The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories

by Kit Reed

  Turns out, if you can’t find your studio you’re OUT, so this really is a contest and that was the first event.

  Poor Cecil. I guess I should have picked a friend with more staying power. He got lost in the woods and we never saw him again. I don’t know what they did to him, but Aline says he gave a sweet exit interview in the Confessional and the world will see it when this show finally airs. OMG, we’re on a show! We didn’t ask her where Cecil went, and she didn’t say. It’s not like we had a tribal council and everybody got to vote. Aline and Leslie call the shots.

  But, hey. Win and it’s the Strickfield Wall of Fame! They carve your name into the marble and you get famous, like every winner since this place started. The future is ahead, but what about Davy, will he resent me if I win?

  I don’t get to see him again until I win or I lose and they kick me out of the colony, and this is what scares me. Right now I don’t know which would be worse. What do I have to do to win this?

  Meanwhile I hear eerie noises in the attic every night. Unless it’s my imagination.

  We’re all here because of our vivid imaginations, right?

  Frightened as she was of the darkness overhead, Gemma knew that sooner or later she had to find out who or what was suffering on the floor above, Every fiber in her body shrieked, “Don’t go up there, don’t go up there,” but if she didn’t, she might spend the rest of her life wondering, and never sleep. She would, she thought, go up there, but not until she found somebody she trusted to stand watch while she entered the cavernous maw of the unknown, so that was the issue. Finding someone she can trust.

  Dear Davy, I’m just so very, very sorry they made you leave, and I …

  Memory, imagination, anxiety, that deep, what-if paranoia—everything feeds this question I’m trying so hard to satisfy: what I want, really, and what I want to do. Which is cool, except instead of coming up with answers, I come up dry. Not knowing terrifies me. That and these formal dinners, me up against the others on wardrobe, on style, everything, all of us gauging the others’ level of confidence, all of us asking, all faux naive, “How did it go today?”

  This is what I’m most afraid of. Silence. Not the terrible, silent woods or the cutesy rustic studio where I’m expected to work all alone—no water cooler, no coffee shop—until nightfall, but the silence inside my head.

  It’s been a long week. I’ve made kind-of friends with Elly Tarbell, she’s a crap poet and therefore not that big of a threat. And I really like Roger Adair, who I hardly noticed last week. His studio is the next one on the hill and when I am staring out the window, which is mostly, I see origami water bombs stuck in the bushes and if I look up at the right time, I see paper airplanes flying out. Until yesterday I thought they were made out of old pages of Roger’s most recent, but heading back to the house for dinner I picked one up, and, cool! When I unfolded it, all there was on the paper were two crossed-out lines and a penciled note:

  FUCK I’M BORED.

  Then last night at dinner … (I spent Thursday night making a shift out of Cecil’s bedspread—watch out curtains, beware bedsheets, mattress cover, you’re next. I can always vary the outfits with a jerkin cut out of that shag rug and when I run out of rug I’ll start on the slipcovers in my studio, where I am trapped from nine a.m. to five, like if I sit there long enough, I can create …)

  Listen, you overdressed bitches, including Aline Armantout, is this “Project Runway” or are we serious about our work?

  Anyway, last night at dinner, I had the paper airplane tucked under a spaghetti strap on my slinky shift, which if I do say so, came out really well. Roger saw it and, zot! We bonded. You should have seen his face when Barton Freeman bragged that he’d knocked out ten thousand words before lunch and Melanie Fangold, who’s out-and-proud-of-it said so what, she’s halfway through her novel, Jillville, it’s a sensation and it’s going to be a smash.

  A bunch of others weighed in, swapping word counts like jocks comparing sexploits in some cosmic locker room. Roger stuffed his fist in his mouth to keep from laughing. I couldn’t help it, I was laughing too because everybody who is anybody knows that in this game, it isn’t how much you do, it’s how good it is.

  I think.

  But guess what. Elly Tarbell, who I thought was a dependable summertime friend, said, too loud, “Well, I only wrote one page and …” Maybe she should have kept it to herself. Her voice shook, but she was so smug that I hated her for saying, “Then I tore it up.”

  Let that be a lesson to me, although I don’t know if it’s about not bragging or shutting up until my book is done. Elly was gone by breakfast, and nobody, not even Miss Nedobity, would tell us where she went.

  DEAR DAVY, BORROW IF YOU HAVE TO, I NEED YOU. COME BACK. LOVE

  Nobody in the colony knew about the Thing in the lake, not even the overbearing housekeeper who herded the colonists like cattle. She harassed them unchecked until the morning that they found the ethereal Wanda Loveland’s drenched body on the path that ran downhill from the studios where the chain gang was unhitched every morning and incarcerated separately until she marched them back to the big house every night. Although Miss Finnerty and the other administrators called it suicide by drowning, nobody could dispute the seaweed that shrouded the body and filled the muddy tracks left by whatever dragged poor Wanda’s sodden, ravaged body uphill to the spot where she was found.

  OK, Cynnie, don’t go there. There isn’t any Thing in the lake at Strickfield and if there was one and I wrote about it, with my luck, it would turn out that’s the elimination deal, that you were stupid, you fell for the myth. I want to win this thing! I tried to pump Miss Nedobity but after Ellie left, the Witch of Endor went somewhere inside herself and she won’t come out.

  Dear Davy, I miss you, you’re the only man I trust, but you have your work and we’re so busy here …

  Plus certain people are getting better lunches, is that a reward for something I don’t know about, or some kind of sign? Mine today was Velveeta spread on Ry Krisp with an apple. To keep me regular? At what? Meanwhile Melanie and Barton Freeman came to dinner belching paté and Alvin Gelb wore a chicken bone in his lapel like a merit badge and of course his second novel (he has a contract) is going like wildfire, and this is only Week Two. I don’t like Edwine, but I have to admire Edwine. She gave them a sour scowl and said ever so sweetly, loud enough for even flabby, fatuous Leslie Strickler to hear, “Quantity doesn’t mean quality, does it?” Then she raked us with that sickly sweet, superior smile.

  Gotta love Roger. He and I were both breaking up.

  Then after dinner Aline gave a little speech about how lucky we were to be still in the running and things will be harder from here on. I thought at least Miss Nedobity would snort derisively, but she just sat there looking moodily into her hands while Aline went on and on about how proud we were making her and Leslie, who hasn’t exactly spoken since that first night. “So far so good,” she finished, “but, remember. Success is unpredictable.”

  Now, what the hell was that?

  Was she, like, foreshadowing the Outside Event?

  Then her voice dropped. After way too long, it popped up in a new, perky place. “Work is work but Strickfield is about colleagueship. Which is why Dame Hilda instituted our famous Crit Nights.”

  Aline was beaming, but I swear I heard somebody groan. “Now, ask your best friend here to tell you the truth about your work.”

  She said, “Tonight,” after which people began to drift away in pairs, at which point I noticed that of the twenty, there weren’t twenty of us any more, just enough to pair off neatly, girl-boy, girl-boy, all but Melanie, who went off to her room with a triumphal, above-it-all grin because as a lesbian, she’d won the immunity prize.

  Roger made a get it? face. I nodded and we paired off. By that time everybody had found somebody, even Alvin Gelb, despite only being fourteen—but, with Serena?

  Serena! So sleek. So intent on meeting Alvin’s famous dad.

  Well, e
verybody paired off except some dweeb so lame that I never learned his name and Florence Klamm, who has nice clothes and the sparkle of a hermit crab. They straggled off to their single rooms alone and this morning they were gone. Into obscurity, I suppose, no better than they deserve. Strickfield winners make headlines and the rest? Who cares what happens to the rest?

  I checked Florence’s room today and—score! She left in such a hurry that she forgot her party dresses which, OK. Frankly, they look way better on me.

  So, if these confessions we’re all making do get aired? Davy, I want you to know nothing went on between Roger and me except some honest literary criticism, I read his chapter and he read an old story I brought along as backup so chill, Davy, we’re just good friends.

  Dear Davy, Crit Night was gruesome. You’re my best first-reader and the only one I trust …

  What’s risky and more terrifying than showing another writer your unborn work?

  Finding the right thing to say about theirs.

  We enter the treacherous land of envy and unbidden admiration that we’re too choked by anxiety and ambition to express, compounded by the fear that what we read will be so awful that accidental truths will pop out of our rivals’ mouths. That resentment will smolder, building until it ignites. Outbursts surface like flash fires, leading to threats and slashed tires, depending on how much we’ve had to drink; camaraderie can morph into hurt feelings, irremediable rifts, but in the seconds before the flare-up, we were so close! Last night started well but it ended with Roger and me on the outs: awful, I only had one friend here and now I don’t.

  It’s easier to say something nice about even a close friend’s work than to hear him say anything that pleases you.

  I want to go home.

  Oh, your crit sessions are a great idea. When this show airs, I want the audience to know how useful they are, although of course we’ll spare them the gories, like, I’ll sign the confidentiality agreement when I win. This is going to air, right? I figured it out! We’re shooting the pilot for Strickfield, the greatest-ever reality show, um, aren’t we? If not, why am I confessing here?

  Really. I just wish Roger hadn’t gotten so mad at me before I showed him the new opening of my novel, I’m sorry it was only a half-page but there are way too many distractions to get anything done. I wish I’d had time to rewrite it, but. Oh never mind.

  I just wish we could write our own futures, but even that’s out of our hands and, about the attic. I only saw that door open once, when Miss Nedobity took Fred Fisher’s bedding upstairs the day Esquire blew the whistle on him. Plagiarism. One phone call and he was gone. It makes me feel bad. And anxious. And bad.

  Part of me wants to go down to Roger’s room and throw myself on his mercy and beg him to like me again so I’ll have at least one friend. I need him to sit by the attic stairs while I try to find out what’s going on up there, and come up after me if something gets me and I don’t come down. It’s the least he could do after what he said about my work, but Roger’s so pissed off about my crit that he probably wouldn’t notice if I packed up and left right now, sobbing my heart out in the night.

  Is that moaning I hear, is it the wind or is it remorse blowing around inside my empty head? OK, Roger. I’m sorry I said your chapter needed work. I am!

  In the woods Martha trails Dennis like a shadow of herself. Dying leaves rustle like old women wringing their hands, whether in grief or anticipation, she can not say. “Dennis.” Before last night they were as one but that changed; she can’t find the reason they are here. What if she loses him? What if he abandons her? The thought sours in her mouth. “Wait up!”

  “It’s this way.” Dennis hurries as though he doesn’t care whether she follows or not.

  In the room, my desires come and go

  weeping, because they do not know

  “Oh, Dennis.” She begins but when he turns, can’t find a way to finish the sentence.

  “Be patient,” he tells her with a look like a perfunctory farewell kiss.

  I’ve come too far to give up now, she thinks and in the next second regret blows into her like a cyclone through an unfinished house.

  I shouldn’t have come.

  … weeping, because they’ll never know

  what might have been on other days

  Excitement quickens her steps. Hopes send her pelting after her lover like a schoolgirl after a soccer ball as the last line comes to her whole.

  Unless she stays.

  That’s it! Wow, talk about your coup de foudre.

  Unless she stays. I don’t need Davy. I know what I’m doing now! All I have to do is get it done, and if Roger and I both could win …

  You bet I feel better, and I have this to say to your peeps before I go down to yet another horrible breakfast where everybody is either too sleepy or too depressed or too hung over to talk.

  I don’t have enough on paper to make Roger smile at me like he did before terrible Crit Night, but by the end of the week I will.

  I think.

  Was it so bad that I said his prose was too big for the story? I was only trying to help him, and as for me?

  I’ve scuttled projects X, Y and Z for this exciting new idea I got in the night. I’m channeling smug, pimply Alvin Gelb, and my novel is just pouring out!

  Last week Roger found out that the wonder kid is writing a book about Strickfield and all of us. The nerve! Alvin’s hero is, like, gushing out his puerile thoughts day by day as the summer unwinds. Roger pulled a printout out of the kid’s trash while Alvin was outside his studio getting loaded in the woods—so much for rules—and gave it to me, but of course that was before we had Crit Night and Roger stopped speaking to me.

  It was still on my desk when I choked down toast and dragged my grieving, wounded self downhill to the shack. Excuse me. Studio, where we’re supposed to write. Alvin’s first chapter was lying there like a gift. I won’t bore you by quoting Alvin’s ostensible book, it’s stupid and callow and mean, but for me? One look and … Wow!

  It was the moment when they zap the corpse with the paddles and the patient comes back to life.

  A writers’ colony is like a foreign country. Not the right place for paranoid, inner-directed people—introverted, most of us, with careers built on failed efforts to bring order out of the chaos inside our heads. We do what we do in hopes of … In hopes. In territory like this we are all xenophobes: touchy, paranoid. Every little thing said or done by the others sinks into sensitive ground, takes root and grows. Like foreigners, we assess the others. Are we the only outsider and they’re all native to this place? We’re uneasy. Aliens, feeling our way, timidly trying to master the language and to make sense of the currency, calculating everything we do, trying it this way, that, in hopes nobody will find out how foreign we are, rehearsing our lines in perpetual fear of saying something wrong.

  Dear Davy, I’m sorry I haven’t written. It’s been busy here …

  You bet I am a smug little bastard, I, Alphonse Frankenstein, son of the most notable critic in the whole fucking country, head and shoulders above every single writer in this entire fucking place which they sent me into like a babe unto the wilderness because Dad said my head was getting too big for my body and I was out of control. Well, fuck that, one look and I know I write better than every single one of these half-baked old writer wannabes in this fucking colony, oh not you, Thalia Fineheart, for you are my best friend in this weird, weird place where Dad planted me like a fucking guidon, like a Crusader in one of his old black-and-white movies that he looks at 24/7, you know, “In the name of God I claim this land for France.”

  I’ve found my voice! I came to dinner last night with two thousand words under my belt, and I loved it. Everybody changed color when I told them, which makes me think all those suppertime scorecards flashed by certain people are a lie.

  I could win this. I could!

  Two writers were eliminated during the campfire sing and six more were gone after the staged readings of Serena
’s astonishing play. Four more lost on wardrobe, deportment, last week’s fox trot contest, which was if you ask me, totally unfair. Leslie Strickler announced it and Miss Nedobity made us practice at cocktail time every night. I wore Florence’s handkerchief point dress and everybody thought I’d flown it in from Bergdorf’s or Neiman’s, I got points for my look, so, cool, but the contest was a put up job. Leslie’s been taking lessons and puffy as he is, turns out to be quite the twinkler in his patent leather loafers. He danced everybody into the ground except Serena, Alvin, Roger and Melanie and me.

  There are so few of us left that I’m getting scared. So far everything’s been—well, unpredictable but not unexpected, but we’re all strung tight over the Outside Event. Will it be dangerous? Targeted? Specific to each player, which is, face it, what we are, or something bigger and worse?

  I should bond with whoever’s left because by God it is strange out, and getting stranger. Even the dreadnought in the diamond dog collar is getting strange. I caught Miss Nedobity on her knees in front of the portrait of the late Ralph Strickler, and the monster of the manor was in tears! Upset much? I couldn’t help it, I freaked. And worst part is, now that Roger isn’t speaking to me, I don’t have anybody to tell. I need somebody I can sit with at these dinners so we can talk and laugh—you know, like friends. I need a friend!

  DEAR DAVY I NEED YOU. DROP EVERYTHING. COME!

  All any of us wants is to belong. We try, but we’re always a little off. Hypersensitive. Judgmental. Jumping to conclusions inside our heads: occupational hazard, right? Every little thing we say comes out wrong, or it’s taken wrong. Even small gestures are misconstrued and although we try to hide it, at every turn we are assessing: are you a winner? Am I?

  As if the worst thing that can happen is losing. Unless it’s taking sides and finding out that we chose wrong. Is that why I’m here? Because fiction is the only work I know how to do, but all I really want is to belong?