Page 3 of Life, Love, and Other Messes

By Thursday, when I finally hit send, I’d rewritten three scenes, fixed wording here and there, and deleted a plethora of unnecessary bullshit. I was wordy by nature, and my first drafts, no matter how much I edited them before sending to Jace, always came back full of red slashes and tired comments of “do you really need all of this?” in the margin. A few times I even got texts from her: smiley faces, winks, the occasional WTAF on p. 219? We’d met in person a few years ago at a writer’s conference and, whether it was a good idea or not, had gone out to dinner together. She was my polar opposite: a mild-mannered, stocky butch with a wife of thirty years and two grown children. She was a former ER nurse who wrote medical dramas full of gore and steamy lesbian sex when she wasn’t milking her goats or feeding her chickens on her little farm in upstate New York.

I had also written over fifty thousand words on book thirty-four, or at least something that could turn into book thirty-four. My main characters always began as me, then morphed into completely different personalities as I wrote, and at the beginning of this one, before anyone was dead or missing, the main character’s girlfriend had just packed her SUV to the gills and left to chase a modeling career across the country, alone. The main character would eventually find a body in her backyard and end up spending seven hours in an interrogation room with a hot cop, which had never happened to me. The girlfriend, though, was Veronica.

My Veronica. I’d dated a lot of people in my lifetime, and I’d royally fucked up every last relationship except for this one. I had a knack for choosing badly in the first place, then foisting myself upon the poor women like Velcro. I would then feel snubbed when they suffocated, and end up furious at them and myself, pushing them away then needing them over and over until things ended for good in a fiery crash-and-burn of a breakup. It wasn’t like that with Veronica, though. I was okay during most of our five-year relationship, stellar, actually. I gave her space when she needed it, showed up at her apartment at two a.m. when she was crying, and did stupid things to make her smile like joining a softball league even though I could barely catch. She knew some of the women I’d dated in the past, but she graciously swept whatever rumors she’d heard under the rug. Although we lived separately, we were exclusive, vacationed together, and once after several drinks had even discussed marriage.

Five years, and then the phone call came. Veronica said she’d applied for the job on a whim, never in one million years expecting to get it. It was with one of the largest law firms in St. Louis, and they offered more than three times her current salary. She couldn’t turn it down.

I considered moving with her. I could write anywhere and I wasn’t glued to my teaching job at a local community college. I owned a beautiful little house in a neighborhood I loved, though, and the idea of uprooting after twenty years and moving to a city where I had nothing but a girlfriend scared the crap out of me. I told her I couldn’t follow her, at least until I had something set up in St. Louis, and she agreed evenly, as though she’d already come to terms with that. Then she said she didn’t believe in long-distance relationships.

We didn’t break up, exactly, but it was understood that we were no longer together. I helped her pack everything in her huge, gorgeous apartment into cardboard, and sat there on the first Friday in May, on top of one of the boxes, waiting for the moving truck to arrive. We’d had kung pao tofu on paper plates for lunch even though I hated tofu. When the moving company called from downstairs, Veronica had told me to go. “I suck at goodbyes,” she said.

“This doesn’t have to be a goodbye.”

“It does,” she told me firmly. “I can’t sit up there wanting to be here, and I don’t want you missing me.”

“I’m going to miss you one way or another.”

“You know what I mean.” She kissed me once more on the mouth, then nudged me toward the door.

“I know,” I muttered. She’d told me I could text, but made me promise to keep it to a minimum. She’d encouraged me to chat up the cute server at our favorite burger joint who had flirted with me once. I knew. I wanted to say I loved her, but instead, I opened the door and nodded evenly. “Drive safely.” And that was it.

In my new story, I’d written what was supposed to be an amicable breakup, but I let my main character fuck one of her friends after drowning her sorrows in a bottle of Jack. It wasn’t so much that I wished I’d done that. Sex scenes broke up tension nicely in a particularly taut mystery. Well, maybe I wished I’d done that anyway.

One way or another, this writing stint had been a good run. I swallowed my prescribed handful of pills a day early and looked longingly down the hall toward my office. I probably had another couple of days before the floodgates closed, and after that, I had plenty of new stuff to edit.

1999

I had no idea my brain worked in strange ways until my junior year of college. Although I’d been sent to the counselor’s office a few times in high school for idiotic things like falling asleep one too many times in Spanish class, I’d never seen a real therapist before, and frankly, I didn’t see this as one of the various and sundry psychoses I seemed to harbor.

While most undergrads earned spending money by working retail or manning the steam tables at university food services, I learned midway through my freshman year that writing papers for people was far more lucrative. At first, it was mostly just short assignments or summaries of books I’d read myself for class, things I could turn out in a few minutes flat. Word spread fast that I was quick, thorough, and had a keen ability to alter my voice from person to person, and a business was born. Two years later, I could make a few hundred dollars on a good weekend, writing for hours and hours, churning out believable essays and term papers while still reserving enough time to get my own work done and drink some with my friends. Between classes I’d previously taken and the reading I’d done in my free time, I knew and owned most of the books the profs used.

The threat of being caught weighed heavily on my mind at first, but by my junior year, it had dissolved completely and had been replaced with a sexy, naughty high. I was never pompous enough to feel invincible, but I enjoyed the thrill of getting away with it.

That lasted until March. Florence Howard was one of my literature professors and a formidable authority on lesbian writers when most people would barely dare acknowledge that they existed. She was the best teacher I’d ever had and I’d taken every course she taught. She was also frighteningly smart and indisputably beautiful. Her class was my last one of the day so I wasn’t hesitant when she asked me to stay after until she placed an essay on the desk between us. The topic was Virginia Woolf, and the name in the upper corner was not mine.

She let me stare at the paper with forced curiosity for several seconds, then spoke very calmly. “Your printer leaves a phantom image right here on each page. Look at lower case d and l.”

I watched her finger as it traced a line two-thirds of the way down the first page, then the second, then the third. I considered lying, telling her that it must have been one of the printers in the school library, or even starting with the obvious fact that she was not pointing to my paper, but no words came to me.

It was fortunate. “Don’t bother lying,” Dr. Howard said. “Daniel admitted that you wrote his paper, and I believe there are three others in this hour alone on which I see the same printer issue.”

I couldn’t bring myself to look at the professor. Terror was ringing in my ears and all I could think about was how I was going to explain this one to my mother. “Dr. Howard.” I was at once embarrassed by the fear my voice betrayed. “I know this is dishonest and I know that it’s wrong, but it’s not plagiarism or…” I finally closed my eyes, trying to force my mother’s disapproving stare out of my mind. “I can’t lose my scholarship.”

“Sit down.”

Dr. Howard’s tone was even. When I dared meet her gaze, I could swear she was almost smiling. There was an air of smugness, granted, but it was far better than the stern look I’d expected.

“Sit down.” This time, Dr. Howard gestured to a chair on the front row. To hasten the process, she pulled up her own chair. “You’re not going to lose your scholarship.”

I wondered if that meant I would be expelled altogether, but I sat, daring to hope for the best. “I’m not?”

She shook her head. “I assume these aren’t the only papers you’ve written for other people.”

“No.”

“Half a dozen more? A dozen more?”

“This semester?”