The Way It Ends

by Marnie Vinge

  Inside the ballroom, the low warm glow of artificial candlelight shimmered inside crystal chandeliers. Tables were laid out, their plastic tops dressed up with white cloths and astonishingly balanced centerpieces that involved flowers and a candle inside a lantern on each. I smiled at one of my professors—Eileen Carrigan, narrative non-fiction—who nodded with a wry smile in return, as though she possessed knowledge about the outcome of the evening that I did not. My stomach lurched at the thought that Tom might have whispered in her ear.

  The whole evening felt like the Oscars. Though at its core, the ceremony was a small departmental awards banquet, so much more than a gilded piece to adorn my mantle was riding on it. If I was given the Headlights Award, and subsequently the Gorman Fellowship, I would be in the perfect position to publish, to critical acclaim, before I hit thirty. Students in the department shared wet dreams about the prospect. Tom’s discreet relationships with editors in places like New York City and Chicago made all of us salivate like a pack of wolves. The fact that Tom had told me, only two weeks prior, that I would be a shoo-in for the Gorman Fellowship did little as a tonic for my nerves.

  I knew that he would keep good on his word, but the waiting was excruciating. Going through the motions of dinner and the other departmental awards seemed unthinkable. I needed that gold-leafed retro Ford statue in my hot little hands. I needed to breathe a sigh of relief, step out into the winter night, and inhale the possibilities that lay ahead. I needed the evening to be over. I think there must have been some small piece of me that knew the scales had tipped, and I was no longer in favor.

  Professor Carrigan passed me by and her hips swayed over to the bar, where I watched her hand the bartender a folded bill in exchange for what looked like a vodka tonic, a drink I’d seen her order before at this banquet when I was a student not-yet-eligible to receive the Headlights Award. The night hummed with possibility.

  My eyes hunted the room and hungrily searched for Tom. I hadn’t seen him outside of class for two weeks. Though it felt like we’d ended the relationship amicably, I had a certain uneasiness about seeing him. At the thought of seeing him outside his office, my stomach lurched again, but not out of anticipation.

  It was then that I spotted him. He stood in the corner, a drink in hand and his wife, Vanessa, draped over his arm. He smiled and was halfway through a laugh when he saw me. His mouth relaxed, his lips going limp at the corners of his mouth. My eyes darted to the floor—back to him—back to the floor—and to him once again. His hadn’t strayed since they’d found me. He said something to the woman he was chatting with and excused himself. His long stride seemed to glide across the room. I was paralyzed. My legs wouldn’t move.

  “Ione,” Tom said as he closed the distance between us. My name was only just audible over the conversations around us. The smile had returned to his mouth. That smile I’d grown so familiar with. I wanted to press my finger to his lips, quiet him, forget the fight and leave this place. But somewhere in the deepest recesses of my heart, I knew it wasn’t possible—that it never had been.

  My relationship with Tom had been doomed from the start. Its beginnings reeked of naivete; a tragic romance barely worthy of the paper it would take to record its history. But it seemed much more important than that to me. It was cliché—a teacher and student—but it was real, and it was the first passion I’d felt since the death of my father. That loss had sapped the life from my world and Tom’s kiss had breathed it back in, however misguided it was.

  “Professor Wolsieffer,” I returned his greeting. My tone was painfully formal, and it stung me to address him that way when only weeks before I’d been in his bed, my hair falling like a golden curtain around his face.

  The proper address smarted him. I saw it on his face. A microexpression of hurt followed by a tempering smile meant to hide his more visceral reaction.

  Immediately, I wanted to take it back. He looked around, amusement on his face. It was infuriating. He hid his hurt while mine flew like a flag at full mast on my sleeve.

  “Tom—” I started.

  He raised a hand and stopped me short, like a coach advising a player on third base that it’s not safe to come home yet.

  “It’s fine,” he smiled. “I hope you get everything you deserve tonight. You’ve earned it.”

  I smiled back; my lips pressed tightly together against my teeth. I knew that some animals interpreted a grin as a sign of aggression, and I didn’t want that to be the case here.

  Before I could respond adequately, he was gone. His back retreated across the room and I caught Vanessa’s eye. Annoyance lived there, a permanent fixture of her gaze. I went to the bar to grab a drink.

  My phone buzzed in my purse as the bartender handed me my whiskey. I fished it out and saw my mother’s number. I forbade her from coming tonight on the pretense that it would only make me more nervous. The truth was that she would have sensed something was wrong. She would have sniffed out my affair with Tom in a matter of minutes like a bloodhound.

  I let it go to voicemail and found my seat at a table of my peers. Birdie sat, legs crossed under her dress, in the seat next to me. It was a childlike pose. The chasm that my affair with Tom had created had begun to be mended and she smiled at me and bumped my shoulder.

  “It’s your night,” she whispered conspiratorially.

  I smiled back.

  Awards were handed out, and the evening marched inevitably toward the Headlights Award like a pack of lemmings unaware of an approaching cliff. Students accepted them with gracious smiles while professors bestowed them, proud of their fledgling writers. The evening wound to a close slowly like a spring-loaded door shutting itself. What would happen tonight determined the opening of other doors—doors that would otherwise remain shut tightly and even locked in some cases.

  And then it was time. Tom sat at a table beside the stage; his arm hung loosely around Vanessa’s chair. He was at ease in his kingdom like a lion at home on the savannah. He smiled when the announcer stepped to the podium. My stomach clenched.

  “And now for the award that everyone’s been waiting on,” she said. Her name was Holly Gettner. She was one of the last recipients of the award and one of the last students to receive the Gorman Fellowship. After her year spent hard at work, and with Tom’s aid, she went on to publish a contemporary debut that became a best-seller in the last year. In a moment’s time, I would be on a collision course with the same future. I held my breath.

  I counted my heartbeats. They were ravenous, starving for the moment that I’d slaved for over the course of the past several years. A piece of Holly’s hair fell forward as she bowed her head to read the contents of the envelope. I exhaled.

  “Well, it looks like our winner this year is Birdie Hauer!” The words tumbled out of her mouth and coiled into my ear like a snake, finding a hole to call home for the winter, before I was able to process them. I turned to look at Birdie. The shock was apparent on her face. She stood. She smiled and covered her mouth, the gap between her two front teeth momentarily obscured.

  The crowd roared with applause. My throat constricted. Rage thundered in my ears. Tom had broken his promise. My eyes darted to him, and I found him staring straight at me as he applauded the recipient of the award. I watched as the corner of his mouth curled into a cruel smile.

  This was my punishment.

  Birdie looked back at me for permission. I stared at her, slack jawed. She had to make a choice in that moment, too.

  I stood from the table as Birdie accepted the gilded Ford replica. I stumbled and grabbed the back of someone’s chair. I apologized. They glared. Eyes were on me. Eyes that had expected me to win. Professor Carrigan looked at me. She was clapping but her lips were just barely parted, like an I’m so sorry waited to be born from them.

  I didn’t want her pity. I wanted to go home. I wanted to throw up.

  And I wanted to kill Tom Wolsieffer.

  Part Two

  BIRDIE

  BIRDIE
>
  7 YEARS AGO

  She looked back before she stepped forward. Applause thundered, shaking the chandeliers and making the glass tinkle against itself. Birdie read surprise on the faces of the students around her, but a thought flared on the periphery of her mind: Why not me?

  The image of Ione’s shock at hearing Birdie’s name instead of her own began to burrow into Birdie, making itself a nest that it would not soon leave. She turned just in time to see Ione retreating out of the ballroom, and for a second she thought of going after her. She thought of leaving indignantly on behalf of her friend, enraged by Dr. Wolsieffer’s betrayal. But before she could act on it, another student’s hand was at her spine, one finger digging in and pushing her forward. She looked back at him—at Nolan—and nodded as he urged her forward.

  She looked over her shoulder one more time and found Ione gone. The ballroom of people looked at her. She had slipped out of the skin that she’d worn for so long, wilting in Ione’s shadow. The temptation to step into the light was electrifying.

  Why shouldn’t she accept the award? She’d worked just as hard—maybe harder—and she hadn’t done any of that work on her back. A smile threatened to reveal the gap between her front teeth, and she stifled it long enough to bring a hand to her mouth, always conscious of the imperfection.

  She looked across the room at Dr. Wolsieffer, sitting beside his wife. What had Ione expected? There was no way the affair wouldn’t have ended in fire. Birdie just hadn’t realized she herself might become engulfed in the flames.

  His eyes met hers, a smile on his lips. Almost cruel, if Birdie had described it. He looked to the back of the room, searching for Ione. Not finding her, he watched as Birdie cautiously took the stage. She felt a little like Carrie on prom night.

  She accepted the award from Holly, her hands shaking. She looked out across the room and smiled. This time, she didn’t hide the gap. A feeling washed over her, like warm saltwater lapping the shore. She stood on the threshold of her future with the most coveted award in the department laid at her feet.

  “You can say something if you’d like,” Holly said in her ear, out of range of the microphone.

  Birdie didn’t know what she would say. A bitterness swept over her, making her want to say directly to Ione, I told you so. I told you this would never work out for you. But her friend was gone.

  She shook her head, declining a moment in front of the microphone. Instead, she raised the award over her head and the applause roared again throughout the room. She looked down at the gilded Ford replica. This award would cost her whatever friendship had been salvaged with Ione.

  Was it worth it?

  Birdie had worked just as hard. She’d slogged through draft after draft, revision and critiques from classmates and from Dr. Wolsieffer himself. She’d gone to his office without Ione. Except when she went to his office, she actually went there to work. Something told her that she wanted this more—more than anyone here tonight, and certainly more than Ione.

  She tucked the piece of gilded metal into the crook of her arm and descended the stairs that led to the stage, her kitten heels wobbly from the adrenaline. A boy reached out to help her down, but she didn’t need his help. She smiled down at the floor, placing her feet carefully. When she looked up, Dr. Wolsieffer stood in front of her.

  “Can I see you for a minute?” he asked. His eyes narrowed on the award like a hawk’s. There was something in the way that he said it that didn’t indicate pure joy for Birdie. Her stomach flipped.

  “Sure,” she said.

  Dr. Wolsieffer turned on his heel and led Birdie out a side exit of the ballroom into the hallway of the union. With one hand in his pocket, he walked onward. They reached a small door in the wall and he pulled a set of keys out. He unlocked the door and ushered her inside.

  The small room was a janitorial closet, and why Wolsieffer would have had the keys to it baffled Birdie. But then she thought it might have been one of the many locations that he liked to hold his trysts. No one could convince her that it had only been Ione.

  “This where you bring all the girls?” Birdie asked.

  Dr. Wolsieffer grabbed her wrist.

  “Hey!”

  “Listen,” he said. His grip loosened, he found himself again. “I wanted you to have this from the beginning. But things got complicated.”

  Birdie snorted, skeptical.

  “I saw something in you,” he said. His eyes seemed to glitter in the gloom of the closet, a little light pouring in from a series of windows above the shelving.

  It was something Birdie had never heard from anyone. Not her parents, not teachers in high school. She’d always been trouble—or troubled—however you wanted to look at it. One seemed a little more fun than the other, she thought. But she’d always felt that she had a gift for writing.

  “You have what it takes,” Dr. Wolsieffer said. “I want to take that and make it blossom.”

  His words were electric. Her skin hummed like the conversation had more to do with sex than anything.

  “But you can’t see her anymore,” he said.

  Birdie knew who he meant. She’d known the moment she’d accepted the award that things would never be the same—maybe never even okay—between Ione and herself. She’d known there would be a choice, he was just laying it out in front of her in words.

  “She’ll try to drag you down, Birdie,” he said. It was a plea. “She’s weight in a world where you can’t carry other people. If you want to fly, you have to let her go.”

  Birdie had thought of Ione as many things, weight not being one of them. The times they’d shared hadn’t been weighty, except in moments where they’d revealed slivers of themselves that other people would have gotten cut on. But she cherished those moments. She felt like she’d made a mistake in letting Holly hand her that award.

  “I don’t know—”

  “Do you want to be a writer? Do you want to have your name on the cover of a book?” he asked.

  “I—”

  “You either want it or you don’t. And sometimes to get what we want, we have to make sacrifices. Sometimes the people that start with us don’t make it to the finish line. This isn’t a cute news clip where you can carry her to the end of the marathon when her legs give out. The real world doesn’t work like that. And certainly not the publishing world.”

  Birdie thought about it for a moment. She knew what he was saying was true. She couldn’t carry Ione through this. If she wanted it, she’d have to get it for herself. And here was Birdie’s opportunity to have everything she’d ever wanted. From the moment she’d first written a story in high school, she’d known that she wanted to tell them for the rest of her life. The magic in creating a narrative—telling lies to tell the truth, as it was said—had sucked her under like a strong wave. She was at the mercy of the tide now.

  “Sometimes we have to want things for ourselves more than we want them for other people,” he said. “She deserves to succeed, too, but not like this.”

  “You mean not as your girlfriend?” Birdie asked.

  “That’s not what I said,” Dr. Wolsieffer tried to clarify. “What happened—”

  “I saw what happened,” Birdie said.

  His eyes narrowed, a threat looming there.

  “What happened tonight probably destroyed her,” Birdie said. “And what do I have to show for it?” she laughed. “A trophy and…you?” she pointed at him with the Ford.

  “You have an opportunity to change your life,” he said evenly. “Let me guess. No family, few friends—mostly acquaintances—and little else going for you outside of your creative life.”

  The words stung, like an antiseptic in a wound.

  “You don’t know me,” Birdie barked, her voice full of false bravado.

  “I know enough,” Dr. Wolsieffer said. “Meet me in my office next Monday if you want to keep the award. Think about it. This could be the beginning of everything for you.”

  He left her there in the close
t. The door swung shut on its hinges as he exited. She looked around at the stacks of cleaning supplies, toilet paper, and paper towels. Then she looked down at her hands where the Ford replica hung at her side, impotent without Dr. Wolsieffer’s push to hot wire the gears.

  Birdie had a hell of a choice in front of her.

  VANESSA

  Vanessa stands at the edge of the pig enclosure. The one she had slaughtered has already gathered flies in the corner, its pink snout losing the color of life quickly. The blood had been useful, though. She would have done well as a pioneer, she thinks. The Donner party might have made it if she’d been in charge.

  If only Tom thought the same.

  In the days since the shooting, Vanessa has seen him weaken in ways that she’d never thought possible. She could have led this group better than him from the beginning, not just now. She knows that. And Tom knows that. For every way that he is brutal, she has him outdone. You can’t marry the devil and remain an angel.

  She leans on the edge, thinking about disposing of the pig carcass. She could ask Jeff to do it. She’s already dirtied her hands as much as she cares to for the afternoon.

  As flies buzz the deceased animal, something buzzes inside her mind. Something in there is rotting, just like the porcine specimen in front of her. The idea that Birdie’s baby might not be okay. She needs to do something.

  There isn’t a doctor here. Of all the people that they’ve attracted, doctors haven’t been among them. Vanessa would have thought that it had to do with critical thinking if it hadn’t been for the people of various other professions they’d lured in. Lawyers and engineers. People who had master’s degrees and whose jobs depending on their ability to make critical choices.