The Rabbit
what happens. When William and Sam Vetiver go off on their respective trips, I wait an hour to make sure they’re really gone,
The first thing I do? Take a long-@$$ shower. I stand under the hot water until it goes cold, using up all of Sam Vetiver’s
salon-scented products. Then I cook myself a decent meal. I’ve been eating well enough, lots of peanut butter and beans, but
it’s amazing what a difference in morale it makes when food’s hot. Next I wander the house, wrapped in one of those scratchy
striped blankets William’s had since grad school. I build a fire and take a nap next to the big stuffed bear. I read a few
pages here, a few there. I go up to William and Sam Vetiver’s bedroom and jump on their bed, then use their vibrator—why they
need this I have no idea, I guess for variety—and flush all their lube down the toilet. Finally there’s nothing left to do
but fire up the hot tub and sit under the stars.
It’s then that I realize how lonely I am. I don’t miss William and Sam Vetiver’s f*ckfests, but it is weird with them both
gone, William at some Big Deal Conference and Sam Vetiver at, of all places, Harrington.
Harrington.
A coyote yips somewhere on the lake. A chorus howls back. I do too.
I’m almost glad my car battery was dead so I couldn’t follow her. I hate even thinking about that f*cking place.
It all started so well. That’s what I thought.
I actually allowed myself to believe I’d made it, clawed my way out of Aegina by saving my paychecks from Barbara’s Book Nook and going up the road to Upper Great Lakes Community College, then applying—and applying and applying—to Harrington, whose MFA program I’d seen in Writer’s Digest while working in the UGLCC bookstore.
I couldn’t believe it. You could get a degree in creative writing?
There were scholarships for it??? I’d finally gotten in after applying five times in a row, and here
I was in this fancy seminar room with wood-paneled walls and tiny diamond-paned windows like at Medieval Times. With rich
people who’d given up two years of their lives to be here, who said things like Aspen and Choate and they all knew what it meant. Maybe I could learn to be one of them. Maybe my real life started now. I was like Gatsby,
if he’d been born a baby girl in a sh*tbox.
That fantasy lasted a week.
Then workshop started.
Here’s what workshop is. You hand in a story, which is called submitting. Your classmates read it. The next week, you’re put
in The Box, which means they discuss you for three hours while you can’t say a word. The Box is supposed to encourage “rigorous
listening.” What it really encourages is suicidal ideation, if you ask me. We actually had some people try that. And one succeeded.
Others quit at break. But not me. I hung in there until The Incident, even though I realized the people I thought were writers
were really wolves and William was the leader of them all, an alpha killer in a blue button-down and khakis.
He seized that position the first day, and we all went along with it because he was the only one who’d already been published—his
novel The Girl on the Mountain, which came out while he was still in college. Never mind that it sold like fifteen hundred copies. Or that the Washington Post reviewer panned it, saying, “If Corwyn doesn’t continue as an author—and that would certainly be my recommendation—he has
a fine career ahead as a politician, because he is in love with the sound of his own voice.
” But Kirkus called the book “a luminous, poised debut,” and The New Yorker included William in its 30 Under 30 issue.
He was the only one who could throw around phrases like my agent, my editor, my publicist, print run, foreign rights, film option. In our program, he was king.
As I found out the first workshop, because I was first up. Our instructor had assigned the order, and I’d drawn the short
straw. Not that I knew that at the time. All I knew was that I’d submitted my best story, the opening chapter of what I hoped
would be a novel called Aegina. I read a page of it aloud, and then I went in The Box.
“I will,” said William, when the instructor asked who wanted to start us off. “This author is really raw. She has vim,” he said with emphasis, leaning forward and raising his eyebrows. Vim? I thought. What the f*ck is that?
“Agreed. She has potential,” said Zahra, the woman with waist-length hair and red designs on her hands, and I swelled like
a sponge in mopwater because I didn’t yet know that potential was a slur, like ambitious, meaning you’d fallen short of what you’d tried to achieve.
Everyone was nodding when William added, “But the story is pure melodrama. The little girl locked in the closet so her mom
can go out on the town? Forced to drink her own urine? Cheap shock value. Trauma porn.”
“So tropey,” said another writer, and someone else added, “It was contrived.”
I sat with my face stinging as if they’d all slapped me, thinking, But it happened! It really happened! I couldn’t say that,
though, and besides, we were supposed to be writing fiction. So I just drew William in my notebook with a dagger sticking
out of his mouth.
“I see what the writer is attempting,” he continued. “But the writing has no grandeur. It’s commercial,” he pronounced, which I would come to realize was the worst insult of all, meaning your work would never be reviewed by
anyone who mattered or nominated for the big prizes, only sold in mass-market paperback in spinning drugstore racks or next
to the dog food and toilet paper in big box stores.
After workshop everyone went to the Castle, the student pub, except me.
The second I was released from The Box I stuffed my notebook in my bag and ran from the room like it was on fire, although I found out later that was unnecessarily dramatic.
William didn’t actually hate me. He just had a very low opinion of my work, which matched his opinion of everyone’s work, only with different adjectives.
It was nothing personal. When it came to writing, William was an equal-opportunity f*cker.
As he was when it came to actual f*cking: That man screwed everything within d*ck distance, right across the disciplines.
Even the poets. His one criterion was that the women had to be pretty in some way. The only ones he didn’t sleep with that
first year were me and the other quiet girl in the program, Becky, the Mouse.
Which was why I was so shocked one night the fall of our second year, when I was in the empty cafeteria filling my thermos
at the milk machine and William came up next to me. He did his smiling and bowing thing and said “Moooooo,” and I was wondering
whether he was calling me a cow when he said, “We can do better than that, can’t we?” and took the thermos from my hand. He
said what a shame we’d been in workshop over a year but never gotten properly acquainted, and did I want to grab a beer at
the Castle? and I looked all around and behind me to make sure there was nobody else there, that he was actually talking to
me.