“Oh?”

Jake’s program—and, apparently, Alice’s—had not been this newer “low residency” type but the more classic drop-your-life-and-devote-yourself-to-your-art-for-two-straight-years variety, and frankly it was also a far more prestigious program than Ripley’s. Attached to a Midwestern university, the program had long produced poets and novelists of great importance to American letters, and was so hard to get into that it had taken Jake three years to manage it (during which time he had watched certain less talented friends and acquaintances get accepted). He’d spent those years living in a microscopic apartment in Queens and working for a literary agency with a special interest in science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction and fantasy, never genres to which he had personally been drawn, seemed to attract a high quotient of—well, why not be blunt?—crazy in its aspiring author pool, not that Jake had anything to compare that to since every one of the very distinguished literary agencies he’d applied to after graduating from college had declined to make use of his talents. Fantastic Fictions, LLC, a two-man shop in Hell’s Kitchen (actually in the tiny back room of the owners’ railroad flat in Hell’s Kitchen) had a client list of about forty writers, most of whom left for larger agencies the moment they experienced any professional success. Jake’s job had been to sic the attorney on these ungrateful writers, to discourage over-the-transom authors intent on describing their ten-novel series (written or unwritten) with the agents over the phone, and above all to read manuscript after manuscript about dystopian alternate realities on distant planets, dark penal systems far below the surface of the earth, and leagues of post-apocalyptic rebels bent on the overthrow of sadistic warlords.

Once he actually had ferreted out an exciting prospect for his bosses, a novel about a spunky young woman who escapes from a penal colony planet aboard some kind of intergalactic junk ship, and discovers a mutant population among the garbage which she transforms into a vengeful army and ultimately leads into battle. It had definite potential, but the two losers who’d hired him let the manuscript languish on their desk for months, waving off his reminders. Eventually, Jake had given up, and a year later, when he read in Variety about ICM’s sale of the book to Miramax (with Sandra Bullock attached), he’d carefully clipped the story. Six months later, when his golden ticket to the MFA party arrived and he quit his job—O Happy Day!—he’d placed the clipping squarely on his boss’s desk atop the dusty manuscript itself. He’d done what he’d been hired to do. He’d always known a good plot when he saw one.

Unlike many of his fellow MFA students (some of whom entered the program with actual publications, mostly in literary journals but in one case—thankfully that of a poet and not a fiction writer—the effing New Yorker!), Jake had not wasted a moment of those two precious years. He dutifully attended every seminar, lecture, reading, workshop, and informal gathering with visiting editors and agents from New York, and declined in the main to wallow in that (itself fictional) malady, “Writer’s Block.” When he wasn’t in class or auditing lectures at the university he was writing, and in two years he’d banged out an early draft of what would become The Invention of Wonder. This he submitted as his thesis and for every eligible award the program offered. It won one of them. Even more consequentially, it got him an agent.

Alice, it turned out, had arrived at the Midwestern campus only weeks after his own departure. She’d been there the following year when his novel was published, and a copy of its cover pinned to the bulletin board marked ALUMNI PUBLICATIONS.

“I mean, so exciting! Only a year out of the program.”

“Yeah. Heady stuff.”

That sat between them like something dull and unpleasant. Finally he said: “So, you write poetry.”

“Yes. I had my first collection out last fall. University of Alabama.”

“Congratulations. I wish I read more poetry.”

He didn’t, actually, but he wished he wished he read more poetry, which ought to count for something.

“I wish I could write a novel.”

“Well, maybe you can.”

She shook her head. She seemed … it was ridiculous, but was this wan poet actually flirting with him? What on earth for?

“I wouldn’t know how. I mean, I love reading novels, but I’m exhausted just writing a line. I can’t imagine, pages and pages of writing, not to mention characters that have to feel real and a story that needs to surprise you. It’s absurd, that people can actually do that. And more than once! I mean, you wrote a second one, didn’t you?”

And a third and a fourth, he thought. A fifth if you counted the one currently on his laptop, which he’d been too disheartened to even look at for nearly a year. He nodded.

“Well, when I got this job you were the only person on faculty I knew. I mean, whose work I knew. I figured it was probably okay if you were here.”

Jake took a careful bite of his cornbread: predictably dry. He hadn’t encountered this degree of writerly approbation for a couple of years, and it was incredible how quickly all of the narcotically warm feelings came rushing back. This was what it was to be admired, and thoughtfully admired at that, by someone who knew exactly how hard it was to write a good and transcendent sentence of prose! He had once thought his life would be crowded with encounters just like this, not just with fellow writers and devoted readers (of his ever-growing, ever-deepening oeuvre) but with students (perhaps, ultimately, at much better programs) thrilled to have been assigned Jacob Finch Bonner, the rising young novelist, as their supervising writer/instructor. The kind of teacher you could grab a beer with after the workshop ended!

Not that Jake had ever grabbed a beer with one of his students.

“Well, that’s kind of you to say,” he told Alice with studied modesty.

“I’m starting as an adjunct at Hopkins this fall, but I’ve never taught. I might be in pretty far over my head.”

He looked at her, his reserve of goodwill, already small, now swiftly draining away. Adjunct at Johns Hopkins was nothing to sneeze at. It probably meant a fellowship for which she’d had to beat a few hundred other poets. The university press publication was likely also the result of a prize, it occurred to him now, and just about everyone coming out of an MFA program with a manuscript went in for every one of those. This girl, Alice, was quite possibly some version of a big deal, or at least what passed for a big deal in the poetry world. The thought of that deflated him utterly.

“I’m sure you’ll do fine,” he said. “When in doubt just encourage them. That’s why they pay us the big bucks.” He went for a grin. It felt horribly awkward.

Alice, after a moment, produced her own grin, and looked just as uncomfortable as he was.

“Hey, you using that?” said a voice.

Jake looked up. He might not have recognized the face—long and narrow, blond hair flopping forward into hooded eyes—but he recognized that arm. He followed it to its point of termination: a rather sharp fingernail on an extended index finger. There was a bottle opener on the picnic table’s red check plastic table covering.

“What?” said Jake. “Oh, no.”

“Because people are looking for it. It’s supposed to be over by the beers.”

The accusation was plain: Jake and Alice, two obviously unimportant people, had deprived this throbbing talent at the heart of the Ripley Symposia, and his friends, of access to the crucial bottle-opening tool, which in turn deprived these obviously talented students access to their beverage of choice.

Neither Alice nor Jake responded.

“So I’ll be taking it back,” the blond guy said, doing just that. The two faculty members watched in silence: again, that back turned, middling height, middling blond, broad shouldered, stalking away, bottle opener brandished in triumph.

“Well, there’s a charmer.” Alice spoke first.

The guy stalked off to one of the other tables, which was packed to capacity, people sidesaddle at the ends of the benches and seated in dragged-over lawn chairs. The very first night of the session and this group of brand-new students had clearly established itself as an alpha-clique, and judging from the hero’s welcome the blond guy with the bottle opener was receiving from his table-mates, their censorious friend was its obvious epicenter.

“Hope he doesn’t turn out to be a poet,” Alice said with a sigh.

Not much chance of that, Jake thought. Everything about the guy screamed FICTION WRITER, though the species itself broke down more or less evenly into the subcategories:

1. Great American Novelist

2. New York Times Bestselling Author

Or that highly rare hybrid …