Page 16 of I'm Not Done with You Yet

And she flushes with pleasure and nods eagerly. Prada. And here I had thought it was a cheap dress from one of those Chinese websites. But no. Pam—fucking Pam—is wearing Prada. The thought that if I hadn’t bumped into Thalia at the bus station, I would’ve come here wearing a dress from Ross Dress for Less makes bile rise up my throat.

We’re seated at long tables, each place set with three plates and three different glasses. I’m about to slide into the seat next to Thalia when Ani slinks in between us with a smooth, smiling, “Oops, sorry.” I end up sitting next to Ani, with Pam on the other side of me. I can’t believe we’re all doing our master’s when it feels so much closer to high school than even college did.

“So, Jane,” Ani says. My name comes out poisonous from her dark plum lips. She touches the tips of two fingers to her chin, and a giant sapphire ring glints on her index finger. “Thalia tells me you’re doing Creative Writing as well.”

“Yeah. You?”

“MBA. Cursed to help out with the family business. You know how it is.”

I don’t know how it is, actually. I’m about as far from knowing how it is as humanly possible. But I’m saved from having to answer when a server comes bearing two bottles of wine, one red and one white. Ani cocks an eyebrow at him, and he smoothly pours the wines into our glasses.

“Cheers,” Ani says lazily, lifting her glass of red wine. I lift mine, too, and manage to spill a little bit over the side. The corner of Ani’s mouth crooks up. I amuse her. I want to run away and hide. I want to smash my wineglass and push the sharp edges into her porcelain face, see which one cracks first—the shard of glass or that fake face of hers?

“This year is going to be so fun,” Thalia says, leaning toward me and holding out her glass. “Bottoms up, everyone!”

Ani doesn’t take her eyes off me as she downs her glass in one long, smooth swallow, and though I almost choke, I end up draining mine as well.

It was a trap. Of course it was a trap. I should have known, the way Ani’s eyes never left mine, the languid, predatory gaze crawled over my skin, her mouth curved into a constant smirk. The way she made sure my glass was always full.

By the end of dinner, I can barely walk back to Downing. The only saving grace is that everybody else seems just as sloshed as I am—Pam keeps talking about how “pissed” she is, and Thalia is looking more flushed than before. There’s a guy—Edward; of course there’s an Edward here—who’s taken it upon himself to “make sure you ladies get back all right.” He has hishand on the small of Thalia’s back, a sight that sickens me. But before I can lunge forward, put myself between sweet Thalia and Edward the creep, Edward the would-be date rapist, Thalia turns, catching my eye, and says, “Jane and I live on the same floor. We’ll be okay, won’t we, Jane?”

I don’t remember the walk up the stairs in Downing. Next thing I know, I’m falling asleep without bothering to wash off the makeup that Thalia had applied on my face, my head swimming in nauseating circles, my room spinning, hating myself. Last thought that crosses my mind is if Thalia’s back in her room okay. I try to recall if I’d deposited her like a lost treasure safely in her room before stumbling back to mine, and then the darkness descends.

I can barely choke down the breakfast buffet the next morning. I sit at the far corner of the massive dining hall, avoiding the morning crowd, and force myself to eat one of the roasted tomatoes and drink a glass of OJ—vitamin C is good for hangovers. I’m about to leave the hall when the doors swing open and in come Thalia and Ani. They’re chatting easily, and the sight of them sours my already queasy stomach. I almost vomit, literally. They came in together. Together, as a single unit. I hunch further into the corner so they won’t see me, my cheeks blazing hot.

How did that happen? I scramble through the tangle in my mind, trying to sort out the events of last night. Thalia and I had staggered back to our rooms together. There was laughter. Who was laughing? I remember talking, though the actual words themselves now escape me. I have no fucking clue what I might have said to her. Something awful? Something that might have repelled/alarmed/scared her?Don’t be scared of me, Thalia, I want to scream until she promises that she isn’t, that we’re still the best of friends, forever and ever, amen.

Had she stolen out of her room after that? Tiptoed past mine—careful, don’t wake Jane the freak—and gone to meet up with Ani? There’s nothing quite like the exquisite pain of being excluded, your presence purposefully blotted out. After careful deliberation, we have deemed you, Plain Jane Morgan, unworthy of our company.

What was it that had finally dealt the killing blow, that had strangled the blossoming friendship between Thalia and me? The answer comes naturally, quickly. Ani. Ani has whispered some poison into Thalia’s ear in a bid to steal her from me, and it worked.

I sneak out of the dining hall like a rat and scurry all the way back to my room. Only when I’ve shut the door do I let myself unravel, leaning against the door and breathing deep. I snap the wristband and think of Ani. Ani, with her black-painted eyelids and her elegant clothes and long limbs, which, like a spider, she has wrapped around my Thalia.

The shatter of glass wrenches me out of my black state, and I realize that I’ve thrown my coffee mug across the room. Shit. I hadn’t even noticed that I’d taken a coffee mug from the dining room. Coffee is dripping in light brown rivulets down the wall, and I really should mop it all up, but I don’t have time. This is the first day of my master’s course, and I’m not going to let Ani ruin that too. Forget Thalia. Forget everyone. I’m not even here to make friends; I’m here to learn the craft of writing. I grab my things—a new spiral-bound notebook, my favorite pen, and a folder full of coursework material that had cost an annoying amount to print out, and I hurry out the door, trying not to think of what I might say when I see Thalia in class.

Our first class plunges us into the deep end. Boom, straight away a fiction workshop. There are fifteen of us in total, rangingfrom early-twenties to the oldest student who is in his sixties. I’m supposed to admire that he’s pursuing higher education so close to death, but instead, it makes me uncomfortable. They’re all well-dressed, lots of leather shoes and boots and what the English would call “smart” button-down shirts. Sharply tailored Burberry coats and shiny leather handbags with neat stitches and logos that are small enough to be subtle, but not so small that you can’t read the “Prada” or “LV.” Nothing so crass as monogrammed logos all over the bags, oh no. We’re writers, after all.

The tables are set in a U, with the teacher’s desk at the center. I hesitate, trying to figure out where to sit for minimum attention, trying not to make it too obvious that I’m waiting to see where Thalia is going to sit. She swans into class last, right before it begins, and her presence brightens up the room. All that golden hair and dewy skin and Colgate smile. All heads turn toward her, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She’s used to being the center of attention, neither loves it nor hates it. She spots me, and her smile widens. While everybody watches, she crosses the room straight to me. The sixty-year-old man has taken the seat next to mine, but she smiles sweetly at him and says, “I’m sorry, is it okay if I take this one?” and he shifts one seat over with a friendly, “Of course, luv.”

And now here she is again, next to me, close enough for me to smell her. My heart twists and twists, and I feel like I could die from the nearness of her, but Thalia is ignorant of the quiet death I’m going through. My mind is a mess of jagged questions, slicing their way across the soft folds of my brains. Did you ditch me so you could party with Ani? Did you spend the night with some guy? Did you fuck him? Did you, did you?

“Hey, didn’t see you at breakfast,” she says.

I’m not sure if that’s a question, so I focus on taking out my notebook from my shitty messenger bag. Next to me, I can feel Thalia’s confusion growing when I don’t answer.It’s not that I don’t want to strike up a conversation with you, Thalia, I think desperately, as loud as I can, trying to make her hear my thoughts.It’s that if I open my mouth, I don’t know what’s going to fall out.My thoughts are spiders waiting to leap from my tongue and poison everything they touch.

“Good morning, everyone!” a voice trills, and thank god, because I don’t know what I was about to say.

Our first teacher is Emily R. Rogers, author of the critically acclaimed but poor-sellingMayflies in the Winter. All of our teachers, I realized when looking over the course handbook, are of the same loved-by-critics-but-ignored-by-the-masses caliber. Emily is in her midforties, past her prime but still lovely to look at. Everyone here is like that—all of them attractive in one way or another, or at the very least, fashionably ugly.

“Right! Welcome to day one of Michaelmas.” She pauses to give us all a smile. There’s that term again—Michaelmas. Google told me it refers to Oxford’s fall term, though why they can’t just call it “fall” like every other college does is beyond me. “Today we’re going to talk about prose fiction and how to keep your reader engaged. Reader engagement depends on a few factors, but the most important thing is tension. What is tension?”

I write down as much of what Emily says as I can while also being painfully aware that Thalia isn’t writing anything down. When I sneak a glance at her, she’s sitting back and watching Emily with a thoughtful expression. She looks so absorbed, so naturally intelligent that I have no doubt that despite the lack of notes, she will retain a lot more of the seminar than I will. By contrast, I feel silly for scribbling so furiously, afraid of missingeven a single word. A child trying to play catch-up at a grown-up class.

“But before we get into all that, we’re going to warm up with a freewriting session.”

My pen stills. No, please. My brain is still in a wine-fug from last night, and I can barely read my own notes.

“We’re going to go for five minutes. Write anything that comes to your mind. We’ll read it out afterward and do a little workshop—how does that sound?” Emily has already taken out an egg timer from her bag.

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