“Why do you keep saying that it wasn’t right for you?” the professor asked. “Your work last semester was excellent. It was all right. You’re one of my most promising students.”
“But I don’t want to write my own fiction,” Cath said, as emphatically as she could. “I don’t want to write my own characters or my own worlds—I don’t care about them.” She clenched her fists in her lap. “I care about Simon Snow. And I know he’s not mine, but that doesn’t matter to me. I’d rather pour myself into a world I love and understand than try to make something up out of nothing.”
The professor leaned forward. “But there’s nothing more profound than creating something out of nothing.” Her lovely face turned fierce. “Think about it, Cath. That’s what makes a god—or a mother. There’s nothing more intoxicating than creating something from nothing. Creating something from yourself.”
Cath hadn’t expected Professor Piper to be happy about her decision, but she hadn’t expected this either. She didn’t think the professor would push back.
“It just feels like nothing to me,” Cath said.
“You’d rather take—or borrow—someone else’s creation?”
“I know Simon and Baz. I know how they think, what they feel. When I’m writing them, I get lost in them completely, and I’m happy. When I’m writing my own stuff, it’s like swimming upstream. Or … falling down a cliff and grabbing at branches, trying to invent the branches as I fall.”
“Yes,” the professor said, reaching out and grasping the air in front of Cath, like she was catching a fly. “That’s how it’s supposed to feel.”
Cath shook her head. There were tears in her eyes. “Well, I hate it.”
“Do you hate it? Or are you just afraid.”
Cath sighed and decided to wipe her eyes on her sweater. Another type of adult would hand her a box of Kleenex about now. Professor Piper just kept pushing.
“You got special permission to be in my class. You must have wanted to write. And your work was delightful—didn’t you enjoy it?”
“Nothing I wrote compared to Simon.”
“Good gracious, Cath, are you really comparing yourself to the most successful author of the modern age?”
“Yes,” Cath said. “Because, when I’m writing Gemma T. Leslie’s characters, sometimes, in some ways, I am better than her. I know how crazy that sounds—but I also know that it’s true. I’m not a god. I could never create the World of Mages; but I’m really, really good at manipulating that world. I can do more with her characters than I could ever do with my own. My characters are just … sketches compared to hers.”
“But you can’t do anything with fanfiction. It’s stillborn.”
“I can let people read it. Lots of people do read it.”
“You can’t make a living that way. You can’t make a career.”
“How many people make a career out of writing anyway?” Cath snapped. She felt like everything inside her was snapping. Her nerves. Her temper. Her esophagus. “I’ll write because I love it, the way other people knit or … or scrapbook. And I’ll find some other way to make money.”
Professor Piper leaned back again and folded her arms. “I’m not going to talk to you any more about the fanfiction.”
“Good.”
“But I’m not done talking to you.”
Cath took another deep breath.
“I’m afraid,” Professor Piper said, “afraid that you’re never going to discover what you’re truly capable of. That you won’t get to see—that I won’t get to see—any of the wonder that’s inside of you. You’re right, nothing you turned in last semester compared to Simon Snow and the Mage’s Heir. But there was so much potential. Your characters quiver, Cath, like they’re trying to evolve right off the page.”
Cath rolled her eyes and wiped her nose on her shoulder.
“Can I ask you something?” the professor asked.
“I’m pretty sure you will anyway.”
The older woman smiled. “Did you help Nick Manter on his final project?”
Cath looked up at the corner of the ceiling and quickly licked her bottom lip. She felt a new wave of tears rushing through her head. Damn. She’d had a solid month now of no crying.
She nodded.
“I thought so,” the professor said gently. “I could hear you. In some of the best parts.”
Cath held every muscle still.
“Nick’s my teaching assistant, he was just here, actually, and he’s in my Advanced Fiction-Writing class. His style has … shifted quite a bit.”
Cath looked at the door.
“Cath,” the professor pressed.
“Yes?” Cath still couldn’t look at her.
“What if I made you a deal?”
Cath waited.
“I haven’t turned in your grade yet; I was hoping you’d come see me. And I don’t have to turn it in—I could give you the rest of this semester to finish your short story. You were headed toward a solid A in my class, maybe even an A-plus.”
Cath thought about her grade point average. And her scholarship. And the fact that she was going to have to get perfect grades this semester if she wanted to keep it. She didn’t have any room for error. “You could do that?”
“I can do whatever I want with my students’ grades. I’m the god of this small thing.”
Cath felt her fingernails in her palms. “Can I think about it?”
“Sure.” Professor Piper’s tone was air-light. “If you decide to do this, I’d like you to meet with me regularly, throughout the semester, just to talk about your progress. It will be like independent study.”
“Okay. I’ll think about it. I’ll, um—thank you.”
Cath picked up her bag and stood up. She was immediately standing too close to the professor, so she looked down and moved quickly toward the door. She didn’t look up again until she was back in her dormitory, stepping out of the elevator.
* * *
“This is Art.”
“That’s how you answer the phone?”
“Hey, Cath.”
“No hello?”
“I don’t like hello. It makes me sound like I have dementia, like I’ve never heard a phone ring before and I don’t know what’s supposed to happen next. Hello?”
“How are you feeling, Dad?”
“Good.”
“How good?”
“I’m leaving work every day at five. I’m eating dinner with Grandma. Just this morning, Kelly told me that I seemed ‘impressively grounded.’”
“That is impressive.”
“He’d just told me that we couldn’t use Frankenstein in our Frankenbeans pitch, because nobody cares about Frankenstein anymore. Kids want zombies.”
“But they’re not called Zombiebeans.”
“They will be if f**king Kelly has his way. We’re pitching ‘Zombeanie Weenies.’”
“Wow, how did you stay grounded through all that?”
“I was fantasizing about eating his brain.”
“I’m still impressed, Dad. Hey—I think I’m gonna come home next weekend.”
“If you want … I don’t want you to worry about me, Cath. I do better when I know you’re happy.”
“Well, I’m happy when I’m not worried about you. We have a symbiotic relationship.”
“Speaking of … how’s your sister?”
* * *
Her dad was wrong about worrying. Cath liked to worry. It made her feel proactive, even when she was totally helpless.
Like with Levi.
Cath couldn’t control whether she saw Levi on campus. But she could worry about it, and as long as she was worrying about it, it probably wasn’t going to happen. Like some sort of anxiety vaccine. Like watching a pot to make sure it never boiled.
She wore comforting grooves in her head, worrying about seeing Levi, then telling herself all the reasons it wasn’t going to happen:
First, because Reagan had promised to keep him away.
And second, because Levi didn’t have any business on City Campus. Cath told herself that Levi spent all his time either studying buffalo on East Campus, or working at Starbucks, or making out in his kitchen with pretty girls. There was no reason for their paths ever to cross.
Still … she froze every time she saw blond hair and a green Carhartt jacket—or every time she wished she did.
She froze now.
Because there he was, right where he wasn’t supposed to be, sitting outside her door. Proof positive that she hadn’t been worrying enough.
Levi saw Cath, too, and sprang to his feet. He wasn’t smiling. (Thank God. She wasn’t up for any of his smiles.)
Cath stepped warily forward. “Reagan’s in class,” she said when she was still a few doors away.
“I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.”
Cath shook her head. It could have meant “no” or it could have meant “I don’t understand”—both were true. She stopped walking. Her stomach hurt so bad, she wanted to bend over.
“I just need to tell you something,” Levi said quickly.
“I really don’t want you to come in,” she said.
“That’s fine. I can tell you out here.”
Cath crossed her arms over her stomach and nodded.
Levi nodded back. He pushed his hands into his coat pockets.
“I was wrong,” he said.
She nodded. Because duh. And because she didn’t know what he wanted from her.
He pushed his hands deeper into his coat. “Cath,” he said earnestly, “it wasn’t just a kiss.”
“Okay.” Cath looked past him to her door. She took a step closer then, toward the door, holding her key up like they were done here.
Levi stepped out of her way. Confused, but still polite.
Cath put her key in the door, then held on to the handle, hanging her head forward. She could hear him breathing and fidgeting behind her. Levi.
“Which one?” she asked.
“What?”
“Which kiss?” Her voice was weak and thin. Wet paper.
“The first one,” Levi said after a few seconds.
“But the second one was? It was just a kiss?”
Levi’s voice got closer: “I don’t want to talk about the second one.”
“Too bad.”
“Then yes,” he said. “It was just a—it was nothing.”
“What about the third one?”
“Is that a trick question?”
Cath shrugged.
“Cath … I’m trying to tell you something here.”
She turned around and immediately regretted it. Levi’s hair was tousled, most of it pushed back, bits of it falling over his forehead. And he wasn’t smiling, so his blue eyes were taking over his whole long face.
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“That it wasn’t just a kiss, Cather. There was no just.”
“No just?”
“No.”
“So?” Her voice sounded much cooler than she felt. Inside, her internal organs were grinding themselves into nervous pulp. Her intestines were gone. Her kidneys were disintegrating. Her stomach was wringing itself out, yanking on her trachea.
“So … aahhggch,” Levi said, frustrated, running both hands through his hair. “So I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that at the hospital. I mean, I know why I said it, but I was wrong. Really wrong. And I wish I could go back to that morning, when I woke up here, and have a stern talk with myself, so that the rest of this crap wouldn’t have happened.”
“I wonder…,” she said, “if there was such a thing as time machines, would anyone ever use them to go to the future?”
“Cather.”
“What.”
“What are you thinking?”
What was she thinking? She wasn’t thinking. She was wondering if she could live without her kidneys. She was holding herself up on two feet. “I still don’t know what all this means,” she said.
“It means … I really like you.” His hand was in his hair again. Just the one. Holding it back. “Like, really like you. And I want that kiss to have been the start of something. Not the end.”
Cath looked at Levi’s face. His eyebrows were pulled down in the middle, bunching up the skin above his nose. His cheeks, for once, were absolutely smooth. And his lips were at their most doll-like, not even a quirk of a smile.
“It felt like the start of something,” he said. He put his hands in his pockets and swayed forward a little bit. Like he wanted to bump into her. Cath backed up flat against the door.
She nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.” She turned around and unlocked the door. “You can come in. I’m not sure yet about all the other stuff.”
“Okay,” Levi said. She heard the very beginning of a smile in his voice—a fetal smile—and it very nearly killed her.
“I don’t trust you,” Simon said, grasping Basil’s forearm.
“Well, I don’t trust you,” Basil spat at him. Actually spat at him, bits of wet landing on Simon’s cheeks.
“Why do you need to trust me?” Simon asked. “I’m the one hanging off a cliff!”
Basil looked down at him distastefully, his arm shaking from Simon’s weight. He swung his other arm down and Simon grabbed at it.
“Douglas J. Henning,” Basil cursed breathlessly, his body inching forward. “Knowing you, you’ll bring the both of us down just to spite me.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Levi sat on her bed.
Cath tried to pretend that he wasn’t watching while she took off her coat and threaded her scarf out from under her hair. She felt weird taking her snow boots off in front of him, so she left them on.