The Northern Wind Couldn't Keep Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Entry Forty-One
Mamie reads Siri's first chapter to four hundred people as her own while Tripp films it, and Siri sets her REJECTED letter on the lectern and walks out, to a suitcase on the porch and Knox on the steps telling her the pages are hers.
Mamie was three lines into my first chapter when I understood she was reading it to four hundred people.
She stood at the lectern in the old stone hall in her cream cardigan, with a spotlight on her blonde hair.
"The lighthouse stopped turning the winter my mother stopped speaking," she read.
I had written that line at a laundromat table at two in the morning.
Nobody had ever seen it except Mamie, who read everything I wrote.
I sat in the third row, on the aisle seat she had saved for me with her coat.
"Take the aisle," she had said that afternoon, tucking a granola bar into my coat pocket. "Third row. If it's awful, you can leave and I'll text you everything."
The letter in my pocket was from the fellowship office, and it had arrived that morning.
It said my entry had been REJECTED for matching an earlier submission.
Entry forty-one.
Mamie's name was on the program under it.
Her voice shook in exactly the right places, and the room leaned toward her.
In the front row, Tripp held his phone up and filmed her with a proud little smile.
He was my boyfriend of three years, and he had told me that morning that everything would work out.
"Trust me," he'd said, kissing my forehead. "I'd never let anyone take what's yours."
I put my hand in my coat pocket and touched the folded note I kept there.
It was the first margin note from the Reading Desk, signed N.W., in the blue capitals I knew by heart.
Tripp had said two years ago, at a party, that those notes were his.
He had never once handed me anything in his own handwriting.
My birthday cards came printed from his phone, and when I wanted him to read the note aloud he always read it off my photo of it instead.
I had thought that was sweet.
Mamie turned a page that I had not given her.
"Nell lit the logbook with the last match, and she did not look away."
Chapter five.
She had gone past chapter one into chapter five, because she had all of it.
The room made a soft sound, the sound people make when they are moved.
A woman in the second row wiped her eye.
I stood up.
My knees knocked the seat in front of me, and a few heads turned.
Tripp saw me and the smile left his face.
He shook his head once, small.
I walked down the aisle.
It was a long aisle.
Mamie saw me coming and her voice faltered on one word and recovered.
The dean, at the edge of the stage, started to rise.
I stopped at the lectern.
The livestream camera sat on its tripod six feet away, with a red light on.
I took the letter out of my pocket, unfolded it, and laid it flat on the lectern beside her hands.
REJECTED, in red, across my own title.
"Entry forty-one is mine," I said into the microphone, and my voice came out calm.
Four hundred people heard it.
"Mamie, read the next line," I said. "You know what it is. You've just never had to say it without me in the room."
Mamie's face went white under the spotlight.
Her mouth opened.
Nothing came out of it.
Tripp was on his feet now, hissing my name.
Somebody near the back said, "Is that true?"
The dean reached for my elbow.
I stepped away from him before his fingers touched me.
I had spent four years making myself small enough to be easy to love.
So I walked out.
The wind off the lake hit me at the doors.
I walked the long blocks to the house on Chester Street where I had lived with Tripp since sophomore year, because I did not know where else to go.
My key would not turn.
It went into the lock and stopped, new brass, a lock I had never seen.
My suitcase was on the porch, zipped shut, with the framed photos from my desk stacked on top of it.
One was of me and my mother outside her diner, and one was of Mamie and me at nineteen, arms around each other.
My phone buzzed.
It was Tripp.
"Don't make this worse," the text said. "Let her have tonight. Mom changed the locks so you wouldn't do something you'd regret. We'll fix it tomorrow."
His mother had known.
She had known before I had.
I sat down on my suitcase in the dark, in my good maroon dress, with the wind lifting the hem.
Footsteps came up the walk.
I thought it was Tripp, and I stood up ready to say something I'd never said to him.
It was not Tripp.
It was a taller man in a charcoal sweater, with his hands in his pockets and his hair blown flat.
I knew him by sight, the way everyone on campus did.
Knox Holloway, the writer-in-residence, Tripp's older half-brother, the quiet one who never came to dinner.
He looked at the lock, and at the suitcase, and at me.
"Those pages are yours," he said. "I've read them for two years."
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