“Okay,” Flannery squeaked. “Cool.” But if she’d never gone to Sacred Heart, she would never have worn this skirt; and she would also never have met Miss Sweeney. To burn it was unthinkable.
“She wrote an essay about the epic skirt bonfire,” Megan stage-whispered to Flannery. “It was all kinds of awesome.”
Jolene shrugged modestly. “It was just okay. But I have a really good professor who helped me revise it.”
“You’re so lucky,” Megan said. “I can’t believe I’m stuck with David Johnston and you get Jayne Means.”
Flannery sucked in her breath when she heard the name of the professor whom Miss Sweeney had written about so lovingly, the professor she had gone to see this very morning.
“Jayne gave the best lecture about Emily Dickinson last week, and this week we studied Emily Brontë—who arranges a syllabus like that, by first name? God, she’s brilliant. Anyway, Jayne claims that Wuthering Heights is a feminist book, because of Catherine’s HE is ME monologue: You know, how we, men and women, are all, at heart, genderless—gender free?—because we are equally crazy, loving, brutal, wild-hearted, whatever. And Heathcliff? Jayne puts him in historical perspective: He’s not just the cartoon harsh guy, but someone trapped in his particular circumstance, and who, in another place and time, might have been completely different.”
Flannery had just taken a bite of her petit four; the bright icing shattered in her mouth like stained glass.
From inside her backpack her cell phone buzzed. Flannery took it out and saw a 212 area code. She took the police officer’s card out of her jacket pocket. The numbers matched.
Not yet, she thought. She pushed the decline call button on her phone. I do not have to answer. No one can make me answer. Because if Flannery simply declined to hear any bad news, Miss Sweeney could stay alive and whole and vibrant—even if it meant she was currently hallucinating her dead boyfriend and wandering the streets of NYC. Because to be alive, Flannery thought, to keep the story going, that was the thing …
Megan pulled her ponytail around and stroked it like a fluffy blonde kitten snuggling on her clavicle. “God, Wuthering Heights. Quite the fever dream.”
Jolene nodded. “It’s magic.”
Megan sighed. “Oh, but of course I had to get David Johnston. He wears wide-wale corduroy trousers that actually make an audible—I swear—whistling sound when he walks. He also uses air quotes ironically.”
Jolene sympathized: “Ugh.”
“It’s even more annoying than using air quotes literally.” Megan looked at both Jolene and Flannery, including her in their freshman musings: “Would there be such a thing as figurative air quotes?”
Flannery’s phone buzzed again. Oh God, how she wanted to answer it!
But she envisioned the paramedic giving Miss Sweeney mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, each buzz from Flannery’s phone a breath forced into Miss Sweeney’s lungs. She couldn’t risk it; she had to keep Miss Sweeney alive.
The boy slumped at the table raised his head again. “Figurative Air Quotes! Best. Band. Name. Ever. Called it!” As if struck by narcolepsy, he put his head right back down.
Megan and Jolene laughed, and even Flannery managed a laugh, though her insides felt so shredded that she didn’t understand how her body had produced a carefree sound.
Encouraged by the girls’ mirth, the boy jolted back up. He looked right at Flannery. “I have a question. I shall be asking this with a sigh, Flannery.”
Flannery nodded gamely. “Okay.”
“Is your middle name O’Connor?”
Flannery always wrote “Olivia” in the middle name blank on her school forms, but now in the overly bright Hungarian Pastry Shop, with a police officer calling to tell her something joyful or horrible, did her embarrassing literary name even matter? Still, Flannery answered him a bit ruefully: “It is. My name is Flannery O’Connor Fields.”
“That. Is. Tragic. I fiercely hate your parents on your behalf. I offer you my boundless empathy. Boundless.”
Jolene and Megan protested, saying that it was an incredible honor to be named after Flannery O’Connor.
Flannery shook her head. “It’s awful. It’s just so … fake.”
He clapped his hands and shouted YES. A sensitive woman working on her laptop at the next table took a slug of coffee and made a great show of putting in her earbuds.
The boy lowered his voice. “Fake Flannery O’Connor and the Figurative Air Quotes! That is the best band name ever. Called it. Done. Finis. We shall not know the likes of it again.”
The buzz of the phone, the buzz of the phone; the officer trying and trying. Could a person choose not to be the recipient of bad news? Could a body simply live in flux?
“And just so you know, Flannery?” The boy tapped the table with his index finger as if frantic to get her fullest attention. “I think parents who give their children literary names should be sent to the guillotine. It’s like wearing a name tag that says, ‘HELLO, MY NAME IS REFERENTIAL,’ and my parents are pretentious and have cursed me with a name I will never be able to live up to. And God forbid I try to be a writer myself.” He reached across the table and held out his hand. “Flannery O’Connor Fields, allow me to introduce myself. I am Langston Hughes Hoffman.”
“Really?” Flannery shook his hand.
Megan smiled. “He really is.”
“You do feel my pain.”
“Please, you are named after great writers! I mean, my name, ‘Megan’? ‘Megan’ is tragic.”
“Oh my God,” Jolene said. “Is anyone here really going to compete with me in the worst name contest? Spoiler: You will not win.”
Jolene drummed the table. “The winner is … Jolene Herrara Johnson. How many Puerto Ricans have the name Jolene? No need to get out pencil and paper for this equation, though, put away your calculators and abandon your abacus, because the number is one—”
“Abandon your abacus,” Langston Hughes Hoffman marveled. “Second best band name ever.”
Flannery thought of the colorful wooden beads on her old abacus, the possibility of joy: the officer’s voice on the phone sounding pleasant, chipper, even! Hon? Your teacher is recovering at the hospital. She’ll be going home tomorrow. Hope you’re having a fun night at the Plaza. Don’t forget the lobster mac ’n cheese!
And so Flannery half-listened to the table conversation while she continued to puzzle out a new narrative for Miss Sweeney …
“My mom falls in love with a dude from Mississippi—my dad—and agrees to name her first child Jolene, because his mother, my grandmother, is vice president of the Dolly Parton fan club? Yes, I’m named after her famous song, and song names are the worst.”
Flannery smiled at Jolene, and wondered if the officer was calling to say it was a different woman in the Cathedral, that it wasn’t Caitlin Sweeney at all. It was a complete stranger, and furthermore, the stranger had survived.
Langston Hughes Hoffman weighed in: “Author names are worse than song names. But the new trend of food names might be even worse. In years to come the students sitting here will be named Apple, Fig, and Pluot.”
Perhaps a thrilling missive from Miss Sweeney awaited her, perhaps clicking open her Gmail account would be nirvana. F: I forgot to get a substitute when I went to the ophthalmologist this morning and Sacred Heart called out a search party. Embarrassing. On the attendance sheet it said you were absent after first hour. Everything okay? Miss S.
Megan gave Langston a hearty, ironic thumbs-up. “Dibs on Pluot. Look for it on my baby announcement in twenty years. No, really, I like the synthesis of the plum and the apricot: Pluot.” She tried out an alternate pronunciation: “Pluot.”
Flannery’s phone buzzed again, a repetitive dirge in her hand. Even sitting with such welcoming and fun people she felt completely walled off. She now not only knew where Heathcliff had gone when he’d dropped out of the narrative of Wuthering Heights, she knew why he’d left. It wasn’t just that he’d eavesdropped on Cathy’s p
rudent and cruel plans to marry the rich neighbor; Heathcliff had gone away because he couldn’t bear to lose the optimistic (if delusional) hope that Cathy wouldn’t marry Edgar Linton after all. Living away, he could escape the certainty of their nuptials. Heathcliff could daydream Cathy’s last-minute change of heart; his mind’s eye could send her running out of the parsonage in her lace dress, her ribbon-bound wedding bouquet of wildflowers loosening as she ran, heather and bluebells falling on the moors.
Heathcliff wanted to linger in the ellipses of fading possibility; to believe that Cathy was waiting for him in Wuthering Heights in her lace dress, her candlelit face at the window, forever looking out for him in the darkness …
Megan yawned. “We should probably take off soon. Flannery, are you staying around here?”
“Today was kind of a last-minute trip. I … wasn’t able to get a hotel room.” She thought back to the Broadway Hotel and Hostel where she’d stood at the reception desk with Heath, and where Miss Sweeney had reminisced in the haze of her Nardil withdrawal, toenail clippings in the nightstand and the Gideon’s Bible in her hand. Flannery thought about the Gospel of the Pentecost, not the verse about sorcery and orgies that had sent the young Caitlin Sweeney and Brandon Marzetti-Corcoran into hysterics, but the haunting lament of Christ: “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.”
Flannery switched off her phone.
Jolene looked at Megan, who telegraphed her agreement with a nod.
“You can come back to the dorm and stay with us.”
Megan smiled at Flannery. “My cousin was just visiting, and so we already have an air mattress in the room. It leaves a good six inches of floor space for us all to move around, but you could take a look at Carman, and see how you like dorm life.”
“No one likes dorm life,” Langston said. He tilted his head at Megan and Jolene. “But these two are pretty fun.”
“Okay,” Flannery squeaked out. “That’s so awesome of you guys. I could be a serial killer. It’s really so nice of you to share your room with me.”
Langston laughed. “Truthfully? You’re not really giving off a serial killer vibe.”
When Flannery put her phone into her backpack, she saw Heath’s purchase from Westsider Books: The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor. She took it out and stared at the cover, her brain absorbing the incongruence of seeing the word O’Connor crossed out and Fields written in: The Complete Stories of Flannery Fields.
Heath. Heath with his borrowed marker at the bookshop. Flannery clutched the story collection to her heart. She would continue looking for him when she moved to the city, especially on winter days when she wore his jacket. And whenever she wondered if Heath, the most spectacular of the incorruptibles, had been a mere delusion, the fever dream of a stressed-out Wuthering Heights fangirl, Flannery consoled herself with the indelible proof—paper and leather—of their day together.
She tucked the book back into her backpack, walked out of the Hungarian Pastry Shop, and set off for Carman Hall with her new friends. But the vibration of her cell phone was a pulse of lonely anxiety Flannery would carry with her the rest of her life, the happy ending she couldn’t quite pull off: Why did I take the journey if I couldn’t save her?
Flannery’s sorrow was a loosening knot; she felt like she might completely come undone, but she was also buoyed by walking along with Jolene and Megan to her left and Langston to her right, and by those who trailed behind: Brandon Marzetti-Corcoran and Caitlin Sweeney, and the other Flannery O’Connor and the other Langston Hughes, and Miss Emily Brontë, and all the other souls who had given of themselves, who had shown their love in person, or on the page.
Flannery looked across at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, towering like a holy dinosaur standing sentry, hunkering protectively over Flannery and her friends as they walked back to the dorm.
And then came a red-inked missive, either conjured by her own longing or by the supernatural power of love that allows the vanished to live on in our hearts and souls. Flannery: Did you really look up and see an extinct animal given to contorting his oversized body on your behalf? Were my lessons about meaning, sense, and clarity all in vain?
And so Flannery tried it a new way.
In the shadow of the great Cathedral, Flannery walked home with her people.
Acknowledgments
Heartfelt thanks to Lisa Bankoff for her faith in Dear Reader, and for all her creativity and dedication.
It is a writer’s dream to have Amy Einhorn, Caroline Bleeke, and Sarah Dotts Barley edit their book. I am deeply grateful to each of you.
Thank you to my fantastic writing group—Judy Bauer, Laura Moriarty, and Lucia Orth—for their true camaraderie and careful reading. My sister Jane was an early and encouraging reader of Dear Reader, too.
For kindness and inspiration, my thanks to Sara Eckel, Andrea Hoag, Stefanie Olson, and Sharon Zehr.
And a world of thanks to Laura Kirk—with whom I shared a few NYC apartments, and dreams, back in the day—for all the years of friendship.
Thank you to my parents, Pat and Mike O’Connell, storytellers extraordinaire, and to my oldest friends, my brother, Patrick, and my sister, Jane.
Thank you to my openhearted children, Juliana, Zach, and Veronica. You’ve given me the world.
And lastly, thank you to my husband, Steve Hill, who gave me my own Manhattan love story.
ALSO BY MARY O’CONNELL
Living with Saints
The Sharp Time
About the Author
Mary O’Connell is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of the short story collection Living with Saints and the YA novel The Sharp Time. She is the recipient of a James A. Michener Fellowship and a Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award. She lives with her husband and her three children in Lawrence, Kansas.
Learn more about Mary at Visit her online at www.DearReaderBook.com, or find her on Twitter @OConnellCMary. You can sign up for email update here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter One
The Day Before
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Acknowledgments
Also by Mary O’Connell
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
DEAR READER. Copyright © 2017 by Mary O’Connell. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Flatiron Books, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.flatironbooks.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-07708-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-11851-6 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781250118516
Our books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact your local bookseller or the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
First Edition: May 2017
r Reader
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