Chapter 2
Freshman Year, First Semester
I didn’t pay attention to West Emerson until he forced me to.
I was sitting outside the Modern Languages building after Intro to Creative Writing the first time we met.
I’d stumbled on this small niche of trees and benches when I got turned around trying to find the exit during the first week of school, and now I slip out the back after every class and kill time until my late geology lab kills me.
(There’s a special place in hell for the person who invented five p.m. labs.)
I’m usually alone out here. The campus starts to empty in the late afternoon, and this spot is off the beaten path, away from the student union and any of the good food or smoking hangouts.
Today, though, a boy in eyeliner stands under drooping palm fronds and motions for me to take off my headphones.
“Mind if I sit?” He points to the bench across from mine.
I slide one side of my headphones off and crane my neck to look up at him. “Go for it.” I put my headphones back on and type another sentence, but in my periphery, I see his mouth move again. I pause my music. “Sorry, what?”
“You’re in Bachmann’s class, right?”
He has straight dark hair that’s falling in his eyes, a hoodie, and a spiral notebook I remember him using to take notes in class while the rest of us use laptops. He’s interrupting my writing, but I grin at the excuse to talk about my favorite thing. “Yes! Dr. B’s a genius.”
He makes a huh sound like he’s never considered it. “The egg thing is weird, though.”
“What egg thing?”
“The loose egg he carries in his pocket?”
I have no idea what he’s talking about. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“The egg he eats every day during our writing warm-up.”
“Why would he carry a loose egg in his pocket?”
He holds his hands out. “You’re the one who said he’s a genius.”
I wonder if maybe he’s high and decide to keep the conversation moving.
“I love the writing prompts, don’t you? Not the two-sentence horror stories, though.
” I shudder. I’m terrible with scary stories.
I’ve read Stephen King’s memoir, On Writing, three times, but I dipped out of Cujo three pages in.
My classmate laughs. At me, possibly. “You’re going to enter his competition, aren’t you?”
At the end of his first lesson, Dr. Bachmann announced that every fall he holds a short story competition among his freshman classes.
The finalists are picked by him, and the winner is decided by popular vote.
The prize is a spot in his creative writing workshop in the spring—a class otherwise off-limits to first-year students. Obviously, I’m entering.
“What gave me away?”
“Other than the”—he bobs his head back and forth as he hums, searching for the correct word—“intense look in your eyes when you had about a million questions for Dr. B?”
The emphasis he places on the word intense makes it clear he wants to use a less flattering one.
He motions to my open laptop. “Is that what you’re working on?
” Even slouched like he is now, with his arms outstretched across the back of the bench and one ankle resting on his knee, he looks tall.
Long. His stature is highlighted by his extremely skinny jeans and his black Dr. Martens; he’s dressed like he doesn’t realize that emo is going out of style.
I should be doing math homework, but he’s right. Apparently, my “intense” expression has made me an open book. “Yes. Are you going to enter?”
“Doubt it.”
“Why not?”
He shrugs. “It’s not really my thing.”
“Then why are you in a creative writing class?”
He tips his head back like he’s going to find the answer to my very difficult question in the palm tree.
Finally, his eyes return to mine; I squint but can’t figure out what colors they are.
Long eyelashes, though. Lucky bastard. He shrugs again.
“It seemed more interesting than mapping out sentence trees in Grammar 101.”
I think about the way I set my alarm for seven a.m. on the morning registration opened to make sure I got a spot in this class; meanwhile, he shows up with a Top Flight notebook that is probably filled with cartoon penises and swear words and whatever boys doodle instead of the M.A.S.H.
game. Angsty song lyrics, maybe. The cool S.
Who knows how the minds of human boys work?
I don’t, which is why I rarely write humans.
His notebook should have been my first clue that we are not the same. If this guy isn’t committed enough to take proper notes, he probably didn’t spend his high school years writing half-finished novels and bad poetry in his bedroom.
“I’m going to be a writer when I graduate, and I still don’t want to map out sentence trees,” I tell him. Sentence trees are boring. Stories, however, are fun. Stories are an escape. Stories are what I want to spend the rest of my life creating. “I’m Mars, by the way.”
“Like the planet?”
I roll my eyes. Everyone thinks they’re the first one to say that. “It’s short for Margot.”
“I’m West.”
I cock my head to the side. “Like Mae?”
“Who?”
“American actress and sex symbol Mae West.”
He laughs in surprise. “Yeah. I guess so. Just like Mae.”
I brighten. Slacker or not (and guyliner aside), I like him.
He leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. “What are you going to write when you graduate?”
“Novels. And I don’t know why I said it like that. I’m not waiting for graduation.”
“What kind of novels?”
I sit up straighter. “Oh. I don’t know. Just…whatever.”
He sits back. “Uh-huh.”
He doesn’t believe me.
The next few minutes are uncomfortably silent as I go back to work.
My short story—about two traveling con artists who deal in magical potions and eventually fall in love—is on the screen in front of me.
It’s nearly impossible to write, though, because West just sits there, coloring the fingernails of his right hand with black Sharpie.
(I’m impressed with how neat it is until I realize he’s probably just left-handed.) It feels rude to put my headphones back on and ignore him, not to mention that I don’t have a single friend in Tucson.
At least Mae West here is willing to pretend he’s interested in my writing.
“Fantasy,” I say as the chemical scent of Sharpie stings my nostrils. He’s going to read my story eventually—the entire class will—so there’s no use pretending it’s something it’s not. “And romance.”
He puts the cap back on his marker with two and a half nails to go (slacker) and leans forward again. “Like Twilight?”
Yes. And also no. My stories are second-world fantasy, not contemporary paranormal.
But the blueprint is there. And look, it’s not like I’m embarrassed.
I like what I like, and millions of other people like it, too.
YA books kick ass. They’re fun. And while there are some literary classics I’ll ride or die for, I still harbor emotional trauma from trying to get through Heart of Darkness without dropping dead of sheer boredom.
But—and it’s a big but—I don’t know West. He might be the kind of guy who forces me to defend my taste. “Kind of,” I say at last.
“Cool.”
That’s it? No defense necessary? I narrow my eyes in suspicion. “Have you read it?” Now that the movie franchise has taken over the world, everyone has either read the book or made it a point not to.
“Should I?”
I tilt my head, wondering if I’m about to make my first friend at college. The tall, skinny boy from my writing class. I could do worse. “You can borrow my copy if you want.”
He nods his head. “Okay. Maybe I will.”
West sits across from me on the bench after our next class. And the one after that. Before long, he sits next to me in class, too, and we walk out the back doors together every Tuesday and Thursday.
Two months after we first meet, West enters Dr. B’s competition with a funny but heartbreaking short story about a kid growing up in small-town Arizona.
In the story, the boy wants a bike for Christmas and instead gets a maybe-magical Chia Pet that becomes his best (and only) friend. It makes me cry on my dorm bed.
Moments before Dr. B announces the winner, West turns to me with a smirk on his lips, and that’s the first time I see the real West Emerson.
I feel violently sick.
Dr. B says West’s name, but West is still staring at me. “I loved your story. You’re not half bad, Mars.”
I blink at him in shock. I didn’t win?
I didn’t win.
“I know,” I snap. I don’t need his half-assed compliments.
West winces. “I wish you were going to be in his workshop, too. What am I going to do if I hear the word ‘heartsick’?”
“You’ll figure it out.”
“Right.” He turns back to the front of the class, but as I look at his profile, all I’m thinking is that I failed, and he beat me, and there are forty-five thousand people in this school, and I might never see him again.
Before him, no one was ever better than me.
At writing, anyway. At sports, math, public speaking, making friends, clapping on beat, juggling, and anything else that can be qualified as a skill, the line of people better than me could reach the moon.
But as luck would have it, the only thing I’ve ever really cared about also happens to be the only thing I’m any good at.
So the fact that West Emerson is better than me?
It’s a problem.