Over the years of his teaching career, Jake had sat down with plenty of students who’d possessed an imperfect grasp of their own talent, though the disconnect tended to center on basic writing ability. Many fledgling writers labored under the misperception that if they themselves knew what a character looked like, that was sufficient to magically communicate it to the reader. Others believed a single detail was enough to render a character memorable, but the detail they chose was always so pedestrian: female characters merely described as “blond,” while for a man “six-pack abs”—He had them! Or he didn’t have them!—were all any reader apparently needed to know. Sometimes a writer set out sentence after sentence as an unvarying chain—noun, verb, prepositional phrase, noun, verb, prepositional phrase—without understanding the teeth-grinding irritation of all that monotony. Sometimes a student got bogged down in their own specific interest or hobby and upchucked his or her personal passion all over the page, either with an overload of less than scintillating detail or some kind of shorthand he or she thought must be sufficient to carry the story: man walks into a NASCAR meet, or woman attends reunion of college sorority friends on exotic isle (which, indeed, was how one particular honeymelon-endowed corpse had ended up on a beach). Sometimes they got lost in their pronouns, and you had to go back, over and over, to figure out who was doing what to whom. Sometimes, amid pages of perfectly serviceable or even better-than-all-right writing … absolutely nothing happened.

But they were student writers; that’s why, presumably, they were here at Ripley and why they were in Jake’s office in Richard Peng Hall. They wanted to learn and get better, and they were on the whole open to his insights and suggestions, so when he told them he couldn’t tell from their actual words on the page what a character looked like or what they cared about, or that he didn’t feel compelled to go along with them on their personal journeys because he hadn’t been sufficiently engaged in their lives, or that there wasn’t enough information about NASCAR or the college sorority reunion for him to understand the significance of what was being described (or not described), or that the prose felt heavy or the dialogue meandered or the story itself just made him think so what? … they tended to nod, take notes, perhaps wipe away a tear or two, and then get down to work. The next time he saw them they’d be clutching fresh pages and thanking him for making their work in progress better.

Somehow he didn’t think that was going to be the case here.

Evan Parker could be heard making his leisurely way down the corridor, despite the fact that he was nearly ten minutes late for their appointment. The door was ajar and he entered without knocking, setting his Ripley water bottle down on Jake’s desk before taking the extra chair and angling it, as if the two of them were gathered around a coffee table for a comradely discussion rather than facing each other across a desk with any degree of formality or disparity in (nominal) authority. Jake watched him take from his canvas bag a legal pad, its topmost pages torn raggedly away. This he put on his own lap, and then—just as he had in the conference room—he crossed his arms tightly against his chest and gave his teacher an expression of not entirely benevolent amusement. “Well,” he said, “I’m here.”

Jake nodded. “I’ve been looking again at the excerpt you sent in. You’re quite a good writer.”

He had made up his mind to open with this. The use of the words “quite” and “good” had been thoroughly interrogated, but in the end this he had felt to be the best way forward, and indeed his student seemed ever so slightly disarmed.

“Well, glad to hear that. Especially since, as I said, I’m not at all sure writing can be taught.”

“And yet here you are.” Jake shrugged. “So how can I help?”

Evan Parker laughed. “Well, I could use an agent.”

Jake no longer had an agent, but he did not share this fact.

“There’s an industry day at the end of the session. I’m not sure who’s coming, but we usually have two or three agents and editors.”

“A personal recommendation would probably go even farther. You probably know how hard it is for an outsider to get his work in front of the right people.”

“Well, I’d never tell you connections don’t help, but just remember, no one has ever published a book as a favor. There’s too much at stake, too much money and too much professional liability if things don’t go well. Maybe a personal relationship can get your manuscript into somebody’s hands, but the work has to take it from there. And here’s something else: agents and editors really are looking for good books, and it’s not like the doors are shut to first-time authors. Far from it. For one thing, a first-time author isn’t dragging around disappointing sales numbers from previous books, and readers always want to discover someone new. A new writer’s interesting to agents because he might turn out to be Gillian Flynn or Michael Chabon, and the agent might get to be his agent for all the books he’s going to write, not just this one, so it’s not just income now, it’s income in the future. Believe it or not, you’re actually much better off than somebody who’s connected, if they’ve published a couple of books that weren’t wildly successful.”

Somebody like me, in other words, thought Jake.

“Well, that’s easy for you to say. You were actually once a big deal.”

Jake stared at him. So many directions to go. All of them dead ends.

“We’re all only as good as the work we’re doing now. Which is why I’d like to focus on what you’re writing. And where it might be going.”

To his surprise, Evan threw back his head and laughed. Jake looked up at the clock over the doorway. Four thirty. The meeting was half over.

“You want the plot, don’t you?”

“What?”

“Oh, please. I told you I had something great I was working on. You want to know what it is. You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I’m a writer,” Jake told him. He was doing everything he could to remove the offense from his voice. “But right now I’m a teacher, and as a teacher I’m trying to help you write the book you want to write. If you don’t want to say more about the story, we can still do some work on the excerpt you submitted, but without knowing how that’s going to connect, ultimately, within the context of a larger story, I’m going to be at a disadvantage.”

Not that it makes any difference to me, he added silently. It’s not as if I give a fuck.

The blond asshole in his office said nothing.

“The excerpt,” Jake tried. “It’s part of the novel you mentioned?”

Evan Parker seemed to sit with this very innocuous question for far longer than it warranted. Then he nodded. His thick blond wedge of hair nearly obscured one eye. “From an early chapter.”

“Well, I like the detail. The frozen pizza and the history teacher and the psychic help line. I get a stronger sense of who the daughter is than the mother from these pages, but that’s not a problem, necessarily. And of course I don’t know what decisions you’re making about narrative perspective. Right now it’s the daughter, obviously. Ruby. Are we going to stay with Ruby all through the novel?”

Again, that hardly warranted pause. “No. And yes.”

Jake nodded, as if that made sense.

Parker said: “It’s just … I didn’t want to, you know, give it all away in that room. This story I’m writing, it’s like, a sure thing. You understand?”

Jake stared at him. He wanted desperately to laugh. “I don’t think I do, actually. A sure thing for what?”

Evan sat forward. He took his Ripley water bottle and unscrewed the top, and he tipped it back into his mouth. Then he folded his arms again and said, almost with regret: “This story will be read by everybody. It will make a fortune. It will be made into a movie, probably by somebody really important, like an A-list director. It will get all the brass rings, you know what I mean?”

Jake, now truly lost for words, feared that he did.

“Like, Oprah will pick it for her book thing. It will be talked about on TV shows. TV shows where they don’t usually talk about books. Every book club. Every blogger. Every everything I don’t even know about. This book, there’s no way it can fail.”

That was too much. That broke the spell.

“Anything can fail. In the book world? Anything.”

“Not this.”

“Look,” said Jake. “Evan? Is it okay if I call you that?”

Evan shrugged. He seemed suddenly tired, as if this declaration of his greatness had exhausted him.