticky, dog-eared copies of the magazines in the nail salons and dentists offices of the cities they lived in in the Real World. When Mimi realized that the fluttering motion in the far upper-right-hand corner of her vision was not the flipping of magazine pages, she looked up. Neither of the girls said anything after she said “Hey” to get Sarah’s attention and directed her with a nod toward the quad, and the strange, beautiful woman who was streaking across it. At almost the exact same moment, they turned back to each other and smiled, happy to know that their real lives would sometimes offer sights as stunning as the Kenyan model in platform shoes with cockatoos on her head in the Vogue that sat between them. Bridget Jameson looked up for only a minute from the workshop piece she was reading for the fifth time—the kindest, most diligent workshopper among us. Though she wouldn’t report it to us, we knew she was reading it again not because it was so good, or inspiring, but because it was so bad, and she wanted to come up with a real, genuine compliment to give the writer at the following day’s workshop, even if she had to take the story apart to find it. She turned back to the workshop piece after only a few moments—she had less than two free hours before the story was being workshopped, not counting the seven hours she had budgeted for sleep—and didn’t have time to waste. As brief as the interruption was, though, we knew she would always associate Simone’s trek with the story, and the tiny kernel of grace she would eventually find in it.

  We didn’t know, watching Simone bob and weave with clumsiness we wouldn’t have believed a woman like her to be capable of, without seeing it for ourselves, what it was that she so desperately wanted to collect every last trace of. Only that she was desperate to a physical degree. If she hadn’t been such a modern, technologically minded person, consulting her laptop for notes on students’ work during workshop, we might’ve thought it was the sole copy of the novel everyone was in such fits to read. What we must’ve known, on some primal, instinctual level, even if it wasn’t one of the things we murmured to one another after we left the privacy of our individual rooms to gather in the stairwell that provided a clearer view of the quad, was that Leslie and Hannah were behind this. And even further away, and dimmer in our collective consciousness, was the knowledge that they were too smart to surrender her only copy of something valuable enough that Simone would completely strip her dignity over it. It was a futile, beaten-before-you-start hunt, which made it only more disgraceful, and made us keep looking long after we knew we should turn away, and kept even the kindest and most noble among us—the Bridget Jamesons and Jamie Brighams, the Tammys and Jordan Marcums—from making even the emptiest gesture of assistance.

  By the time we had congregated, the rain had gathered speed, the drops so big and close together they were one sheet of falling water, and the thunder was upon us, just over our shoulders instead of out on the horizon. One of the things we all loved most about Fielding was that there was very little between us and nature. We romped to lectures through fields of wildflowers and ate our meals with the sun on our faces, the grass convening with the backs of our thighs. Unfortunately, the same proximity was true of thunderstorms. We were in it, even huddled safely together in the stairwell.

  “She needs to come in, like, now,” Lucas said, his voice hanging low with worry, no joke to lighten the gravity of the situation. Robbie didn’t jump in with his usual chorus of agreement, but turned instead to Sarah Jacobs, his face searching for some sort of comfort there.

  “The lightning’s getting closer,” Jordan said, shaking his head in fatherly disapproval, still not making any sort of move to call Simone inside.

  “Should we call Pearl?” Bridget asked. “I mean, I think he’d want to know about something like this.”

  “I mean, I think everyone’s gonna know about it pretty soon,” Jibs said, nodding down to the very public quad Simone was still moving slowly across.”

  “You guys don’t think Hannah and Leslie would—”

  But we never got to hear the first question Mimi ever asked instead of answered, because just then, we saw Simone spot the last speck of white paper on the quad before her, wedged into the lowest branch of the first tree signaling the end of the quad’s wide-open stretch. She froze like the gazelle at the watering hole who realizes he isn’t the only one who comes here for sustenance, contemplating whether to make a run for it or fold. We all knew what she was going to do before she leapt, every trace of her awkward lobster crawl gone, shed for the impossibly long arcs of an Olympian’s valedictory gait. We saw, in the steady, unwavering line she made, the same determination that had finished two novels in four years.

  Until the very moment the lightning hit the thickest branch of the tree the sheet was nestled in, we all felt confident she was going to get it.

  We felt the force with which the branch smacked her crown as squarely as if it were hitting the person standing closest to each of us, even from as high up as we were, and across all that rain. She crumpled as if she were no more durable than the lone sheet of paper she had been after, the pages she had managed to retrieve still tucked tightly, firmly under her arm. Still her secret and burden alone, at least for another day.

  * * *

  The branch didn’t kill her.

  After Jordan called for help and went sprinting out onto the quad to look for a pulse that he immediately signaled up to us he was able to find. And the local paramedics came huffing and puffing across campus to arrive at their first real emergency in some time, judging from the labored paces they kept. After even Lucas and Robbie looked away from the moment the paramedics actually lifted her body onto the stretcher and the curtain that was never good enough to begin with fully betrayed her, and the all-student email canceling her workshop the following day, we all collapsed back into our rooms to see what would happen next.

  Simone was back on campus for Leslie’s big finish a few days later. By then even the most diligent students among us were attending workshops and lectures in body only, our minds assembling and reassembling the pieces of this story. Even Bridget had missed a mandatory craft lecture. We didn’t feel guilty, though, or worry that we might not be getting the education we had paid for, because
we were learning more than any workshop or lecture could’ve taught us. What Leslie and Hannah were executing was meticulously plotted, and revealed as many dark secrets of the human heart as the best Ian McEwan novel. It feels next to impossible to capture all that on the page, but maybe it always does. Maybe that’s what writing is. What we want to make sure is clear, though, is that any shortcomings here are ours, and not the girls’. You can’t blame a protagonist for a flaw in the plot—to them it’s only life, messy and imperfect, and maybe better and truer for it.

  It was a perfect day. We never would’ve dreamed of being late for what we had been called upon to do that morning, and not only because Leslie wasn’t someone you kept waiting, afraid she might change her mind about showing you whatever it was she had called you over to see. It was a day so too-good-to-be-true that any excuse for tardiness would’ve immediately given itself away as false, no matter who delivered it, or how true it happened to be. It was the sort of day on which it felt like only good things could happen. Car accidents and heart attacks and even the far smaller bits of unluckiness that might delay you felt as foreign a concept, in weather like this, and in so beautiful a place, as the children’s laughter had at a writing residency.