How to break a writer’s Heart

 LEDA QUIT COLLEGE the day she got the email. 

Her morning started out regular. Nine-thirty alarm for her ten o’clock class. She felt, as usual, that there was absolutely no way in hell she could get out of bed. She’d been working late last night, and then a bunch of the girls were going to Chloe’s place for a few drinks, but it turned out there was also coke and Leda had a policy of never turning down free coke. 

This had been happening a lot lately. Especially the coke. And aside from that, just the staying too late after work. 

The thing was, the girls from work were kind of the most interesting thing going on right now. Like Chloe was also the manager at an animal shelter and also worked as a dominatrix. And Emma used to be a heroin addict and then she got clean and started working needle exchange and passing out food to homeless people. 

When you compared it to all that, school seemed pretty stale. Not to mention, Leda’s body was not reacting well to mornings. 

Still, on every morning but this one, she went to class. Five minutes after the alarm, she would dutifully pull herself to vertical no matter how horrible it felt, swig some cold-brew coffee from the jug in the refrigerator, and have her butt in the desk not more than five minutes late. Usually in the clothes she’d slept in, which were the clothes she’d come home in, sweatpants and a drapey t-shirt and no bra, a giant coat and boots for warmth, her hair a bleached mess standing up all over. 

The morning class was creative writing. Leda had just decided last semester that she wanted to be a writer, and there was only one section of introduction to creative writing, at ten on Mondays and Wednesdays. It was taught by semi-famous novelist Candace Bellwether, who hated Leda’s writing. 

“I would encourage everyone to take Leda’s piece as a lesson,” she would say, fake-smiling her contempt, “about why we should avoid salacious topics in our writing.” 

But they weren’t really salacious topics. They were just Leda’s life. 

Maybe she actually just hated Leda. 

Leda had been dancing at the Foxy Female for the last two and a half months. It was all the way in Daily City, across the bridge and through San Francisco. She learned about it from Kaycee who was in her feminist studies class. 

“It’s woman-owned,” Kaycee said. “And the money is sick.” 

Sick money sounded like a great idea to Leda. Her parents were in a battle over who could pay less for her college living expenses. Her father was covering rent and her mother had food and bills, and there wasn’t money for anything else like clothes or drinks or cigarettes. Sometimes there wasn’t quite enough money even for food. Leda’s mother sent the same amount of money each month, and if one month for example the gas bill was higher because Leda’s roommate wouldn’t stop cranking the heat at night, Leda would buy a ten-dollar case of ramen and live on that for a couple weeks. 

“I don’t think I could be a stripper,” Leda said. “I mean, no offense.” 

“Dancer,” Kaycee said. “It’s not as bad as you think. Just topless, no big deal. Or you can be a server. They make minimum wage plus tips.” 

Kaycee got Leda a couple server shifts. Leda didn’t have a car, so she rode with Kaycee. An hour and twenty minutes on the way to Daily City when there was still traffic, thirty minutes back to Berkeley when there wasn’t, usually listening to music and singing or talking about their feminist studies class. 

“It’s so important for women to know they own their own bodies,” Kaycee said. “Your body is yours and you can do whatever you want with it.” 

At work, Leda carried trays of drinks and the club’s signature onion rings over to little tables, made flirty conversations with the customers. They were mostly men in groups, puffed up and buoyant: work buddies on payday, guys from out of town still wearing conference name tags, bachelor parties. A few guys by themselves, which freaked Leda out but they were always polite. Several straight couples, looking terrified and pretending to have fun.

She watched Kaycee slink to one side of the stage and the other, hips winding like belly dancer, small breasts bouncing in and then out of her cherry-red bra. The couples held hands on top of their tables as they watched, the single guys looking weirdly comfortable, and suddenly it was the groups of guys who were awkward, unsure whether to make eye contact or to look over Kaycee’s head at the green curtains at the back of the stage. 

Then, while Leda brought fresh rounds of beer and more onion rings, Kaycee visited each table, her bra back on, inviting them to stick money in her clothing. Leda watched her count it in the dressing room after their shift was over: four hundred, five hundred, six-fifty total. 

After the first week, Leda got her hundred and twelve dollar check from the owners, Jackie and Terrianne. They were an old lesbian couple, with short sun-bleached hair and very tan faces like they spent a lot of time at the beach, even though no one in northern California ever went to the beach and there would be no sun there if they did.

“I think I might want to try dancing,” she told Kaycee on the ride home. 

Kaycee laughed. “Yeah, I thought you might.” 

Now that Leda was going to be a writer, she took notes about everything that happened at the Foxy Female. She wrote them in a small red notebook, typed them out into stories, brought them to her creative writing class. 

“Strippers again,” Candace Bellwether said, holding Leda’s draft. She had written about Emma’s heroin addiction, the track marks on her arms, how she had gotten clean by spending a year working on a goat farm upstate. 

“Dancers,” Leda said. 

“I don’t think this depicts a very positive image of women,” Candace Bellwether said. 

“I thought it was hot,” said the mustached guy who wanted to be David Foster Wallace.

The woman next to him said, “I think stories that depict drug abuse are trite.” 

Candace Bellwether nodded like this was the correct answer.

“For your next piece,” she said, “I want something besides strippers. Why not explore your, um.” Candace Bellwether wrinkled her nose. “Cultural heritage. Have you read Amy Tan?”

Leda looked around the room, a semicircle of desks. Less confrontational students bit their fingernails, staring down at Leda’s draft in front of them, covering it in scratchy doodles. Nobody said anything good about the story. Candance Bellwether’s second novel had been declared best of the year by Adroit Magazine, which had instantly launched it to best-seller status, and even thought that was seven years ago, it had marked her as a permanently qualified expert on what could and couldn’t be written about.

“I’m a huge fan of Asian narrative structure,” David Foster Wallace guy said.

When Leda got her drafts back with anonymous comments, one of them said, in capital letters and purple pen, I LOVE THIS. Leda held it in both hands, read the short message over and over, heart pounding like it was a love letter from a secret crush.

“Join me for a line in back,” Leda’s boss Jackie said.

Leda had just finished a set, not her best. The late night and early classes were getting to her. Her eyes felt puffy while she danced, and she had to clench her jaw to keep from yawning. She hoped she wasn’t about to get a talking-to. She tried to look as professional as possible snorting white powder off the mirrored tray, like how a lawyer would do it in an Eighties movie. 

“You go to college with Kaycee, right?” Jackie wiped her nose with the back of her extremely tanned hand. “What are you studying?” 

“I’m majoring in sociology,” Leda said. “But actually I want to be a writer.” 

“That’s a fabulous goal.” Jackie leaned in and smiled, a scrappy old aunt giving out some sage life advice. Leda could smell her hair gel, sharp like rubbing alcohol. “Terrianne is a writer. I was wondering, would you like to have dinner sometime?” 

“What?” Leda asked. It was stronger coke than she was used to, and this conversation wasn’t going where she’d expected.

“Dinner,” Jackie said. “Like a date? Me and Terrianne are open, and I think you’re just adorable.”

Her tone was so nonchalant, so indistinguishable from the advice-aunt that Leda almost looked behind her to see if she was talking to someone else in the room.

“I’m really flattered.” Carefully, with as much poker face as the coke would allow. “But—” 

“No problem,” Jackie said, like this happened all the time. “I always figure it can’t hurt to ask.” 

Leda wondered if this meant she was fired.

“We should do a group read,” Jackie said. “Do you want to share some of your writing? Everyone who wants to join could read it and then we could all get drinks and discuss it.”

“That’s sweet of you to offer,” Leda said. “But I don’t want to force people to read my writing.”

“There’s no forcing around here,” Jackie said. “I think a few of the other gals might want to share their stories, too.”

The girl with the purple pen was named Rebecca Martinez. Her hair was purple like her pen, and she wore black stompy boots and a hoodie that must have started out black but was more like dark gray now.

Leda tried to get her into a conversation after class a couple times.

“Hi,” she’d say, or “I loved your first story.”

Rebecca always smiled politely and then ran off, black clothes whirling a storm around her skinny frame. She had only shared one story so far. It was about vampires, and Candace Bellwether had hated it almost as much as she hated Leda’s stories. Leda wasn’t super into vampires, but she liked how Rebecca’s vampires spoke Spanish and hung out at Mexican goth clubs.

It would be nice to have a friend in the class, Leda thought. A writer friend, someone to share work with, two writers helping each other. An ally against Candace Bellwether, a reason to bother coming to class.

“This is hilarious,” Emma said. “No seriously, if I saw this online or whatever, I would read it.”

For their first meeting of the Foxy Feedback Writer’s Club, Leda had chosen a story that she couldn’t share in class. It was about Candace Bellwether—name changed, but same haughtiness, same casual ability to drop a quick, offhand phrase that would break a writer’s heart. Same dismissals of Leda’s and Rebecca’s stories, too lewd, too lowbrow. With a little distance, Leda could see how it might be kind of funny.  

“Did she really say that thing about your piece serving as a lesson of what not to do?” Chloe asked. “That’s low.”

“She’s such a snob,” Emma said.

“Did you notice,” Jackie said. “She only hates the writing by the women of color students?”

The six woman around Leda nodded, clinked their drinks, murmured that’s right and that’s what I’m saying. Obvious to them, evidently, but she hadn’t even thought of it. All semester, a room full of white kids trying to be David Foster Wallace and Elena Ferrante, and Candace Bellwether had it in for the Taiwanese stripper and the Mexican vampire.

You should try to publish this,” Kaycee said. “Adroit’s website has a section called In the First Person that’s all reader stories.”

“Adroit?” Leda asked. “Isn’t that shooting kind of high?” 

“It’s a good idea.” Jackie winked at her. “Nothing wrong with shooting high.”

Rebecca was supposed to hand out copies her second story the next Monday, but she wasn’t in class. She wasn’t in class on Wednesday, the day when her story would have been discussed, or any days after that. She was gone.

Leda had been hoping to invite her to the Foxy Feedback group. The plan was to write a note on the back of Rebecca’s draft, along with her email and phone number.

“So much of writing is about a resilient spirit,” Candace Bellwether said, not naming anyone in particular. “Some people cannot take criticism.” A few students nodded their agreement. Other ones just stared down at their desks. Leda wondered if she had stared at her own desk like that the first time Candace Bellwether had insulted Rebecca’s story. This time, she vowed to look up, to let her anger be seen even if she was too scared to fight.

Snob, she whispered, too quiet for anyone but herself to hear.

Racist.

On the day Leda quit college, when her nine-thirty alarm went off, she pulled her phone off the charger and checked her email. Twice already during the semester, she had dragged her wrecked body the ten minutes to class in the cold on three hours sleep, only to find a note on the door saying Candace Bellwether would not be making it to campus. 

“Check your email,” she said, when the students complained. “I always send notification.” ‘

Which was true, but both times at odd hours, 2:30am, 8:45, so you’d have to check in the morning and then even check again before you left your apartment. Checking her phone, she said a non-verbal prayer for some good news, that creative writing was cancelled for the day, even though it was supposed to be her favorite class.

There was an email from Candace, but it was just a reminder to please double-space their drafts. Leda threw the phone down on her pillow, then picked it up again.

She could swear she had just seen the word Adroit. 

It was hard to find anything in the inbox. Her vision had gone double, and random words kept jumping out at her. 

There it was. From Adroit, subject: Your submission. 

“We’d like to publish your piece, How to Break a Writer’s Heart,” it said. “Please find a contract attached with terms of payment.” 

Leda held the phone in one hand. With the other hand, she covered her mouth so she wouldn’t scream.

Then, fingers shaking, she forwarded the email to Kaycee.

“Check it out,” she wrote at the top. “I’m quitting college.”

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