At first, the other students talked about things Gray had liked: the spare description of the barn at night, the menace evoked by the unforgiving landscape. I breathed a sigh of relief, my shoulders creeping down from around my ears.
Alan cleared his throat. “I didn’t get why she would meet him—the magician fellow. He’s a bit of a tool.”
Claire, thin and cool, shot him a pitying look. “Women go out with tools all the time. Her choices are rather limited.”
“Especially in rural Kansas,” another girl said. “Good use of setting, I thought. Wasn’t the Dust Bowl the result of poor agricultural practices?”
“It’s all about scarcity, isn’t it? Isolation.”
“Man’s rape of the environment.”
“It wasn’t rape,” someone objected. “The magician represents an escape for her. Something outside her gray, boring existence.”
Ryan—who wrote storyboard scripts for video games—shrugged. “Or she just wants sex.”
“Not sex. Connection,” Erinma said.
I opened my mouth. Shut it.
“Which is why she goes for it. She feels like life is passing her by,” someone else said, trying to be sensitive.
“So she gets drunk on magic elixir and takes off her clothes for a traveling carny,” Claire said, not trying to be sensitive at all. “Fabulous idea.”
“Are you victim blaming?” Erinma demanded.
“I’m only saying she’s not a child. She’s what, eighteen? Nineteen?” Claire looked at me for corroboration.
This was almost as bad as reading the reviews forDestiny. Worse, because it was my words, my story, they were talking about. I nodded dumbly.
“So, old enough to know better,” Claire said.
My stomach churned.
“Can we try to be more sex positive here?”
“The magic is a metaphor,” someone said. “The magician, he’s the one with all the power. He totally takes advantage of her.”
“I don’t see that,” Ryan said. “He never touches her.”
“He gets her to unbutton her blouse.”
“Yeah, but she wants to,” Shauna, who wrote flash fiction, said.
“Where does it say that?” Alan asked.
“It’s implied, isn’t it? All that description.” She read from my manuscript. “ ‘She touched his hand to her breast... Her diaphragm expanded with her breath.’ ” Shauna managed, barely, not to roll her eyes.
I knew the rules for receiving feedback.Listen. Take notes. Don’t take it personally. But it felt personal. As though they weren’t critiquing my story or characters but attacking me. I looked at Maeve, hoping for rescue. She seemed to be listening, her expression slightly bored, an executioner waiting for the verdict in a trial.
“The problem is, it’s not clear how much agency Rose has,” another student piped up. “She’s obviously an unreliable narrator.”
“Maybe the ambiguity is the point.”
“So which is it? Is she a victim? Or is she a slut?”
They all looked at me.
“We can only judge what’s on the page,” Maeve said.
