“Honestly? It’s my favorite,” she said.
We took the cupcakes to the big flat rock called Porcupine Rock because that was Harrington’s mascot so there was all this graffiti on it, likeGo Porks! PORKS RULE!, and we sat and watched the moon rise, a big yellow one, almost full, just a little misshapen on one side. I was shy about eating only the frosting like I usually do, but I saw Becky scraping hers off with her teeth and leaving the yellow cake, so I did too. I said, “I liked your story.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Also thanks for never saying anything mean.”
“You too,” I said.
“Honestly, why would I?” she said. “Writing is hard enough, and the world is even harder,” and I said, “That’s the truth,” and we sat licking frosting off our fingers. “It’s my fault what happened back there,” Becky said. “It wasn’t my best writing. My heart wasn’t in it. But I can’t hand in what I’m really excited about.” “Which is what?” I said. “Why can’t you?” and she said, “Don’t tell anybody,” and I said I wouldn’t, and she said, “It has to be a secret,” and I said okay, and she stage-whispered, “It’s a ROMANCE novel.”Oh, I said. Gotcha. Of course she couldn’t submit those pages. She’d be ridiculed right out of the program. If writing commercial was a crime at Harrington, romance was a sin. They might even revoke her scholarship.
Becky ate her third wad of frosting and threw the bald cake into the woods for the raccoons. “But I do want to publish it after the program, though,” she said. “Do you think that’s stupid? Like too lowbrow?”
“Not at all,” I said, “or if it is, I’m with you. I want to write thrillers. Maybe we could be the Lowbrow Club,” and I blushed because I had never said anything like that to anyone before, and why would anyone ever want to be in a club with me?
But Becky said, “To the Lowbrow Club,” and I said, “May we both be huge bestsellers,” and we mushed our final cupcakes together in a toast. Then I asked her what her romance novel was about, and I sat eating and listening and nodding while she told me the story.
After that we started hanging out a little, taking walks or sometimes meeting at the student union just to sit and read together, and the program swallowed us both up again and I forgot all about my thriller and her romance novel until years later, long after The Incident with William, when I’d left Harrington and was working in my first bookstore.
Chapter 36
The Jig Is Up
After William had caught Sam in his study and stowed his axe, after he’d taken off his ice-encrusted parka and boots, they’d come upstairs and Sam had sat miserably in the great room like a guest as William built roaring fires in all the woodstoves and fireplaces—the power was out. “May I help?” she asked, but he said “No thanks.” He stalked into the kitchen, and she heard him clanking around in there. Sam went and stood in the doorway, watching William fix dinner on the gas burner, which he’d lit with a match. Crackers and tomato soup. “Is there enough for two?” she asked.
“Help yourself,” he said, and carried his bowl into the dining room.
Sam ate the leftovers out of the pot, although she didn’t want it at all. Outside the wind shrieked and the window walls trembled and literally bowed inward, then hissed as they were blasted with snow. Sam would not have been surprised if they’d shattered and the roof flew off the house. The fire flattened and fizzed in the stove. It was amazing how moving air could sound like someone screaming.
She went back into the great room and found William making up one of the couches with the Pendleton blankets and his pillow from upstairs. “What are you doing?” Sam said.
“What does it look like I’m doing, Simone?”
“Would you like some company?”
“Does it look like I’m inviting your company?”
Sam sighed. “William. Please. I’m so sorry. What can I do to make it up to you? I’ll never go near your study again, I promise. I was just—”
“I know what you were doing, Simone.”
“What?”
“The jig is up,” William said.
“What does that mean?” Sam asked.
“It means I know what you were doing in my study. You were digging. Digging digging digging in my past like a little mongrel bitch. Again. Looking for God-knows-what. Trying to discredit me. To bring about my ruination.”
“What?” Sam said. She felt again the danger she’d had the morning on the causeway, a sensation like vertigo. Was this really happening? And she felt something else: Shame. He wasn’t completely wrong. But she’d been looking for evidence to prove he was in the clear.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I wasn’t digging for anything. I was just curious—”
“You’re lying, Simone. I know it and you know it. I’ve known it all along, how untrustworthy you are. I could no longer ignore it that morning on the causeway, after you woke me screaming in the night about some supposed phantom with a knife. And the way you run around half-naked all the time. Loll about the house like some Lolita, trying to lure me onto the rocks. To throw me off my game. Derail my deadline. Because I’m writing and you’re not. You’re trying to undermine me. You always have been.”
Sam was shaking her head, no no no. “None of that is in any way true. I would never—”
“I suppose it was inevitable,” William went on, tucking his blanket in around his feet. “I’m the more successful one. You’re the dinghy to my ocean liner. I don’t know if you’re even conscious of your deranging envy. I suspect not. But everything you’ve done in this relationship is designed to destroy me.”
Sam’s eyes filled with tears of indignation, sorrow, and fear. Shecouldn’t believe he was saying this. That he believed it.Didhe believe it? Worse, had he believed it all along? It was so insane. Maybe it was just the heat of the moment. But he was breaking them.
