Chapter Ten
I START MY POEM LIKE I do all homework assignments: the night before it’s due. I like the anxiety of it, the blood rush of adrenaline. The pressure of having no choice but to just write. In many ways, it seems counter to who I am—the careful girl who aims to avoid pain and confrontation at all costs. But with a deadline and a blank Word document, I somehow prefer the chaos.
This isn’t high school, though, or even college creative writing. Now I’m in a real MFA program where someone in a fancy English department decided Leigh Simon shows promise and gave me a spot over god knows how many other people. People who don’t write their poems the night before they’re due.
So I need to get serious. I need to write at least four poems good enough to submit to the fellowship application in January, and so far, everything I’ve submitted to workshop has been met with a lukewarm reception. There’ve been a few that people liked, of course. But they never seem to reach the whoa of Will’s, the damn of Kacey’s, the clever of Hazel’s. Maybe it’s time to try something new. A little less pop culture, a little more me.
I glance at the time—8:21 p.m. What to even write about? I scroll through Instagram searching for an image to inspire me, a common practice I used in college when writer’s block hit. But there’s nothing.
I pace the apartment. The window outside reveals a sliver of setting sun in the distance. People on the street below speed past one another, holding take-out bags. Four girls, probably undergrads, walk by in short, highlighter-color dresses. They’re all fresh-faced and pretty and struggling to balance in heels on the sidewalk.
My mind pulls up a memory from college. Stopping at the liquor store in Medford, a few blocks away from the Tufts campus, buying Natty Light on the way to a party with my sorority big sister Marnie. The hot-pink dress I’d brought from high school. My then-boyfriend Andrew’s hand at the small of my back, introducing me to other deep-voiced college boys with fancy parents and fancy cars when we got to the off-campus party. The feeling that I had made it . That a lonely girl from an uncool town could be here. Could belong.
I walk back over to my laptop and start typing.
All leg, all mini dress so pink
you can chew me up, spit me out, don’t
bother holding back
the gape of glossed lips, bunched neon fabric,
the frat house bathroom light bulbs
flickering like a paparazzi camera.
I pause to keep thinking. Stand. Walk around the room. Go to my bathroom, open the cabinet behind the mirror, and pull out my makeup bag. It’s stuffed to the brim. I curl my eyelashes, slick on mascara. A smear of crimson lipstick, topped with sticky clear lip gloss. A fluffed brow, a silver-struck cheekbone.
When I no longer recognize myself, I stop. I always wear makeup—I love makeup—but I do the same six steps every day, maybe a wash of lipstick if I’m feeling particularly bold. Now, in the mirror, there’s something freeing about transformation for no one but myself.
I slip on a black velvet dress from the back of my closet, stuff my toes into high heels. My fingers move across my phone to a music app, and I turn on something bubblegum, pulsating.
Then I stand in front of the full-length mirror I’ve stuck to the inside of my closet door with Command strips. Slinking down to the floor, I sit, arching my back, pursing my lips, hollowing my cheeks. I pretend I’m in a music video. I pretend I’m in control. I put on an entire performance and I win an award for it. I cry an acceptance speech; my eyes splinter to the camera flashes.
When the music fades, I kick off my heels and go back to typing, the Word doc filling before my eyes.
On Monday, I do my usual routine: Get a latte and a cookie on my way to pick up this week’s poem packet from the English department office, then head to my Writing Center shift.
Two poems past mine is Will’s, and this one stops me in my tracks. Each word on the page is an undone button, a fraying thread threatening to take the whole thing apart.
I stand still, reading. Then I read it a second time and a third. I’m on my fourth go when I’m interrupted by a voice and the unnerving smell of Axe body spray.
“Leigh, right?”
It’s the frat guy I helped with his essay, all six foot four of him, wearing a hoodie and jeans with a baseball cap. He’s holding a cup from the café downstairs, and I see crumbs of something in his facial hair.
“Oh hi,” I say, slightly flustered. “Yes, Leigh.”
“Are you okay?” His eyes flicker across my body. “You look a little disturbed.”
I shake my head. “No, sorry, I was just caught up in reading something.” I stuff the poetry packet into my tote bag.
“I wanted to thank you for your help on my essay. I felt really good about it when I submitted it, and I just got feedback from my professor, which was great.”
“Oh, I’m so glad!” I wish I hadn’t forgotten his name. “Well, please let me know if you need anything else.”
I don’t particularly want to help him—our session was frustrating and too long and he sat too close. But it’s nice to get positive feedback and to feel useful.
“Really?” His eyes light up. “Do you have a shift now?”
I’m walking into a trap, but one where there’s absolutely nothing I can do to keep myself from getting entangled in a net.
“Yeah, actually.”
“Great, I’ll follow you.”
I study him again before nodding, fixing a small, polite smile on my face. He’s sort of attractive, if you were to shave off his scraggly beard, update his wardrobe. He has a few things going for him. Like how tall he is; how even though he smells like a mall, he smells familiar. But most of all, how he clearly likes me. How easy he is to read.
We walk together to the Writing Center. Will’s there, but he avoids my gaze. He must know that by now I’ve read his poem. My eyes roll to the back of my head at all of these mixed messages he’s sent over the last six years.
“Okay, well, can we do a session now?”
Seeing Will made me forget about the frat guy in front of me. “Um, yes. You just have to sign in with Thalia at the front desk, and she can assign me to you.”
He does just that. Will has started a session with some girl. He’s fully focused, his broad shoulders hunched over a piece of paper, his pen tracing the words.
“Leigh, we signed in Lucas—he’s all yours,” Thalia says, pulling me out of my own head.
We sit at a small table together, and Lucas takes out a thick packet of paper from his backpack. This time it’s an English paper.
“Oh fun.” I skim the first page—it’s an essay about Virginia Woolf.
“You think?” he asks, but instead of looking in my eyes, I find his gaze lower.
“Yeah, I like Virginia Woolf.”
He nods. “That’s helpful, then. You can tell me what to write about.”
I laugh—is he being facetious? “Absolutely. One A-plus Virginia Woolf essay coming right up.”
He seems to realize I’m making a joke, but he mansplains A Room of One’s Own to me anyway—a book I haven’t read since AP English my senior year of Rowan. His essay right now is a stream-of-consciousness mess with no cohesive thesis. My goal is to get him there.
But he can’t concentrate. He didn’t bring me a note for his coach this time, so I have to assume he’s here because he genuinely thinks I’m helpful, as opposed to getting extra credit. And while that feels good, what doesn’t is how his eyes linger more on my body than the words I’m pointing to with my pen.
Eventually, he gets what he came here for: a solid thesis statement written by me with an outline for his second draft.
“How was your session?” Christine touches my elbow in hello when I sit at the consultant table.
“I thought I was helpful. But no idea if he thought the same. He was too focused on my cleavage.” I look down to the very slight vee of my top.
“You should tell Thalia.”
“Really? I might be overreacting.”
Will is listening. I can tell because he’s stopped typing on his laptop, even though his eyes are glued to the screen. His hands flex, as if he’s having an internal debate with himself over whether or not to join our conversation.
“That guy is clearly creepy, and he shouldn’t be allowed to leer at you,” Christine whispers.
“It’s fine. If he does it again, I’ll say something to Thalia.”
Christine shrugs. “Your call. But I get a bad vibe from him.”
Will starts typing again and for reasons I can’t explain, it infuriates me. I almost want him to say something, even tell Thalia himself.
But then I remind myself—he’s not my boyfriend. He’s not here to protect me. He’s a classmate. One who’s decided to trounce all over whatever fragile friendship we’d struck in the pumpkin patch with a poem. A stupid poem that teases me with something he’s never wanted to give. A dangled grape, a bait and switch.
Thursday workshop can’t come soon enough.