A blast of cool air in the kitchen announced a late arrival. I whirled, expecting Bethany Ladd, but it was Tess, the only black first-year in the Program, and Soo-jeong, a Korean international student. Each carried a shopping bag with “Minty’s Bakery” printed on the side.
“Team Dessert,” Connor murmured.
Margaret looked flustered, as if she had just remembered their existence. “Tess and Soo-jeong! I hope you don’t mind us starting without you. You’ll want to get started chopping apples for that pie.”
“No need.” Tess set her bag on the counter and pulled out a bakery box. “Sorry it took so long. It was kind of a hike driving all the way into town and back.”
“You were supposed to—”
“Use our resources. That’s what I did.” Tess smiled. “Minty’s is where I got my wedding cake. They make the best apple pie in town, and I know the owners, so I get a mean discount.” She put up one hand, as if staving off objections. “Trust me, it’s for the best. I don’t bake.”
Soo-jeong said, “Me neither.” She had evidently been eating a slice in the car.
Tess poured herself a glass of wine and sat down next to the Shakespearean.
“Well,” Margaret said, her expression unreadable. “Looks like dinner is served.”
* * *
After dinner Lorraine, the department secretary, crouched over the fire pit with lighter fluid for an hour, while the smokers—students and professors now freely intermingling—leaned together tipsily under the awning. I wandered a little apart from the group, admiring the house, until Gwen appeared at my elbow. She bumped me with her shoulder, and I bumped her back. We drifted down the path that wrapped around the rear of the house, and for a moment it felt like we were strolling the Riverwalk again, arm in arm on a coffee-buzzed night, under stars like icy flowers.
Gwen broke the silence first. “So, what do you think of all this?”
I thought it was a place where gracelessness could not survive, where ugliness would be redeemed by the study of ugliness, and where those who studied it would be lit from within by fires of intellect and passion.
“It’s okay,” I said carefully.
She raised an eyebrow. “Feels more like summer camp than grad school to me.”
I shrugged. I’d never been to summer camp.
“Scavenger hunts and bonfires are fun, I guess, but I’m here to learn. I want to be talking to the professors about ideas. Not doing trust falls into their arms.”
So, there had been a trust fall. I quashed the impulse to reply with a winking Connor-ism about it. Earlier, I’d seen Rocky reach out from the smokers’ circle to tap drunkenly at the shoulder of Gwen’s pea coat as she walked by, and they’d had a long conversation. She’d even accepted a cigarette, as she sometimes did after a few drinks. “Weren’t you talking ideas with Rocky back there?”
She looked amused. “Poor Rocky. He really does look like a raccoon, doesn’t he? With those big circles around his eyes. I was trying to pick up some clues from him about working with Bethany.”
I’d had him all to myself for an hour in the car, and the thought hadn’t even occurred to me. “I tried to register for her class, but the website wouldn’t let me.”
“He said you have to submit an essay. Like an audition.”
“A personal essay?”
“An impersonal essay.” She scrunched up her forehead. “I tried to get Rocky to tell me what that means, but he wasn’t very cooperative.”
“He doesn’t seem to like talking about her very much.”
“I guess not.” Gwen grabbed my forearm. “Just promise me you’ll at least try to get into her class.”
“Of course.”
Gwen slipped her fingers into the crook of my elbow, and we walked like that for a while, the sounds from the house growing quieter behind us as we continued down the trail. “I’m so glad you’re here, Mac,” she said in a low voice, and I realized she was a little drunk. “It would be awful without you.”
I imagined an alternate universe in which I hadn’t gotten into the Program. I probably would have stayed in Wheatsville forever. “I’m glad I’m here, too.” Gwen’s presence didn’t seem to be in question.
A burst of drunken singing came from the direction of the bonfire, which had evidently roared to life at last. We turned and walked back around the hill, following the trail of sparks vaulting skyward like fast-dying stars.
4
For the next three days, I labored over my impersonal essay. I saw it as a chance to redeem myself for my ignorance about Bethany and prove, to myself more than anyone, that I belonged.
The topic stymied me, though. What was an impersonal essay? How could I articulate why I deserved to be in the class without referring to myself? I picked up Ethical Negation again, hoping for guidance, and found only Bethany’s repeated assertion that there could be no ethical selfhood, only the negation of selfhood.
Finally, at 1 a.m. the night before the deadline, I began writing.
I was born Mackenzie Claire Woods in Wheatsville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago with a historic downtown and an ice rink in the shopping mall . . .
I wrote about the pageants, how I won them and why I stopped. It was both simple and cathartic to tell the story of a girl who had so thoroughly disappeared. As I wrote it, I felt myself wondering what happened to the Little Miss Sweetness Upper Midwest Division in the pictures, the way you wonder about someone who moved away abruptly, before you ever learned her last name. Probably she’d grown up poised and graceful in a modest house with enough money and a father who’d stayed. Maybe she’d studied broadcast journalism in college and then quit the local news to become a housewife. Wherever she was, I imagined she was very happy. She’d never lost.
I attached a few pageant photos and sent the whole thing to the email address Gwen had given me for submissions.
I got an email response within twenty-four hours. I was in.
* * *
I saw at once which seat belonged to Bethany Ladd. At the head of the seminar table, a black tote bag hung from an empty chair. In front of it next to a mug of tea sat a single cruller, untouched.
The students who had already arrived clustered around the opposite end of the table, leaving as much space as possible between them and the cruller. I set my stuff down next to Gwen—she had also gotten in, of course—and joined them in silent waiting.
The clock ticked. The seats around the table filled. I felt pleasantly surprised when Connor came in, so late that he was forced to take one of the seats next to the Bethany-shaped absence at the head of the table. Five minutes passed, then ten, as we waited for someone to fill the final chair.
Bethany strode through the doorway eleven minutes late carrying a stack of thick, stapled syllabi, dark red wedges of hair swinging forward past her cheeks like twin ax blades. She saw the cruller and dropped the papers with a thump, glancing around the table at us sharply. “No one has eaten the pastry.”
Silence.
“I brought this for you.” She didn’t seem to be addressing anyone in particular. “I don’t eat pastries.” She slid the cruller to Connor, who stared at it. “Go on,” she urged.