Love Story(75)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“Hunter,” Gabe said, “why don’t you get us a couple of sodas?”

Hunter nodded shortly and stood.

“Hold on.” Gabe sat forward, drew his wallet out of his back pocket, and waved a bill between his fingers. “Sounds like you may need this.”

“Funny,” Hunter said. But he took the bill. As he backed out the door and closed it behind him, he was watching me.

“Erin,” Gabe said, turning to me.

“Yes, sir?” I asked in my best imitation of Hunter.

“You have a problem with authority.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You can’t take criticism.”

“What do you mean, I can’t take criticism?” I demanded. Gabe did not laugh, so I said, “Ha-ha, joke.”

“But I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt,” he said. “Lloyd Peters tells me you’re a brilliant student and wrote a phenomenal paper for his early American literature survey.”

“Bleh!” I said automatically. “I mean, I am thrilled that Dr. Peters enjoyed my paper.”

“He said you tore Nathaniel Hawthorne a new one.”

“Like shooting fish in a barrel,” I said gravely.

“And in my class,” Gabe said, “though your demeanor has on occasion been less than professional, you’ve given terrific advice to your fellow writers. In fact, according to the statements of your peers, you’ve been more helpful than any other student. Brian has commented to me on how much your suggestions have helped him. Summer. Isabelle. Hunter.” He snapped his fingers. “What’s-his-name, what-do-you-call-him, Wolf-boy.”

“Kyle.”

“And very recently, Manohar. I was particularly amazed by that. If I’d been you and Manohar had said those things about my first story, I would have knocked his block off.”

All of this was said with a jovial smile on his cherubic face.

“And you have a gift,” he said.

Those words meant much more to me now, after everything that had happened, than they had when he’d written them on my stable-boy story. I let the words hang in the air between us like the unexpectedly lovely scent of an aromatherapy candle in a funky SoHo shop. I had a gift.

“I think your original story was your best,” he said. “The class’s criticism of that story sent you on a journey you didn’t want to take. Sometimes it’s good for our foundations to be shaken. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

“I guess,” I said bitterly. I still didn’t understand why Manohar always got to comment first.

Gabe continued, “You were writing what you thought was a good story. You didn’t know Hunter would be in the class, so you weren’t trying to make a point to him. You weren’t exorcising demons or recounting your family history. You were concocting an enjoyable fantasy for yourself. We all do our best work when we write the story we want to read.”

I squinted, determined not to cry again. “I’m not sure this one ends well.”

“It ends the way you say it ends,” Gabe said gently.

“I think Hunter might have something to say about that.”

Gabe’s chair creaked as he leaned forward. “We’re not talking about your life, Erin. We’re talking about your writing. Your imagination. Your creativity. And it’s time you learned there’s a big difference between your writing and your life. To do it right, your writing takes an incredible amount of work. Your life takes more.”

I nodded slowly. “Believe it or not, I’ve been trying to repair my life. I’ve planned to apply for the publishing internship.”

Gabe raised his white eyebrows at me. “Really.”

“Yeah. From your tone of voice, it sounds like you’re telling me I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell, and I shouldn’t bother.”

He pried his mouth loose from its grim line to say, “That’s what I’m telling you.”

I held my breath. I could not cry in front of him. Not again. I tried not to think about my life in New York, my internship, my whole writing career fading in front of me, all because of my tangle with Hunter, whom I’d also lost. I would think about this later and let loose with the waterworks. Not now.

“But, Erin.” Gabe tapped his finger on his desk to the beat of his words. “If you are trying to make a writing career for yourself, you will get rejected again and again and again and again.” Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. “You must keep going. You have to learn not to take no for an answer.”

I left his office unsure whether to feel better or worse about my chances at the internship, my chances at publishing my writing, and the incredible amount of work it would take to be friends with Hunter again.

He sat on the chaise longue, three bottles of soda beside him on the cushion. As I passed him, he handed one to me.

I downed big swigs of soda while walking down the dark street, thinking hard. I was halfway to the coffee shop when I realized I was ninety minutes late for work, and I had been fired.

A week and a half later, we read Hunter’s story for class. I was afraid it would be some kind of recrimination, about a man who takes revenge on the bitch who ruined his life. But it seemed to be about reconciling his relationship with his dad. I hoped it was true and I thought it was beautiful, but the rest of the girls in the class didn’t hide their disappointment that it wasn’t about his sex life. The biggest topic of discussion was Manohar’s hilarious story about an Indian stockbroker joining a bluegrass band, which the class argued was unrealistic—everybody but me.

After class, I went back to my room and found a new tube of my expensive face cream on my bed. Summer did not know where it had come from, and she had not let anyone into the room. Jřrdis said the same thing, but she looked guilty.

After Hunter left for the hospital late that night, I sneaked up to his room and stuck my New York City magnet on his doorknob.

Jřrdis’s art project was installed in the college gallery the following week. Everybody she’d roped into cutting faces for her—meaning pretty much everybody in the dorm—was there to admire our handiwork. One of the huge collages held thousands of photos that at a distance formed a portrait of Summer and me. An even larger collage, titled Watchdog, showed Hunter curled up asleep on Jřrdis’s bed with my belly-dancing outfit hanging on the door in the background.

Hunter was at the opening. In fact, at one point we gazed at each other across that collage. When I arrived back at the dorm, a gift card for the restaurant around the corner from the dorm had appeared on my bed.

Summer wanted me to go home with her to Mississippi for Thanksgiving, but neither of us had the money to buy me a plane ticket. Even Jřrdis was headed to the home of a friend from Brooklyn. Summer tried to get Jřrdis to take me, too. I waved them off. I would go to the dining hall for the sad Thanksgiving dinner for foreign students who couldn’t go home and had no local friends, and I would meet some new and fascinating people. No biggie.