The visiting instructor nodded and said that risks are good. Risks are, the visitor maintained, the “salt of life.” She looked at Clare. “Our shared human tragedy is, historically, that in order to have power, you must exercise power. I can see how this story understands that.”

Clare’s colleagues, meanwhile, had discovered a new substance. They blew on it and sniffed. They examined its color. They applied it tentatively to their lips, providing detailed commentary.

Later, in the hall, Clare stood near the sign-up sheets for meetings with agents; these were an offering to the fiction students, who were meant to begin peddling their wares by proxy. Clare had something now. And she entered her name in small caps, trying to make it look as if it had been printed by machine.

At the center of one particularly crowded schedule pertaining to Alex Levendorff, who was presumably able to make his or her clients into instant thousandaires, Clare noted the name LOUDERMILK slashed across two time slots and enclosed in a heavily inked-in rectangle. Clare had never heard of a poet having an agent, but then again Loudermilk seems entirely unlike other poets. That long poem of his from earlier in the semester had made the rounds even with the fiction students, and Clare still can’t get the part about “lots and lots of sofas” out of her head. Sofas across America, Clare thinks.

But Clare does not want to think. If she thinks too concertedly about Loudermilk’s enviable situation—his two perfect bodies, the one literary, the other flesh and blood—the bubble generated by her own small success may burst, the image fade. She reminds herself that she does, more than in the past, seem to have a future today.

Instead of thinking, Clare goes over to the narrow fridge. Inside is a single food item, an enormous plastic vat of pickled peppers she purchased across the train tracks at the Aldi. They have a strange, dull, dusty taste and she has stopped eating them but does not know how to dispose of a bulk amount of yellow brine. But perhaps the pickles taste fine.

Clare tastes the pickles.

They do not taste fine.

Clare is going out tonight.

It is something the Seminars calls its “prom.”

Forty-Three. Persistence

Forty-Three

Persistence

Lizzie has never been to the Seminars prom. She’s underage, but it’s more than this: Her dad is usually in attendance. It’s kind of his thing. Therefore, it’s, like, incest taboo, much? Not to mention that Marta has historically seemed to sanction her father’s grossness on this particular evening.

Lizzie gags a little. Though no one is watching her, she pretends to vomit delicately into her own mouth.