Chapter Sixteen
W ILL AND I DON’T TALK on Sunday, but that’s fine, of course. He’s probably hungover, and I’ve got a bit of a headache, too. It would be weird to expect communication.
But then Sunday rolls into Monday and we still haven’t spoken. I’m not sure what kind of text to send. Hello, thank you for the orgasm, let’s do it again sometime, but only as classmates, because nothing has changed and I still know deep down in my heart that you’re exactly the wrong kind of guy and we inevitably won’t last and who needs that stress in this economy ?
Gen vetoes this option when I text it to her.
When we left Penelope’s room, the party was dying down anyway. That’s kind of how these nights progress. Once Jerry attempts to breakdance, it’s at its peak, and you really need to end. Also we ran out of wine.
But it does feel like something has changed. Will is more than my classmate, more than a friend. And definitely more than a guy I went to high school with. I’m so tempted to ignore what my intuition is telling me is right. That maybe William Langford could be a guy I could do forever with.
That’s what makes this moment, in hour two of a long nonfiction workshop, feel so precarious.
Will’s not talking. He stares at the essay we’re reading—something long and winding I can barely follow myself—and all he does is drag his pen from word to word like he’s trying to memorize the entire piece. He’s never been the Hazel type, but he always participates. He’s the kind of student that waits for the Hazels to take up space in the beginning, then chimes in near the end with something so introspective, so smart that the teacher probably goes home to her husband saying that’s why she went into teaching in the first place.
“What do you think, William?” Jen Stewart-Weiss asks now, and Will is jolted out of whatever reverie he was in. I see a flash of embarrassment in his eyes. He puts his pen down.
“I’m sorry, could you repeat that? I was, uh, lost in thought.”
Jen raises an eyebrow.
“What do you think of Sheffield inserting himself into the action?”
His face goes back to its usual coolness.
“It’s always interesting in journalism when the writer has an opinion. But for me, in this piece, page four is where he starts to lose credibility. I have to wonder if Sheffield’s participation is self-indulgent or genuine.”
“Well said.” Jen nods, and the conversation continues, Morris picking up on Will’s point. Like he’s dismissed, Will goes back to staring at the paper in front of him, careful to not meet my eyes.
I start running through all the potential reasons why he could be mad at me. The ways I’ve messed this up before it’s even begun. I know I told him in the Writing Center I didn’t think it would work, that whatever attraction he felt was just nostalgia—something purely physical. Some leftover chemical reaction from a bad experiment we started at Middlebury, a thing he would eventually regret. But two days ago, in the quiet of Penelope’s room, he murmured, I can’t write a single poem where you don’t exist . Hot breath against my ear, his thumb dragging up and down in a constellation so perfect, it’s as if he already knew my body’s cartography. It didn’t feel just physical. It felt years in the making.
Not a tipsy accident. Something fated. Something poetic.
I need to talk to him.
We walk out of the class, and I catch up to him as he zigzags past lingering classmates and slow walkers, his gait stiff and determined. But I’m faster.
“Do you want to grab coffee with me?” I touch him lightly on his arm.
“Um.” He pauses, looks around and over my head. “Sure.”
It’s the kind of enthusiasm girls dream about.
“So, what did you think of class?” I say, as we walk to the atrium café.
“Sheffield’s a hack.”
“Mhmm. Yeah. Agreed.”
We take our cappuccinos to go. He seems lost in thought, anxiety stitched into his lips and chin.
“Want to just walk?” I ask.
He nods and we start meandering around campus, now leaf-strewn and rosy-cheek crisp in North Carolina’s November, a light drizzle beginning overhead. Once we’re out of earshot of other people, on a less busy sidewalk behind Gilman Hall, I take a deep breath, ready to launch into the soliloquy I spent the rest of class rehearsing in my head.
“Will, I—”
“I’m sorry. I should’ve texted you yesterday.”
Okay. Not what I was expecting. I regroup.
“No, I mean, it’s fine. We were both probably hungover.”
He shakes his head. “I was fine yesterday. I wasn’t that drunk on Saturday.”
“Me neither.”
We look at each other for a moment, parsing through the implication that what happened in Penelope’s bedroom wasn’t solely because we were under the influence of alcohol, but something far scarier.
He clears his throat. “I wanted to apologize.” While I don’t know where he is going with this, my chest tightens.
“Apologize for what exactly?”
“I know this is my fault. You very clearly said in the Writing Center you didn’t want to entertain”—he motions to the space between us—“this, whatever this is, and at the time, I respected that. But once again I let myself get carried away, and then Saturday happened, and now I feel even more confused and…”
“And what?” My body is so still, I have to actively remind myself to breathe.
“You were right, what you said before. This isn’t sustainable. And besides, we’re here to write. Look at class today. I’m clearly getting distracted, and I can’t afford to.”
My throat dries, and there’s a pang in my chest. But even in the face of information I don’t like, my first instinct is to placate and nod, so I do.
“Yes, right. Of course. I understand that and I agree.”
“And besides, you’d soon see I’m not…” He stops and gives me a long look, like he’s holding something back.
I’ve never been good with silence. Have always wanted to fill in the blanks. Even as a little kid, with no sibling to play house with, I’d puncture the white noise of my bedroom with long, whispered conversations between Barbie and Ken—some tangled drama about who got to drive the pink convertible. They never listened to each other, but as long as I could keep them talking, I felt like we were getting somewhere.
“It’s just physical attraction,” I say, rolling back my shoulders. And of course it is. I’ve worked myself up, after spending weeks methodically working myself down, for nothing.
The wind brushes across my face harshly. Beside me, Will laughs. But it’s not joyful; it’s more of a low chuckle. Its edges skate across my neck.
“Right.” His gaze is so intense I feel my face heat. I avert my eyes.
It’s so strange, this thing. At Rowan, I would’ve died for the chance to hook up with Will Langford, the gawky, glasses-eyed kid who scribbled all over people’s poems in red ink. For a moment in Middlebury, I thought something could come to fruition between us. Until it didn’t.
But now that we’re old enough and hypothetically available enough to really explore that physical attraction, that something more I felt hiding in his words on Saturday—it feels too fragile. Like it could crack open, seethe.
As much as my body wants it, my mind knows it’s not a good idea. Bad enough that we’re in the same cohort and competing for the same fellowship; those are small issues compared with what I know most deeply is true: Guys like him don’t stay with girls like me. More important, they’re not good for people like me. The ones who want to please. The ones who contort and twist to fit into whatever shape the other desires. I’m trying to move on from those old habits.
And so, on this rain-damp quad behind Gilman, the only words I have in my vocabulary are nods and yes and right .
“Let’s just be normal then,” I say to the silence.
Will nods with a weak smile. “Sure.”
I reassemble my brain to live and breathe this new normal . Not because it’s easy, but because I know, in the end, it’s best.
After Tuesday-afternoon shifts in the Writing Center, Will and I usually leave together, sometimes getting coffee on our way home before we split off in opposite directions. But today, five minutes before the shift ends, he jumps up with his phone.
“My mom’s calling. So I need to leave.”
I look down at his phone, which is neither vibrating nor ringing. “Cool.”
He does it again the week after—this time, to go pick up a prescription. He’s a good liar, of course. His face neutral, his eye contact natural.
I know the truth, though. He doesn’t want to be alone with me. I’m not sure what I was expecting when I asked him to be normal with me, but it certainly wasn’t this.
September’s impromptu pumpkin-buying trip feels like a completely different timeline. And it’s all the more confusing because this is maybe what’s best for me. Being Will’s enemy was hard. Being his friend , if you could call it that, was harder. But being his nothing is maybe worst of all.
At first I convince myself it’s great. This is essentially what I asked for when I shut down our kiss in the Writing Center, and now I have the mental energy to completely dedicate myself to my fellowship application and my self-care regimen against burnout, which consists of watching Netflix, listening to Gen’s exploits with the local TV meteorologist, and going to therapy.
But as the weeks drag on, I find myself missing our poetry correspondence, his accidental grazes of my arm or back. Though in retrospect, I wonder if they were ever accidental.
In fact, his comments on my work have become irritatingly professional. Checkmarks, some underlines, and a paragraph to the side—about stanza length and similes, not unhurried musings about our classmates, high school gossip, whatever he read that week. And every time we’re in the Writing Center together, I avoid sitting at the spot where he gracefully set me down over a month ago, his hand roaming under my sweater and my staccato breaths in his ear.
Some memories are easier to block out.
But occasionally, we have no choice. After workshop one Thursday, he ends up across from me at the bar, nursing his beer and avoiding eye contact. His shoulders are turned completely to the side, where Morris sits next to him.
“So who’s going to AWP?” Morris asks the group.
All of us, even Jerry, raise our hands or nod. AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, holds a yearly conference of seminars, keynotes, and panels for writers from across the country. This year it’s in Washington, DC, and Perrin is paying our entry fees; we just need to pay for transport and hotels once there. It’ll be two nights of poetry readings and networking with writers, and while a lot of it sounds pretentious, I am excited to see Erica Go in person, as she’s doing both a reading and a keynote address. I’ve only ever seen her read on YouTube and Instagram, and I would love to be able to introduce myself, just in case it gives me any sort of edge for the fellowship.
“Travel plans?” Kacey asks. “We should definitely split into cars or something so we can do this the most cost-effective way.”
“And all be in the same hotel,” Christine adds.
I cast a glance at Will, who definitely does not look back at me.
While drinking beer, we start searching for hotels and transportation. The conference isn’t until after we get back from winter break, but it’s something exciting to think about, so we start planning nonetheless.
“How are those fellowship applications coming?” Kacey asks the group.
“Jeremiah Brandon won’t know what’s hit him,” Houston drawls.
“Damn, you really think it’s gonna be you, don’t you?” Athena punches his bicep.
“Fuck no.” He scrunches up his face. “I think Jeremiah himself is going to politely request that I leave this program.”
Athena snorts, and the rest of us laugh.
“All of you applying?” I ask the fiction writers. No one has outright said it, but it’s obvious all the poets are interested in working with Erica Go except Kacey.
“Yes,” Athena says. “And to be honest, it’s ruining the vibe. Like sometimes on Wiebke’s work I wanna make a constructive comment and then I think, Nah, better the bitch doesn’t know . It’s actual sabotage.”
Wiebke laughs heartily. “That’s her twisted way of saying she can’t actually find anything to comment on in my work.”
“Ohhhh shit!” Houston squeaks. “MFA trash talk!”
“And all you poets but Kacey are applying?” Wiebke asks, grinning.
I don’t want to speak for everyone, so I don’t confirm or deny. But Hazel pipes up immediately. “I’m applying at least. I hadn’t actually read Go’s work before, but she seems like a fascinating writer, and I’d love to work with her.”
I bite the inside of my cheek. Jerry nods, and eventually Will does, too, unable to meet my eyes.
“Didn’t think that was your type of poetry,” Athena says to him.
He shrugs. “I bought all of her books in September and I’ve been making my way through them. I like her work more than I thought I would. I think doing the fellowship with someone who isn’t one hundred percent like you is probably more beneficial than someone who writes in the same vein. Go’s different from my usual, sure, but I think that’s probably why she’d be good for me.” He pauses. “Great, even.”
I officially cannot stand this conversation any longer, the mixed messages and subtext far too much for me to handle. So I take my usual tactic before anything gets messier.
“I’m leaving,” I announce, chugging the last of my beer and offering a halfhearted wave to the group at the long table.
“So soon?” Wiebke asks.
“Yeah, just tired.”
People chime in with goodbyes and only when I turn back for another quick wave do I finally meet Will’s eyes.
They’re dark and velvety and dangerous. Not a small part of me wants to drown in them. I just don’t know how to make this work. And I don’t think he does, either.