I’M A FEW MINUTES LATE TO CLASS THE NEXT MORNING. THE LINE AT the campus Starbucks was moving at a glacial pace, and I discovered why when I got to the counter, where a girl with pink hair and two nose piercings struggled for nearly five minutes to input my very simple order. When I finally reach the classroom, all my students are crowded around Skylar’s laptop, giggling. They don’t notice as I walk in.
“Look,” says Skylar. “There’s even a sentence-by-sentence comparison of the first few paragraphs of both stories.”
Christina leans forward. “Noooo.”
“And there’s an NLP comparison—look, here.”
I know without asking: they’ve found Adele Sparks-Sato’s blog report.
“They think all of The Last Front is stolen, too,” says Johnson. “Look, the paragraph right after. There’s a quote from a former editorial assistant at Eden; she says it always felt fishy—”
“You think she took it right out of her apartment? Like, the night she died?”
“Oh my God,” says Skylar, delighted and horrified. “That’s diabolical.”
“Do you think she killed her?”
“Oh my God, don’t—”
I clear my throat. “Good morning.”
Their heads pop up. They look like startled rabbits. Skylar slams her laptop shut. I stride cheerfully to the front of the room, Starbucks in hand, trying my hardest to keep from trembling.
“How’s everyone doing?” I don’t know why I’m doing this oblivious bit. They all know I heard them. Their faces have turned a uniform scarlet; none of them will meet my eye. Skylar sits with her hand pressed against her mouth, exchanging panicked looks with a girl named Celeste.
“That bad, huh?” I nod to Johnson. “How was your evening, Johnson? How’d the homework go?”
He stammers out something about Dickens’s verbosity, which gives me time to decide how I want to handle this. There’s the honest route, which is to explain to them the details of the controversy, tell them the same thing I told my editors, and let them make up their own minds. It’ll be an object lesson in the social economy of publishing, in how social media distorts and inflames the truth. Maybe they’ll walk away with more respect for me.
Or I could make them regret this.
“Skylar?” My voice sounds more like a bark than I intended. Skylar flinches like she’s been shot. “It’s your story we’re critiquing today, isn’t it?”
“I—uh, yeah.”
“So where are your printouts?”
Skylar blinks. “I mean, I emailed it to everyone.”
I requested in the workshop guidelines that the subject of critique bring printed copies of their story to class. We’ve been using laptops since last year, though, and I know it’s unfair to rip Skylar for it, but it’s the first knock I can think of. “I made my expectations very clear in the handouts. Perhaps you don’t think the rules apply to you, Skylar, but that attitude won’t get you very far in publishing. Keep thinking you’re the exception, and you’ll end up like one of those creeps who corner editors in bathrooms and slide manuscripts under doors into hotel rooms because they don’t think the industry guidelines apply.”
This wins me a couple of snickers. Skylar’s face goes white as paper.
“Are you going to corner editors in bathrooms, Skylar?”
“No,” she drawls, rolling her eyes. She’s trying to play it cool, but I can hear her voice quiver. “Obviously not.”
“Good. So print your manuscript next time. That goes for all of you.” I take a long, satisfying sip of my Very Berry Hibiscus Refresher. My knees are still trembling, but this verbal putdown gives me a rush of hot, spiteful confidence. “Well, let’s get to it. Rexy, what did you think of Skylar’s story?”
Rexy swallows. “I, uh, liked it.”
“On what grounds?”
“Well, it’s interesting.”
“‘Interesting’ is a word people use when they can’t think of anything better to say. Be specific, Rexy.”
That sets the tone for the rest of the morning. I used to think that mean teachers were a special kind of monster, but it turns out that cruelty comes naturally. Also, it’s fun. Teenagers, after all, are unformed identities with undeveloped brains. No matter how clever they are, they still don’t know much about anything, and it’s easy to embarrass them for their ill-prepared remarks.
Skylar gets the worst of it. Technically her story—a whodunnit set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, in which none of the witnesses will cooperate with the police because they have their own secrets and community codes of honor—is not bad. The writing is strong, the conceit is interesting, and there’s even a clever twist at the end that makes you reevaluate every previous word uttered by the characters. It’s very impressive for a high schooler. Still, her inexperience shows. Skylar’s exposition is clumsy in parts, she makes use of quite a few contrived coincidences to move the story along, and she hasn’t figured out how to toe the line between tense and histrionic dialogue.
I could gently correct these tendencies while encouraging Skylar to think up the solutions herself.
“And then, again, there’s a lawyer on the scene out of nowhere.” I tap the page. “Do lawyers grow on trees, Skylar? Maybe they have a spidey sense for marital discomfort?”
Then: “Do Chloe and Christopher have a weird incest thing going on, or is that just how you’ve chosen to portray all of their sibling interactions?”
Then: “Does every single Chinese person in this neighborhood know each other, or did you just find that convenient for the plot?”
Then: “I wonder if there’s any better imagery you can use for sexual tension than literally biting into a strawberry.”
Then: “‘She let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding.’ Really?”
By the end of it I’ve convinced most of the class that Skylar’s story is horrible—whether they agree, or whether they’re scared of invoking my ire, I don’t care. We’ve picked her voice and style to shreds. Her metaphors are unoriginal, her dialogue is wooden (at one point I even make Johnson and Celeste act out a scene, just to highlight how cringey it sounds out loud), her plot twists are all borrowed from readily recognizable pop-culture sources, and she overuses her em dashes and semicolons to the extreme. By the end of our session, Skylar is close to tears. She has stopped nodding, frowning, or reacting to any bits of criticism whatsoever. She merely stares out the window, lower lip trembling, fingers twisting the top page of her notebook into tiny pieces.
I’ve won. It’s a pathetic victory, sure, but it’s better than sitting here and suffering their mocking glares.
That hot, vicious satisfaction stays with me through the rest of the morning. I conclude the critique circle, assign homework, and watch them flee wordlessly out the door.
I’ve only made things worse, I know. Now I’ll have to sit before their resentful, condescending faces for another week and a half. I’m sure that, behind the scenes, they’ll bitch about me endlessly until this workshop is over. I’m sure they’ll join the chorus of Juniper Song haters online. But I’ve at least made myself into a terror rather than a punch line, and for now, I’m all right with that.
Once they’ve left the classroom, I pull out my phone and Google “Candice Lee Juniper Song Athena Liu.” Johnson’s words have been stuck in my mind all morning: There’s a quote from a former editorial assistant at Eden; she says it always felt fishy.
My breath quickens with fear as the results load. What does Candice have on me?
But the relevant article—another tiresome Adele Sparks-Sato hit piece—contains nothing new. Candice offers no damning evidence, no new shreds of proof that haven’t been overanalyzed to bits by the internet already. Just a vague quote that means nothing much at all.
I close the article and scroll through her social media accounts. Candice’s Instagram is private; her Twitter has been inactive since last March. Her LinkedIn, however, announces she’s recently taken on a new job as an editorial assistant at a small press based in Oregon.