Chapter Eight
D ESPITE H AZEL’S BEST EFFORTS TO keep me up with her teeth grinding, I sleep better than I have in months. When I wake up, she’s in bed reading Pablo Neruda and chugging her Nalgene full of water. I scroll through my phone a bit on my side and then turn over so she knows I’m awake.
“Morning,” I say.
She looks up immediately. “Sleep well?” She puts her book to the side, obviously a morning person very interested in chatting.
I make an mhmmm sound as I stretch my legs and arms long. “Not sure I’m ready for the hike today.”
Hazel rolls her shoulders back a few times and circles her neck around. “Oh, it’ll be great. I hike a ton in Oregon. The best trails are in the Pacific Northwest, you know.”
“Sounds like it.”
This is what I’ve been fearing—a cohort full of Nature People who love to sit on the forest floor and wax poetic about death.
“What are you going to wear?” I sit up and pull my hair into a bun.
“Oh, I brought a merino wool tee and my hiking pants. Wool is much better than cotton, you know. Better to sweat in. And the pants are what I wear in Oregon. I see girls sometimes who hike in yoga leggings and they’re just not at all right for this activity.”
“Ah nice, I’ll do something similar then.”
I packed maybe three different outfits for this weekend but the best I can do is a pair of leggings (fuck me) and a college sweatshirt with white leather sneakers in lieu of hiking boots. Didn’t need those in Boston and certainly didn’t want to be the person to buy a new outfit for an MFA sleepover.
“Those Lululemon?” Hazel asks as I pull on my plain black pair.
“Yeah.”
“I hope they don’t snag on a branch and tear. I hear they’re really fragile.”
I change and put on a pair of jeans instead, the uncomfortable kind without stretch.
We go upstairs to the kitchen, where maybe half of everyone is awake and assembling breakfast. Christine’s propped the door to the deck open, and the air has that early-fall briskness, the smell of maple syrup filling the kitchen as Houston flips pancakes.
“Morning, everyone,” Hazel says as we join the group at the granite island. Despite our drinking last night, no one looks too hungover, save for maybe Morris, who blames it on his elderly age of thirty-four.
Will isn’t upstairs yet, and I wonder if he’s hungover, if he regrets anything he said last night. I mull the conversation with a coffee until he emerges from the stairs. He’s wearing jeans, L.L.Bean boots, and a baggy, faded crew-neck sweatshirt that says ROWAN SCHOOL on it. It takes me immediately back to high school, peering at him out of the corner of my eye as he hunched over a notebook in the library. Wondering, but always doubting, if he could ever be writing about me.
“Go Gators,” I mutter when he moves next to me, grabbing his own coffee mug.
“Sometimes I like to pretend I’m still there. Feels like I peaked then, unfortunately.”
“I sure hope that wasn’t your peak.”
He does something unexpected: He laughs, and the sound of it, breathy and warm, fills me up even before we’ve eaten.
Houston serves us pancakes and we all chat and eat on the deck, scattered across the Adirondacks and kitchen chairs we’ve pulled outside, the sun slowly warming us up.
“This hike is chill, right?” I ask Christine. “I’ll be fine without, like, serious hiking boots?”
“Oh yeah, I wouldn’t say the trail is that strenuous or even that muddy. It’s like a two-hour thing. You won’t even need to pee outside.”
“I love peeing outside,” Houston chimes in.
I grimace next to him. “I don’t think I could physically make myself even if I needed to.”
“But let’s just enjoy a casual walk and then, I don’t know, we can do whatever. Read, write, talk. Go on Morris’s Tinder,” Christine says.
“A productive workshop, maybe!” I chirp, looking at Will, who pulls out a chair next to me with his pancakes.
“I couldn’t even fathom a more perfect afternoon,” he says, just to me, smooth and buttery in my ear.
There are nine of us walking on a zigzagging trail full of families and other walkers, and despite the chaos, the one thing that’s certain is that Will always ends up next to me.
I’ve always been aware of his body, where he is, where he’s looking. One time in high school, I remember he was behind me in morning assembly. He’d been sitting first in the row, and I could have filed in beside him, but I didn’t want to sit next to him. I figured it was better to act like I didn’t know he existed. Like his voice, his body, his entire demeanor didn’t affect me at all. So I sat one row away, dragging Gen next to me. Will got up during the assembly to announce that the student literary journal was now open for submissions, and I remember vividly how he made a split second’s worth of eye contact while making the announcement, how he leaned forward slightly before he sat down behind me. And then I remember thinking how stupid I was for thinking anything of it at all.
Walking next to him now on the leaf-strewn dirt trail, it’s strange how even ten years later I can feel myself falling into the same pattern. Always watching him, always being conscious of where he is, where he’s looking.
You can take the girl out of high school, but you can’t take the fractured remnants of an obsessive crush out of the girl.
I think back to what I’ve discussed with Bridget in therapy. How I need to consciously stop caring so much what other people think—especially when it comes to Will, who is the exact type of person I can already feel myself wanting to tailor my behavior to.
So when he speeds up, I don’t. When he slows down, I find myself going a bit faster, all in a conscious effort to do what I want to do, and not what I think he wants me to do, which was surely the point of Bridget’s last monologue to me.
“Not a big outdoors person?” he asks as I tiptoe around a wet pit of leaves that threatens to stain my white shoes.
“Tried it once. Not for me.”
He nods solemnly. “I don’t know if I’m the biggest fan, either.”
“Really? You seem like the type who knows exactly which mushrooms not to eat.”
He laughs, and the sound ripples through my body.
“Avoid the red ones with white spots, that’s all I know.”
I take a swig of water from my bottle. “I like the sun and the fresh air. I’m just more accustomed to city sidewalks at this point.”
We walk in silence for a moment, and as the group starts separating, I find myself wanting to hang back with Will instead of talking to the others.
“How was Boston?”
I shrug. “Fine. Expensive. Stressful, but that was my job’s fault, not the city’s.”
“The ad agency, right?”
I nod. “It started out cool. It was kind of a fancy agency, and we had big-name clients and everyone was really smart and talented. I liked being in that group. But then it just became too much.”
“In what way?”
It’s still embarrassing how things ended at Coleman + Derry. I was grateful to have the “excuse” of the MFA to quit, but everyone who worked with me surely knew what was happening under the surface. Leigh Simon couldn’t take the heat, so she got out of the kitchen. It’s terrifying to think I might have to go back to that world after graduation.
“After writing things you don’t believe in or care about and sucking up to clients who think you suck, you just sort of lose what you even liked in the first place. You know, when I started it was kind of fun. You’d get a brief from a client: Okay we need to promote X product for Y audience segment, and you have to create some catchy tagline in eighty-seven characters or less for this digital ad. It was like a puzzle, and I liked being given parameters and rules. I knew exactly what someone wanted from me, and I could mold my words to fit that.”
I watch the ground as I talk, avoiding muddy patches. I notice how the feet next to me step completely in sync with my own—left, right, left, right. The old me would have made something of that.
When I look up from our feet, Will’s full attention is on me. Even though I’m warm from the sun, I shiver.
“At some point, you drown in it, all the corporate bullshit language. The agency would encourage us to think big, be creative, whatever, and the client would just stamp it out immediately. I started to dread putting words on a page.”
I skip the parts about my weekly bathroom crying sessions or my inability to fall asleep on Sunday nights out of anxiety.
“So that’s why you’re here,” Will says, and I raise my eyebrow. “To rediscover what you like about writing.”
“Maybe.” We walk in silence for a few beats. “Why are you here? One master’s degree wasn’t enough?”
“Well, it’s felt like my whole academic career has been leading up to this point. So why not?”
“The English-major-to-MFA pipeline can be quite the conveyer belt.”
He runs his hand along the bark of a tree, as if he’s looking for something stable to touch. “I’m not on a conveyer belt. I’ve always wanted an MFA.”
“Of course.”
The others are walking faster now, and I feel like I should rejoin the group. Getting stuck in these one-on-one conversations with Will seems dangerous. Like I’m teetering on the edge of a cliff and only the faintest gust of wind could topple me over. Back into the old habits that got me so preoccupied with what other people think to begin with.
We approach a bridge over a rushing creek, relatively high off the ground and flimsier than a city girl who’s petrified of heights would want a wooden bridge to be. It’s held together by nothing more than wood, rope, and faith, swinging slightly as people cross it. I watch Christine and Wiebke and Hazel walk over it like it’s nothing to them. The last thing I want is to embarrass myself and seem like even more of a dumb sorority girl than half the class probably already thinks I am.
Almost everyone is across the bridge, which is at least eighty feet long, but Will and I straggle behind. I feel my body reject the bridge just looking at it. I pause a foot away, my legs unable to go farther.
“Let’s go a different way,” he says.
“What’s wrong with this way?” My teeth start to chatter.
“You’re clearly afraid of heights.”
“No I’m not.”
Will gives me a horrific, glorious smirk.
“It’s too embarrassing. I’m an adult. I should be able to walk over a stupid bridge,” I whisper.
Christine is now on the other side, looking back at us, waving, ushering us to come.
“Who cares? Why torture yourself?”
“Because everyone already thinks I’m some prissy… girl. It’s just a bridge. It’s nothing.”
“Then why aren’t we walking over it?”
Indeed, we’re standing right in front of the first wooden slab. I can’t make my foot move. Instead I see the rushing water below and imagine myself drowning.
“I… I…”
“We’ll catch up with you!” Will’s low voice bellows. “I dropped my wallet!”
Christine gives a thumbs-up on the other side, and the rest of the group continues on.
“What are you doing?” I hiss, suddenly aware that I am (A) alone with the very person I shouldn’t be alone with, and (B) still no closer to the other side of the bridge.
“Let’s just go another way. People will think you’re helping me now.”
“How do you even know there is another way? We’re going to get lost and then we’ll have to come back this way and cross the bridge anyway and then we’ll be late to join the group and everyone will be pissed at me and think we held them up from going home.”
“People don’t think like that,” Will says, as if it’s a universal fact. “Come on. I think I saw another direction we could go if we backtrack a little. I’m sure it all ends up at the same spot.”
I look back at the group, now just shards of color between the trees. And then I look at Will and his ridiculously broad shoulders, his caramel hair glowing in the late-morning sun.
“Fine,” I sigh. “Let’s backtrack.”
It’s obvious that neither Will nor I has any real insight into trails or hiking. I’m not sure why I thought he knew his mushrooms—he was seconds away from touching poison ivy until I intervened. He walks with a perpetual frown plastered to his face, but when we get to forks in the trail, he chooses which way to go confidently, despite having no idea where we are.
At this point, I’m pretty sure we’re lost and going in circles. Perhaps Will’s years in Vermont gave him access to the outdoorsy aesthetic via his Bean boots, but he’s still ultimately a guy in a smartwatch and a prep school sweatshirt. Admittedly, it’s a step up from my woefully unprepared ensemble of crisp white sneakers and extremely uncomfortable jeans.
I’m resentful that I should probably be nice to him now, given that he’s created this lie on my behalf, god only knows why. Still, talking is easier than I expected. In high school, had I found more reasons to have a conversation with him, I would’ve been stilted and worried about not liking the right books, not saying the right things. But given everything—which is nothing, I remind myself daily—that has happened between us, maybe I’m less guarded than I’d be otherwise.
“I’m sorry about your dad.” My voice is low even though the trail is hardly busy. “I heard you and Hazel talking after class… I didn’t know.”
“I wouldn’t have expected you to have known.”
Will’s voice is tight. He looks straight ahead as if suddenly determined to find the rest of the group.
“What was he like? I guess I only met him… that one time.” The words get stuck in my mouth.
Will raises his eyebrows, and I wonder how much he thinks about that moment—his parents walking in on us at Middlebury. Probably not that often.
“Our relationship was…” Will pauses. “Complicated.”
“Complicated?”
He flinches. “Well, you read the birth story, I guess. But it wasn’t just that he taught English. He was also a writer. A creative writing professor. He wrote short stories. Not like super big, but he’d been in The New Yorker a few times over the years. Had a few collections published.”
“Oh wow, so family business.”
Will chuckles. “Hardly. I don’t know if my dad even thought I was a good writer. He wasn’t very forthcoming with the compliments.” There’s an edge to his voice. “He was more interested in having me read his shit and explaining to me exactly how ‘the mechanics’ functioned. And then telling me how my own writing process was wrong, how I should outline instead of just proceeding with feeling .”
“Sounds like he was jealous of you.”
Will lets out the heartiest laugh I’ve ever heard from him, and it sends a rush of blood to my chest. “No. I’m quite sure he wasn’t.”
“You knew him best. But I know overcompensation when I see it.”
We reach another fork in the trail and, not knowing what to do, debate if it’s best to turn around completely in order to go back to the cars. There may be another way there, a way over the bridge, but we can’t figure it out. And my biggest concern is wasting everyone’s time waiting for us.
“I don’t want to lead you even more astray,” Will says.
It occurs to me that I don’t want to join the others just yet.
“Let’s risk it. Let’s try this one.” I point to the left trail.
We walk into a large muddy section over which someone has resourcefully laid a wooden log so passersby can teeter across instead of sinking into the mud. Will traverses it, no problem. I’m worried about slipping off and embarrassing myself, though, so I approach hesitantly.
“I wouldn’t really consider this a height, Leigh.”
I send him a dirty look. “I’m not afraid . I just want to be careful so I don’t ruin my shoes.”
He smiles. “Come on before a group comes behind you. Then you’ll be even more stressed.”
He’s right. He stands at the very end of the log, about ten feet from me, and I take one step at a time, holding my arms out for balance. Near the end of the log, I make the mistake of looking up at Will instead of watching my feet, and I lose my balance.
“Shit—”
In the split second before I fall into the deep mud, Will’s arms are on either side of my waist, steadying me. I don’t remember doing it, but my arms are on his shoulders. I’m still on top of the log and I’m a few inches taller than him from up here. He’s looking up at me and his eyes are wide, as if I’ve caught him doing something he shouldn’t.
He doesn’t take his hands off me until I’m back on the ground, now looking up at him.
“Sorry,” I mutter, and move my hands off his shoulders.
His brow furrows. “What do you have to be sorry about?”
I shrug but don’t respond.
We continue down the path silently, meandering in and out of other hiking groups. When other walkers go by, I step behind him in a single-file line. And then I’m irritated once more that I’m the one who steps behind him, as if he’s leading. Why doesn’t he step behind me ?
Bridget is right. I constantly accommodate, but then I secretly resent other people for not being as accommodating.
It turns out the left turn worked. In another fifteen minutes, we find ourselves on the other side of the original parking lot where we parked the cars. And our classmates only had to wait ten extra minutes for us to catch up.
Kacey pins me with a look when we return to the group standing in front of Christine’s car. I feel her grin, but I avert my eyes.
We pile back into the cars—me with Christine, Kacey, Houston, and Wiebke. Will goes with Hazel, Athena, and Morris. In our car, everyone starts discussing dinner, Wiebke insisting she take charge in the kitchen because Americans don’t even know where to begin when it comes to seasoning, which Houston takes as an affront to last night’s pasta.
I’m hardly listening. Instead, I feel the ghost of Will’s hands on me for the rest of the ride.
I was dead wrong about peaking on Friday and taking it easy on Saturday. Tonight is clearly the night we’ll be peaking, which is to say, I anticipate a painful Sunday morning.
Houston tends to be the ringleader when it comes to drinking. He puts us on a tight shots schedule, but also insists we follow each one up with water, the mark of a true professional. Wiebke, maybe because she is European and has been drinking since she was twelve, can easily keep up with him but is miraculously never drunk. Morris had a brief stint as a bartender in New York, so we beg him to make us drinks, which he is happy to accommodate as long as we indulge his long-winded stories, like the time he fucked up a martini for Conan O’Brien, who, he offers with the smile of a conspirator, is perhaps a bit meaner than he looks.
Prior to the MFA program, I was only a casual drinker, but since everyone else is drinking, I obviously want to participate. So I do. I drink Houston’s shots and Morris’s old-fashioneds and whatever cheap beer Kacey pushes into my chest.
The alcohol probably doesn’t help my state of mind when I see Hazel and Will by the fireplace, sitting on a luxurious faux-fur rug, her knees skimming his.
I pull Kacey aside in the kitchen after she hands me my second beer. “Do you think Hazel likes Will?”
“Why do you keep calling him Will ?” she whispers with a grin.
“Because that’s who he is. Do you think Hazel likes him?”
Kacey takes a step around the kitchen wall to look at them on the fur rug. “Probably. I could see that happening.”
“I guess they’re the most pretentious people in the cohort,” I muse.
Hazel throws her head back in laughter at something Will said. They’re probably talking about Poet Twitter drama or something else stupid and niche and insignificant to 99.9 percent of the population.
“I think he’s definitely her type,” Kacey says. “But you know William from before. Do you think she’s his type?”
It’s a great question. What is Will’s type? He never brought anyone to high school dances until his senior prom, when he brought Maddie Katz. She was a National Merit Scholar and the co-editor of Expressions and had extremely long eyelashes. She ended up going to Yale. Then, he dated someone named Katherine in college. I don’t know much about her, but there’s something pretentious about a Katherine who doesn’t go by Kate or Katie or Kat, isn’t there?
I don’t answer fast enough, so Kacey continues: “Or what about you? Is he your type?”
I choke on my beer. “Absolutely not. No, no, I mean, we—no. I don’t like him like that . And please, you’ve seen him, there’s no way. He would never—with someone like me —right?”
She gives me a sly look as if I’m lying. I shake my head again in aggressive confirmation.
Her eyes flit back to Hazel and Will. “I can tell Hazel judges me for hooking up with August. Can you imagine how hypocritical she would be if she went and hooked up with someone in the same genre and year ?”
“So hypocritical,” I slur. “Such a bad idea.”
“Right. Gonna keep my eye on this. Let me know if you see any further developments.”
I salute her with a “Yes, ma’am.” She’s right. There’s no worse idea than starting something with someone in the same year and genre. We’re all up in each other’s emotional and artistic business every single day. Adding sex and, even worse, real feelings to that mix would be a disaster. What a grave mistake Hazel would be making if she got involved with Will. I continue nodding to myself self-righteously about this as I go back into the living room and join the people on the couch.
“Conan was a good tipper, I’ll give him that, but I just don’t know ,” Morris says over the din of chatter and indie music in the background. “I see an ego there, you know what I mean?”
“Let’s play a game!” Christine shouts before Morris can continue his Conan Slander Tour.
“Spin the Bottle!” Houston chirps. There are groans.
“You’re twenty-seven,” Christine says. “Aren’t we all way too old for that? Half of us have partners anyway.”
“’Twas a joke, Chris, chill. Was just thinking that some may be into it.” He flips his gaze to Will and Hazel, who are still on the rug; Hazel is showing Will something on her phone. I don’t think they heard Houston. But is everyone catching on that Will and Hazel could become a thing?
Athena says, “My favorite party game is when you name a famous person you think you could reasonably attract. Like, not who you find hot, but who do you think you could go up to at a bar and like hit that? It’s actually very revealing. Says a lot about you, what you’re attracted to, what league you think you’re in, et cetera. For example, I know it may be vain, but I think Megan Rapinoe would be utterly fascinated by me.”
Christine starts us off. “This is niche, but I seriously think I could get the pop-music critic from the New York Times . I just have a weird feeling I’m what he’s looking for.”
“He’s my cousin’s best friend!” Morris chimes in. “I’m going to text him now to tell him!”
“Oh, I love this,” Kacey says. “I think I could get the hot Texas Senate candidate. Does that count?”
She shakes Hazel’s shoulder and explains the game to her and Will.
“What about you, Leigh?” Christine asks.
I mull it over. “Okay, not a celebrity, but my English teacher from tenth grade. I’d swear to anyone there was a vibe.”
Will’s gaze jolts over to me. “Mr. Carson?”
A laugh breaks out from my mouth. “Yes.”
“Oh my god, juicy!” Kacey says. “Tell me about this Mr. Carson, you guys.”
I look at Will first, and he holds his palm out to me as if to say, Go ahead .
“I don’t know. Your standard tall, dark, and handsome. Bookish. Cheeky. He just found a lot of excuses to talk to me, more than other students. He was professional always, but I don’t know, sometimes you can just tell. He was quite young, in my defense. He couldn’t have been that many years out of college.”
“Tell us, William, could Leigh pick him up in a bar?” Athena asks.
“I’m sure. Leigh could probably pick up anyone in a bar.”
I guffaw so loudly I surprise myself. Will looks over to me, his eyes glassy from drinking. We make a moment of eye contact so uninhibited on both sides I feel a chill in the center of my body that extends to my fingertips.
The night winds down after that. Some people pass out on the couch; the more cognizant ones help tidy the kitchen. I lie on the faux-fur rug with my eyes closed, the room slowly spinning. Then I feel a gentle tap on my ankle and open my eyes to see Will standing above me.
“Time for bed.”
I’m vaguely aware of lights flickering off around me and people going to their rooms.
“Mhmm.”
He leans down to hoist up my shoulders and suddenly I’m standing, pressed into his neck. How easy it would be for him to turn his face to the right, if I nudged to the left, until there was nothing between our lips but hot breath.
“So was that true?” I slur as he places a hand on my lower back, guiding me down the stairs to the bedrooms. It feels like a branding iron the way my T-shirt rides up and one or two of his fingers touch the skin above the waistband of my jeans. Even drunk, I clock every sliver of skin-to-skin contact.
“What?” His voice rasps, as if the muscles in his body are strained, pulled taut.
“You think I could pick up anyone in a bar?” When he moves his hand off my back at the base of the stairs, I grab his hand before I can convince myself not to.
He’s quiet for a second. His thumb trails a path across my knuckles, and a low hum buzzes under my skin. Then he steps away from me, dropping my hand, and opens the door to his and Morris’s room.
“Good night, Leigh.”