Beside me, Stevie freezes mid-zip.
I swallow, worry immediately flooding my thoughts because I know exactly what he wants to talk to me about. The story I submitted last week.
My stomach knots immediately.
He hates it.
I knew it.
Every anxious thought I’ve spent years trying to outrun crashes into me all at once.
Wrong major. Not talented enough. Too emotional. Trying too hard.
I keep my expression even. “Sure.”
Stevie slings her bag over her shoulder, leaning down as she passes me. “I’ll be right outside,” she whispers dramatically. “Like... right outside.”
“Go.”
“Going,” she says, squeezing my arm before disappearing out the door.
I wait until most of the class clears out before forcing myself out of my seat and walking to the front with my laptop clutched against my chest like some kind of shield.
Professor Stephenson flips through a stack of papers before pulling one free.
My stomach drops the second I see my name at the top.
Hunniford Sanderson - Week Two Fiction Submission.
I inwardly cringe.
I wrote that story in two hours after staring at the blank page all night. Half of it came from the book I’ve been secretly trying to write for months before inevitably convincing myself that it’s terrible every single time I open the document again.
“This,” he says, holding up the pages, “is a wasted assignment.”
My stomach drops, and I take a sharp breath.
“Oh.” It’s all I can get out, but can you blame me?
He glances down at the paper again, shaking his head slightly, and humiliation floods through me so quickly I actually consider pretending to pass out just to escape this conversation.
“It’s not what I expected when I asked for a short story in a genre of your choosing,” he continues.
I open my mouth, but no words come out.
“The premise itself is simple enough,” he says, leaning back against the edge of the desk. “A girl realizing the people around her weren’t honest with her. Not exactly reinventing fiction.”
My face burns.
“But the execution surprised me.”
Wait, what?
“It did?”
“Yes.” He taps the paper lightly. “Because you didn’t write the emotion like you were trying to impress someone. You wrote it from inside the character instead of explaining it from the outside.”
He flips through the pages before stopping at one paragraph.
