Can I Tell You a Secret?

If word gets around, I’ll say you made it all up. I’ll tell them you’re lying, that you’re just looking for attention.

But, if you promise to take it to your grave, then I’ll tell you this:

The professor

He tells the class to put the subject first. Who is doing the action, but more importantly, why? A subject is important, he says. For that short amount of time, they are the center of your world. He puts up a five-minute timer on the projector. Write. Write whatever comes to mind—I don’t want you to stop until the timer is up. I stare at him, his head of thick brown hair and eyes hidden behind wide-brimmed glasses. He is soft-faced and lanky, unassuming in every way. He wears colorful socks to put his students at ease, even wears old 90s converse to prove it. He’s telling us that he’s just like us. Just like her.

wrote

He’s a writer, of course. English class. English professor. English student. She is so young. He is not. A classic story. He sits in his dimly lit office, always just a little too dark for comfort. The shadows cling onto his shoulders as he fishes out a word from the back of his mind. He hovers over his computer, its light reflecting against his glasses so I can’t see his eyes as I knock. Come in, he says, his voice sticky smooth like the fly tape my mother hangs above all the doors in summer. As a child, I’d once grabbed hold of a strip, and felt the way its toffee-like glue morphed around my small fingers. No matter how hard I tried to pull away, it wouldn’t come off. How can I help you?

a story

I would have never heard about it otherwise–he doesn’t speak of it in class, performing the duty of a humble artist. But the department loves it, and so does the internet. What a masterful piece, how intricately he weaves the details of a chilling mystery, they say. Late at night, when I hope no one is watching, I search for the story. His name stains my internet history, but I finally find it. A young woman in a professor’s writing class. A failed marriage. A sick obsession. He watches her while she writes, reading her stories with such fervor his hands shake. He wants more, he wants her. But he can’t have her, no. What he could not have, the professor writes, he ripped to shreds like a lion with its prey. He digs little pieces of dirt out from underneath his fingernails, sawing off a patch of her hair to keep in his pocket. He smells it and touches himself. I click out of the website.

about her

She is my year, always used to smile, always made jokes in class. He liked that, he would tease her constantly as though they were friends. Maybe she got a little too close, maybe she gave off the wrong ‘vibe,’ maybe she dressed too provocatively–isn’t that what they say? But that’s not the point of this story. We all had meetings with him for our midterms, to talk about the direction of our piece. How can I help you? I tell him I am still unsure of what to write about–that I’d hit a rough patch of writer’s block. He smiles at me as a father would. Try some writing exercises,  he says. They always help me. Or even better, take events from your life, and fictionalize them. See where the stories take you. I write a story about her, about how she stopped smiling in class, about how she dropped the course after midterms finished, guaranteeing its stain on her transcript. The professor says nothing of it–pretends she never even existed. With hands frozen in the winter air, he pulled a maggot from her body, pressing it between his fingers until it revealed soft pink flesh. When I get my midterm back from him, a note is scribbled at the top with red ink: fantastic job – she seemed so real.

death.

Every now and then I see her on campus. I always want to talk to her, but I never do. She had new friends, and a new major. Someone told me she doesn’t make jokes in class anymore. One day, I stop seeing her altogether. His story says she’s dead, my story says she disappeared like a magic trick. The top hat is pulled off, the rabbit within, gone. Which is the truth? Is there a truth to tell? One of those endings could have left her alone; allowed her to finish the class in peace so she could graduate. Her dark brown eyes, wide as she stepped out of his office during an empty Tuesday afternoon. My friend had gotten dumped just an hour earlier by some girl he’d met at a frat party, showing up to my dorm with a water bottle of vodka. I left him there to go to my meeting with the professor to talk about my midterm, my writer’s block. She is dazed, arms pressed tightly against the straps of her backpack. She doesn’t look up, the fluorescent lights in the hallway dim against her dark hair. She almost bumps into me, stopping short of my shoulder. Sorry, she murmurs, eyes glued to the ground. Her shadow slips into the stairwell without a sound, the heavy doors clicking behind her. Subject, verb, object.