“Maybe you just don’t like my writing,” she said when he walked her to the door of her dorm, and she didn’t ask him up. She said her roommate was in that night, which wasn’t true, but she had no intention of sleeping with him, even if he was obviously smitten with her, which was flattering. But he was anything but smitten with her writing.
“It’s not personal,” he explained to her. “Your work just isn’t strong, compared to the others in the course. In fact, it’s very weak, Alex. I think you can do a lot better than that.” And oddly, instead of dismissing his comments, she wanted to try harder to convince him she could write and knew what she was doing. It was like a challenge to win him over, which made no sense even to her. She was going to be a published author very shortly, and she had no idea if he could write. But he had been a teaching assistant for four years, so she assumed he knew more than she did about the stories she was writing, and how they should read. She was obviously falling short, and believed him.
He took her to a football game after that, and the movies, and kissed her again. And no matter how hard she tried, her grades didn’t improve. But she was dating at least, which made her feel like everyone else, and he was a great-looking guy. Her roommate saw them together and declared him a hunk. So it was official. But all the while they were out together, he slipped in unnerving comments about how inadequate her writing was, which made her feel awful, and then he would tell her how fabulous she was in other ways, and the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. He made her feel good and bad alternately, and had the power to make her insecure about what she wrote. The only time she felt good about herself was when she was working on her latest book with Bert, or writing alone in her room on weekends. She turned down Scott’s invitations because she had to work, and told him she had papers due for her other classes, or had too much reading to do. He invited her skiing during spring break, which she declined too, because she wanted to spend it at St. Dominic’s and was hoping to finish her book.
She forgot about his cutting comments when she stood outside a bookstore in April and grinned from ear to ear when she saw her book. There it was. Blue Steel by Alexander Green. It was dedicated to her father, and she almost cried when she saw it in the store, it was so beautiful and real. She had given all her free copies to the nuns, who were thrilled for her. She walked past the same store again, two days later, when she was with Scott, and it was still in the window. They stopped to look at what was on display, and Scott pointed at her book.
“I’m reading that now. The guy is incredible. You wouldn’t like it, it’s too rough, but he has an amazing mind. It’s his first book, he lives in Scotland and Montana, grew up in England. He’s a man’s man. It’s beautifully written, with the best lurid crime scenes I’ve ever read. He makes murder sound like an art.” Her heart flew as he said it. So he didn’t hate her writing after all, just her assignments for class. She felt better after that. She had him tell her the story, just to see what he’d say, and he hadn’t even finished it yet. There were unimaginable surprises in store at the end.
“I hear the ending is great,” she said as they walked away.
“The whole book is great,” he said, and she beamed.
The professor had returned from her book tour by then, and Alex got two A’s in a row, and an A+ on her final assignment, which made her decide to meet with the professor in her office on the last day of class. Scott’s grades in the professor’s absence were going to pull down her overall grade for the class severely. Alex explained the situation to her, and asked if she would look at the assignments Scott had graded to see if she agreed. The professor said that she usually didn’t do that, but she would this time, because the grades seemed surprising to her too, given the caliber of Alex’s work.
She got her answer two weeks later. The professor said that there had obviously been a mistake, she thought Alex’s stories were outstanding, and she gave her an A+ in the class. Alex was relieved to see it, but more than that, it told her something about Scott. He had been jealous and had abused his position to put her down and make her feel terrible about herself. She felt betrayed, justifiably, and when he called her that night to see her, she said she was busy and couldn’t make it. She didn’t care anymore about what he’d said about her writing, but she was irate about what he had tried to do to her, to crush her and shake her confidence in herself. He was passive-aggressive to an extreme degree, and it felt like abuse. It had worked for a while, but the professor’s grades restored her faith in herself. It was a sad lesson to her.
As it turned out, Bert and others were right. People would be jealous of her writing, and maybe one day her success. She was treading on a minefield when she showed them her work, and Scott had hated her talent and tried to undermine and destroy it. She felt as though he had tried to steal something from her. She didn’t answer his calls after that, but he showed up at her dorm the last day of school. She had just sent her latest book to her agent, and was feeling happy and free.
“Why are you avoiding me?” He confronted her in the lobby of her dorm. He had been waiting for two hours, and seemed angry when she walked in. “And what right did you have to sweet-talk the professor into raising your grades?”
“The same right as any student,” she said, looking him in the eye. “That was personal, Scott. The work was better than you said.”
“Not in my opinion,” he answered, turning vicious immediately. “I thought it stank. I could have failed you in the course, but I didn’t, because I thought you were cute. But not so cute if you sneak behind my back to complain about the grades I give.” The professor had questioned him about it, and wasn’t pleased.
“I asked her to judge the work for herself, and I guess she disagreed with you.”
“All you care about are the grades. You don’t give a damn about the quality of the writing. You won’t get anywhere that way. All you’ll ever write is junk. You’re pathetic,” he said with a look that told her how little he thought of her, or how jealous he was, or both. It was shocking to realize that he hated her for the way she wrote, which was a gift.
“By the way, how did that book turn out?”
“Which one?” He was puzzled for an instant.
“Blue Steel, by that new guy, Alexander Green.”
“It was superb. That’s writing of a caliber you’ll never reach, not like the crap you write.” He wanted to hurt her one last time since she’d dismissed him, for reasons he would never understand or admit to. She was on to him now. And he wasn’t throwing bombs at her anymore. He was throwing praise at Alexander Green, whose work he thought was “superb.”
“I’ll have to buy the book,” she said with an evil grin.