Chapter 155: the interview

Chapter 155 — The Interview

Nora slid her phone across the workshop table the next morning as though it were a summons. On the screen was an email from the literary magazine’s student editor, a brisk, friendly list of eight questions.

"Read them," she said. "Tell me which ones are traps."

Roxanne scrolled. Most were harmless. Why did you start writing? What inspires you? What do you hope readers take from your story? Then she reached the sixth and slowed down. How much of yourself is in your main character?

"That one," Nora said, watching her face. "If I answer honestly, everyone will connect Edda to my life. They’ll look at me in the corridor and think, there she is, the girl who gives away her umbrella."

"You can discuss your writing without explaining every private reason behind it."

"What if they ask whether the story is about me?"

"Tell them it’s fiction."

"What if they don’t believe me?"

"Then they’ll have to live with the mystery."

Nora laughed, despite herself. "You’re not very helpful."

"I’m incredibly helpful. I’m just not a mind reader."

They practised for the rest of the hour, Roxanne reading the questions in a stern editorial voice and Nora answering with her chin tucked down. By the fifth run, she had found a sentence for the sixth question that was true without being a confession, and she wrote it on the back of her hand in pencil.

That afternoon, Mr. Ellery asked whether anyone wanted to read a passage aloud, and Nora’s hand rose before she seemed to have decided on it. She stood, which she always regretted, and her voice shook on the first line. But the room was quiet and kind, and somewhere in the second paragraph the shake smoothed out. When she finished, a boy near the window asked why Edda never told her friends how tired she was.

"Because she thinks being tired is a kind of rudeness," Nora said at once, and kept going, explaining Edda’s habits and fears with an ease that made Pippa lean forward on her elbows. It occurred to Roxanne that Nora spoke most naturally when the conversation was about the story and not about her.

"You build people who feel real," Mr. Ellery said, tapping his pencil on his knee. "That is rarer than good sentences."

Nora went pink to the ears and stared hard at her shoes, and Roxanne pretended to find something fascinating in her notebook.

Her own practice that evening went far worse. She had claimed an empty classroom on the second floor, and she stood at the front with her pages and read the opening paragraph. She stumbled on the same sentence. She read it again and stumbled again, because she was trying to sound polished, and polish turned out to be a heavy thing to carry in her mouth. By the seventh attempt she was glaring at the page and wondering whether she should rewrite the whole opening, or the whole story, or move to another continent.

"Rehearsing," said a voice from the doorway, "or threatening the manuscript?"

Liam leaned against the frame with a bag of sports cones over one shoulder. She had not heard him approach.

"Go away."

"I was passing. I heard a woman saying the word teaspoon with a great deal of hatred."

"Leave."

He did not. He set the cones down, folded his arms, and said, in an ordinary voice, "Read it once. Straight through. Don’t stop for anything."

She wanted to refuse. She picked up the pages instead and read. She tripped on the same sentence, felt the old urge to go back, and made herself carry on past it. The rest of the paragraph came out in her own voice, a little slower than she had planned, and by the end she had stopped thinking about whether it sounded impressive.

"That was better," Liam said.

"I stumbled."

"You did. It sounded better anyway. It sounded like you, instead of someone you were pretending to be for an imaginary audience."

"You’re not supposed to be perfect," he added, when she did not answer.

"Easy for you to say. You enjoy being embarrassing."

"I’ve turned it into an art."

She laughed, and put the pages down. He sat on a desk and swung his boots, looking suddenly uncertain about whether he was allowed to stay, so she waved a hand at the chair beside him.

"What’s the story about?" he asked.

She told him: the shoebox, the chipped teaspoon, the girl who thought the box was full of nothing. The recipe nobody could cook from. The memories each object carried. He listened with his head tilted, and for once he did not interrupt.

"And the ending?"

"Still working on it."

"It sounds good. I’d like to read it when it’s done."

"You probably just want to find out whether you’re secretly in it."

"I am curious about that," Liam admitted. "Deeply. But I’m also curious about what you write." He picked up one of the cones and turned it in his hands. "I mean it. That part is not a joke."

She looked at him, and the old reflex to deflect rose and, for once, went unused. "Thank you."

"Don’t spread it around."

"I have a reputation to protect, too."

He grinned and hauled the cones back onto his shoulder, and left her with her pages and the unremarkable, solid feeling of having been seen without being pushed.

On Friday afternoon, Nora’s interview was scheduled in a small office above the printing room. She had asked Roxanne to come, and so Roxanne sat on a hard bench in the corridor with a book she did not read, listening to the murmur through the door. Fifteen minutes passed. Then thirty. A clock somewhere ticked loudly. She began to worry, then reminded herself that long interviews were usually good news.

The door opened at last, and Nora came out looking thoughtful rather than shaken, her eyes slightly unfocused, as though she had been somewhere deep.

"Well?"

"They asked the question." Nora sat down heavily beside her. "The sixth one. I used the line on my hand. And then the editor asked why I chose to write about someone who feels invisible, and I didn’t say what I’d planned."

"What did you say?"

"That sometimes people become so used to being needed that they forget they deserve to be wanted too." Nora stared at the opposite wall. "I didn’t know I believed that until I heard myself say it."

Roxanne turned that over. It was a good answer, and she could tell it had cost something. "It was a very good answer."

"It was true. That’s different."

"Sometimes it’s the same."

Nora gave a small, shaky laugh, and for a while they sat shoulder to shoulder in the corridor without saying anything else.

The final schedule for the Winter Arts Evening arrived that evening. Roxanne’s reading was confirmed, a ten-minute slot just after the choir. Below the programme, a note announced that Nora’s story would appear in the literary magazine’s winter edition, and Nora promptly sent a message made up almost entirely of exclamation marks.

They went to the campus café to celebrate, with its warm lamps and its cracked mugs, and ordered hot chocolate and an enormous slice of lemon cake they split with a spoon. Nora talked faster than usual, then slower, and finally set her spoon down.

"Would you help me edit a second story? After the evening, I mean. I’ve started one."

"If you don’t expect me to do all the work."

"I wouldn’t dare."

"Good. I would charge you in cake."

"I’d accept those terms."

It was dark by the time Roxanne walked back across the courtyard, her scarf pulled up to her chin and the taste of lemon still on her tongue. She was nearly at the dormitory steps when her phone buzzed with a message from a number she did not recognise, a student code but no name.

Are you the girl reading at the Winter Arts Evening?

She hesitated, then replied. I am.

The answer came almost at once.

I heard your story is about memories. I hope you know some people might recognise themselves in it.

Roxanne stopped on the steps and frowned at the screen. She had not shared the whole story with anyone outside the workshop.