We Wish You Luck

by Caroline Zancan

  Standing in one tight cluster of third-years that morning, unified, finally, and for the first time, in the way that Penny had been trying to unify us since almost the beginning, and probably looking like a pack of traveling evangelicals to anybody who didn’t know better, we practically glowed. In the white book-handing-out outfits Leslie had instructed us to wear, even Jenny Ritter’s mom haircut looked fresh.

  She had given us our orders in her Leslie way, leaving little room for uncertainty, the afternoon before, when we had all gathered for our second and final meeting about our class gift. Once again, the email instructing us on time and place came from Penny’s account, but as soon as we arrived at the barn classroom it was clear that Leslie was still the one in charge.

  Either Leslie or Penny had arranged the room so that there was the exact right number of chairs for us around the wooden table old enough to have hosted student protests in the sixties and seventies, and the first coed classes the college had ever offered. There was one bound, unmarked book in front of each chair, including the one where Leslie sat. She was flipping through her copy like it was the new Neiman Marcus catalog, breezily, but not uninterested. She waited until we were all seated before looking up at us.

  “Okay, guys, on a scale of one to ten, how surprised are you that I came through on the class gift, which, obviously, is what’s in front of you?”

  Her smile was so winning, as she said this, that we were all tempted to try to produce a number, just because she’d asked for one. She held up a hand, two thoughts ahead of us as always.

  “Don’t answer that. The point is that our books are ready, and I think you guys are going to like what’s here. And not only your own work.” She smiled naughtily at that last possibility. “Here’s the thing, though, it’s not for the faint of heart, so I wanted to give you a chance to read what’s here before you decide whether you’re in or out. No one’s name is on the book, so it’s not too late.”

  At that point our eyes were divided between the books themselves and Leslie’s face; the half of us who turned our gazes to the latter searched for some indication of what we would find inside the books. It never occurred to us to just open them without express permission from her.

  “Well??” she said, disbelieving our hesitation. “Open them!”

  What was on the page was Jimmy, plain and simple, although the combined effect of the crisscrossing phrases and lines and lone words in bold were anything but. It was his poem from the illicit second-term bonfire, yes, and other poems like it, and the Xeroxed pages of an early copy of Simone’s novel with its offending passages underlined—we still haven’t made any guesses as to how Leslie managed to get that—but also lines from his papers on the poets he read and wrote his mandatory packet papers on, and every combination of all those things again, and again. It was the sum of these things in every conceivable order they could’ve fallen in, so that in the end it was just a tornado of words you could practically feel migrating across each page that you turned to, falling into the shape of a boy we had once known.

  Hannah was the one who had created and compiled what was actually in the books, that much was clear from the grip with which she held her own copy of it to her chest in the corner of the classroom where she stood, just behind Leslie’s left shoulder. We hadn’t noticed her there when we walked in, eager as we were to know what had been placed in front of us, and mesmerized as we were by Leslie’s almost military presence. But in the few moments of silence after Bridget Jameson began weeping silently and Patrick Stanbury closed his eyes and rested the book against his forehead, and Melissa and Tanner looked for each other’s hands under the table, even though they hadn’t exchanged more than twelve words since their latest standoff, it occurred to all of us at almost the exact same moment that only Hannah could have made what this was. We all started looking for her at once, and there she was.

  From the magnitude of Leslie’s voice and gait and personality, from the strangeness of her workshop stories—legendary by then—and all the things she said and did that no other real live person we knew would ever do, it might have been easy or tempting to finger her as the mastermind or driving force behind their plan, but the book was at the center of it, to be sure, and that was pure Hannah. Only someone who loved him could’ve done what she did with Jimmy’s words.

  She’d cut them out and arranged them like flowers. She pasted them down—to keep them, or hold them—to make them stay. But each time she finished one layer she would start another, the words in a slightly different order, and wore the layers like armor from the fact that he wasn’t actually there anymore. She had taken his best lines—the ones you knew were true as soon as you heard them—and scattered them throughout her own work, and then ours. Not plagiarism, memoriam. Not a shred of unoriginality, but elegy.

  It was even more than that, we knew. If Jimmy’s suicide was evidence of the limitations of writing and storytelling and the gaps they can bridge and the wounds they can mend or make manageable, here was evidence of just how much those things could do. We heard Jimmy’s voice on the page in a way we’d never been able to in life, and it was impossible to drown out or play over, clear and permanent as it was, fixed for all eternity. It was maybe the only existing antidote for what Simone had done; the solution to the unsolvable human problem that was as much Jimmy’s Goliath as Simone had been.

  We hadn’t known that he had given them to Hannah, his words. That when he sent his packets to Simone, he sent them to Hannah, too. We didn’t celebrate one another’s birthdays unless the party was at The End of the World and attended one another’s weddings only through Facebook. We kept our new story ideas and our theses on Henry James to ourselves, and lost one another to the days that passed steadily toward packet deadlines. So it didn’t occur to us that they might have been keeping track of each other during those four months between the end of our first June residency and Jimmy’s death, from afar, the way the air traffic controllers track the red dots of planes in the sky.

  But that must have been how she knew he was gone. His words stopped coming every month.

  We’re not going to pretend that we didn’t keep flipping after the last of his words to look for our own writing. It was there, or some better version of it was, and we realized later that for all her hubris and all the craft lectures she had skipped, Leslie must have been keeping at least one eye and ear open while pretending to walk around with headphones playing music at impolite levels or sleeping through seminars, or at least borrowed notes from someone later, because she had learned a thing or two while she was at Fielding. Enough to tweak our works in progress in the ways our professors had been urging us to do. She had just gone ahead and done it without asking us for our permission or making suggestions that would help us do it ourselves—an impatient and unbending but brilliant editor. We never looked for or received confirmation that she was the one who had edited our pieces for the book, but we knew it the same way that we knew the Jimmy magic was Hannah’s.

  Though we don’t have a single picture of Leslie or Hannah on campus, and between all fourteen of us, no one can produce the T-shirt from that first term, or even remember what motto we finally agreed on, every single one of us still has our book. It’s partly nostalgia, yes, and partly because it contained the versions of our stories in progress that we would ultimately build into fuller, complete pieces that would end up in our theses, but also because what was inside of it was just that good.

  We were still completely engrossed in what we had been given, still dabbing our eyes as surreptitiously as we could and trying to remember the last time we had each seen Jimmy, when Leslie stood up to make her exit.

  “So anyway, you guys take as much time as you need to think it over, and anyone who wants to distribute our gift can meet at the flagpole tomorrow morning at ten. And, you know, look halfway presentable. This is a gift to a faculty member, not a fraternity party.” We were too eager to get back to the
books to be offended at the idea of Leslie giving us wardrobe or etiquette advice.

  Maybe it was because of their history as hall mates, and the dance they’d had to do around Leslie’s bathroom routine, that Jibs felt comfortable asking the one question still left unanswered by the books, which most of us had forgotten about until she asked.

  “But what about the picture?”

  “What picture?” Leslie asked, showing no evident distress at being the one in pursuit of information, for once.

  “The one Jimmy took of Hannah by the pool.”

  “Oh,” Leslie said. “Loveland, Colorado. But it wasn’t Jimmy who took the picture, it was me. Jimmy was next to me, but he couldn’t work an iPhone for shit.”

  We couldn’t believe Leslie would end up in a place so unglamorous, never mind all the hopes we’d held for the picture. When we all started to press her for information at the same time, more gingerly than she would’ve pressed us, she said, “They have the best tortillas in the country,” shrugging like it was the most obvious fact in the world. “You can live on tortillas for almost nothing.”

  “But why not Denver or Boulder or even Fort Collins?” Mimi asked.

  “Don’t get me started on the fucking yuppies there,” Leslie said. “Do I look like I’m the type of person who can be bothered to spend two hundred dollars on leggings?”

  Not even Lucas or Mimi were bold enough to say that, yes, of course she did. She must’ve been able to see how disappointed we were in the silence that settled in lieu of anyone pointing this out to her. Because she went on.

  “Jesus, here’s the thing you need to realize if your writing’s ever going to be any good.”

  We wanted to be good too badly to be wounded at any suggestion that we weren’t already, and leaned forward to hear what it was we needed to know. Seeing how much better she had already made our writing, we would’ve done just about anything she told us to do by then.

  “Not everything interesting happens in New York or L.A. or Paris. If you’re with the right people, Loveland can be the most interesting place in the world.” We realized as she was saying this that she had already proven it true. Because none of us would ever meet anyone half as interesting as this strange girl we had met in an unremarkable corner of Vermont.

  “I mean, I hate to break it to you guys, but sometimes being original means being uncool. Do you know how many novels have been set in those fashionable places everyone wants to go to, and all the other hipster paradises around the world? And do you know how many novels have been written about Loveland?”

  “So is that what you were doing there?” Jamie Brigham asked. “Writing a novel?”

  We tried not to be hurt when Hannah crept silently past us to the door and left the room.

  “I mean, we got in enough shit to fill one,” Leslie said, not acknowledging Hannah’s exit in any way. “Or at least a really robust short story. But, no. We were there because it was one place to be. I have a second cousin who was managing a mostly empty apartment complex there, and I was able to arrange a deal. You wouldn’t believe how cheap it was. And the tortillas, of course. Jimmy was only there a few weeks. We tried to get him to stay longer, but he said he had shit to tend to.”

  We tried not to linger too long, imagining all the things that probably entailed.

  “We didn’t hear from him after that, which I guess isn’t surprising. The guy didn’t even have a cell phone. They wrote to each other for a while after he left, though—Hannah and Jimmy—which is just the sort of outdated weirdo thing those loons would do.”

  We thought this might be the end of what she had to tell us about the picture, and were relieved when she went on.

  “The apartment complex was kind of out in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of town. I mean, it was a real dump, but the mountains and the sky around there are so pretty that even a second-rate cockroach fest like this place couldn’t ruin it. And it kind of felt like we were surrounded. By the mountains, I mean. Like they separated us from the rest of the world and anything that happened there. We spent the days watching movies. Jimmy had never seen anything. Like, he might have actually never seen a full movie from start to finish in his entire life. But, man, he took to them. We watched it all. The Terminator. Star Wars. Indiana Jones. The Godfather movies. They both had a thing for musicals, which I can take or leave, so we watched a lot of those, too—Newsies and West Side Story. You know, she’s kind of a scholar, so Hannah made us watch some of the classics, too, which were a snooze, but Jimmy liked even those. We watched maybe every great story that’s ever been told on the screen. Hannah has this theory that to be a good storyteller you have to study stories in other formats, too—songs and poems and movies. So the great thing was we didn’t even feel guilty, how much time we spent watching. And then we’d smoke at the pool at dusk—well, I would, mostly, but I got Hannah to smoke a full cigarette once, don’t let her tell you any different. After that we’d make an epic dinner every night before we sat down to write. At first we tried to all write in the same room, but Hannah vetoed that pretty quickly, because I may or may not do this thing where I tap my pen in sync with the rhythm of the lines I’m trying out before I write them down, and she likes to write like it’s her job. So she took the kitchen while I took one of the bedrooms. She always has to be sitting in a hard chair to write, while I like to get comfortable. Jimmy took the bathroom, God love him.”

  Jibs opened her mouth here, to which Leslie held up her hand before Jibs even took a breath to begin.

  “I have no idea why. He was a strange kid, you know that. There was a second bedroom he could’ve taken instead. Anyway, there was a real nice long, flat stretch of land that runs parallel to the complex and at night sometimes guys from town would race their motorcycles down it. Revving their engines, making a big spectacle. Mostly it was fine, but this one night they were really going for it. Shouting and carrying on in between runs. We thought it might be a Saturday, the way they were going on. We had completely lost track of the days. For a while we all just waited for it to pass, all in our own separate rooms. But then Hannah came into the bedroom with her head in her hands, and I thought she was gonna lose her damn mind, and—”

  “I was so mad, I really was.” Hannah said this from the doorway. We hadn’t noticed that she had returned. She was smiling at the memory, nodding her head to confirm that it had really happened the way Leslie was telling it. “I was on the verge of something smart, I could feel it! And they just wouldn’t stop, and I could feel it all, being lost. And that stuff doesn’t always come back.”

  “No, it does not,” Leslie agreed.

  “I started jumping on the bed you were on to keep myself from going crazy. You know, just jumping my crazy out, which of course scared poor Jimmy. Those goddamned springs were so loud. He came running. And he was so relieved to see that it was just me. Do you remember that?”

  Leslie nodded. “I remember you came into that bedroom like a complete madwoman. I was so glad to learn that I wasn’t the only crazy one between us. And the fact that he ran toward you instead of away from you, as scared as he must’ve been from all the noise you were making . . . Well, I probably don’t have to tell you he wouldn’t have done that for me or anybody else.”

  “I decided that we all needed to get out of that apartment, so I just started running. Down the stairs and out the door. And I’ll always love you both for following me right away. For not having to think about it for even a second. At first I was just going to give the guys out there a scare, screaming and carrying on in the middle of mostly empty nothing—they couldn’t have seen a spectacle like the one I gave them very often. I thought it would at least startle them, but they loved it. They raised their beers and whooped, glad to have another wild creature to howl at the moon with them. And you and Jimmy both howled back. I still can’t believe he howled.”

  “I wouldn’t believe it either if I h
adn’t heard it myself,” said Leslie.

  “And at first it was just the three of us and the guys with the bikes, and then it was the three of us and the empty apartment lot, the asphalt and the yellow lines the only proof that any human being had been out there anytime lately. But we kept running, howling whenever it would occur to one of us, happy the bikers had given us something back for what they had taken. And I just kept waiting for one of you to stop, but neither of you did.”

  “Which is no small thing when you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day.”

  Hannah shook her head at this in disapproval, but she was smiling.

  “It felt like we ran all night,” she said. “And we were completely breathless when we stopped, covered in sweat, and we had wasted almost an entire night of writing. But he was happy for a second there, I swear to God he was.”

  “I think that’s right,” Leslie said.

  It occurred to us only then that they might not have talked about this with each other yet.

  “You’re leaving out the best part,” Leslie said.

  “Discretion, Leslie,” Hannah said, but again, it was clear she didn’t really mind.

  “Nah.”

  “And then without having to say anything we all turned toward the pool in between the parking lot and the apartments,” Hannah conceded. “And we ran even faster than we had been toward it, and all jumped in at the same time.”

  “Buck-ass naked,” Leslie clarified.

  “Not all of us,” Hannah said. “Jimmy and I kept at least a few things to the imagination.”

  “Wimps. That poor boy didn’t even know how to do a cannonball.” Leslie turned back to the rest of us. “Don’t worry, though, I taught him.”

  “He was gone a few days later, and I left the week after that. I lied to you and said my leave from work was up, but I’m pretty sure you knew I was lying.”

  “Yeah,” said Leslie. “You’re not very good at it.”