Love Story(24)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“Erin?” Gabe asked.

In this shocking nanosecond, I thought Gabe was asking Hunter whether I was the girl he loved so much he couldn’t see.

In the next horrible nanosecond, I realized my stupid mistake. While I’d daydreamed, everyone in the class had commented on Hunter’s story. Summer had forfeited her turn since she’d already responded to Manohar. Gabe was calling on me for my opinion.

I sighed as the blood rushed to my face. Blood rushed to my face every time Hunter moved his pinkie in this class. Directly across from me, Manohar must think I had rosacea.

“This was not my kind of story,” I began, running my finger along the edge of the first page. I snatched my hand away, realized I’d given myself a paper cut, and sat on my wounded hand. “I can’t love a story in which the characters don’t get what they want—”

“Oh, I think he got what he wanted,” said Kyle. Other boys chuckled.

I raised my voice. “—or don’t know what they want. We’ve all heard the existential blues a million times. That said

Hunter

”

He looked up at me when I called his name. I would not say this to the class in general, speaking about him in the third person. This message was for him, and I wanted him to hear it.

“I thought your writing was lyrical and descriptive but completely clear. I could see this setting in the sauna.”

“Almost as if you were there,” Brian commented.

“Seriously.” I held up my hand to shut Brian up without taking my eyes off Hunter. “It was the best story I’ve read for this class.”

Hunter bent his head to scribble something on his story, a small smile tugging at his lips. “Better than yours?”

The class shouted with laughter.

Of course he would be an ass when I was trying to be nice. “As I said, this is not my kind of story. The other thing I would point out, though—”

Everyone quieted and leaned forward, hanging on my words. They expected another performance like my entertaining response to Manohar about my own story.

“—is that there’s no dialogue,” I finished.

“There’s dialogue,” Brian said. “The girl says, ‘This feels so good’”—he couldn’t resist imitating the girl’s sultry voice—“and then the guy says—”

“Yeah, she says something,” I broke in, “and then he says something. But the definition of dialogue is speaking together, trading ideas. These characters never do that. And the main character never exchanges a single word with the mystery girl who is so much more important than the shower girl.”

“I thought Hunter wrote it that way on purpose,” said Kyle.

“Maybe he did,” I said. “That choice has some artistic merit. On the other hand, having the important characters speak to each other and interact would have been more difficult to write. Maybe Hunter took the easy way out.”

This time he looked up at me without smiling. At long last, he lifted his chin, opened his blue eyes, and acknowledged me across the table as if he finally heard what I was saying.

“As long as there’s no dialogue”—I spoke directly to him—“no connection between the characters, nothing really happens in this story. It’s all in the character’s head, and there’s no action.”

“Seems to me he got plenty of action.” This Manohar-like comment was made by a boy who hardly ever said anything in class. If even he felt it was safe to take potshots at me, belaboring the issue was pointless. I looked to Gabe, my signal that I was done.

“Your turn, Hunter,” he called.

The class was silent as Hunter finished writing a note on his story, or finished faking writing a note for effect. Then he grinned brilliantly at us. “Thank you for your comments. I was a little nervous about my first time”—everyone chuckled because he was so hilarious—“but it wasn’t nearly as painful as I thought. Your feedback will be helpful when I revise this story for my portfolio at the end of the semester.” He sounded like a human form letter.

“Did you mean to leave out dialogue?” Summer pressed him. “Was it too hard to write, like Erin said?”

He kept grinning while the smile faded from his blue eyes. “Gabe may take exception to this, but I feel that my contribution to class on the day my story is discussed is the story itself. Then you tell me what you think of the story, and I learn from that. I shouldn’t have to respond to your response. That’s not freshman honors creative writing anymore. That’s freshman honors psychology, and I don’t need any talk therapy.”

“Maybe you do,” said Isabelle, beside him. “Maybe you wrote something into your story that you never intended. You could learn a lot about yourself from that.”

“I always do exactly what I intend,” Hunter snapped.

Thirteen people stared at him. Hunter did not lose his cool. I knew this from six years in school with him. Even his new friends knew this about him by now.

He blinked, realizing what he’d done. The slow smile spread across his face again. He winked at Isabelle. “But thanks for the advice. I honestly appreciate the work all of you put into critiquing my writing.”

*

DISCUSSION MOVED ON TO ANOTHER CLASSMATE’S writing, but my mention of “my kind of story” generated another argument later in the class between Summer and Manohar about proper genres for the course. Class time ran over. I had to get up and leave before Gabe dismissed us, and even so, I was late for work at the coffee shop.

No matter. Hunter’s story was all I thought about through my entire shift. I knew exactly what Summer was talking about when I walked into our room six hours later.

“I’ve been telling Jřrdis all about it.” She motioned me over to Jřrdis’s bed with a pair of scissors.

“My stable boy was blond,” I protested, taking the scissors and the magazine Jřrdis handed me and settling in the pillows beside her. “If this girl is me, why doesn’t she have red hair and a face clogged with freckles? I’m not hard to describe.”

“Exactly,” Summer said. “He couldn’t give her red hair. Everybody in class would know it was you. Nobody suspected he was the stable boy in your story because he hadn’t even shown up yet when you turned your story in. But this girl is you. It’s obvious. Since he was twelve, this girl has made him feel as if the earth stood still. He’s still a virgin because if he couldn’t have this girl in high school, he didn’t want anybody else. She even has your husky voice.”

I winced. “Yeah, that screams sex, doesn’t it?” I had taken exception to the husky voice description. Just because I was an alto didn’t mean he had to make me sound like a cougar.

“So?” Summer insisted. “How can you ignore the fact that he’s talking about you?”

I wasn’t ignoring it. I realized he was talking about me. I also knew he wasn’t serious about any of this. If he’d really felt this strongly about me, he would not have stolen my fortune.