22
T he next day, as MC made a circle of desks in Mr. Pryor’s classroom, she tried to remember the calculus behind agreeing to run the last Explorations meeting of the semester against all her better judgment.
Nothing came.
She knew it had something to do with the whiskey from the night before.
An attempt to mitigate the sinking feeling that, even after all her efforts to do the right thing, she’d messed up spectacularly.
And if she could just go back once more, talk to Nora again, then maybe, just maybe, she might be able to salvage things between them.
She’d assumed only a few diehards would attend.
The holiday break had officially begun at the last bell, a few hours of light left before the next day heralded a dirty-snow Christmas Eve with subzero windchill.
But Ben, Sheila, Patrick, Heather, and the rest of the crew shuffled in.
Sheila was wearing a knee-length sweater that might’ve been a dress.
Heather was wearing mittens. It seemed the school had already turned off the HVAC.
As they sat down, MC handed out packets of the afternoon’s workshop submission, an experimental poem that featured one line per page. As far as she could tell, it was about trees, being depressed, and a dating show MC had never heard of and hadn’t had time to look up.
Despite her gloomy mood, the rhythm of the discussion took over faster than ever.
Her mind became focused, her muscles uncoiling for the first time since sending her article to Joe.
There was just something about getting together and working through something difficult—talking it out, questioning assumptions, eventually remembering that making sense was occasionally overrated.
It was this togetherness that MC had always loved, she realized, more than writing, even now.
Especially now.
They took a bathroom break at some point. MC checked her phone. Just one message from Joe.
GOING LIVE THE DAY AFTER XMAS!!!
A wave of bile rose in her throat.
When everyone came back, she tried to keep the workshop talk on track.
But it was hard, given how formless the poem was.
Or maybe the problem was that it was too formed.
Ironically, the piece had been submitted anonymously.
While the students had kept their tone cautious and respectful up to that point, now the knives came out.
Everyone saw what they wanted to see; everyone wanted to reshape what was there to fit their worldview.
“Pause,” MC said, after Patrick had suggested compressing the poem into a single stanza, in the bottom right-hand corner of a single page, with all the lines deleted except the first and last. “I want to backtrack and talk about anonymous submissions.”
The room, which had gotten a little testy, a little bored, seemed to snap back to attention. MC tried not to stare directly at Heather.
“Like, should it be allowed?” Sheila said.
MC spread her hands. “Let’s start with what it means.”
“It means someone wanted to protect themselves,” Ben said.
MC shrugged. “It’s feeling like the opposite of protected to me. Because if I came out and said I was the one who’d written this, you all probably wouldn’t be going to town on it, slicing and dicing it up.”
“Did you write it?” Ben asked, wiggling his eyebrows.
“If I say no, then you probably won’t believe me, will you?”
“Is it rude to ask the person who wrote it to identify themselves now?” Sheila said. “Like, if they’re in the room, they can just tell us why they did it this way.”
“But if you ask that, aren’t you violating their privacy?” MC said. “Going against their intention?”
Patrick shook his foot and said, “At a certain point, your intentions don’t really matter. You put this out for public consumption. Why should you get to withhold your name?”
Heather picked her fingernails, but her posture was tense.
“I can think of some simple reasons,” MC said. “Fear of judgment, for starters.”
“Okay, but the judgment is happening regardless.”
“But it’s judgment of the work, not the author.”
“It doesn’t seem fair,” Sheila said. “We all put our names on our stuff. Why should one author have extra power?”
Heather finally spoke. “Maybe it’s the only power the author thinks they could have.”
“Well,” Sheila said, “it’s not very brave.”
They went back to suggestions for revision. As they talked, MC found herself wondering if Heather really was responsible for the piece, or if it was someone else, someone less obvious.
Jae would know. She was the one managing the submissions inbox while the advisorship was in limbo. But MC didn’t want to ask.
The meeting ended. MC got a lot of hugs goodbye, which surprised her. Even Patrick wished her “whatever kind of new year you want to have.”
She thanked him, and realized she didn’t know.
Conrad had told her to meet him out in the parking lot when she was done.
But she still wanted to discuss the anonymous submission with Jae.
Not to discover the author, but to give a word of caution about letting students go down that rabbit hole—because sometimes it led to a bestselling novel nine years later and a trail of emotional wreckage in its wake.
As she walked toward the English Department office, she heard low voices arguing.
The halls were eerily quiet otherwise. Everyone, including staff, seemed to have fled for their vacations as early as possible.
The sky was darkening outside, and the few fluorescents that were still on made it seem like night had already fallen.
MC walked toward the voices, sensing that she was overhearing something that wasn’t meant to be overheard, but also worried that Jae was on the receiving end of some disgruntled teacher’s rant.
Hers was definitely one of the voices, MC realized as she got closer. But when she reached the door, she was surprised, then not surprised, to find the other one was Conrad’s.
“—let it go,” Jae was saying. “You’re having a baby.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“Then take responsibility for it.”
“It wasn’t planned.”
“But it’s happening. Jesus, Conrad.”
“How is this any more fair to Gabby or some future child?”
“We can put it behind us. We made a mistake...”
MC backed away, slowly, on tiptoes.
When she got outside, she texted Conrad that she was ready to go. She still hadn’t texted Joe back. But for once, Joe was far from her mind.
Her brother was cheating.
She’d suspected it. More than suspected it. But she hadn’t let herself live in the reality of Conrad getting physical with his boss, a woman who wasn’t his wife. And now his wife was pregnant with their baby.
A mistake, Jae had called it. MC hoped it really had been singular.
She stood outside the Destroyer of Worlds, shivering in the dusk, until her brother appeared under the floodlight outside the back entrance.
“I thought we said meet in the lobby,” he called. “Aren’t you freezing?”
“A little.”
He unlocked the car, and she got in first, glad not to have to look at him for another few seconds.
When he finally joined her on the driver’s side, he sat in silence for a moment, breath frosting in front of him.
“Hello?” he said.
It would be easy to breathe out. To say hi back, to let him turn the car on, and with it the heat.
They could focus on warming their hands, and the stiffness would remain inside them both, the unspoken things they believed were their business, their right to put words to or not.
MC had done it a million times. Let the moment pass, the tension fade, resigned to the wrongness as an unfixable, maybe even necessary, component of the universe.
Better to move on from the certainty of hurt than to linger in it, suffering for nothing.
Or not nothing.
For the truth.
“I lied to you,” she said.
“About what?”
“Why I came back to Green Hills. In September.” She cleared her throat. “This whole time, actually.”
“Can I turn the car on? My hands are about to fall off.”
“Go ahead.”
He pressed the button, music and heat flooding the car.
She turned the music off. “I’m not writing a novel.”
“Could’ve guessed that.”
“But I did write something.” She took a breath. “An article, for Joe’s website.”
“Jawbreaker?”
She nodded. “It’s about the fact that Nora Pike secretly wrote a bestselling rom-com under a pseudonym.”
She chanced a look at her brother. He was frowning.
“Really?” he said. “She doesn’t strike me as the type.”
“Well, she is.”
“I mean, hey, good for her.”
“It’s actually not good for her. Or if it is, it’s only good because her identity has been protected ever since her book was published earlier this year.”
“So how did you figure her out?”
“Joe did. But he wanted me to be the one to come back here to get the story.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m the love interest in Nora’s book. Or I was the inspiration for it. He thought I could get the scoop without her realizing what I was up to.”
“Whoa.” He looked intrigued. “Did you?”
“Sort of. I mean, yeah. More or less.”
“But she has no idea you’re writing about it?”
“No.”
“So, you conned her.”
“That’s one way to put it.” She sighed. “Joe needed a big story. He felt like I was the only one who could deliver. So I did my best, for his sake, and now I’m doing my best to have the story come out without exposing her identity to the world.”
“Is that... possible?”
“In three days, we’re going to find out.”
“That’s super intense.”
Conrad pulled out of the parking lot. He seemed like he was mulling things over. But when a minute had passed and he’d said nothing, she added, a little annoyed, “Also, I just heard you fighting with Jae.”
Blanching, he pulled off the road, into the parking lot of the Mexican restaurant—El Sombrero—and put the Destroyer of Worlds in park.
“First of all, whatever you heard, you don’t understand. And second of all, I don’t think you’re in a position to be getting on your high horse right now.”
“Obviously. Why do you think I started by confessing that I came here and lied to all of you guys for, like, three months?”
“Oh.” He blinked. “You did that for me?”
“I did it because I’m sick of us being fake siblings. I get that not everyone will be best friends with their brother. But you deserve the truth from me.” She pressed her lips together for a moment. “And I’d like to think I deserve the truth from you.”
“Fine.” He leaned back in his seat. “I cheated.”
“When?”
“October.”
MC winced. “How far did you go?”
He blew out a breath. “Let’s call it halfway.”
“Are you still cheating?”
“No. God. We haven’t done anything since I found out about the pregnancy.”
“And that conversation I just overheard?”
They’d been maintaining a respectful lack of eye contact. But when MC heard her brother start to cry, she looked over and put a hand on his arm.
“I guess I’m not one hundred percent over it,” he whispered. “I’m a fucking asshole.”
She agreed, but he didn’t need to hear that just then. “What happened with you and Gabby? I thought you guys were rock solid. Wildly in love.”
“We were. In the beginning. But it was a crazy time of life. She was just about to start college, I was fresh off eating shit at Harvard...”
“What do you mean, eating shit? It was your choice to drop out.”
“Yeah, because I knew I was about to fail out anyway.”
She blinked. “Oh.”
“This is what I mean about you projecting some bullshit fantasy on me.”
“I... I never would’ve guessed, Con. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“I mean, you really went off about how entitled and pretentious those Harvard kids were.”
“Because I was embarrassed I couldn’t keep up with them.
” He snorted. “I don’t even know why they accepted me in the first place.
” He scrubbed at his eyes. “Gabby was so into me, even after I confessed about how I’d messed up at school.
She said it was good that I moved back home, that I shouldn’t feel bad about transferring to community college.
‘What’s wrong with being a big fish again?
’ And she said if I wanted to tell people the truth, I could, but if I wasn’t ready, there was no rush.
So I went with it, and things felt a little better.
But it didn’t last. I kept thinking about how I’d failed.
How high school had made me think I was something better than I was.
I couldn’t get over it.” He laughed. “That’s why I was so psyched when Jae called me over the summer. It was a chance to go back.”
MC looked at her brother, whom she’d idolized and envied and resented for so long, never suspecting the self-loathing that’d defined his early twenties. “And then what happened?”
“I don’t know. It’s complicated. But running the school started to make me feel like my old self, like I was at that peak again—the one I was at when I was eighteen.
And she was right there with me.” He shook his head.
“I think she felt like a failure, too, after her husband left her. We talked about it a lot. Bonded over it, I guess.”
MC tapped her knee. “That’s pretty hard-core.”
“Yeah.”
“Which is worst-case scenario.”
“I know.”
“You have to tell Gabby.”
“Even if it’s the worst thing I could ever say to her?”
She nodded.
“Well,” he said, “I guess you have to tell Nora also. Before the article comes out.”
“Yeah.” She closed her eyes. “That’s why I’m back here.”