She picked up her notebook, carried it to the metal trash bin in the corner of the room, and shook the thing over it; a gob of slime slid off, then she dried it the rest of the way with her shirtsleeve, because honestly she was past caring. In the last thirty seconds of her life, years of goals had simply disappeared. She was pregnant. She was pregnant. That complete fuck.

Samantha was not an especially lucky girl, she was well aware. Clueless had played at the movie theater in Norwich the previous summer; she knew there were girls her own age who drove cars around Beverly Hills and put together their outfits on a computer, and that obviously wasn’t her, but at the same time she wasn’t contending with violent child abuse or abject poverty, either. There was food in the house. There was school, which meant books, and they had cable, and her parents had even taken her down to New York City twice, but on both occasions they’d seemed mystified by what they should do once they actually got there: meals in the hotel, a bus that drove around with a guide making jokes she didn’t understand, the Empire State Building (it made sense the first time, but the second time also?) and Rockefeller Center (also twice, and neither trip was around the holidays, so … why?). Not that she was all that knowledgeable, herself, about what the greatest city in the world might have to offer three yokels from the middle of New York state (which might as well have been the middle of Indiana) but she’d only been nine the first time and then twelve the second so it really shouldn’t have been up to her.

The main thing she did have, which most people didn’t, was a future.

Her parents had jobs and her father’s was for the college in Hamilton, where his title was something important-sounding like “plant engineer” but it really meant he was the one who got called when some girl tried to flush a Kotex. Her mother cleaned too, but at the College Inn: her title was the far more honest “housekeeper.” But what her father’s job in particular really signified was something she’d had to explain to him, rather than the other way around: his fourteen years of service to the institution was a leg up when it came time for her to go to college herself, and a significant chunk of change to pay her way. According to her father’s own employment handbook, which he himself had never read but which Samantha had been on intimate terms with for a couple of years, the college gave every consideration to the children of its faculty and staff when it came to admissions, and when it came to financial aid, that was actually spelled out in black and white: 80 percent scholarship, 10 percent student loan, 10 percent on-campus employment. In other words, for a person like Samantha, something along the lines of a golden ticket in a chocolate bar.

Or at least that had been true until today.

Her shitstorm was not to be blamed on substandard sex education at Earlville Middle School, let alone Chenango County (where the locals had done everything possible to prevent its young people from learning how babies were made); Samantha had been fully cognizant of the details since the fifth grade, when her father said something about an especially eventful weekend at one of the fraternities (an incident which had necessitated the presence of the police and resulted in a girl dropping out). She was used to finding things out for herself, especially when those things were cloaked in the distinctive parental silence of stuff-you-weren’t-supposed-to-know-about. Over the following years, her peers caught up to her in basic knowledge (again, no thanks to the official policies of the school district and the state, which had actually declined to mandate sex education) but the knowledge was just that: basic. Two girls in her class of sixty had already moved to “homeschooling” and one had gone to live with a relative in Utica. But those girls were stupid. This was the kind of thing that was supposed to happen to stupid people.

She gathered up the rest of her stuff and left the classroom as a pregnant person. Then she went to her locker as a pregnant person and she joined the others outside and got on her bus, taking her customary seat at the back, but now as a pregnant person, meaning a person who, if she did nothing, was going to eventually produce another person and therefore let go of the reins of her own life, probably forever.

But obviously she wasn’t going to do nothing.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Talented Tom

He told no one. Of course.

He went to San Francisco and the Castro Theatre, and then, the following day, on to Los Angeles where the meetings went about as well as he could have hoped (and the thrill of being in a room with Steven Spielberg numbed his distress for days), but in time he had to return to New York, to the work on his next novel and to the new and sparsely furnished apartment in the West Village. By then, he’d nearly managed to persuade himself that the email had been a kind of phantasm, conjured by his own paranoia, propelled by some random bot under the control of an intentionless algorithm. That didn’t last. Waking up on his unadorned box spring and mattress combo the day after his flight, he reached for his phone and found that a second message had landed in his in-box, again forwarded from the JacobFinchBonner website contact form and featuring the same You are a thief. This time, though, it also said: We both know it.

The website had been converted from his old writing coach site, and now looked like the sites of most successful writers: an About Me page, media and review attention for his individual books, a list of upcoming events, and a contact form that had been in heavy usage since Crib’s publication the previous year. Who was getting in touch? Readers who wanted him to know what was wrong with his book, or that Crib had kept them up all night (in a good way). Librarians hoping he’d come to speak and actors sure they were right for the parts of Samantha or Maria, plus pretty much every single person Jake had ever known and lost touch with: Long Island, Wesleyan, his MFA program, even those fools he’d worked for in Hell’s Kitchen. Every time he saw one of these in his own in-box, with its tantalizing half-line of content (Hi, I don’t know if you remember me but—Jake! I just finished your—Hello, I was at your reading at—) his chest tightened, and it stayed that way until the message turned out to be from a former classmate or a friend of his mother or a person whose book he’d signed at some bookstore in Michigan, or even a random crazy guy who believed an entity from Alpha Centauri had dictated Crib through an orange peel in Jake’s fruit bowl.

And then there were the writers. Writers requesting mentorship. Writers requesting blurbs. Writers requesting an introduction (with endorsement, obviously) to Matilda, his agent, or Wendy, his editor. Writers wanting to know if he’d read their manuscripts and give an opinion as to whether they should let go of their lifelong dream or “hold on.” Writers wanting him to confirm their theories about discrimination in the publishing world—Anti-Semitism! Sexism! Racism! Ageism!—as the sole and true reason their 800-page experimental non-linear punctuation-free neo-novel had been turned down by every publisher in the country.

In the months after his book was sold, Jake had formally (and gratefully) left behind both his MFA and private coaching work, but he fully understood that he now had a special responsibility to not be an asshole to other writers. Writers who were assholes to other writers were asking for it: social media had seen to that, and social media now claimed a significant portion of his mental bandwidth. He’d been a relatively early adopter on Twitter, that playground of word people, though he seldom posted anything, himself. (What was he supposed to tell his 74 “followers”? Hello from upstate New York, where I didn’t write today!) Facebook had seemed harmless until the 2016 election, when it bombarded him with dubious ads and “push” polls about Hillary Clinton’s supposedly nefarious deeds. Instagram mainly seemed to want him to prepare photogenic meals and frolic with adorable pets, neither of which were a part his Cobleskill existence. But after Crib was purchased and he’d begun sitting down with Macmillan’s publicity and marketing teams, Jake had been prevailed upon to maintain a vigorous presence on these three platforms at least, and given the option of stepping up his activity or handing the task over to a staff member to operate on his behalf. That had been a harder decision than it should have been. He’d certainly seen the appeal of offloading the chore of being tweeted at and DM’d and poked and contacted by every other avenue of connection the internet had dreamed up, but he’d still, in the end, opted to be the one in control, and since the day his book was published he’d been starting his days with a sweep of his social media accounts and a review of the Google alerts he’d set up to trawl the internet—Jacob+ Finch+Bonner, Jake+Bonner, Bonner+Crib, Bonner+Writer, etc. It was time-consuming and irritating drudgery, and crammed with rabbit holes, most of which drilled straight into his personal labyrinth of unhappiness. So why hadn’t he accepted the offer of some Macmillan intern or marketing assistant to do it?

Because of this. Obviously.

You are a thief. We both know it.