American Literary Review

- Spring 2010 - Fiction


Notable Alumni

 Melissa Yancy

Nominated for inclusion in the 2011 Best American Mystery Stories


THERE INVARIABLY CAME A POINT in an interview when the questions would turn to Leonard’s college years.

Leonard had liked this interview so far—the man was young, and understood Leonard’s novels, but didn’t feel the need to demonstrate it with essaylets, where the question—if there were a question—came like an anticlimactic spook in a horror film, the audience waiting in suspense to see the killer only to be startled by a mewing housecat.

The interview was for a culture magazine, sleekly designed, with music, food, and politics features. Leonard preferred conversations for these sorts of publications, and over the last hour, he had ruminated on baseball, on Duchamp, on Dashiell Hammett and the Superman films. For the writer’s digests, the questions were usually about the minutiae of process—whether he wrote in the morning or the evening, whether he wrote drafts longhand or on the computer—as if writing were like baking, and the temperature of the yeast was all.

Do you still keep in touch with them? the interviewer asked him now.

By them, the young man meant Bret and Anna, never Hillary, whose success had been short lived. They had all gone to Harden College together in the late 80s. Leonard kept in touch with Hillary, who was still writing, but he had long ago stopped mentioning her name in interviews, because he could not suffer the indignity of the blank faces or confused questions this would elicit. More often than not, the interviewer had not heard of Hillary Rosenstad. Despite how good Hillary’s work had been, she had no cultivated persona, and that had cost her. Even their college had failed to list Hillary as one of the notable alumni, a slight he tried to rectify with the alumni affairs department to no effect. Everyone wanted to hear about Bret and Anna.

We don’t really talk, he told the young man.

But you were friends, right, back in your Harden days?

This seemed to be an important point to people. They were hell-bent on imagining the three of them as undergraduates, self-possessed and eerie, as though they had foreknowledge of how successful they would all become. It hadn’t been like that. But it hadn’t been entirely unlike that, either. Sometimes he pictured camps of literary fans descending on Harden college, like civil war re-enactors but with trunks full of silk scarves, engraved cigarette lighters, worn copies of Euripides’ plays, trying to recreate the atmosphere that must have enabled three (or four, counting Hillary) young writers in the same class at a small college to become renowned novelists.

The atmosphere had been creepy. If he had to identify any one thing, it would be that. In the 1950s there had been a string of unsolved disappearances in the green mountains that overlooked the tiny Vermont college. The men and women who had gone missing had so little in common that a serial killer—or at least any kind of serial killer known to profilers—was ruled out. Somehow, that seemed worse. That left room for theories about a paranormal trapdoor, a mountain monster, a hidden cult.

And then there was the story. The town that housed the college was the subject of a famous short story in which the townsfolk stoned a family as part of a ritualistic killing. Decades later, in Leonard’s time, the town still had a foreboding stillness.

We weren’t really friends, he told the interviewer.

That was not exactly true, but he and Anna and Bret had not been friends in the way people liked to picture, and it was better not to entertain these ideas. One of their fellow students from Harden would have certainly said yes, that Leonard had been one of them. He had stood with them in the quad, their shoulders turned in, uninviting others. But Leonard had always felt as though he’d merely been granted a temporary pass that could be easily revoked. Permanent status would have required a sacrifice, something to cement the allegiance.

The college had the reputation as a playground for spoiled, privileged children who couldn’t bother with the academic rigor of the Ivies. Bret had attended a school in Los Angeles that would later spit out Paris Hilton; Anna had come from a cloistered Christian academy in a sleepy Southern town, where she rarely attended class. But Leonard had not been one of those students. His parents were bohemian types who re-used soup cans as pencil holders and wine bottles as vases; their house was filled with books, they went to the museum on the free days, and they ordered in Ethiopian food. He had always thought they were sophisticated. He arrived at Harden in jeans and a leather jacket, not expecting to feel inferior. He was from Brooklyn, but at Harden, he felt like a hick.

You’re all so different as novelists, the interviewer said.

Are we? Leonard replied.

When he liked an interviewer enough, as he liked this young man, he sometimes wanted to tell the truth. They all looked like different novelists, to be sure. Leonard was considered funny, inventive, the genre-bender. Anna was classic, with a preternatural gift for pacing and atmosphere. She had always been the most talented one. Bret’s work was timely, harsh, with loose regard for storytelling. But Bret and Anna’s work bore striking similarities. They both crafted reckless, privileged characters, dealt with gruesome subjects, and their most famous novels were about murders.

Did they have an influence on your work? the man asked.

They defined it, Leonard said. But it was hardly in the way the interviewer would have guessed.

Almost everything people said about Anna was true. The first time Leonard had seen her in a tailored wool skirt and a dramatic silk blouse, he had to laugh. Nobody dressed like that, not at 19, not in 1985. Bret was equally ridiculous, Truman Capote trapped in a more handsome man’s body. Anna used her eyes and Bret used his tongue to elicit scorn among their classmates. Harden students joked that Anna’s eyes were kryptonite green. It was an overblown description, Leonard thought, but they did have a glow that was almost unearthly. And Bret, for his part, could insult you so thoroughly you might not get the joke until days later.

Leonard could still remember the beginning, his surprise at finding an ace of spades in his campus mail box on a cold Thursday afternoon in February. The card was wrapped in a piece of white paper, an invitation to a speakeasy. The password for entrance was prohibition. He didn’t have to wonder who was hosting. But he didn’t know how he’d become an invitee. Perhaps they’d heard he wrote stories.

He considered refusing the party. He knew he was supposed to feel privileged to be invited, which angered him. And shamed him, because he did feel lucky.

It felt like it was going to snow that Friday night, and the campus was quiet from students leaving town for the weekend. It was so cold his teeth hurt as he walked out to Russell Street. It turned out that Anna lived in a house—a house!—a cottage that was a hundred years old. It had never occurred to him that a fellow student might live like that.

Bret was keeping guard at the door, asking for passwords.

Prohibition, Leonard said.

And? Bret said. From what? He stood in the doorway, blocking Leonard’s entrance.

Oh stop, Anna said, suddenly coming into view behind him. From the Latin, prohibere, she said. Let him in.

He followed her into the kitchen, and she handed him a snifter of syrupy liquor. It burned his nose before he even got the liquid to his lips. He wanted to ask her what it was, but he was afraid it was another thing he was supposed to know.

It might have been the dim lighting, or the alcohol, or the biting cold outside that made the house seem intimate to him. Later, he would not remember his conversations, only that he’d been happy to inhabit that space for a few hours.

Whatever he had said, it was good enough. After that night, Leonard found himself their provincial toy. They invited him along, and teased him thoroughly. But once, when he’d shown up at their smoking spot in a borrowed blazer, hoping to impress them, they wouldn’t even talk to him. They wanted him to remain their funny little Brooklyn boy.

Anna had an air between a nun and Norma Desmond. She always stood completely erect, and her hair never seemed to grow long or sloppy, but was magically trimmed to the exact same chin length at all times. She could drink more than the street kids he’d grown up with, but she never seemed to lose her composure, and he never saw her sick the next day. In spite of her tailored suits, she was still gamine beneath the surface, as though you would see a wild horse if you could only get her clothes off.

To be near her, Leonard tolerated Bret’s occasional ogling. Plus, Bret knew people. He already had a literary agent, which Leonard found incomprehensible. When he was a kid, Leonard’s teachers had treated him like he was prodigious, and he’d almost believed it, until he’d gone to Harden.

It was Hillary to whom Leonard went for with help on his story drafts. He wouldn’t take any writing classes, and he was afraid of Bret and Anna. Hillary thought they were phony. She didn’t see how Leonard couldn’t, too. Do you want Anna because she’s frigid? Hillary had asked. She sleeps with Hendricks, he’d said. Hendricks was Anna’s mentor, her Latin teacher. Please, Hillary said. She only wishes.

And then, in the spring of their junior year, a townie died. He was 21. The townies were generally treated with derision, and any Harden student who deigned to date one risked their social standing. Sleeping with a townie, slumming it for a night, was acceptable, as long as you weren’t seen with one on campus.

The story had been on the front cover of The Harden Review. But the news didn’t last long. The police had few leads, and the boy, whose name was Roger Geffies, didn’t have the sort of family who made themselves a nuisance to the police.

The story had stood out to Leonard because of the bar where Roger had last been seen. It was Carmine’s, a real drinker’s bar that he and Anna and Bret frequented when Bret felt like mingling with the hoi polloi. Few Harden students ever went there, so they could drink in relative peace, Bret alternately making fun of the locals then hoping a muscular one would go home with him.

Bret and Anna had been there the night that Roger Geffies died. Leonard was supposed to have gone with them, but he had to study. He was on an art scholarship, and he was barely pulling a D in French. Bret and Anna didn’t seem to have to study. In the classes they loved—like philosophy and literature—they read far beyond the required reading. But in everything else, they skipped class, forgot assignments, and always managed to pass their exams.

We’ll speak French to you all night, Anna had said, begging him to come along.

I can’t understand your French.

We’ll speak slow-ly, won’t we, Bret?

He’s such a bore, Bret said.

I’m going to flunk out, Leonard said.

And an exaggerator, Bret said.

He had wanted to go. Or course he had. It was one more night with Anna, an inebriated Anna. But if he lost his scholarship, he wouldn’t see them anymore at all.

It had been hard for him to study, knowing they were at Carmine’s, being snarky, sitting as close as a couple. Bret, for all his homosexuality, had a desire for Anna that bordered on the erotic. Leonard could barely focus on his French. He didn’t understand the subjunctive, no matter how many times Professor Montrose had tried to explain it to him. Anna was fluent in Italian and French and studied Greek and Latin. Bret knew Latin and French and was learning Italian. When they wanted to speak privately in Leonard’s presence, they always picked another language.

Hey, Leonard said to Anna when the story about Roger Geffies came out later that week.

Did you see that guy? he said. The one who died?

What guy? she said. And why are you still saying guy? She hated that word.

The one in The Harden Review. He was last seen at Carmine’s.

Since when do I read The Harden Review?

I know, but I thought you might have seen it. Leonard walked across the room and found a discarded copy. Here look, he said. This is the guy. Did you notice him there?

She glanced at the paper. He hardly looks notice-able, she said. Bret was busy hitting on someone at the bar, she continued. A straight black guy.

I just thought you might have seen him. That would be a story.

It would have been something if we had, wouldn’t it?

She smiled at him.

He hadn’t asked Bret about it. Leonard usually let Bret control their conversations. But it was Bret who brought it up a week later.

You know I saw that townie who died, he said to Leonard.

Roger Geffies?

At the bar. I remember him. I went up there to get a drink, had to squeeze myself in, rub against a few nasty guys. He ordered a Manhattan. Unusual choice for Carmine’s.

Right, Leonard said. It was usually Pabst, or something straight up.

Thought he might be a fag, for just a second. But then he looked at me with this blank, stupid face, a face only a fish-monger could make. Oh well.

 ***

Did you know? the interviewer asked Leonard.

Part of Leonard’s talent was this ability to slip away for long stretches of time but to appear present to others in the room. He had used this skill to write pieces of his first book during some of the early jobs he’d had.

Excuse me? Leonard said. Did I know?

That you would all go on to be so successful? Could you feel it then?

Oh, he said. No, not in my case.

Bret had already been well-connected, Anna wrote pieces that were impossible to put down. And Hillary had always seemed like a writer to him, sassy and persistent, and she wrote about real people.

Whereas Leonard had dropped out. He didn’t understand why he had to take so many classes that didn’t interest him when he was an art major.

Bret and Anna had tried to pretend that this made Leonard more legitimate, like he wouldn’t be cuckolded by academia. They seemed to like to picture him working in an automotive repair shop, learning street dialogue and incorporating those rhythms into his fiction. But he already knew Brooklyn. He had wanted to know Harden, and even though he kept in touch with all of them for a few years and they kept up the illusion that he was somehow lucky, he was no longer part of Harden.

What advice would you give to young writers? the interviewer asked. This mandatory question usually signaled the interview was winding down.

Kill someone, Leonard said.

The young man laughed. That’s a good one.

Leonard would throw that out on occasion, hoping someone would call him on it. He didn’t know what he would say if an interviewer probed. But he wanted to be tested.

Leonard knew. Of course he knew, at some level, as even a child would know. But there was nothing real—just a coincidence and a strange feeling. One could not bring the loosest of circumstances to the police. They were at the bar. How convincing. But he was thankful there was nothing more convincing. Because he could not have told anyone anyway.

He placed it aside in his mind, like an unsavory meal he was finished with. But he could still see it in his periphery, and knowing it was there made his stomach turn.

And then Anna and Bret’s books came out. He read all his friends’ and teachers’ work over the years. The Harden books he’d bought immediately, and read them in a quiet place, giving them greater attention. Bret wrote a new book every few years. Leonard didn’t care much for his work, but he understood that it was important. He thought Bret’s books were better in summary. Anna took her time. Her first book was a major bestseller that he could not stop reading, and he couldn’t help but think that the main character bore some striking similarities to himself. He never thought he had made such an impression on her. As a writer, he should have known better. The character was surely a composite, and if his background and his gestures had crept in, it was nothing to read into. But another character in her book was surely Bret, and the place was Harden. Not Harden as Leonard had experienced it, but the college as it must have seemed to her.

And there was murder. In Anna’s book, and in Bret’s most famous book, murder by blueboods beyond reproach and suspicion; in Bret’s case, beyond guilt, and even motive.

The books had a confessional quality. In Bret’s, the main character made callous references to his killing that everyone assumed were simply jokes. He badly lied to detectives who managed to excuse him.

And Anna had not written another book since. She had implied, right in the prologue, that she might not be able to write another story. The book seemed so blatantly confessional that he almost laughed. It was the only way he knew how to respond. There was a sick glee in learning that he had been right, dosed with equal amounts of guilt and fear.

Critics always assumed young novelists wrote books that were at least semi- autobiographical. Except when the subject was murder. No reviewer would suggest that part were true.

A few years later, Leonard’s own book came out. It had been difficult to get published, and he had tried to keep his expectations low. He’d been told it was too clever, and too pastiche. The book did not go on to become a bestseller, but it quickly earned a literary sheen. Now he was suddenly the elite one. He rarely spoke with anyone from Harden except Hillary. But he still missed college, like he missed certain women who hadn’t been good for him.

As his success grew, he was asked about Bret and Anna more often. He could protest that he was not one of them, but in his silence, he certainly was.

Several years later, after he had published three successful books, he and Anna were scheduled for panels on the same day at a literary festival in New York. He spotted her in the back of the room when he was speaking. The panel was about the influence of film on literature, and he’d been going on about film noir. He stopped talking when he saw her. She looked almost exactly the same, with the blunt haircut and the classic clothes. Her agelessness made him think that maybe she’d been a vampire all along.

She waited for him as he answered a few eager questions from straggling attendees who wanted to know how to find an agent or how to write a good query.

You’re famous, she said to him.

Not like you.

Just not as rich as I am, she said.

They had dinner, and she still proved intimidating, ordering food he’d never heard of.

She had stopped smoking, and he was thankful for that, but without a cigarette in her hand, there was a creepiness to her composure. The cigarette had given her something to do, but because she was not a fidgeter, nothing had filled the void.

Anna found small ways to flatter him, mostly on the subject of his books, where he was weakest.

I’m not going to say I love them all, she said. Sometimes you try too hard.

But they’re exciting, she continued. You’re quite an omnivore. Really, you’ll eat anything.

And you’re a purist? he said.

Finicky. And you talk too much in interviews.

That’s what interviews are for, he said.

Interviews are for headlines, Anna continued. You talk about what you ate for lunch. Every comic book you ever read.

You won’t even say if you’re married.

Why should I?

You’re famous for being secretive.

Is that all I’m famous for?

That’s not what I meant, he said.

No, it is. Instead of another book, I offer up the artifice.

I don’t mean that.

You talk about TV shows, she said. You give dissertations.

Are you afraid of what I’ll say? In Anna’s book, talking too much had proved fatal. They’d killed the man with loose lips.

How’s that? she said.

I’ll confess my crush on you.

I’m sure you already have. Crush. That’s a cute word.

Even though she no longer smoked she could still drink a good deal. She’d been a sickly child and her family had medicated her with liquor. She’d grown up sour and extremely tolerant of drink. She had already had twice as much as Leonard had, but he was drunk, and his retorts were frustratingly slow. He tended to apologize too much when he reached his liquor limit, and he could feel it coming.

Had enough? she said.

Just the right amount, he said. She seemed to know what he meant.

This wasn’t exactly as he’d pictured it—but he had pictured it, he wasn’t above that—finally having made it, bedding the woman he’d wanted, presenting her with the irresistible allure of his major literary prize.

The lobby of the hotel was swanky, but he was half-afraid, following her upstairs, that the aesthetics of the room could change Anna’s mind. He imagined she would be physically turned off by teal linens and plastic plants.

Fortunately, the room kept up the standard that the lobby had set. The bedding was modern, with tufted ivory squares and rich brown pillows. It was simple and inoffensive. You never knew what you would get in those places. He had actually stayed in more than one generic looking hotel room—all scalloped comforters and striped wallpaper—where he had noticed that the wall hangings were hung upside down. Once, he’d been lying in bed, feeling somehow off, before realizing an abstract palm tree was flipped around. On that occasion, he had tried to fix it, only to discover that the hooks on the frame were upside-down as well. He didn’t bother to put it back it up, leaving a faint rectangle on the wallpaper. The housekeeper who’d discovered it on the floor must have suspected a particularly wild night had transpired.

Anna took her time in the room, making herself another drink from the small bar. She sat in a chair in the corner and regarded him. He felt like a boy again, unsure of what to do with his hands. She posed herself dramatically, her legs crossed, her arms spread wide on either armrest, like it were a throne.

He knew nothing about her sexual history. At Harden, the students who didn’t know Bret was gay assumed they slept together—and with Bret, it wouldn’t be surprising if they had; and of course there had been talk of her and the professor, Hendricks, but there’d never been any real evidence of that. There’d been a boyfriend back then, too, but even he had seemed oddly asexual, and she had referred to him in her acknowledgements only as her dear friend ever since. She never revealed personal information in interviews, except concerning her dog, with whom she would pose for photographs.

She was wearing a striped shirt, a black blazer with a mandarin collar and slacks with sharp pleats. Her entire outfit was like a chastity belt to Leonard, and although he knew she was no virgin, he couldn’t help entertaining the illusion. A sexual purity that wasn’t moral, merely superior, as though no one had been worth sleeping with all these years.

After she finished her drink, she started to unbutton her jacket. She didn’t even look at him, but worked at each button unceremoniously, as though she’d been hired. He had wanted to undo the buttons. He almost wanted to reach over and stop her, but he knew that wouldn’t work.

She took off all of her clothes and stood there, not smiling. Her body was as boyish as he’d ever imagined it, even though she was forty. It seemed wrong to see her like this, as though her head no longer matched her body but was detachable, something he’d popped onto a girl in a fantasy of his. He was used to undressing incrementally; he’d never understood getting naked all at once. But she stared at him as though it was what she expected, and for the first time in his adult life he removed all his clothes before sex.

Strangely, he did not feel he should kiss her on the mouth or on the neck or on her breasts, that all of it would feel contrived, god forbid, romantic. But barring that, he didn’t know exactly what to do. She stared at him fiercely, as if that was the lovemaking itself, and it almost seemed to be so.

He felt self-conscious of his elbows and knees as he climbed onto the bed, like a marionette plopping on top of her. He was nervous before he entered her, and he could feel it in his fingers and toes the way he did when he was a teenager.

When he was inside her, it was not what he was expecting. It was like tearing something in a very satisfying way. Stupidly, he thought of The Sword in the Stone, of the sensation of pulling out the blade. The gallantry of the image embarrassed him, because it was not about that. But it was the pulling, the satisfying pulling.

Afterwards, he felt a mixture of glee and nausea. He had corrupted this incorruptible thing, which was as wonderful and awful as that is.

Impossibly, Anna had one more drink after they had sex.

I shouldn’t have stopped smoking, she said. I’d drink less.

She got back into bed with her bourbon, still naked, then said, I am going to smoke. Do you want to smoke?

Yeah, he said, even though he hadn’t smoked in years.

Yes, she said. The word is yes. This time, she collected her striped shirt and put in on before climbing back into bed with her pack of Parliaments.

He had ruined her and he needed to ruin himself now, too. He wanted to say it like he wanted to throw up—the same caught feeling in his throat, the same need to get it over with.

You killed that boy, didn’t you? he said.

Excuse me? Did you have to fuck me to ask me that? He had never heard her say fuck before.

Looks that way, he said. He was glad he was still a bit drunk and smoking, too, though he had already burned his throat on his first inhalation. He could not have had this conversation otherwise.

Always the detective, aren’t you? she asked.

He was. He was the detective who could not crack the case. And even though you wouldn’t find Leonard’s books in the mystery section of a bookstore, there were sleuths in prominent roles. He had always told interviewers about his passion for Raymond Chandler. He had never said it was personal. But Bret and Anna were the confessors, and he was the gumshoe.

The inept detective, she said. The blunderer.

But he still gets his man.

Well, I didn’t do it, she laughed.

But Bret did?

You should have come with us.

So I could participate?

He wouldn’t have done it if you’d been there, she said. I’m not making an excuse. It’s the fact of the matter. He could control his jealousy when you were there. I think he was so conflicted, half wanting you, half owning me, he couldn’t focus his aggression.

Did Bret hit on him? he said.

No, she said. God. You’re not very good at this, are you? If Bret killed everyone who rebuffed him back then, we’d have nobody left. Is that really how you figured it? I would have given you more credit. No, the boy had one of those accents Bret couldn’t stand. And a mustache, and a curl to his lip. A real Southern Gothic. You would have thought I was wearing a halter top, the way he sauntered up. We couldn’t have looked less inviting. But maybe it was our clothes that attracted him. He said, What’s with the suit? You a business lady or something? He seemed to like that idea. He bought me a drink. He’d asked the bartender what I was having, and he seemed to get a laugh out of a little woman drinking her bourbon neat. Bret started lying straightaway, like he liked to do, making up stories about who we were and why we were wearing those clothes. Televangelists, I think the story went.

I heard him do that one, Leonard said.

It was one of his favorites, she said. This boy knew we were lying. But he went along with it. He wanted me to dance with him. One of those pop metal songs was on. Do I look like I dance? I asked him. He got a little aggressive. Just innuendo, nothing more. But I could see Bret’s face start to harden. You think you can just come and talk to people like us, Bret said to the boy. I don’t know. The idea that this boy targeted me as a conquest made him feel dirty, I think. Like he was besmirching us by the very suggestion. Oh, I get it, the boy said. Lady’s a dyke, is she? He breathed on me. And then he finally went back to his compatriot at the bar. But he didn’t leave when his friend left. His friend went home with a girl and he stayed at the bar. I knew why we were hanging around. I was getting bored, but Bret kept pressing for one more drink. When the boy got up, Bret stood up. I didn’t know what was about to happen, but I was excited to find out.

I didn’t try to stop him, she continued. By the time I realized what was going to happen, I was in an odd shock, like a man I barely knew had proposed to me and I was horrified but also momentarily pleased, unable to say no. Does that sound strange? He hit him on the head with a bottle he’d taken out of the bar. It was late by then, no one else was around. I don’t know if he intended to kill him at first, but once he’d hit him, he seemed to like it. I was distracted by the brightness of the blood, how fake it looked. I just stood there. He kept hitting him. Then he kicked him in the head. We were near the car. We just picked him up between us like was a drunken friend and brought him along in the car with us. I guess you know the rest, detective. That was in the papers.

Leonard listened to her telling it like it were just an extemporaneous story she crafted to amuse him. There was no emotion, and it felt very far away. He had to force himself back to the reality of it.

But the bartender knew who you two were, Leonard said. He must have seen him talking to you.

You couldn’t see the booth from the bar, she said. But see, that’s just it. The police work. It should have been obvious. We talked to him there, we left soon after, there was blood only two blocks from the bar. But he had already told us too much about himself. We knew he was running from away from his family in Kentucky. We knew he was in trouble. There were so many other places to look. Not at us. Not at Harden students.

Like your book, he said.

It wasn’t killing him that changed me. That was so much easier to take than I had ever guessed. I didn’t feel guilty so much as astonished. There were so few consequences, even inside of me. I think it made me an atheist.

I thought you were always an atheist.

That was just in class, she said. I was still Catholic. Somewhere inside.

Leonard could see it now, the way Bret and Anna had reworked the story in their fiction, the way they had dealt with it. She had romanticized it, turning it into part of a sacred ritual, her language almost ethereal, all beautiful woods and rushing wind, leaves underfoot and crisp snow. Bret had debased it, making it part of a string of totally motiveless killing, his words all gore, chainsaws and cannibalism, blue intestines and mutilated breasts.

The real motive was simply not good enough.

Leonard had reworked the story in one of his novels, too, casting himself as an orphan indebted to a dangerous group that had brought them into their fold. A group he feared and loved but would never completely be a part of.

It’s like this, she said. Everybody knew and nobody cares. You knew. And you still slept with me. You still had to consummate your success.

Leonard couldn’t argue with that. But there was more to it. He wanted to see how far he could go, how detached he could become and still stand it. How like Bret and Anna he could become.

You could have told someone, she said. But then you wouldn’t have been able to do this. Or did you think we’d kill you, too? She laughed.

It was not a crazy idea.

Why did you have to know? she said. Does it make things any different?

It did. What was it that one of the reviewers had said about her book? Implicates the reader in a conspiracy.

He was more than a reader. He had been at Harden. The narrator in Anna’s novel hadn’t killed anyone, either. But he had been deeply complicit. Leonard wanted to feel the full weight of that complicity. Without knowing, he could always compartmentalize it. He could tell himself that they were all novelists, and that they only knew one language—never fact, only fiction.

Ever since then, when the subject of Harden had come up in interviews, he was tempted. He offered up small truths. But he knew he would be reduced to a character in one of Bret or Anna’s books. No one would take it seriously.

He looked up at the interviewer who was now packing up his things. Did I talk too much? he asked the man.

The young man slid his business card across the table and pushed back his chair.

I wish you had said more.


 

MELISSA YANCY works as a non-profit fundraiser. Her work has appeared in One Story, Barrelhouse, At Length, Crab Creek Review, The Journal, Narrow Books, and The MacGuffin.