Pretty Is by Mitchell Maggie

Author:Mitchell, Maggie
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781627791496
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2015-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

Part Three

Lois

A spring-smelling wind batters the house, grinds tree branches against the windows, rattles the panes, swells my curtains. On my computer screen, I have proof. Lanky, solemn … The evidence was a few keyboard taps away. Outrageously coincidental, absurd, perfect.

Student: Sean Michael McDougal University ID: 722455982

Status: Sophomore GPA 2.7 Credit Hours: 54

Previous Institution: Utica Upstate Community College (UUCC)

Transfer GPA: 3.0

Utica. It’s not that far away; I’m sure we have plenty of students from that area. I understand that it’s not the kind of evidence that would stand up in court. I feel the pieces falling into place, though; I practically hear them click, lock down. This explains so much.

Sean is the son. Zed’s son. No wonder Gary has been a recalcitrant protagonist: I misimagined him from the start. I made him a grizzled woodsman instead of a sullen undergrad. It’s not only the manuscript that demands revision—that much I already knew—but my relationship with Sean. I need to alter the balance of power between us. I need to find out what he knows.

What he thinks he has over me is the threat of exposure. For too long—and for no good reason—I have allowed this threat to be an effective weapon. I see how to seize the upper hand: I have what he wants, which is information. Memories. Truth. Or reasonable approximations thereof.

I have an idea.

* * *

Once again, my dilemma boils down to a straightforward and impossible question: what do I really want, anyway? You’d think that at twenty-nine I’d be better equipped to answer that question than when I was twelve, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten any easier.

I will have to consider my next move very carefully.

I think back to the period during which I wrote the first novel. I had no business doing it; I did not tell my PhD adviser, who would have been outraged. I was supposed to be writing my dissertation—a three-hundred-page scholarly monstrosity—and dissertations require all of your attention and stamina and intellectual energy, or so we were encouraged to believe. But my characters seemed to leap from the margins of my dissertation and demand their own space. How could I concentrate on Pamela or The Mysteries of Udolpho or Evelina, on the serial abductions of Pamela et al., when little fleshly versions of Carly and of me danced in the margins? They, too, had been abducted; they, too, had a story.

The novel began as a strategy. I would sit at my battered secondhand desk to work on my dissertation, fortified with coffee and a little (very little) sleep, and I would open another document, a blank page, where I would allow what became the novel—the dissertation demon, I took to calling it—to spill out. After an hour or so the demon would be quieted, and I could return to my real work in peace. It felt almost as though the books were writing each other. The novel—urgent, greedy—took on a life of its own, and I ended up finishing it first.

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