Dear Reader

by Mary O'Connell

  Oh, she was the mousiest of explorers, too nervous to check the map and now desperate to find it. Had the book perhaps dropped out of her backpack when she paid the driver—was it in the cab, whisked off forever, and Flannery an unwitting barterer, now holding a dozen roses in exchange?

  At the gates of Columbia Flannery searched the sidewalk—no book—and the street … but saw only bits of paper and crushed coffee cups in the snow sludge by the curb. She looked up at the statue of the woman holding the open book: How odd it was to see a female statue holding something other than the baby Jesus. Flannery thought of her grandmother’s wedding photo, where she had paused in the Mass to lay a bouquet of red roses at the marble feet of the Virgin Mary. Her grandmother had been a true believer, while Flannery’s parents were merely sarcastic, and Flannery herself was just unsure. But she knew her grandmother’s gesture had been meant to honor what she believed in: a fullness of heart that made space for the miraculous, motherhood, and the promise of Heaven. Because Flannery believed in the relief and comfort of books, of ideas, she propped her roses at the pedestal of the goddess of the open book, reverent. She bowed her head, as if being dramatic and freaky might help her find Miss Sweeney’s book, might help her divine Miss Sweeney’s precise whereabouts, and she looked up at the blank, iris-free eyes of the statue and said aloud: “I will find her!”

  Miss Sweeney answered back, her voice smooth carmine ink on creamy cardstock paper: And you will do it with the skill set of the self-aggrandizing high school narrator, you dear icon whisperer.

  Three

  “Caitlin! Caitlin!”

  Flannery looked away from the statue and saw the boy from the bench, walking quickly, waving at her. Oh, how her heart pounded at his thrilling mistake. He’d shouted the name so beautifully—the hard C and the lush l of it!—that she wished it were her own. As he came closer, and Flannery saw what was in his hand, relief—ahhhh—made her weirdly place her own hand to her heart, as if she were perched on a Tuscan veranda in a low-cut ball gown. He was holding Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights like a choirboy with a missalette, the open book placed in his palms.

  “Hey! You dropped your book.” His fingerless gloves revealed his bitten-down fingernails, his mashed nail beds. He pointed to Miss Sweeney’s name on the title page. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, really, Caitlin Sweeney must have sat on a flowery canopy bed in Kansas and written her name in this copy of Wuthering Heights: the C had a curlicue, the Y had a swirling, baroque tail. Now a boy was pointing to her name, thinking Caitlin Sweeney was the girl standing in front of him in Manhattan. Flannery considered the unpredictable migration of physical objects, and she wondered if Miss Sweeney was safe—she did!—but the boy was standing so close she could smell his breath mint.

  “Your book dropped out of your backpack. It was under the bench.”

  “Oh, okay,” Flannery said officiously, as if this were a profitable business deal she was closing with confidence. Ah, yes, the inevitable return of the missing book. “Thanks so much.”

  But she was so happy to have the book back in her possession that she began to giggle with a nervous enthusiasm that suggested the return of a lost paperback book was pure comedy gold. “How embarrassing! I guess I did drop my book.” It wasn’t much of a conversational gem, but the boy rallied.

  “I’m always dropping books myself. It’s quite the hobby.” He flashed the peace sign and in the stoned cadence of an ancient American hippie, he said, “Drop, like, you know, books, not bombs, people.”

  Cold clouds shooting from his mouth and books and bombs and low winter clouds and a dog walker brushing past, being pulled along by three dogs: a schnauzer and an apricot poodle wearing a fuchsia diamanté collar, and another dog, the breed the Obamas owned—oh, what was it called? As Flannery looked into the boy’s eyes she envisioned the First Dog bounding across the White House lawn and she dearly wished she were not the sort of person to conjure presidential dogs when something exciting happened, which was never, except for right now, the world cracking open.

  He put Wuthering Heights into her hands. “Right. There’s your book, Caitlin Sweeney.” He pointed vaguely at Flannery, raising his fingers up and down. “What’s with the look, Caitlin? Going for the school-girl look or are you an actual schoolgirl?”

  Her stupid uniform! “Actual schoolgirl. And my name’s actually not Caitlin.”

  “Well, then. What’s your name, actual schoolgirl?”

  “Flannery Fields.”

  He cocked his head to the left. “Flannery Fields? Is that really your name?”

  “It really is.”

  His first moment of interest! Squinting, he smiled, as if delighted by what he had stumbled upon: Flannery Fields. Even if he was about to make fun of her name, he was suddenly interested in her because of it. Flannery floated back to an impossible memory. She sensed her neonatal self opening her mouth, amniotic fluid bubbling in her throat as her parents stared at the sonogram that revealed her gender, and debated the name Flannery: I really want to! You sure? I think so! Should we…? Even with her organs still forming, tethered to her mother by a length of umbilical cord, the fetus that would be Flannery could divine this moment, could offer up a gurgling, ghosty, Do it, people!

  Miss Sweeney chortled in her brain: Though it would be the best band name ever, let’s not dwell too much on The Fetus that Would Be Flannery.

  “Flannery’s really quite a fantastic name.”

  And there it was, from the boy’s lips to God’s ears, forever and ever, amen. The belated yet definitive victory of her name, for having to endure the eye rolling—even from the flipping teachers—at roll call, and the inane nickname that revealed the dullardly meanness of her tormenters. (Was Flannel Sheets really the best they could cook up?) And of course the granddaddy of all horrors: studying her namesake’s classic short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” in freshman English class and the accompanying jokes about mixing up the adjectives in the title, of having Mrs. Piccone announce, her voice an octave too high for sincerity: “Aren’t we lucky to have our very own Flannery at Sacred Heart!” Of having Callie Martin lean in close and whisper, her breath Trident fresh, her voice syruped with faux kindness: “And wow—weird!—you look just like Flannery O’Connor too!”

  Flannery had studied the black-and-white photo on the book jacket, and while it was true that Flannery O’Connor was The Very Worst Thing A Girl Could Be (not pretty), she had rather liked her cat-eye glasses and sleeveless plaid dress; she thought that Flannery O’Connor looked polite and intelligent, fully cognizant that the God she adored had not only had graced her with the famed lupus but with an underdeveloped jawline, so that boys, who were apparently enslaved to visual symmetry—regular madmen for the quotidian!—might pass her over for the generically pretty, thus leaving Flannery O’Connor free to develop her formidable talent. Flannery Fields, to her dismay, could imagine no worse fate.

  “If you like people to mock your name,” Flannery told the boy matter-of-factly, “you can’t do much better than mine. What’s your name?” Oh, God, wait! Stop! Do-over! Had she put too much emphasis, weirdly, on the your? Draped that one syllable with nonsensical innuendo? There were so many potential ways to embarrass oneself, millions of replicating snowflakes of humiliation, each uniquely cut.

  “I’m afraid my name’s not quite as good as yours, Flannery. It’s Heath. It’s Heath Smith.”

  Flannery laughed out loud, but felt the burn of his mean joke. Must everyone taunt her with her love for her favorite book?

  “Very clever.” She held up Wuthering Heights. “Rhymes with?”

  “I imagine I’m not quite as taken with rhymes as you are, Flannery. And is that really your given name? Flannery Fields? You’re not actually Caitlin Sweeney?”

  “It’s a long story.” Flannery stretched her social skills by attempting some jokey small talk: “But chances are good that I’m not Caitlin Sweeney.”

  “Well, chances are good that
you’re going to say no to this; I shouldn’t even bother asking.” He sighed, as if he were no stranger to the myriad disappointments a day might put forth. Flannery looked up at his dark eyes and the curved planes of his face, wondering how that could ever be true. She thought of Cathy contemplating her deep, spiritual love for Heathcliff. “He shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, but because he’s more myself than I am.” The handsome part probably didn’t hurt, though.

  “If you’re not in a terrible hurry, maybe you’d have a bit of lunch with me?” He was not charmingly tentative; he sounded confident that Flannery would indeed like to join him for lunch. And she needed to read—not go to lunch—she needed to find Miss Sweeney on the Columbia campus. Yet the whereabouts of Miss Sweeney slipped into a category marked SECONDARY and happiness came as a trapped bird in her chest, bashing his soft wings inside her rib cage, and she wondered if she might be levitating. At this rate Flannery would have to work hard to keep Miss Sweeney in her birdbrain thoughts at all.

  “Actually, even if you’re in a hurry, I guess I’d still like for you to have lunch with me.” Now his voice sounded spiked with loneliness, and so Flannery felt a quick rush of love for him, though she knew she was being foolish, a valentine jackass extraordinaire.

  “Uh. Lunch? Oh. Sure!” Flannery was in pure cavewoman mode, her monosyllabic reply a false reflection of her SAT score.

  “Great. Oh God. I can’t believe I just said that even-if-you’re-in-a-hurry bit. I sound like a sociopath, right?” He made his voice deep and starched, a Masterpiece Theatre voice-over: “He met his victims on the Columbia campus, luring them with dropped books. It is entirely unclear why any lovely young woman would have exchanged even three words with him.”

  Flannery smiled down at the pavement and wondered why her once-firm brain was softening into an unrepentant compliment whore, why it swirled mental violets and roses around the word lovely. He thought she was lovely! He found her pretty, captivating, dear! Or … did he? God, usage was everything! How she feared the colloquial, the reductive British lovely, which she thought meant quite satisfactory. Thank you for those lovely mashed potatoes. But she was thrilled, regardless, her bright uptown joy highlighted by the fact that she was not at school, a random gray day unfolding, but on a NYC street with a British boy who was grumbling about lunch options.

  “In this blighted landscape of cran-apple muffins and pan au chocolat, of mango flaxseed smoothies and turkey sandwiches dressed with local organic field greens”—with a grand, sarcastic hand flourish, he indicated the clogged traffic on Broadway—“quite obviously from the verdant fields of upper Manhattan, what I’d really like is a tureen of hot applesauce and a generous serving of leg of mutton stew.”

  “That sounds so good.” Thrilled, sure, but worried that she was already turning into that daffy girl who agreed with any old thing a good-looking guy said, a once-brave adventurer happy to be shipwrecked on Patriarchy Island, Flannery quickly added: “Except I’m a vegan.”

  “A vegan?” Heath chuckled, and cut his eyes to the side.

  But then the sky opened up, the surprise of ice globes pelting down, and all along the street came the harsh blooms of black umbrellas shooting open, of people canopying their newspapers over their heads or shielding their faces with backpacks, and Flannery knew this as the hot breath of Miss Sweeney on her neck, because her thoughts about Miss Sweeney weren’t even secondary now. She certainly wasn’t feeling the valiant despair of a person combing a college campus for a missing teacher. She was standing outside the gates of Columbia with Heath Smith, marveling at her bizarre good fortune.

  “Good God,” Heath said, flipping up the collar of his leather jacket. “This hail is as big as pearl onions! This wuthering day is a certain omen of pearl onion Armageddon.”

  Wuthering. Flannery’s sunken heart rose again, her heart flew up and up, and Miss Sweeney’s red-pen voice said: Your heart flew up, Flannery? Is your heart a muscular blood-kite? Well, Flannery’s heart really was a muscular blood-kite by this point, and the hail felt like magical crystal rocks striking her body. At any given second a pink and purple Pegasus might come thundering down Broadway. Because: wuthering. In her most grandiose daydreams Flannery would never have envisioned going to lunch in Manhattan with a boy who used the word wuthering. Emily Brontë herself had to explain the word on page 4 of her masterpiece: “‘Wuthering’ being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather.”

  Heath put his hand on Flannery’s back—oh, she was glad to be coatless, to feel his whorled fingertips frying through her shirt, her cami, her bra strap, and then, skin—as they crossed Broadway like any lovers hustling along in the rain.

  He pulled open the door of the first restaurant they passed, Nussbaum & Wu, and ordered cappuccinos and grilled cheese sandwiches—they ordered the same thing!—baby Swiss on rye, a non-vegan lunch to be sure. But Flannery consoled herself that cheese wasn’t animal death, not even animal suffering, if the cow was raised on a family farm—Bessie and a silver bucket! A striped cat—fat from milk and mice—figure-eighting around the cow’s legs while the kindly farmer on a wooden stool milked his favorite Guernsey. But the milk used to make the baby Swiss was probably from the dairy operation exposed in that documentary, the cows fatigued and miserable and penned in suffocating enclosures. Flannery vowed to eat more purely in the future while she enjoyed her sandwich, so greasy and glistening and delicious.

  “This is crap,” Heath said decisively, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin. “Cappuccino’s not bad, though.” He licked the milk foam from the cupid’s bow of his top lip. Flannery felt her heart flutter, and she didn’t even have to wait for Miss Sweeney’s red-pen voice, she knew it was a cliché. Still, there it was, a moth trapped in a valve.

  “You can’t really get a proper cheese sandwich in New York, can you? Like a slice of white cheddar and tomato on a roll? Is that rocket science?”

  Flannery laughed. “What? Mine’s so good.”

  Heath groaned. “The epicenter of innovative culinary delights, and here we are with our dismal sandwiches.”

  Here we are, thought Flannery, here we are: not floating off in some candied fantasyland, but sitting in the tangible world—the sharp corner of the chair against her leg and a regrettable half-moon of filth showing in her thumbnail as she ate her sandwich. She willed herself to consider Miss Sweeney, though Flannery herself was the very picture of delight trumping concern, leaning close to the boy to hear what he would say next.

  “I should have never switched from tea.” Heath sipped his cappuccino. “From my first sip of the fancy coffees, I was hooked. It’s curtains for my pilgrim spirit. Now I could never sail off to America without a milk-frothed espresso drink; now I’d be the conquistador with a cappuccino to go, in search of a lost city to trash with disposable coffee cups. Also, did I tell you I plan to have my iPhone surgically grafted to my ear to enhance my American experience? Greetings, brain cancer.”

  Flannery grinned so enthusiastically at his dramatic doldrums that she felt her top lip lodge over her gumline. Because who talked like this about coffee and cell phones? Even the way he said cancer made the word sound lush and vibrant as fresh spring flowers: “Con-sah.” Cancer was an unbloomed yellow daffodil, not yet yolk yellow but tight and green, showing just a hint of eggy lip. Miss Sweeney appeared again, right there in Nussbaum & Wu, her voice slow, enunciated. Flannery, is cancer a devastating killer, or is cancer an unfurled daffodil? Which came first, the chicken or the egg or the dreadful metaphor?

  Heath banged his knees on the booth when he stood. “Now I must relay a bit of fairly awkward news.” He bowed at the waist. “I am making a trip to the gents’ room. I shall return.”

  Flannery let loose with a string of hyena laughter as he walked away, and that was an unfortunate thing. But when he looked back and gave her a crooked half-smile, Flannery thought, Manhattan is m
ine. Everything at Nussbaum & Wu was beautiful and true: the bald man in his olive green trench coat playing Candy Crush on his cell phone and eating a brownie, the girl with storm-smeared eyeliner studying her organic chemistry book and drinking an orange smoothie, the warm, dark smell of brewing coffee, the perfectly angled rows of black-and-white cookies in the bakery case. O, brave new world indeed! She wanted to kneel down and kiss the sticky tile. If she were at school right now she’d be in gym class, learning archery. Archery! Katniss was yesterday’s news. Today, Flannery was the girl who had taken a fast arrow to the heart.

  “You need anything else?” A man with a bar towel slung over his shoulder and a bus tub of dirty dishes looked alarmed by Flannery’s moony, nut-bar smile.

  “I don’t think so,” Flannery said. She pointed to the general direction of the men’s room: “But, well, I don’t know for sure because um … my … he…”

  The man sighed. “Your date is in the bathroom. I got it.”

  Her date! Nussbaum & Wu exploded with a confetti of fiery gold and silver hearts, the satisfying pop pop … POP of bottle rockets and the sizzle and flare of Roman candles. Because it occurred to Flannery that she was on her first date, and—check it off her list, people!—she would no longer be that person who had never gone on a date because she was currently ON A DATE. RIGHT NOW.

  “But there are other people in the world, alright, sweetheart?” The waiter nodded in the direction of the people in line and at a couple awkwardly holding their sandwiches and smoothies and scanning the room, doing the high school cafeteria boogie: Hey there, folks. Any room at your table?