Love Story(33)
Author: Jennifer Echols

On the large digital clock behind the front desk, eleven fifty-five blinked to eleven fifty-six. I needed to turn this story in, but I could not. I had written it for a specific purpose, to shake Hunter out of his pattern of seeking me out, shutting me down, and writing a sexy story about somebody else. If this story didn’t motivate him to tell me how he really felt, nothing would.

The problem was that in prodding Hunter to lower his defenses, I’d lowered my own too far. The other stories I’d written for class had been fictionalizations of my life. This one wasn’t fiction at all.

At eleven fifty-seven I was second-guessing myself. Why had I written this story anyway? What had possessed me to do this to myself? I could quickly write another story as a replacement. It would suck, but at least I could protect my soul from the prying eyes of the class.

I couldn’t risk it. Gabe might have some system of knowing when a story had been turned in late. At the very least, some of my classmates might come into the library and ask for the reserve folder in the next few minutes so they could read the stories before starting their weekend. I would be busted, my grade would suffer, my dreams of the internship would be gone. It wasn’t worth the risk.

At eleven fifty-nine I wiped both wet hands on the matted red chair, crossed the lobby, and asked the kid behind the counter to add my story to the reserve folder for my class.

Before I could change my mind, I ran away, back across the lobby, past the group of chairs, and up the stairs.

My money from the summer was running out faster than I’d expected, and I’d signed up for extra shifts at the coffee shop the whole weekend. I had an early American literature survey (bleh!) paper to finish in the two-hour window before my belly-dancing class, and no time to lose. I settled at a table on a second-story balcony with a glass wall below the rail so I could see the lobby floor. This was one of my favorite places to study. The white noise of five stories of library was the perfect background music since I was sans music player and earbuds.

Nothing changed about the white noise, I was pretty sure. The scanners at the checkout desk below me blooped softly, the elevator slid up and down, and behind me girls were having too loud a conversation for a library. But something changed. Something made me look up from my laptop toward the front desk on the first floor.

Hunter was checking out the stories.

He took the folder and handed over his student ID in exchange, then headed for the group of chairs where I’d just been sitting. Nothing unusual about that. It was a convenient place to read if you’d popped into the library only to read the stories for class. He didn’t choose my fuzzy red chair. He sat in the larger carved chair upholstered in golden velvet, a stylized throne.

But he didn’t seem like a king, for once. The huge chair made him smaller in comparison. He looked young, curled up with the stories, one leg folded under him. I hadn’t seen him sit that way since middle school, happening upon him reading under a tree in my grandmother’s pasture. He would not sit that way if he knew people were looking at him. Strange what a gaze did to Hunter.

I watched him. I knew he was reading my story rather than one of the others because my paper was a higher-quality bright white, one of the few luxuries I sprung for anymore. He stared at one page for a long time, leafed back to the page before it, read the whole passage again. He winced. I tried to figure out which of the many wince-inducing sections he was reading, judging from how many sheets he seemed to have left. I couldn’t tell.

Reaching the end, he held the story up and stared at it for a few minutes. He stretched and popped his neck, then settled back down to read the other two stories. But the bright white story came out again. He read it through, slipped it back into the folder, turned in the folder at the desk, and left the library. He’d scratched a lot of comments in his notebook about the other two stories, but after reading mine, the first time and the second, he hadn’t scrawled word one.

Maybe he was saving his comments to tell me in person. All weekend I half-expected him to confront me as I worked at the coffee shop, or read on a blanket with Summer in the park, or wrote in my room and listened for him in the stairwell. He did not confront me. I did not see him. My story hadn’t affected him the way I’d hoped. He’d gotten the last laugh after all.

That’s what I thought until class on Monday.

Anything Is Possible

by Erin Blackwell

She knocked on the closet door, then opened it slowly. Her daughter probably had her earbuds in as usual and wouldn’t hear the knock anyway, but she tried to warn her daughter as best she could. Her daughter had an exaggerated startle response; doctors had said witnessing domestic abuse might have caused this.

Her daughter looked up easily from her pillow nest in the closet and smiled. “Hey.”

“Hey.” She sank down into the fluffy softness in front of her daughter. “What are you reading?”

Her daughter showed her the cover: Pride and Prejudice.

“Haven’t you read that before?”

“Like four times. But it gets better every time.”

She didn’t doubt her daughter. She wasn’t much of a reader herself, but she’d seen quite a few movie and TV versions, and the more recent ones were definitely better. “Well, I’m turning in,” she lied. “Don’t stay up too late reading, okay?”

“I won’t,” her daughter promised. Her daughter had bent her head to the book again before she had even closed the closet door. She suspected her daughter was lying, too.

Free of this responsibility, she hurried down the grand staircase, careful not to look as if she were hurrying. She waltzed right past the office where her mother still slaved over the books for the business, anxious to find a way to make it leaner smarter better richer and exceedingly more boring. If her mother burst out of the office at this moment, she could say she was headed to the kitchen for a snack. But her mother, like her daughter, stayed put behind a closed door.

As she sneaked oh so quietly out the side door, careful of the squeak that sounded when it was opened too far, she began to feel foolish. She was thirty-two years old, way too old to be sneaking around behind her mother’s back, and her daughter’s.

But thirty-two was way too young to have a twelve-year-old. At eighteen she had run away to Hollywood to escape the iron fist of her mother and prove her worth by making it on her own as an actress. At twenty she’d had a baby. Now she’d run away back home to escape the iron fist of the father of her child.

She would not stay here, she told herself as she leaped from the porch stair, over the corner of the crunchy gravel path, to the dewy grass where she wouldn’t be heard. Moving through the wet night toward the barn was like drawing closer to her destination in life after a long and fruitless detour. Her new man made her feel like anything was possible. They would take his son and her daughter, strike out on their own, and make a new life for themselves. They had not discussed this but she knew it would work out.