Love Story(5)
Author: Jennifer Echols

She poked my breastbone. “You know what I mean. The horse-race part of the sports section.”

I drew myself up to my full height and looked down at Summer, trying to impress on her the ridiculousness of her theory, which was of course pretty damn close to the truth. I said haughtily, “I certainly do not own a horse farm.” My grandmother owned it. Even when she died eventually, I would never own it. She’d made sure of that.

Summer stared stubbornly up at me. Then her eyes drifted down to boob level. “And that shirt. I should have known nobody looks that good in a regular old T-shirt, not even you. Who made it?” She grabbed my arm, whipped it behind my back, and rammed my face into the wall. Holding me there, she fumbled with my neckline to read the label. “We’ve only known each other a few days,” she muttered, “but I always assumed I would share everything with my college roommate, and we are not getting off to a good start.”

She was a poor girl trying to look rich. I was a former rich girl suddenly poor. As a tall redhead, I could not have looked more different from Summer, tiny and African-American—but we were both Southern and struggling to fit in here in New York. I had sensed this about her immediately, and I had liked her a whole lot until she dragged me out into the hall and threatened to blow my cover. I was just about to jab my elbow into her ribs to get her off me—I had to hide that designer T-shirt label at all costs—when a voice beside us purred, “Good afternoon, ladies.”

Summer and I jumped away from each other. Gabe Murphy was our writing teacher, a stubby man with a bulbous nose and lots of snow white hair. He would have looked jolly, like Santa Claus, except he dressed in a hoodie and cargo shorts and flip-flops like most of the class. I figured he’d been a surfer in California until one day he glanced in the mirror and realized he was forty pounds overweight and nearing retirement age, and he thought he’d better come to New York to pursue the writing career he’d always thought he would have plenty of time for later.

I called him our writing teacher rather than our writing professor because I wasn’t sure he was a professor. That was a special designation the university gave to personages with fancy degrees. I doubted it applied to Gabe. I wasn’t sure whether to call him Dr. Murphy or Mr. Murphy or just plain Gabe. He hadn’t introduced himself, and the syllabus was labeled GABE MURPHY. No clue there. None of the other students had taken a stand on the issue, so I coped by calling him Excuse me, or—

“Hello,” I said noncommittally. “Summer was just straightening my shirt before class. I want to look professional when we discuss my story.”

“We’re writers,” he said. “We’re prone to eccentricity.” He tilted his head toward the classroom, indicating that we should follow him inside.

When he’d disappeared through the doorway, the grin Summer had worn for him dropped away. She pointed at me again. “I am not through with you.”

“I can tell!”

We crossed the classroom threshold and bounced into our chairs. We couldn’t slip into them because they were huge and upholstered. Pulling them out and dragging them back up to the table caused a commotion in the quiet room. Even the noisy guys across from us had hushed with the entrance of Gabe. Now they watched us reprovingly, as if we were five-year-olds playing jacks in a church pew at a funeral.

Ignoring the noise, Gabe said a few words about appreciating those of us who had been brave enough to share our stories first. As if we had volunteered for this. He shuffled through the stapled stories in front of him, making sure all three for the day were there. He had said during the first class meeting that nowadays, writing students were paranoid about sharing because they were afraid someone would nab their work and publish it on the internet. So our instructions were to place one copy of our stories on reserve in the library for the other students to read. Then we brought copies for everyone. The class made notes during the discussion and passed the copies back to the original author. I couldn’t wait to read my classmates’ glowing praise.

“These stories have a natural order and flow nicely from one to the next,” Gabe was saying, “so let’s start with—”

There was a knock on the door.

I heard my sigh again in the stillness of the regal classroom. This one was not a sigh of satisfaction but a sigh of what-species-of-tree-slime-dares-knock-on-the-door-at-a-time-like-this.

Gabe got up from his upholstered chair. This was not instantaneous because of the weight of the chair and the girth of his own belly beneath his La Jolla T-shirt. He opened the door a crack and talked in a low tone to the interloper. Summer and I were closest to the door. We couldn’t look over our shoulders and stare at Gabe without being obvious, but we could hear most of what was being said. The interloper wanted to transfer into our class. Gabe was telling him we did have space for one more, but a creative-writing class was a family unit, and before the interloper joined, the other students would need to approve. The interloper said he was sure that would not be a problem.

I recognized his voice. Or rather, I recognized the tone of his voice. The Indian dude was cocky, but the interloper’s cockiness would make the Indian dude look modest in comparison.

“Are you okay?” Summer whispered, managing to make even those breathy words sound high pitched. “Are you that worried about the class discussing your writing? You look really pale all of a sudden. I mean, you’re already pale, but it’s like your freckles have faded.”

A dry “Thanks” was all I could manage. I was not okay. I was gripping the edge of the carved table so hard, I would not have been surprised if my fingers snapped off.

The interloper was my stable boy.

And I could not let him read my story.

2

“We have a new student,” Gabe announced, closing the door. He pulled out his wingback chair at the head of the table and sat down. “A potential new student. He’s out in the hall drawing a horse. In the meantime, where were we?”

I did not care where we were. Gabe reviewed the rules for critiquing the stories. I should have cared, but in my mind I was out in the hall with Hunter Allen, jogging his elbow so he messed up his horse.

All of us had drawn a horse as a creativity demonstration on the first day of class. Gabe’s point, I think, was that each person had a unique perspective and something to bring to a creative-writing group. The cocky Indian guy definitely had a unique perspective. He had drawn a horse’s ass. Summer had drawn the underside of a horse—inaccurately. It seemed to have no gender, or at least no genitalia, like a Barbie or a Ken doll. But it was a perspective I wouldn’t have thought of, and I was impressed with her. I was not an artist, but I had tried my best to capture a horse in motion, not in a race of some human’s devising, but running for the sake of running, a horse being a horse. I had loved looking out my bedroom window first thing in the morning with the mist rising from the bluegrass, watching the yearlings race each other when nobody was betting, because that’s what horses did.