Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [2]
In fact, I’d meant to initiate this conversation a month ago, but vanity had fueled my procrastination. The novelty of dating Adam had worn off within the first three weeks, but for the two months that followed he’d been a nice accessory, something to wear on my arm at faculty mixers and gallery receptions. A first-time novelist still riding the critical praise of his debut work, Home Is Where the Heart Lies, he had a magnetism at social gatherings, an air of importance that transferred to me when we were in public.
He cupped my hand in his. “I hope we’ll remain amicable? There’s a poetry reading tomorrow. Maybe we could go together?”
I pulled my hands away and clasped them between my legs, drawing my knees together as if to keep my fingers warm. “Actually, no. Everett asked me to go.”
“If you ever want to talk—if you ever need a second opinion for one of your stories. I still think ‘The Other Day’ has a lot of potential. It’s just that one scene that needs trimmed … Well. Just call me.”
“You know,” I said as he gathered his things. “For a novelist that was a rather clichéd break-up.”
“I have to go.”
I nodded. He squeezed my hand, a last apologetic gesture, and rushed for the door.
We’d met in the English Department library. I had been trying to noiselessly rip scraps of notebook paper to mark noteworthy pages in The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. He’d walked over and handed me a small stack of bookmarks he had pulled from his briefcase. “Thought you might need these,” he’d whispered. The bookmarks were for his novel. Each featured a photograph of his smiling face.
At age twenty-nine, my own idealism beginning to fray around the edges, I kept faith in my mother’s sanguine outlook on life: It was still reflex to call home when I toed the edge of failure.
“Hi honey, how are you?” Her voice came tinny and distant through my old office phone. “I can’t talk long. The Baldwins are on their way over, and my curlers are going cold. We’re going to Applebee’s to spend those gift cards Uncle Lynn gave us for Easter.”
I had called with the intention of announcing the break-up with Adam, but at near-thirty you can’t just come out with that kind of news without warning. As preface I complained about grading. Scoring seventy-four college essays four times a semester had begun to seem impossible—and this was only paper two of the term.
“I’m so exhausted.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s too much.”
I stared out the window at the overcast November day. Behind me, my office mate Everett typed furiously, reaching blindly every five minutes for the mug of twenty-five-cent office coffee he kept at his elbow. The coffee cup sat next to a second nearly identical mug filled with tacks and paper clips. I was waiting for him to grab the wrong cup.
The English Department offices occupied the fourth floor of the Humanities Building, a gray stone structure that commanded the highest hill on campus. Our window overlooked a courtyard lined in summer with tulips that leaned toward the sun. The tulips had long since died, and overnight the ivy that grew along the building’s facade had shriveled around the windows, clinging in gnarled ropes. Central campus sprawled to the left, and across the lawn sidewalks clustered in crisscrossing pentagons made their way downhill toward the Fray and Fuhler Art Buildings, twin cement complexes as modern as the Humanities Building was old.
“Am I insane to be doing this?” I asked.
“Maybe you should get some help,” Mom replied without answering my question. “Why don’t you have Zoë grade some?”
“Zoë’s never graded an essay in her life. Besides, this is college composition, not algebra—everything’s subjective. I can’t just outsource grading.”
“I don’t think it’s such a terrible idea. You need to delegate. No one would know.”
I remembered how in the seventh grade when I couldn’t seem to stretch my report on President Lincoln from five pages to the required seven, she advised I enlarge the font and narrow the margins.
“Those kids don’t read your