Aimee Bender

GHOST BABY

ON THURSDAY, NINA’S SHORT STORY was up in workshop. This was her second submission, and the semester was nearly over; in fact, this would be our last class, with students turning in their final rewrites during my office hours the following week. We’d spent the first half of class talking about Gio’s story, which was a baseball anecdote that needed a little more character development, but did have some effective action sequences and a funny moment with a clumsy umpire.

Nina’s story was about a woman who has an affair with a ghost and gets impregnated with a real baby, whom she loves very much. When I was reading it the night before, in bed, burning my eyes into it, trying to focus, I recognized the storyline almost immediately; besides the movie of long ago, which did not include a baby, I actually had come across several stories with this plotline before in previous classes, baby included. It seemed to be an occasional favorite among some softer-hearted undergraduates, for its romantic belief system, for, perhaps, the soothing quality of a dead yet attentive lover, for a baby as an iconic symbol of love expressed beyond the grave. Often the birth of the baby and the mother’s act of holding it for the first time were the last line of the story, and therefore the baby never needed to be developed as its own yowling character on the page.

But I hadn’t expected a story like this from Nina, who was a tough type, who sat in the corner of our grouping of tables usually with her lightning bolt earrings and her arms crossed, who held something like three majors: this, visual art, and a startling turn into finance, or business, which she’d told me once in office hours she was planning to use to raze capitalism and “fight from within,” making a company that would help dismantle other companies and through some slightly difficult to understand but admirable mechanism help employees realize the illness of consumerism. I hadn’t pegged her as a ghost-baby–type writer. She had passed around the stack of pages the week before, as was our usual custom, and after Gio’s workshop and a short break, once all the students had returned from the bathroom, we settled back around our square of movable tables to discuss it, the descending rays of the spring afternoon sun pushing through the high windows and making those sitting on the east side squint.

As was typical, I began our conversation with a question.

“What feels most alive to you in this story?”

The class tittered.

“Exactly,” I said. “Even the ghost! That very active ghost. Did he feel like a real character to you?”

“I thought he was hot,” said Eloise, with the long, shiny, reddish hair. She was usually the first to speak, and had told me once in office hours that she hated any moment of silence and felt compelled, like pouring water into an empty glass, to fill it. “Use that image,” I’d told her, and it was the starting sentence of her next piece. She was a senior, and she’d explained to me earlier in the semester that this would be her very last class before finals, and then graduating. On this day, she was wearing some kind of bell necklace over her school logo T-shirt, which she’d told us upon starting that she was ready to ring the moment we were done. “When he stood in the doorway, sort of shimmering, and she saw him for the first time? Hot.”

“I thought it was really amazing when the ghost left, and she cried, and then she felt the feeling of a seed inside her, a kind of ghost seed.” This was Raymond with the dark liquid eyes, a deeply sensitive reader. His most recent story had been about two elderly women in a nursing home, and he had handled their dialogue with surprising attunement.

“Yeah,” echoed a few others. Across the square of tables, someone, maybe Yesenia, shifted in her seat.

“Do you guys think it’s an actual ghost baby?” Angie asked. “Haunting her?”

“No, definitely a real baby,” said Eloise. “She made a point of saying it smelled so good, and how it felt in her arms.”

“It could be part ghost,” continued Angie, who wore a lot of black eyeliner.

“I don’t think a ghost baby, even part ghost, would smell that real,” said Eloise.

Nina kept her arms crossed. She had her chair pushed slightly back. We followed an old and increasingly defunct rule in workshop which was that the writer didn’t speak while their work was being discussed, and she was listening to our conversation with a kind of heightened vigilance. Had she been a certain kind of silent male, I might’ve worried about her sometimes, about controlled rage and how it might one day express itself. There was something closed off in her like that, something tense, unknowable. But her hands were visible on her arms. Her backpack snug below the table.

“I wasn’t sure about the end, though,” said Raymond.

“Oh, no, I loved the end,” said the one with the ponytail, the one whose name I always forgot. Twice over the past month I had called her the wrong name, due to my own distractions, and she had looked so discouraged by the second mistake that I now didn’t use a name for her at all.

“I thought it was really beautiful,” she added, softly.

“I just didn’t really think it worked when Tom came in,” continued Raymond, tapping his pencil on the page.

“Yeah,” someone else said.

I looked at my paper. Which one was Tom again? Had she named the baby?

“Tom?” said someone else in the circle. “You mean Frank?”

Raymond laughed. “Tom,” he said. “You know. The guy with the lawn mower. I just thought he seemed a little random.”

Nina, in her corner, moved around slightly, bangs swishing. Her face as impassive as ever.

I flipped to the back page. She kissed the top of the baby’s head.

“Page fourteen?” I said.

“Fourteen,” confirmed Raymond.

“Wait, there was a lawn mower?” asked Gio, adjusting his baseball cap. “Did I miss that? I mean, I read this on Monday, so it was a few days ago, but I did read it twice—“

Raymond lifted up his paper. And then Tom, the man with the lawn mower, crossed the street, and began to cut the grass, he read.

The class shuffled around their papers. “Huh,” I said.

“Well, I just thought it was way too harsh that the baby died,” said Gio, while we were all flipping around, reading fast, and silently. “Did she really have to do that? I thought it was kind of gratuitous.”

An inert quiet settled around the table then. I had read her story quickly, that was true. Before class I had sat in my office and box-breathed to the count of four to settle myself even a little because my anxiety was high and my fingers were made of prickling and I wanted to be sure I could form basic sentences, could lead the group adequately for the two and half hours needed so that I could go home and lie on the floor again. My stepsister was not talking to me, likely for good reason, because I had called her boyfriend an idiot about something I hardly remembered that had to do with how he made a sandwich. I had recently gone through a breakup and did not really understand why we had broken up. My father was ill. My friend suicidal. I felt grounded by very little, and the previous night, I had read Nina’s story, marking up the margins as best I could with bits of praise and suggestions for development, but reading in general was currently difficult, and the only thing I seemed able to absorb at all was the student work, and that by necessity. For the last few weeks or so, I had been leaning heavily on the class, letting them do most of the discussion. It was, without doubt, poor teaching, but I also had observed, through my internal static, that when I talked less, they talked more, when I guided less, they took up the reins, and some might say it became, without my constant hand in the mix, closer to the student-centered ideology espoused so heartily in the college brochures.

“The baby did not DIE,” said Lola, mad.

“It wasn’t a metaphor,” said Gio, “that part with the blood?”

Raymond started to laugh. “Stop making shit up,” he said to Gio. “Be respectful to Nina’s story.”

Nina sat still, her eyes alert.

“I am!” said Gio. He jabbed a finger on the paper. “How could you forget this? And the trickle of blood grew into a stream and soon Eleanor was awash in it and everything was over.”

Now the class was loud, everyone talking. “I mean, I would’ve remembered a stream of blood, Jesus!” “What page are you on?” “In mine, she’s all quiet at the end.” “In mine she is kissing the baby. Kissing it!” “Maybe I’m missing a page?”

“Class,” I said, as their eyes drifted to me, then back to Nina, then back to me. I had made an elaborate speech on the first day about how useful it could be that the writer not speak during her workshop. I had gone on and on. “What page are you on, Gio?”

“Fourteen,” he said.

My fourteen ended with the kiss moment.

“My fourteen seems to be different,” I said, slowly.

“Mine has that lawn mower, remember?” said Raymond. “The man with the lawn mower crossed the street…”

Eloise started laughing. Her laugh was rich and full. Everything ahead of her. “So,” she said. She looked at Nina. “You rogue. I’m guessing you guys don’t have an ice-cream sundae?”

Gio laughed back. “Uh, no?”

“It all was a reason to go get an ice-cream sundae, which is what Eleanor did right then. Chocolate-vanilla. With sprinkles. Page fourteen. Last line.”

We all looked to Nina now.

“Nina?” I asked.

“The writer shouldn’t speak during her workshop,” she said evenly.

“This isn’t a usual workshop!” said Gio. “We all have different stories!”

Nina kept her gaze fixed. Her arms tightened around herself.

“Class,” I said, as they shifted back to me, faces unsure. “Let’s try to continue, just for a little bit. Let’s try to figure this out on our own for a moment. Did you all have the ghost lover?”

They did.

“He was a criminal,” said Yesenia, who hadn’t spoken yet. She was one of the quieter students, but without question the best writer in the class, with an undeniable voice in her work. She usually waited through the discussion, releasing a comment at the end that somehow politely vaporized various other comments along the way—including my own—thus restructuring everyone’s view of the story. We all waited for Yesenia as a kind of verdict bringer. She also often raised her hand, which was unusual.

“Mine was really sweet,” said Ana, with the two black braids. “He gave her those roses?”

“He raped her,” said Yesenia. “In mine, he raped her.”

“Oh, no, no,” said Ana, flipping to her page. “It was definitely not a rape. You can’t possibly call that a rape. She said it was the best sex she ever had. Right here: She arched her back and moaned and later would tell her friends it was the best sex she’d ever had.”

“Hold up,” said Gio, turning to his copy. “In mine, she was asleep the whole time. I mean, she was awake in her dream. She gave consent while dreaming to a ghost, so it seemed like it might be okay? It was like a girl’s wet dream.”

“It was a rape,” said Yesenia.

There was something about the calm firmness of her voice that made the rest of us stop moving our pages around and look up. She turned to her story. “Page five,” she declared. The scene she read was brief, but the ghost had come into the woman’s room and made an advance, she had said no, he had continued. There was no question it was a rape, and it was also without doubt the best-written part of the entire story, or set of stories, that Nina had ever brought to class. The language had a hard and pure power. The class sat still, listening. I glanced at Nina, but even now could not read anything on her face, just maybe the slightest pulse in her jaw, which could’ve been a trick of the light.

“Whoa,” said Gio.

“That is really different than mine,” said Ana. “I like mine better.”

“This is really good writing,” said Yesenia, raising the paper. “It feels like the clear center of the story to me. Am I the only one who got this?”

“In mine they just talk,” said Raymond.

“Ice cream,” said Eloise. “They make plans about ice cream.”

“Everything else in the story,” said Yesenia, eyes intent, “felt a little light, throwaway. You ask what felt alive? This felt alive. Awful. But alive on the page.”

“I hear it,” said Raymond, nodding. “Did anyone else get the scene Yesenia read?”

We were back to flipping through our pages then, though everyone knew they would’ve remembered that part, or at least we certainly hoped we would’ve remembered that part, what Yesenia had read, which was still in the room with us, the words, the helplessness and loathing Nina had captured, the depth of the betrayal, and as we searched, and the words on the pages ran through the memory scanners in our minds, something—some concern, some focus—was beginning to shift in the room.

Which was exactly the moment that Nina chose to rise slightly in her chair and bang her hand loudly on the table.

 “You guys!” she yelled, startling half the class. “Ha! That was amazing! That was insane! I could not have asked for anything better! Did you know I’m also a performance art major? This was my final. I mean, for that class.” She fished around for her phone which was tucked in her shirt pocket. “I actually had this filming the whole time. I hope that’s all right? It was unbelievable. Would you be up for signing release forms? Only for my class. I’ll just be airing part of it at the showcase, no names or anything.”

She started laughing, peering at the screen, checking, waving it at us, showing us the angle of the shot. How it was this experiment in types of narrative, she said—she had planned it for weeks, wanting to see what it was like to mess with our expectations right in the moment like that, to undo the most basic rule of workshop, which was that everyone would be reading the same story. “Because we’re all living our different stories, right?” she said, moving in her seat. “I wanted to make that part of the whole thing.” In her other course, she explained, lightning bolt earrings swaying, they’d been talking about different modes of storytelling all semester and she had wondered if it would work, but she’d had no idea it would be this good. Most of the class put down their copies of the story, shaking their heads. Gio said she was a genius. Eloise asked Nina to explain it all again—it was for what course? She did what? Yesenia’s comment seemed to have evaporated. All eyes were on Nina now, and she described it again with a lilt, happier than I’d ever seen her, telling about the class, about her project, about how she’d cut a hole in her shirt pocket in just the right position but she hadn’t been able to move much at all, about how there were actually twelve different versions of the story, about how hard she had been biting her lip during the workshop itself, trying not to reveal anything. “I think I might have an injury!” she whooped, touching her lip with a fingertip, checking it for blood.

Raymond said he did not want to be filmed and would not sign the release form.

“You sure?” Nina said, suddenly armed with handfuls of pens to pass out. “It was so perfect, what you said.”

“Sign it!” called someone across the room. “You gotta be in it, Ray!”

“That was really fucked up, Nina,” said another. “You filmed us?”

“Twelve different versions?” laughed someone else.

Raymond shook his head. “You tore the trust of workshop,” he said, as the room filled with the sounds of pens moving over paper.

I looked over my waiver. It was only for her final. The video would, supposedly, not go further than her final. Nina was looking over at me with a kind of youthfulness in her face, an ambition and excitement in her forehead and eyebrows that I had never seen on her before, and I had no idea what to do, and I was barely catching up to what had happened—and it seemed that something had happened, hadn’t it?—but since I couldn’t pin down what it was, I just signed mine and passed it in as well.

Eloise sent her paper in and said she had known something was up when Raymond had started in about the lawn mower, it was the weirdest feeling, she would never forget that feeling! The art had worked, she said. It was like she had lost her mind for a second. “Yeah,” said Nina, nodding, vigorous. “Awesome, Eloise. Totally my point.” A few others handed their copies in. Someone else pushed the pen away and shook her head, as if talking to herself. Another whispered something to Raymond, who nodded. “But what was the real story?” asked Gio, handing Nina his release form. She arched an eyebrow at him: “What do you mean?” “I mean, just what was like the core one?” he asked. “You know, the starting point?” Nina smiled. “But is there ever one core story, Gio? Why does there have to be a ‘real’ one?” she asked, using air quotes. She received the stacks of notated story pages and release forms flowing her way like a bride at a receiving line. “You guys are the best!” she sang. Gio rocked back in his chair.

“It felt real,” said Yesenia.

Nina paper-clipped the pages together. “Then I guess I did my job!” she said. “Any physicists in the room? Is our quantum existence more important in one universe than another?”

“Oh god, I failed physics so bad,” said Eloise.

“No core story,” Gio murmured.

“Just it was by far the best thing I ever read from you,” said Yesenia.

“Thanks, Yesenia,” Nina said, bobbing her head. “Thank you. Means a lot.”

Ana, who was sitting right near Nina, leaned in closer, her voice hushed. “Just to say,” she added, “I disagree. I liked the love story so much more. The thing Yesenia read was disturbing.”

“I thought the ice cream part was pretty funny,” said someone else, across the room, looking down, sending a text.

Something seemed to have shifted, or ended, and all of a sudden, as if the students were following a common rhythmic cue, the rest of the phones were out, and on, and Yesenia was looking at hers, scrolling, something new and unspeakably sad on her face. A few others were standing, arguing about what might make a core story, or which version they had, or if it was an acceptable thing to have done in class, voices loud and scattered, and someone high-fived Nina, and there was nothing else to workshop, and Eloise made the decision for me and put her hand on her bell necklace and started swinging it, releasing its peal. “I’m done with college, done with college!” she called, ringing, packing her bag. “Later, everyone!” She danced out the door. I watched her go like she was a character on a TV show. Several times I had opened my mouth to speak, but nothing had exited and nothing had come to mind once my mouth was closed, because had Nina done something? Had something been done to Nina? It was like many things had taken place at once, and I did not know how to gather any of them, so they were finishing it all on their own. Raymond was the only one who glanced over at me, his eyes flat and clear. “We done?” he asked, eyebrows up, and something in his voice and the weight of his assessment pierced the fog and I sat up and cleared my throat and said yes, sure, I guess we were, weren’t we, and not to forget to turn in the work next week, the final, everyone, due on Thursday, including any assignments they hadn’t yet turned in, please email me with questions, thank you.

Nina grabbed her backpack and started to leave, surrounded by others in a cluster asking her how she’d thought up the idea, and how on earth did she keep from bursting during, wasn’t she going to put it online, Raymond and a few others slipping through the door quietly on their own. Into the hall they sifted, to Gio’s uproarious warm laugh, until it was only me and Yesenia in the room. The sun had almost set, and the space had by now filled with the golden light of evening. I stood, slowly, and began sliding my own notebooks into my backpack. She was taking her time straightening papers. She tapped them on the table to neaten the edges. She had to do it several times because her hands were shaking.
            “Thank you, Yesenia,” I began, “I—”

“I think I might even know the guy,” she said. “In the part I read. He’s an English major. The way she described him. I used to see them walking together sometimes. The mole on his cheek, the icy eyes, the skinny muscles. He’s super pale, kind of like a ghost, too.”

I walked over and she showed me the passage and we read it silently together, the words strong and magnetic, pulling my eyes right to them. Yesenia had bracketed the section and made an exclamation point, and then wrote: This is amazingly well written, Nina, and it also is upsetting to me. It might be weird to say, but are you okay? I’m available to talk if you ever want to. She was a senior too. “I guess I’ll try to give it to her later,” she said, tucking the story carefully into her backpack. “I want her to have it.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s really good. But I mean, it really might not be that guy—”

“I know,” she said. “I’m not going to have him arrested or anything. Not yet,” she laughed, painfully.

“It is a fiction class, after all,” I said.

“It is.”

I asked, feebly, if she needed any help finding Nina’s information, and she slung her backpack onto her shoulders and said no, that stuff wasn’t hard to find.

“It’s just weird,” she said, as we walked toward the door, her glasses catching the last gleam of golden light in the room, “that I was the one who got this copy. I was raped too, a long time ago. I mean, maybe other people in this room were too, but definitely me. So. It was weird, to be the only one to get it.” Her gaze was to the side, thinking something through, and I stumbled through an awkward statement about how I was so sorry to hear it, about how the story wasn’t meant for her. “Oh, I do understand that,” she said, her voice steady. We stood at the door together, and the circle of tables looked so empty now, just a few scraps of paper left, a pen, someone’s water bottle. Hooting out in the hallway as other seniors finished their courses. “Except it feels like it was meant for me,” she said. “Or, more it feels like I’m the only one who saw it.” Her eyes, behind the sheen of sunset, were almost electrically bright. “I mean, I know we’re not supposed to read in autobiography, but even if we just talk about it as a story, it was clearly the best part. We didn’t even do that. We didn’t even really workshop it.”

“We couldn’t,” I said, though I wasn’t sure that was true.

“The class ended so fast,” she said.

“It did,” I said, certain I had failed them both.

The hallway was quiet as we passed through the building and walked to the parking lot together. While we climbed the levels of the parking structure, I told her about resources on campus in case she needed to talk to someone about her rape. “Don’t worry,” she said, looping her thumbs under her backpack straps. “You don’t have to give me that speech. I work at a sexual assault nonprofit. I mean, I do appreciate what you’re doing. It’s just that I talk about it all the time.” She shook her head.

We stood together on level four, which was growing dark around us, the cars hulking shapes between their yellow lines. Students—and faculty—paid fifteen dollars to park here and take their expensive classes, a few of which I taught. It was a large structure, over eight levels tall, and had been the site of two assaults over the course of the semester. We had received email notifications. Reminders to walk to our cars with a buddy, or to call the campus security officer for an escort, except one of the campus security officers had been tagged for making inappropriate jokes, so most people weren’t calling them anymore. The daylight was dimming now, and a few students trickled from the stairway including a young man who sort of matched Nina’s description; he was muttering to himself, heading up the ramp, and at that point I was on a sharp edge, on the lookout for other tendrils of her story in the world. I glanced over at Yesenia, but she was staring through him, mind visibly elsewhere.

“Your car close?” I asked.

She waved to the near distance.

“You can see it?”

“Yeah, it’s right there,” she said.

“I’ll watch until you’re safely in.”

“Thanks. Where are you parked?”

“Oh, just around the corner.”

“You okay walking on your own?”

“I should be fine. Thank you.”

“I can drive you,” she said.

In front of us, most of the spaces were marked compact with yellow painted letters, but no one ever followed the rule. All the remaining cars looked huge that night, huge and deceitful in their small parking spaces.

“Okay,” I said.

We walked to her car, a midsize blue Honda sedan, and she moved some papers off the passenger seat. I could glimpse, in the back, a large library reference book about graduate schools, and a couple of crumpled sweatshirts.

“Sorry for the mess,” she said.

“You should see mine!”

What was she thinking about? I had no idea. The etiquette did its job crowding out everything else.

I directed Yesenia to my car, and when I got out, I thanked her again for speaking up and told her congratulations.

“On what?” she asked, motor running.

“Finishing college?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Yeah, you’re right. Look at that!”

She rolled up the window and drove off. I felt faintly sick to my stomach. I opened my own car, put my bag down on the passenger side, and turned on the heater. The rest of the parking lot was emptying into a gradated field of concrete. No one was in my back seat waiting for me with a knife, and the muttering young man I’d seen walking up the ramp did not pop out from behind another car to try to grab at my door handle, and I saw neither him nor anyone else as I circled down the ramps toward the exit, and all the unrest in my evening was inside of me that night.

The following week was finals, and all of the students decided to turn in their work remotely, with generic thank yous and emoji goodbyes, and then they were off into the world and their summers. Yesenia wrote me an email asking if I’d be willing to write her a recommendation letter that she would use in fall applications; she wasn’t sure yet what she would be applying for, but she was just making sure it would be okay. I told her I would be very happy to recommend her for whatever she chose, and that I hoped she would in some way continue her writing. Raymond wrote saying he was trying to get a job teaching English abroad and could I be a reference, and I said yes, I could, of course. Neither of them mentioned the last class, and I did not see either of them in person again. No one else came in or reached out. Once, over the summer, when I was dropping off some books at the campus library, I thought I glimpsed Nina across the grassy quad. She was carrying a red art portfolio under her arm, dressed in some kind of black cape, looking frighteningly thin. Was it even her? I thought I recognized the saggy canvas backpack hanging over her shoulder. She loped across the main quad and then turned into a building I didn’t know.

Summer came and went, and my own life stabilized a little. My father started a new kidney medication that seemed to be working. This seemed to make enough difference in my mental state to allow me to apologize to my stepsister and her boyfriend: “I don’t know what came over me,” I said, over the phone. “Of course everyone likes their own kind of sandwich.” She—my stepsister, a forgiving person—had laughed. I called my suicidal friend I had been avoiding calling, and she picked up the phone. I took a lot of long walks. I considered writing the workshop class an email, telling them I would read an extra piece of theirs since I had not been as participatory as I had hoped throughout the entire semester, had not been a guide, really, of any kind, but I could never get the wording of the email right, and it remained in my Drafts folder.

In August, at the start of the new semester, I was sitting in office hours after teaching my first class, sorting piles of books, beginning the dutiful process of adding my new student info to my roll book so that I could keep track of attendance and assignments, trying to begin with more focus and energy this time around. It was a warm summer afternoon, and I was tossing some outdated scrawls on yellow sticky notes stuck to my desk from the previous semester when somebody knocked on my doorframe. I looked up, and the one whose name I could never remember stepped in. There she was, looking exactly as generic as she had before, just with a little summer tan now.

“Hi,” she said, a little shy.

“Hi! Come on in!”

She set her backpack down, and perched across from me in the olive-green tippy chair. Nearly three months had passed since our class, and I had effectively given her a grade, but to greet her by name was even further from my grasp now than it had been earlier.

“Good to see you!” I said. “How was your summer?” She said it had been fine. She told me what classes she was taking, and who would be teaching her new workshop. I smiled at her, another sticky note in hand.

“I can’t read any of these,” I said, laughing, pointing at the note. “I have no idea what any of these notes I wrote say.”

“I was in your intermediate class last spring,” she added, touching the end of her ponytail.

“Oh,” I said, “I know. Of course. You wrote the funny story about the fraternity party.”

She gazed out the window, where a trombone player was practicing round-sounding scales on the music school lawn below us. I tried to summon up a detail from that story, something about red plastic keg cups, but she brushed her hand in the air.

“No, it’s okay,” she said. “Really. I only came by to tell you that I went to see her final.”

She picked up a stray purple binder clip on the desk, squeezed it open, let it snap.

“You mean Nina’s?” I said.

“Who else’s?”

“Where was it?”

“Art school gallery. Open to the public,” she said. “For like a week. Senior final presentations. You didn’t go?”

“I hadn’t realized it was something you could go to.”

“There was even an opening party,” the student said.

It was surprising to me how quickly the prickly anxious feeling surfaced again just at the mention of Nina’s name.

“Ah,” I said. “So how was it? Was it a good party?”

“Well, I went to the party part kind of by accident,” she said. “It was nice. They had wine and a cheese plate and everything.”

Outside, the trombone player finished his scales, and began to practice long whole notes. I considered thanking the student for coming, saying I had work to do. Did I really want to hear more about this video? She herself was sitting right at the edge of her seat, looking like she was ready to bolt out of the room at any moment.

“So?” I said, after a pause. “Did you see it?”

“It was in a corner,” she said. “On a big screen. You couldn’t miss it.” She kept her eyes out the window, snapping the purple clip. “You have a few minutes?” she asked. “You seem kind of busy.”

“I have a little time,” I said. “Please. Go on.”

She scooted back a bit, half-settled into her chair. “Well,” she said. “So there was the big screen in the corner, and it had a little plaque next to it that said the piece was called ‘Storytelling.’ And it was just gray on the screen until it faded into our class—and then it was all of us except Raymond and a couple others who were sort of fuzzed out. And it was only the first part, the whole lawn mower/ice cream/dead baby debate part. When we were trying to figure out what was going on. A bunch of people crowded around to watch. They were really into it. They kept moving closer to the TV. Laughing.”

“Yeah. I bet.”

“It was funny. Funnier than I remembered when it was happening.”

“How much of the first part?”

“I think she cut it around when someone asked her what was going on and you said something about how we should try to figure it out on our own. Definitely before Yesenia spoke up. It just looped right back to the beginning. The people were riveted though. They kept laughing and laughing. You signed the release, right? They thought you were hilarious. That look on your face, like you’d been hit by a bus. I watched it twice. Some people stayed to watch it more.”

We were quiet together, picturing it.

“Did anyone recognize you?” I asked.

The student shrugged. “Oh, no. No one ever does. Nina definitely had no idea I was there,” she said.

“It’s my superpower,” she added, a little bitterly.

“Anyway, though, I think I figured it out,” she said, fixing the binder clip on her finger now, waving it around. “On the walk home. It’s the ghost baby. Our workshop. The part that wasn’t in the video.”

She shifted a little in her chair again, slipped her eyes past mine. This was, by far, the longest conversation I’d ever had with her. There was something forgettable about her, it was true. She looked like many other students, which was a small part of it—brown hair swept into a ponytail, balanced features, a blue T-shirt, a backpack. But it was more than looks, something about the way a gaze bounced off her, how she spoke in workshop in half sentences with words trailing off, a generalized wincing from attention. In class, everything about the way she sat at the table as if she wasn’t really there had made me want to look at somebody else instead.

It was happening now too, an attention drift, but I leaned in, forced myself to focus. “Wait, what do you mean?” I asked. “Can you say that again?”

“Yesenia’s part. The scene she read aloud. That moment in class.”

“That was the ghost baby?”

“Yeah, you remember what I’m talking about?”

“Of course. Can you say any more?”

“It’s sort of hard to explain.”  

“Please?” The ache in my throat surprised me.

The trombone player stopped outside, releasing us into silence, and the student stilled herself, as if waiting for the right phrasing to arrive. When she spoke, her words were slow, searching.

“I guess,” she said, “I guess I just think it was some kind of luck that Yesenia got that copy. That’s what I keep thinking about. I think that part was supposed to get buried in the person who received it. I mean, I know I wouldn’t have read it aloud or said anything about it. To be the only one? No way. But Yesenia did, and when she did, she gave birth to it or something. It didn’t seem like Nina expected any of that, you know? I think she just put the scene in, like it was one of the twelve, like she said in class. I mean, maybe it was just a plot twist! Maybe it was all just a cool experiment. But what if, right? What if she had been raped, or knew someone who had been raped, and never told anyone? What if she snuck it into class and that was the only time she ever spoke about it, and no one in class ever mentioned it? What if Yesenia had us all hear her? I mean, I heard her, right? I really heard her. It’s like a ghost, haunting me, that passage she read.” She shook her head. “I think about it all the time.”

Students and teachers passed by in the hallway, the sounds of feet, greetings, hellos, how was your summer.

She stood.

I was sitting in my chair, still listening. I didn’t want her to go yet. “Yeah,” I said, to stall.

In all this time, I hadn’t let go of the roll book, and the class from the spring was only a couple pages back. I flipped to it, looked down the list. Nina, Raymond, Yesenia. Lola, Angie, Eloise. Gio. Ana. Hers the only name that floated without a source. It was so small, so pitiful and obvious an act, and yet when I looked up, her eyes were on the roll book too, and I could see a kind of hesitation in her stance, maybe thinking I might even get it wrong now, with the roll book in front of me, with every possible aid in the world.

“Liz,” we said together, at the same time.

“Liz,” I said. “It haunts me too, Liz. I think about it all the time, too.”

She glanced down the corridor. “Do you think it’s weird I was the only one there?”

“No.”

“I thought Yesenia would definitely be there. I don’t know. I thought a few other people would be there.”

I didn’t want to say it aloud, that the forgotten one would be the one to remember to go. To stand and watch. To report back. To know what had been cut, as if Yesenia had passed the witness baton directly to her. But we stood looking at each other for a moment, Liz and I, passing something between us, and for a fleeting second, she sharpened. It was amazing. I will never forget it. It was like she shimmered into being right in front of me, before returning to her usual blur. And then she turned, as if she had known it herself, as if she had to exit before we acknowledged it together, and walked off down the hall.

AIMEE BENDER is the author of six books of fiction, including the bestseller The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and The Color Master, a NY Times Notable Book. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and Tin House, as well as heard on “This American Life.” She lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at USC.