Lessons in Love (20 page)

“It doesn’t have to contain an actual Jesus or six pairs of animals to connote…” Dalton ends his sentence by eating. Everyone takes turns baking and Mr. Chaucer provides the drink.

“Well, I wanted the point of view to be…” Priss starts but Mr. Chaucer does his combination head shake and tilt and she’s instantly quiet. One of the rules that’s been explained is that you can’t comment on your own story. You write it, hand it in with copies for everyone, and get to listen to every word people have to say. But you can’t be your own footnotes. So Priss gives an embarrassed smile, and looks down.

“Anyone else?”

Linus proceeds. He’s smart. The editor of the serious campus paper, and known for his grades and perfect SATs, if not for his sense of humor. “It needs work.” He looks up and addresses us all. “That’s my honest opinion. You have to use the principles of effective composition even in a creative context.” He goes on to explain why, in very academic terms until Mr. Chaucer interrupts. He leans on the old dictionary, causing me to eye again the applications. Weird to think that one of them will have so much of me in it. I wonder who else will apply. Probably the entire senior class. Linus gives me a side glance. “You have to be tough in here.” I nod.

“Love can handle the constructive criticism,” Dalton says. He grins at me. He and I spoke before about how that term, constructive criticism, is thrown around the way people say “no offense” and then proceed to offend you. As though under the guise of constructive, people can be honest and say you suck. I grin back.

Mr. Chaucer pats the dictionary as though it’s an old friend or a dog. “There’s the payoff. The “good part”, if you will, of this group. And since Love is new to our meeting — I’d like her to see how we end our sessions, just so she’s not freaked out at the possibility of having her creative writing hacked to bits when it’s her turn.” Chaucer refills my cranberry juice spritzer and explains. “Despite the food and drinks, our circle is no picnic. Sometimes, your piece will be ripped apart. And it’s not a good feeling.”

“Trust me,” Sara says, rolling her eyes and gripping her pen tightly. “But it happens to everyone.”

Mr. Chaucer goes on. “So at the end, after your poem or story or play has been examined and put to the verbal test, we do the kindest thing.”

“Burn it?” I joke. People laugh.

“No — praise it.” Mr. Chaucer sits on the only chair left — neither Dalton nor I wanted to take it — a butterfly chair in the corner. “Priss, I think you have a remarkable talent for pacing. You know just when things need to happen — the right dialogue, the perfect action.” He hands his copy of her story back. “Well done.”

Linus goes next: “Priss, you have a great way of hooking us in, getting the reader to want to know what happens.”

Everyone delivers the praise face-on, not shy about it. I notice that the criticisms were said in the third person, but the praise in direct — this strikes me as gentle, too. None of these people — with the exception of Dalton — are people I really have reason to hang out with — except maybe Avi for editorial meetings — or even talk to. But now I’ll be one of them; nod to them over casseroles at Sunday dinner, brush past in the hallway, and wait in line for coffee at the student center.

“That’s true.” Dalton nods, brushing his chocolate hair out of his eyes. “Page-turning. It’s a quality I need more in my own writing.” He casts a self-deprecating smile towards Priss. “You really have that part down.”

“I’m just a really big fan of yours, Priscilla. You know that. And even though I didn’t love this story — I still think you’re amazing.” Sara crosses her arms. The group is small enough that each week is devoted to close reading of just one person’s work. By adding me, Chaucer lengthened the process, but no one seems too put off. I just need to brace myself for the all the construction that lies ahead for me and my writing.

Everyone turns to me. I clear my throat and hold back a mini-belch from the fizzy cranberry spritzer. “I’m new, obviously, and I’m sure I’ll feel kind of timid…”

“You? Timid?” Dalton gives a disbelieving look.

“I’m not sure what exactly I like about this story.” I look at Priss then at Mr. Chaucer. He nudges me ahead with his eyes. “And I know that’s not helpful because generalities don’t make you better they just make you question yourself…but…” I hand her story back. On her lap, Priss has a pile of copies, all with notes on them, each one marked up for improvements or suggestions. Already I can’t wait to have the same pile back on my lap when after I’ve gotten a chance to submit. All those comments and notes directed at my writing, which up until now has gone largely unread.

“Can you tell us the line you liked best?” Chaucer suggests. “Sometimes if you don’t know what to say, showing an example of the writing that worked for you could be the key.”

I take my copy of her story back and quickly flip through it, all eyes watching me. But even under pressure in here, it’s a good kind. The excitement that runners get before they sprint, or actors do before a play. Build-up, but not negative.

“Here.” I point to a section. “On the eighth page, when you say ‘mile and after mile, the dust kicked up behind the car wheels but the Milagro Café was still in view’…it’s small, I know, but I like how you’re so clear about the picture. Telescoping, almost, on what you want us to find.”

Priss smiles. “Thanks. Telescoping. Good word.”

We end the session with a discussion of scheduling.

“Dalton you’ll be next week” Mr. Chaucer points to him. I breathe a sigh of relief — even though I’m excited I’m not quite ready for it. “Then, Love.” He checks his teacher planner. “That’ll be right before Columbus Day.” This rings a bell in my mind and apparently in Chaucer’s, too, because the next thing he does is wordlessly distribute the applications for the Beverly William Award. It lands in my lap, flapping like a bird’s wing, and for a second I don’t even look at it. I watch the room, taking in how everyone has hold of their applications, how
constructive
suddenly just got competitive. Only Dalton casually shoves it into his notebook without looking. “Then after Columbus Day we’ll get to Sara and so on…” Mr. Chaucer opens his front door, letting a gasp of cooler air in. Then, when we’re all standing and ready to go, everyone waits before leaving.

“Okay — quotation of the week.” Mr. Chaucer recites from memory. “Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but, most important, it finds homes for us everywhere…Hazel Rochman.”

Dalton whistles as we leave the paddock area. I think about the quotation, about finding a home and how that’s what I hope to do at school, with my writing, even with love. The whistle carries through the air. The extra weight of the BW Award application makes me ever-mindful of how much I have invested in applying.

“Is that
Rain Falls for Wind
?” I’m kind of shocked — not just that Dalton knows the band The Sleepy Jackson, but that he likes the music enough to whistle it.

“
I’ve been drinking and thinking of you
…” Dalton sings, remarkably on tune. “What’s not to like?”

Our feet rustle through the leaves. The other ACW head back to main campus while Dalton and I, the only ones from the west dorms, head the other way. “I thought you were…” Dalton tucks his notebook securely under his arm, saying nothing about the application he so carelessly shoved inside, and leads me not back the way I came via main campus, but a back way. On the far side of the paddock, he lifts a metal ring off the gate and swings it open. I can almost imagine horses here, riders practicing jumping or whatever they do exactly during lessons. “You just have me pegged as Sidekick Boy.”

I run my tongue along the inside of my teeth, thinking about that comment as Dalton walks into the darkness of the woods. “I know you’re not Robin to his Batman. Really.” I duck under a branch and keep following him. “And by the way, don’t lead me to the swamp and do something you’ll regret.”

“This isn’t a murder mystery,” Dalton says. “But that’s one of the reason I like walking this way. You can’t really, during the day — because technically we’re trespassing on that person’s land.” He points through the thick pines to a house, all it’s windows lighted up. “But it makes me think about home.”

“Why, you live in the woods?” I ask. “How very Robert Frost.”

Dalton doesn’t give me a quick response. He lazes into growing up on a farm, with his academic parents with three sisters. “It wasn’t idyllic or anything — I mean, it can get boring when you’re fourteen. But as a kid, it was awesome.” He pulls back a branch so I can walk by. “And I love visiting there. We have wicked sledding contests in winter.”

“You, on a sled, shrieking?” It’s a funny image, almost too sweet — for someone who always has an edge, always has something extra to add.

“In the interest of full disclosure…there might be some mulled wine involved.” He laughs.

“So, you like The Sleepy Jackson….” I pause, realizing I’m filling air with chit-chat rather than saying what I want. “In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that maybe I did peg you as Jacob’s whatever. I mean, it’s how I know you, right?”

And it’s true — over the years he’s always been there, just off to the side when I’ve gone to talk to Jacob, or on the Vineyard when we hung out. At assemblies or in a class here and there. It comes as a revelation that only recently have I been adding to the once-slim file in my brain marked Dalton. “I’m sorry, I think.” I stop walking, the wind catching the edge of my scarf, making it dance of its own accord.

Dalton turns, looking taller in the darkness, his eyes still such light blue they appear nearly silver. “Your story — for Chaucer?”

“The one I wrote in two days to get into the class?” I make a mental note that I mentioned the haste with which I wrote it to remind him it might not be my best work.

“It’s you and him, right?”

A sound somewhere between guffaw and snort comes out of my mouth. Nice. “NO. No — it’s not. It’s fiction. A short story.”

“Right, of course. But…” Dalton punctuates his sentence with a click of his tongue. “In every fiction there’s a kernel of truth, isn’t there?”

From my waist I pull my worn-in Hadley sweatshirt and slide my bare arms into the double-lined cotton into it. Right then, I know that’s how I feel about ACW, that familiar comfort. Of being surrounded by something that could be trite (a high school writing class, a Hadley article of clothing) but turns out to be perfect. “I don’t know what I think about that truth in fiction stuff. Amelia and Nick Cooper are just figments.”

“I think,” Dalton says still not moving, “That that’s the problem with them.”

“What?”

“They don’t jump off the page. You know, come alive and feel so real you could know them or grasp their fingers.” He puts his hands together. “And in good fiction — the best fiction — you can. Touch them, I mean.”

I rest chin on my chest — an awkward position but one that affords a certain amount of shyness and warmth. “So you’re saying you don’t believe in Amelia and Nick.” I wonder if underneath those names I really do mean me and Jacob, all that stuff about them kind of being together in the story and kind of not. And if Dalton thinks this, too. If he’s trying to tell me something.

“I just don’t buy it. The two of them on that beach. All that water underneath the proverbial bridge.” He snaps the branch back and it rustles the pine needles.

“So you don’t think once people — characters, I mean, have that much history they can surpass it like Amelia wants to?” I picture the character I made up with her hands up, her feet on the sand, waiting for me to tell her if she’s real or not, if she and Nick Cooper will really be joined or if she’s destined to comb the beach for polished stones and glass by herself.

Less than a mile away from us right now, Jacob is strumming his guitar or doing homework or playing fooseball in the Bishop common room, maybe thinking about Chloe Swain or — maybe, me. And farther away, Charlie’s off doing whatever it is he does when he’s not with me. It used to be fishing or repairing his boat, but now he lives a life at college that feels for some reason even less related to me. So maybe Amelia and Nick are a loose version of me and Charlie, unable to meet fully on that beach, wherever that is.

“What did Mark Twain say?” Dalton thinks. “Not trying to be pretentious, or anything, but my dad — he’s an English professor.”

“And just what did your dad, by way of Mr. Twain, say?”

“The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug.” Dalton switches his notebook to the other arm. “You’re applying, of course?”

I swallow. “Yeah. You?”

“Yep.” He says that the same way Jacob does and I wonder who started it — who brought what to their room freshman year and where the dividing line is between them. “Long shot, though.” He waits for me to catch up then explains. “But I figure — any lesson in writing is a good one.”

I take that in. “You never know — you could win it.”

“So could you.” He whistles again then stops. “Like Twain said, it’s a subtle but huge difference.”

This applies to him and Jacob, too, I think. How being with Dalton kind of reminds me of being with Jacob but isn’t the same at all. How, like lightening bugs or lightening, it would be a mistake to clump them entirely together. We leave the cluster of trees and wind our way toward the dorms. Rather than passing the graveyard, this way we go past the track, the swamp where the campus dogs like to play, and Dalton talks. “I think you’ll like the class. Meetings are one of the best parts of my week.”

I don’t ask what the other best parts of his week are, I only breathe out relief. “I’m just glad I’m in.” Cold air fills my lungs with the seasonal shift. “I just want to be good at it, you know? Be able to write something that blows people away. Or, maybe not even that major an impact. Maybe just something people like. Something I like.”

Dalton nods. “That is the goal, isn’t it?”

“You nervous that you’re up at bat next week?”

As we approach the service road that nudges up to a path behind the grassy oval, Dalton stops. First I think it’s for dramatic effect but then I realize he’s got something in his shoe. He hands me his thick notebook while he deals with the pebble.