The writer’s name was Josh West, and he noticed Alex immediately. She felt out of place the moment she got there, and spent most of her time hiking in the hills surrounding the camp, and avoiding the others. She was startled and a little unnerved when he followed her on one of her walks one day. He approached her when he walked into a clearing as she was sitting on a rock, gazing at the view and trying to decide if she should leave the workshop early.
“You look very serious,” he said. “Am I interrupting a literary meditation?” he asked as he sat down next to her, a little too close for her liking. “It’s good fun being here, isn’t it?” He had a movie star smile and perfect teeth, he had the appearance of someone who worked out a lot, and he had taken his shirt off so she could admire his muscles.
“It’s not exactly what I expected,” she said, although it was precisely as Bert had predicted, much to her dismay.
“What did you expect then?” Josh seemed surprised. Most people loved it there.
“More writing, and a little less ‘fun.’?” She could hear the others having sex in the tents at night, after they sat around the campfire drinking too much and passing joints around, playing strip poker, or they came back to the camp naked after a swim. It was Sodom and Gomorrah for would-be writers.
“It’s good to let your hair down. What kind of writing do you do?” He hadn’t talked to her yet, and she had been avoiding him, once she observed him trying to seduce the other women indiscriminately. She was the youngest person in the camp. The only other person close to her age was a Dartmouth dropout who said he was writing a book about whales and smoked weed all the time. So far, he was incoherent every day by dinnertime, and she could smell the marijuana wafting from his tent at all hours of the day and night.
She wasn’t sure how to answer Josh about her writing, and didn’t want to tell him the truth. She said the first thing that popped into her head. “Young adult novels, for girls.” She felt ridiculous saying it, because it was so far afield from what she did write, but her answer suited her image better than the truth.
“No sex in those, I guess,” he said, looking bored, and then put a hand on her thigh and smiled at her, as she wondered in terror if he was going to rape her. “Maybe you need to do a little research so you can move on to adult novels, although the big money is in YA these days, so you’re smart to aim for those, just don’t live them.” It was a slimy thing to say, and she stood up to get his hand off her leg. He made her feel dirty just sitting next to him.
“I think I’ll go back to camp,” she said as she started to walk away and he followed her. She was by far the most attractive woman in the camp—he just hadn’t gotten around to her yet. He assumed that every woman there would be pleased to go to bed with him, but he was wrong about Alex, who made it clear that she wouldn’t. He reminded her of a snake as he slithered along beside her.
“How about a swim in the river on the way? And since we didn’t bring our bathing suits…” He smiled lasciviously at her, and she wanted to throw up. She sped up her pace, which only enticed him more, and just before they reached the camp, he grabbed her, pulled her into his arms, and pressed his body against her. She could feel his erection bulging in his hiking shorts, and knew exactly what it was, although she’d never been in that situation before. She was still an innocent at twenty. By pure reflex, she did the only thing she could think of to get him off her and raised her knee sharply into his groin. And as he doubled over, she ran the rest of the way back to camp, and went to pack her bags. The week at writers’ camp had been expensive, but she didn’t care. She was packed by the time he got back to camp, limping slightly and livid. He stopped at her tent and looked at her with eyes blazing with pain and fury.
“What are you? A lesbian?” he spat at her, while two women stopped to listen and wondered what had happened.
“No, a writer. I must be the only one here. What is this? A sex camp for bored housewives and people like you pretending to be writers?”
“Who are you? Heidi? What did you expect here?”
“A lot more than this. Have a great week,” she said as she brushed past him and went to check out at the main tent. She was in her rented car five minutes later, and offered no explanation for her early departure. She drove home slowly through New England and got back to the convent four hours later, where everyone was surprised to see her. She told them about it at dinner, and they were relieved she had left. And when she saw Bert a week later, she told him he had been right about the writers’ camp.
“I told you, it’s just a lot of wannabes looking to get drunk or high and laid.”
“You forgot to tell me that part,” she said, looking embarrassed.
“You don’t belong in a place like that. You’re the real deal, Alex. There’s nothing you can learn from them.” She had discovered that herself, and she still felt sick when she thought of Josh West. She told Bert about that too. “What’s a porno crime novel?” he said, laughing after she told him she had kneed him in the groin.
“I didn’t want to ask. But when he gave a workshop on self-publishing, which he recommends, I realized that that’s how he published his porno crime series.”
“What did you tell him you write?”
“Young adult books for girls,” she said, and started to laugh too. “I couldn’t think of anything else.”
“That’s what you look like. They should know you write the scariest damn crime scenes I’ve ever read.” And she did it with art, skill, and precision. The victims in her books so far were evildoers whose deaths were no loss to anyone. There were no crimes against women or children. The key to her books was not the violent deaths she depicted, but the intricate twists and turns in the plot to solve the crimes. They were acts of pure genius that kept the reader guessing till the end. There was nothing seamy or sordid about them, which wasn’t easy to pull off and yet somehow she did. They were smart books for intelligent people—a Rubik’s Cube of crime that she took apart and put back together, and presented the simple answer no one had thought of in the end. Reading her books was like watching a magic trick, even he couldn’t figure out how she did it, which he loved about her work. There was no sex in the books, and the reader didn’t even miss it. She had created a style all her own, distilled from all the crime books she had read, detective stories, and thrillers. And he thought her latest one was even stronger than the first two, and it involved multiple murders.
“No more writers’ camps for you, young lady,” he chided her. “Now get back to work,” he said sternly, and then chuckled to himself as he walked to his kitchen to get a glass of wine. He loved working with her. It was the most fun he’d had in years, and he was learning from her too. It was a good exchange. He was grateful to Rose for bringing them together, and so was Alex.
He sat down in his favorite chair and read the new pages she’d brought him. She’d completed the outline and was starting to work on the book.
“This is terrible,” he said, frowning at her after he read for a few minutes.