Page 68 of Past Present Future

19

ROWAN

PROFESSOR MIRANDA EVERETT lives in Brookline, a picturesque town less than thirty minutes from Emerson on the green line—although calling something in Boston picturesque is a bit like calling romance novels romantic.

“Welcome, welcome,” she says with an easy smile, beckoning Kait and me inside. Professor Everett is chic in a patterned wrap dress and suede heels, hair glossy. “Get out of the cold; take a seat wherever you like.”

A few other classmates are already here, spread across the living room. An accent wall is painted a deep teal, a gallery wall arranged above a lush velvet sectional, where Owen, once again clad in his bowler hat, is showing Sierra something in his notebook. Soft jazz plays from some hidden sound system so modern that it remains the same volume no matter where you are in the room. Then there’s Professor Everett’s framed National Book Award over the mantel of a real wood-burning fireplace. Coziness personified.

“I want to live here,” I whisper to Kait as we take off our coats, handing Professor Everett the Trader Joe’s snacks we brought. She adds them to the growing pile on the coffee table.

Kait unwinds her scarf and fluffs out her hair. “Already planning to get ‘lost’ later just so I can explore the rest of it.”

Professor Everett does this a few times a year: invites the creative writing cohort over for a potluck and a night of literary games. As close as I was with my teachers in high school, I definitely never went to any of their homes, and while it wouldn’t have sounded appealing back then, there’s something about a professor’s invitation that feels so incredibly collegiate. I even dressed up, a white collared blouse under a deep green sweaterdress, thick black tights, and vintage pumps.

We always feel like equals in Professor Everett’s class, no patronizing, no arrogance. A fact that’s cemented when someone addresses her and she laughs and says, “Okay, I get that it’s very polite and all, but you really can just call me Miranda.” She lifts her glass of wine—sparkling cider for the under-twenty-ones—in a toast. “I’m so glad you all could make it tonight. Keeping with the theme, I don’t want this to be overly formal, either. Just a casual get-together of literary nerds.”

Kait and I take seats on a pair of folding chairs near the fireplace while Professor Everett—Miranda—explains the first game. “I call it Chaos Story,” she says. We’ll each write a sentence inspired by a prompt and then pass our sheet of paper to the next person to write the next sentence. And so on, and so on, until the last person reads the piece out loud. Later we’ll divide into groups for critique sessions and cap off the night with a freewrite.

“Naturally,” Felix says from a goldenrod armchair, because we all know how attached she is to her freewrites.

I reach into my bag for Neil’s notebook and a pen as Sierra passes me a carafe of spiced cider. This is the kind of dreamy writer gathering I’ve always imagined, and I want to soak up every detail.

Each round of Chaos Story, there are new rules: we can’t use any words that begin with the letter A, or we can’t use any adjectives or adverbs. Miranda plays too, adding herself to our haphazard circle and tipping over a vintage hourglass each time we pass our sheets of paper.

Next to me, Kait taps her pen on a legal pad. “Is ‘always’ an adverb?”

“Yes,” says Tegan. “Because it describes how you do something.”

“Are you sure?” Felix asks. This sparks a lively debate until we finally use our phones to look it up.

My phone buzzes with a text halfway through the next round. I’m about to turn it to silent when the name catches my attention. It’s not someone who ever really texts me, except for when we traded numbers at the beginning of the summer before all of us met up at Golden Gardens one afternoon.

Sean Yee: hey rowan, it’s sean. have you heard from neil lately?

I frown down at it, thumbing out a quick response.

I saw him four weeks ago and we texted just this morning.

Sean: oh ok

Sean: so he’s alive lol

Rowan: unless someone with annoyingly good grammar kidnapped him and stole his phone, yes.

Sean: he hasn’t been replying to my texts. same with cy and adrian

That’s strange. Out of character for him. Sure, maybe his texts have seemed a little shorter than they usually are, but we’ve both been busy studying. That misstep I made, bringing up his dad—he hasn’t mentioned it since.

I can go back to waiting, hoping that one day he’ll decide he’s ready. Even if the thought of him aching on his own is enough to crack my heart open.

I tell Sean I’m sorry, that maybe he’s just been swamped, before putting my phone away and trying to push past any lingering worry. Surely it’s just stress. I’ve gone a week without texting Kirby and Mara—at least, I’m fairly sure I have.

When we break out into critique groups to share snippets of our works in progress, I peek at my printed-out pages as others start reading aloud, flicking away lint on my sweaterdress. I decided to add a new chapter to my Hannah and Hayden story, the book I’ve been working on for the past couple years that never feels done. In it, they’re on a company retreat and they’ve just discovered there’s only one hotel room left—with only one bed, naturally. One of my favorite tropes, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t found a way to use it in this book yet.

I should feel solid about it—I know these characters, Hannah’s fierce ambition and Hayden’s reserved-but-secretly-sweet nature. And yet as I reread, some of my sentences sound stilted. Awkward.

And worst of all: boring.

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