Ninon
Jack Emery
“I need you to write something.”
Outside my door, in the hallway, is a girl who’s probably still getting carded at bars. Highlighted hair flows out of her mesh trucker Von Dutch hat until it bounces up at her black t-shirt, which doesn’t make it all the way down her stomach to her faded designer jeans or even her piercing. Which I’m sure is the whole point.
“What?” I ask, squinting at her. The grim gray traffic of the clouds outside my window are doing a fairly accurate impression of the inside of my skull. It’s impossible to tell what time it is. I can’t seem to find my clock.
“Are you okay?” she asks, raising an eyebrow at me. The eyebrow is perfect. Her blue eyes are perfect. Everything about her is perfect; there’s even an artistry to the way she wrinkles her nose at my disheveled appearance and bleary eyes. I couldn’t tell until I got a good look at her, but now it’s obvious that she’s a genetically altered tomato: looks appealing, remarkably long shelf life, and completely devoid of flavor.
“I’m fine,” I mumble.
Or she’s like the special effect in a movie, if you prefer: only an expert could tell you what’s wrong with this picture, but there’s obviously something missing. Sometimes the only way you can tell is by looking at the other people in the scene, and you realize that they’re not making eye contact, because there’s nothing there.
Really, I could do this all day. I usually do.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
“You’re a ghostwriter,” she says, looking at a little yellow piece of paper that I’m afraid I might recognize as coming from the little yellow notepad on my employer’s desk.
“Hey, do I come to your apartment and call you names?”
“I need you to write something.”
“Terrific!” I say, and I even manage to sound authentically pleased. “Call Gavaldon Writing Services. They’re in the phone book. I’m afraid I’m exclusive.”
“Gavaldon sent me.”
“Gavaldon told you where I live?”
“Uh, yeah,” she says. “You weren’t answering your phone.”
I hate Gavaldon, but there’s no reason to take it out on her. “Haven’t paid the bill lately,” I say, rubbing my eyes. “Um, listen, you think we could maybe reschedule this for the afternoon?”
“It’s... two o’ clock,” she says.
“Is it really?” I ask, startled. Where the hell is my clock?
She nods, holds up her watch.
“Well,” I say. I wave her in with my hand with what I hope is some sort of effective communication, but after a moment, even I’m not sure what message my hand is trying to convey. Eventually, I have to add, “Come on in.”
I start to bang cupboard doors open and shut as I prepare coffee. “You’ll have to excuse me,” I say. “Long night.”
“Drinking?”
“Nah,” I say.
I don’t know why I’m positive she’s going to want some, but I examine the dish rack by the sink to see if I actually own a second coffee mug. The end of an electrical cord is sticking out of the garbage disposal, which solves the mystery of the missing clock.
“I keep weird hours,” I say, which is true.
“I’m kind of in a hurry,” she says, pulling a notebook out of her massive purse.
“I’m Chris,” I say, fighting the urge to tell her to get the hell out of my apartment so I can go back to bed. Look at me, I’m sociable!
“Ninon,” she says.
“What is that, French?”
“I have no idea,” she says. “How long is this going to take?”
It takes about five minutes of me puttering around the kitchen before I realize I’m out of coffee beans, filters, and sugar, and then another ten minutes to jump in the shower, get dressed, and walk to the Starbucks down the street. She doesn’t leave a tip, so I do.
“So,” I say, once my laptop and I are both more or less powered up. “Let’s get down to brass tacks.”
“I need you to write something,” she says.
“Thank god,” I say. “I was afraid you wanted someone to do your plumbing.”
My first impression is that Ninon would kill me if she thought she could get away with it, but then I realize that she actually could. She mentioned her last name on the way over here and it’s closely connected to a family that I know—without checking—has been referenced in the fiction of people like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Bret Easton Ellis, and Candace Bushnell, although I think Truman’s the only one who had the courage to use their real name.
Novels are the paintings of the twentieth century: you haven’t really made it until someone’s captured your likeness... and the better the author, the greater the prestige. I never understood why everyone was so determined to write about these people. I dated a girl when I was still in college whose daddy was a big important senator, and I kinda got the impression that if you’ve seen one rich person, you’ve seen ‘em all.
Maybe they just like the perks; this is my first trip to Starbucks in three months.
I try to move on: “So, what’ve you got?”
“It’s an assignment for my creative writing class,” she says.
“When’s it due?”
“Tomorrow at nine o’ clock.”
“In the morning? That’s a hell of a deadline.”
“It needs to be done sooner than that,” she says. “I need time to make copies and get to class.”
“So we should figure on having you out the door by around...?”
“Eight in the morning.”
“How long is this going to be?”
“About two thousand.”
“What have you got so far?”
“Nothing.”
“How good does this need to be?”
“Good.”
“How good?”
She says—after thinking about it—“Really, really good.”
“I’ll check with Gavaldon. We might have something on file—”
“I don’t think that’s going to work,” she says. “My professor’s going to be able to tell.”
“You know, they all say that, but I knew a guy who got his MFA, and he kept submitting “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something” to writing contests, and he kept winning—he did this for like three years, paid for all his textbooks this way—until he tried it on one of those Write-Like-Hemingway competitions. The judges were not amused.”
“He can tell,” she says.
“Who’s your teacher?”
“Paul Frinkle.”
“Oh, Paul.”
“You know him?”
“Not very well, but I went to the party when he got his fellowship award, and I sat across from him at the dinner. I can’t read his work, but he seems like a nice guy.”
She doesn’t seem to agree.
“You’re right,” I say. “He’d probably be able to tell.”
“I don’t like him.”
“Listen, Ninon,” I say, leaning forward, “I gotta ask—and understand that this is not an occupation that allows me to be judgmental—but I need to know, so I’m clear about where we’re coming from: why aren’t you writing this?”
This interests her.
“The other day in class, somebody asked him what it took to get an A in the class, and he said that we’ve got to already be writing at a ‘professional level,’ whatever the fuck that means, which is bullshit, since it’s beginning fiction. That’s what it’s called: beginning fiction. If I were in advanced fiction, I might understand, but he seems to think that I’m going to walk into the class and be able to write the way he wants me to!”
“How are you doing in the class so far?”
“I’ve got a B, if I don’t get an A on this last assignment.”
“It’s a creative writing class,” I say, with a smile. “I don’t think it’s going to keep you from getting into law school. Hell, it’s probably something you should be proud of.”
“I can’t get a B in this class!” she says, loudly enough that the guy behind the counter looks over at me like I’m the one giving her the grade.
“Why not?” I ask, beginning to wonder if getting her a cup of coffee was such a hot idea.
“I’m only here for the summer,” she says, “for this class. Do you realize how long it took me to convince my parents to let me take this class? They kept telling me that I couldn’t do it, that it wasn’t worth the money, that I wasn’t going to be able to get a good grade. And my friends all said the same thing: oh, you’re not smart enough. Even my boyfriend said that, if you can believe it. I flew home last weekend, and they’re still saying it. And I kept telling them, no, no, I can do it.”
She’s on the verge of tears. I feel terrible, like I’ve kicked a puppy.
“And my mom has been giving me shit about the credit card . . . . ”
I suddenly feel considerably less terrible, but still sympathetic.
“What does he want?” I ask, trying to focus on the assignment.
“I can’t write the way he wants me to,” she says. “He keeps going on about how he wants this deep, meaningful story that’s going to make him think. I don’t write that! I don’t write like that. I talked to him after class, and he said, ‘Well, do your best,’ and then he said grades aren’t that important. He’s such a fucking asshole.”
She looks up, suddenly, like she’s had a Joycean epiphany. “Can you help me?”
There’s a famous story about how The Gambler was written in a month. The reason that story is famous is because it’s damned near impossible. Can I knock out a piece of fiction in less than twenty-four hours? Sure. Will it be any good?
There’s a famous writerly saying: The first draft of anything is shit.
But will it be good enough to trick Frinkle?
“I’ll pay you triple your rate,” she says, recognizing my hesitation.
Here’s another one: Only a fool ever wrote, except for money.
“Let’s get some coffee to go,” I say.
3:05
Ninon is downloading the other stories that Frinkle seemed to like while I pepper her with questions about the class. Near as I can tell, it’s the usual workshop ordeal: you turn in your story and then the other students pile on, getting their pound of flesh for the injuries sustained when it was your turn to critique their stories, or just picking it apart because they have no idea what the hell you’re doing. And, of course, at the end of the table there’s Frinkle, tossing in the occasional comment, but for the most part leaning back and watching the proceedings like a Roman emperor, with all of the gluttony, stupidity, and sloth implied.
Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt; comprehension does. This is, in my mind, the most likely explanation for the decline of God in the last few centuries. And it is the groaning, terrible problem lurking underneath the garbage in every art class today, like that weird monster in the trash compactor in Star Wars: people seem to think that if you can understand something, it can’t possibly be worth your time.
“Did he give you any advice on this last one?” I ask, looking at the sparse pages of feedback she’s gotten from him.
“He said he wanted me to write something autobiographical,” she said. “My stuff already is autobiographical. It’s all very personal; just because it doesn’t mean anything to him—”
“Do you have some of your writing with you?”
“Right here,” she says, holding up the notebook.
4:10
Ninon has written ten stories, none of which are longer than five pages. I read all of them.
Normally, this is the very first thing I do when I get an assignment: sit down and look at the samples. A lot of the time, it’s not worth the trouble; everyone knows celebrities don’t write their own books, so imitation isn’t necessary. Sometimes it’s downright impossible, since a lot of them haven’t written anything except their names since grade school.
Ninon’s stories have their problems. It’s damned difficult to find any trace of her anywhere, and what does pop up is extremely unpleasant: a cheerful contempt for the disadvantaged and a consistent and uncanny inability to feel empathy for anything other than her cat. What could I expect, right?
But here’s what catches me off guard: her stories are funny, in spots actually hilarious. They’re cute. They’re all first drafts, but she obviously spends a lot of time thinking about them before she writes them down. I can tell there’s something impressive lurking beneath her weaker punch lines and her occasional bits of eccentric syntax, but I don’t get the impression she’s even recognized her own ability yet.
And this is a potential problem: I don’t know if her teacher has either. Frinkle has thirteen other students, and he hasn’t read as much of her work as I have; there’s a good chance he’s lumped her in with the kid who keeps writing gibberish about insane asylums and the girl in the back who keeps trying to write historical fiction based on the movies she’s seen set in the same period. If that’s the case, I can’t write the story with too much skill—he’ll assume that she’s just trying to get a good grade, or, God forbid, that she’s stolen it from somewhere, and then it’ll be impossible for him to grade it objectively. It’ll have to be slightly above average.
But if Frinkle does have some idea of what Ninon is capable of, I’m free to let her hand in a masterpiece and take my percentage when the magazines and anthologies come calling. But I don’t dare give her something slightly above average, because he’s going to assume that she just didn’t try hard enough and mark her down accordingly.
I look over the little one-page reviews he’s written for the two stories that she’s submitted so far. They’re not much better than the students’ reports, and the obtuseness in those range from “failure to comprehend certain subtleties and allusions” to “exists in an entirely different dimension.”
I have to work my way past a few cheap shots and nasty comments about Frinkle to get any real information from Ninon, but she mentions—while complaining—that he’s said on at least two occasions that she’s one of the brightest students in the class. Not that this is enough to get her an A, of course, Frinkle added, with an easy smile. Looking at the other stories, this isn’t saying much, but I spend some time Googling him, and I eventually find an editor at Norton whose judgment I value who says that Frinkle has a “keen eye for budding talent.”
I decide to take the chance with the quality. It’s so difficult to write shit.
Intentionally, anyway.
4:34
I read her stories again, but I can’t hear anything yet.
4:58
I find a story by Frinkle on the Internet. I read it over and over and over again.
“What’s taking so long?” she asks.
“Don’t question my art!” I cry. “Hand me a knife! This ear confounds me!”
She calls me a weirdo and leaves to get a snack from the vending machine. I’m glad to have the vacation from Hurricane Ninon; I’ve run out of busywork for her to do and she’s unbelievably distracting.
(Look, I don’t care whether someone looks over my shoulder when I write—and anyone who says they have a problem with this is a prima donna, frankly. Harlan Ellison can write a story in front of an audience, and I’ve seen him do it. Spare me the bullshit about having to have a special pen or the right color paper or a favorite chair, okay? A true professional should be able to write in the middle of a crashing plane, a newsroom, or a war, because the day may come when there isn’t a choice.)
I’m taking my time, letting the story come to me, and I can already see the skeleton of the outline I should probably be writing down. She’s even got this weird little verbal tic, a strange approach to conjunctions, that I’m pretty sure I can work in somehow. But I’m still doing background, still trying to figure out how to hit the right notes.
I’m stalling.
Why I’m taking so long: I don’t want to do this.
It isn’t illegal for me to write a story for Ninon to pass off as her own. It may be a breach of contract for some people to hire a ghostwriter, but the courts treat me pretty well, at least in this area. Actually, Ninon isn’t breaking the law either, but she’s up against something much worse: she’s taking classes at a university that is more aggressive about going after plagiarism than any other school in the country. If she gets caught, she will fail the class, get expelled, and make some very powerful enemies.
The hell of it is, though, it may not be illegal, but it’s still wrong. She doesn’t deserve to pass the class without doing the work, but I’m saving her ass anyway.
Why?
I’d like to say that I’m in it for the cash, that I’m behind on my rent and I need to send money to my mom. I’d like to say, hey, somebody’s going to do it, might as well be me. But I know contract killers must make similar excuses when they’re dragged in front of Saint Pete, and while I admit that this job has made me a bit of a mercenary, if I don’t have better motives than that, I should give up fiction and ask Gavaldon to give me some work in the fraud and forgery department, which I know damn well exists.
“When are you actually going to start writing?” she asks me through a mouthful of corn chips.
“Listen,” I say, “you can’t just sit down and vomit out a story, okay? You have to approach it carefully, you have to figure out what your audience wants, and the best way to give it to them.”
“Frinkle says that’s the absolute worst way to write a story.”
“Frinkle’s probably right,” I say. “But this isn’t art. I’ve got a different objective.”
“So, what am I supposed to do?”
“Write an autobiographical story?”
“I’m bored,” she says.
“Let’s go to the library,” I say. “I need some books.”
5:20
The first thing Ninon says after she hangs up the phone is, “Fucking traffic!”
I’ve just heard half of a surprisingly unpleasant conversation with her boyfriend, Ashton. The problem, at least from this end, seems to be that he’s a giant pathetic failure who’s entirely afraid of his mother, since she’s in control of the money, and his mother disapproves of Ninon, and so Ashton just won’t commit.
Suddenly, I have a breakthrough: I can hear emphasis. The “commit” is obvious, but I listen closely and I realize that she goes out of her way to sound out every word, and she seems to stress the syllables most of us would just roll over slightly more than the others, as though she’s protesting our sloth. It’s not news anchor English—it couldn’t be, unless you went back and added bleeps—but I suspect it’s coming from a similar place. She has a tendency to hesitate until she’s got the exact right word, and the pause is never very long, although the result is frequently disappointing.
“I thought your boyfriend’s name was Joshua,” I say, assuming I’ll be corrected, since I’m terrible at names.
“That’s my other boyfriend,” she says.
“Oh,” I say.
“Fucking traffic,” she says.
“You have two boyfriends.”
“Yeah,” she says.
“And your problem with Ashton,” I say, making sure I haven’t missed anything, “is that he’s afraid to commit.”
“Yeah,” she says.
“What are you writing?” she asks.
“Just remembered something,” I lie.
5:32
“Tell me a story,” I say, because we’re still in traffic.
“About what?”
“About Ashton,” I say.
“He had a birthday a few months ago,” she says.
“How did that go?”
“Like shit,” she says. “That’s why we’re having problems.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Well,” she says, “Ashton’s big fantasy has always been to sleep with two girls at once, right? So for his nineteenth birthday, I brought my roommate over. Now, this was a really stupid idea, I admit, because he’s never really gotten on with my roommate, but she’s bisexual, and she’s always up for a good time, so.
“Anyway, you should have seen him when we finally came over: he looked so happy, like he was a little kid. So I made out with my roommate for a while until he thought he was ready. But, see, Ashton likes to act like he’s this big stud muffin, but the thing is, he’s just not that great. And I mean, I warned him, I said, you’d better jerk off before we come over, or else you’re not going to be able to last right? And, of course, he just says oh-yeah-sure-whatever.
“So they start going at it and he lasts, like, a minute, I swear to God, and of course, he’s completely humiliated, and my roommate goes, is that it? She’s been sleeping with this football player, and so she’s completely unimpressed, and I’m completely frustrated because I didn’t get to do anything, so me and my roommate take care of each other, and Ashton says he doesn’t care, but he does. He got into a big fight with my roommate, and we’ve been having problems ever since.”
“Good story,” I say.
“You think so?”
“No.”
“I could tell you about—”
“Stop talking.”
I am starting to hear it; it is faint and indistinct, but it is there.
I spend the rest of the trip listening to her. She doesn’t say a word.
6:45
“I suppose dinner falls under expenses,” she says, glaring at me.
“This is really good steak.”
7:20–7:25
The car hasn’t moved five feet in five minutes.
“Fucking traffic!” I yell. I am wearing Ninon’s hat.
I’m a little tipsy.
“Anyway,” I say, “yeah, you should see the stuff they sneak in there. They’ll use the first letter of every chapter to swear at their ex-wives, or they’ll arrange the pages so if you read the center of the thirteenth chapter straight down it spells out ‘Written By Ghost Monkey Number Fifty Six Thousand’ and other silly shit like that. Hardly anyone’s reading ‘em anyway, and most people add enough of a cushion to their deadlines so that they’ve got plenty of time to goof around. Jenkins alone, God! The Bible Code’s got nothing on him.”
“How did you get into this?”
“Needed the money,” I said. “Student loans. I’m an English major.”
“Makes sense,” she says.
“Gavaldon’s got a good thing going,” I say. “He helps us out with the loans, so we owe him a big pile of money, and then he cracks the whip and sends us out into the fields to pick words. I mean, that was literally my choice: Gavaldon or Blockbuster Video. Or construction.”
She doesn’t really care, which is mutual.
“By my calculations,” I say, “I wrote a million words last year.”
“Jesus,” she says.
“I’m the Stephen King of ghostwriting,” I say. “I’m a name now—which is good, because that means I can start getting contracts with royalties. When you start out, it’s all flat fees, but I’ve still got a long way to go before I can get away from Gavaldon. I probably should have used a pseudonym. I mean, how terrible would it be: I finally write my novel, I turn it in, and the publishers don’t even bother to look at it because of my history?”
“Is that a concern?”
“I don’t know.”
Ninon looks over at me, and I notice that she isn’t entirely perfect: there are little flecks of gold in her pupils that sparkle in the setting sun. Something shifts inside me and I realize why I’m helping her.
She sees the change.
“Are you attracted to me?” she asks.
That’s what I was afraid of.
“No,” I say.
8:00 sharp
I read her stories again and again, until her voice in my head grows loud and steady.
“There are only a handful of people in this business who can really mimic well,” I say. “Not just in ghostwriting, but in fiction, you know? I mean, it’s difficult enough to put yourself in someone’s head, but you’ve got to be able to pull yourself out as well, and try to see the world the way your characters do.
“Updike’s great, right?” I say. “I love Updike. But every one of his stories is a one-man show, starring Updike as the hero, the wife, the love interest, the villain, the little boy, the mailman, and the dog. It’s like, all Updike, all the time.”
This is me completely sober. This is me doing what I love.
“Acting,” I say. “That’s what we do. We act on paper. I’ve never understood why writers have so much trouble speaking, because that’s what we do, right? We put ourselves in someone else’s head and figure out what they want and how they’re going to try to get it, and then we write that down. Or pitches! How are you going to call yourself a writer when you can’t even write a cover letter? What if you write a novel about someone who speaks? Or you have to write about a cover letter? What are you going to do then?”
“I used to be a drama major,” she says.
“Shush,” I say.
8:37
I flip through the best story. She flips through the contact list on her cell phone.
“Hey,” I say. “This one about the dog.”
“Yeah,” she says.
“This paragraph you’ve got here, the one about his moods... it seems like this would make for a much stronger ending than what you’ve got right now.”
She actually looks up from the cell phone. “That’s how I ended it originally,” she says, and she doesn’t sound as intrigued by this as I am. “But the middle section talks about the same thing, and it just seemed strange to just stop talking about it and then go back to it again.”
“This is good,” I say. It’s even better than that—I love this flash of understanding, the all-too-rare moment when creative souls recognize the intent buried beneath the effort or the skill of a story. This is what I look for in an editor, once I’m sure that they’re actually going to cut the check. It’s a sign that we have something in common, which I desperately need if I’m going to pull this off and not have it sound like a tinny recording.
“Thank you,” she says, and she goes back to text messaging.
9:21
“When are you going to start writing?” she asks.
“Shortly,” I say. “I think I’ve almost got it.”
“You keep saying that,” she says, “but I don’t see any results?”
“You want to see my results?” I ask. “Is that what you want?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Okay,” I say. “This is my thinking: Frinkle’s an Iowa boy, which means we’ve got models: Stegner, O’Connor, Michael Cunningham... I think I’ve got some ZZ Packer around here somewhere. Normally, my first instinct would be to try Carver, but I don’t get the impression that Frinkle’s much of a fan.
“Now, we’re working in fairly confined quarters here, because this needs to follow the modern short story model. We can’t have anything interesting happen, unless it’s an authentic historical occurrence, and we can’t have any really interesting characters, and we can’t have any suspense, because that’s too genre—God forbid the reader have some reason to keep reading. It should probably also be a magnificent coming-of-age tale. Frinkle will like that.”
“This sounds like a shitty story.”
“It does, doesn’t it? But that’s the beauty of it: if you can accept the constraints, and work around them, and still write something good, it’s obvious you’re a genius. When was the golden age of Hollywood screenwriting? Same time they were being limited by the Hayes Code.”
“Aren’t you thinking about this a little too much?”
“God, no,” I say. “Now, let me tell you about Frinkle.
“I like Frinkle. He’s a nice guy, but I can see from what I’ve read of his work so far that he’s got a big, big hang-up. You can tell he firmly believes that the only reason he’s here, the only thing that justifies his presence at the august institution you currently attend, is that he’s smarter than everyone else. He didn’t get a job here because one of the buildings has his name on it, or because he was popular in school, or because of how well he wrote. He got here because of what’s inside his head, and because he’s willing to smile and simper and play the game. And in the back of his head, and in the back of the classroom, he hears the same thing every day: if you’re so good, why aren’t you famous?
“Let’s play into that,” I say. “We can’t just tell a story; we’ll have to come up with some sort of vague, elaborate metaphorical structure which we can work into the subtext of the story, some complex intellectual concern lurking underneath the surface of a simple story about ordinary things. And we don’t want an overt, stunning insight into the nature of the world, because then he might think he understood what you were talking about, but we should probably hint at the idea that the experience has fundamentally changed the protagonist’s life.”
“What are you going to use for a vague, elaborate metaphorical structure?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t need to. It’s art.”
9:50–10:50
I spend an hour listening to her talk about her childhood. It is horrifying and entertaining and completely useless.
11:11
I lose the voice.
“Tell me a story, Ninon.”
“You didn’t like my last one.”
“My feelings are irrelevant,” I say. “A great writer doesn’t judge until he understands. Tell me another story.”
“Okay,” she says.
11:20
“Oh, bullshit! That’s not even possible!”
“I swear to God,” she says.
Ninon is lying on my bed, playing with her purse.
“You sure talk about sex a lot,” I say.
“Well, what else am I supposed to do with my time?”
“Are you saying that there’s nothing else?”
“If there is, I haven’t found it.”
“Well, you are a teenager.”
“I’m twenty-three,” she mumbles.
Suddenly I get an idea.
“Houellebecq suggests that sexual revolution inevitably results in death,” I say, which is a horrific oversimplification, but the clock is ticking and I’m pretty sure if I don’t manage to knock my subtext into decent shape before midnight, I’m not going to be able to finish in time. “I think we should take advantage of the iconography of popular slasher films to comment on this. What’s more important: the sex or the revolution? Is it the violation of taboo that offers such tremendous power? If so, what’s left? When cigarettes and sex become trite, where will the children strike back against authority? We are led inexorably to murder, which is why Charles Manson and his ilk have moved to the other side of the spectrum and become not monsters but innovators, as worthy of a t-shirt as Che Guevara. Frinkle will love this: it’s obvious he was raised Catholic, but he’s probably agnostic these days.”
I look over at Ninon to see her reaction, but she’s asleep.
Midnight
Ninon’s highlighted hair fans across my sheets and drapes over the end of the bed, next to the library books she couldn’t be bothered to move. Her arms are wrapped around my pillow and she’s still got her cell phone in one small, clenched fist.
The truth is, I always knew what I was going to write. It was obvious from the start.
Frinkle will love it. So will his students.
The only problem is, I had to figure out how I was going to get it past her.
So I sit down in front of my little laptop and I open up a new document and I start to write as fast as I can, because I’ve got only eight hours to go. At first, the words don’t come at all, so I get up and I move the books off the bed and pull the blanket over her huddled form and tuck my other pillow under her head.
“Good night, Ninon,” I say.
Then I sit down and I look at my reflection and the city in the window and my fingers start to move, and I write a story about what it’s like to grow up without ever needing anything, and how pointless it seems to want something when it can be on your doorstep in less than twenty-four hours. I write a story about how difficult it is to make it through the day when every moment you feel like you’re wasting it. I write a story about waking up one day and finding out you have something to say, but realizing you have no idea how to speak the right language.
I write a story about casual sex and nihilism and desperation.
I write a story about Ninon. When I finish the first draft, I write it again. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written.
Finally, finally, I write.
Previous | Contents | Next