The Nix(103)

And while you write these stories, all you care about is what Bethany will think reading them. The stories are really just a large ongoing performance that has a single goal: To get Bethany to feel certain things about you. To make her believe you are talented, artsy, brilliant, deep. To make her love you again.

The paradox here is that you never show her any of these stories.

Because even though you hang out with the writing crowd and take the writing classes and dress like a writer and smoke like a writer, ultimately you have to recognize that your writing isn’t very good. It earns a lukewarm reception in classes, unenthusiastic feedback from teachers, loads of anonymous form rejections from the editors you query. The worst is when a teacher asks in an unusually intense office-hours visit, “Why do you want to be a writer?”

The subtext here being, of course, maybe you shouldn’t.

“I’ve always wanted to be a writer” is your pat response. An answer that is not altogether true. You didn’t always want to be a writer but rather wanted to be a writer ever since your mother abandoned you, at age eleven, and because life before that feels like an altogether different person’s life, it might as well have been always. You were, essentially, reborn on that day.

This is not something you tell your teacher. This is something you carry on the inside, in a cavity filled with every true thing about you so that there is nothing true left on the outside. The morning your mother disappeared, especially, is stuffed way down deep, your mother asking you what you wanted to be when you grew up. And you said a novelist, and she smiled and kissed your forehead and said she’d be reading whatever you wrote. And so becoming a writer was the only communication you’d have with your mother, a one-way communication, like prayer. And you thought if you wrote something really great that she’d read it and, by some strange calculus, it would prove to her that she should never have left.

Problem is, you can’t write anything near this level of quality. Not even close. Despite all the training, there is an elusive element missing.

“Truth,” suggests your teacher in the end-of-year meeting, when you are called into the office because you have one more story to write before graduation and so your teacher wants to impress upon you in a last-ditch way that you absolutely have to “write something that’s true.”

“But I write fiction,” you say.

“I don’t care what you call it,” the teacher says. “Just write something true.”

So you write about one of the only true things that ever happened to you. A story about a pair of twins living in the Chicago suburbs. The sister is a violin prodigy. The brother is a troublemaker. They sit tensely at the dinner table under the imperious gaze of their stockbroker father, then are released into the night where they have adventures, among them the slow poisoning of the Jacuzzi belonging to their neighbor, the headmaster of their elite private school. The manner of poisoning is simple: pesticide overdose. But the explanation? Why does the brother want to poison the headmaster? What has the headmaster done to deserve it?

This one is easy to answer, but difficult to write.

It all clicked a few years ago. You finally connected the dots you were unable to connect when you were eleven. Why Bishop seemed to know things beyond his years. Sexual things. Like at the pond that final afternoon together when he pressed himself into you in exactly the correct position for sex—how did he know that? How did he know to do that? How did he know to seduce the principal to avoid a paddling? Where did he get all that pornography, all those creepy Polaroids? Why was he acting out? Becoming a bully? Getting expelled from school? Killing small animals? Poisoning the headmaster?

The moment you grasped this and suddenly understood it you were in high school, walking to school one morning, and you weren’t even thinking about Bishop or the headmaster or any of it when suddenly it came to you all at once, like in a vision, like your mind had been putting it together all this time beneath the surface: Bishop was being abused. Molested. Of course he was. And the headmaster was doing it.

And the guilt washed over you so hard you staggered. You sat down right in someone’s front yard, dizzy, dumbfounded, astonished, and missed the first three periods of school. You felt like you’d broken open right there on the lawn.

Why hadn’t you seen it? You’d been so wrapped up in your little dramas—your crush on Bethany, buying her a gift at the mall, which at the time seemed like the biggest problem in the world—so wrapped up that you didn’t see this tragedy happening right in front of you. It was an immense failure of perception and empathy.

Which is maybe why you decide finally to write about it. In your story about the twins, you describe how the brother is being abused by the headmaster. You don’t tiptoe around it; you don’t evade it. You write it the way you think it happened. You write it true.

Your classmates are, predictably, bored with it. They are by this time weary of you and your subject matter. Yet another child-abuse story, they say. Seen it before. Move on. But your teacher is unusually enthusiastic. He says there is a different quality to this story, a measure of humanity and generosity and warmth and feeling that was missing from your earlier efforts. Then, during another private chat, the teacher mentions that a bigwig New York publishing guy named Periwinkle has been asking around, trying to find new young talent, and could he, the teacher, send him this story?

This is the final step in becoming a famous writer. This is the final step in fulfilling the ambition you’ve had since your mother walked out: impressing her from afar, winning her approval and praise. And this is the last thing you need to do to get Bethany to notice you again, to see the very special qualities that the trombone boys can’t compete with, to get her to love you the way you should be loved.