Chapter 4

“There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects.” —Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

* * *

“I know you all spent the last two days wracking your brains about what is neither a subject nor an object.” 

He scanned the room to see if anyone was laughing.  No.  Kayla was smiling at least, a small indulgent smile.  Good sign.  He didn’t need her to think he was funny; her wanting to indulge him was enough to work with.  She was wearing a tight brown sweater that matched her eyes and some kind of serious pushup bra.

Off to the side of the room was Rona Gomez, not smiling, not even looking up, just scribbling furiously.  Crap.  She really had been wracking her brains, and now his joke, which he made every semester, wasn’t a joke anymore, more like a personal insult.  That’s okay.  With her forehead cradled in her right hand, her face hovering a few inches above her notebook, she didn’t look like she was taking it personally.  Anyway, he wasn’t supposed to be worrying about her. And see, he hadn’t been.

“To answer that question, please take out your coursepack, which you were all supposed to purchase for today.”

The room grew loud and shuffly with the sounds of students rifling through their bags, pulling out their packets of illegally reproduced articles, still wrapped in plastic from the copier’s.  The black guy looked from the Ashley next to him to the Brandon next to her, then up at Gavin.

 “Um, hey. Teacher. What if we don’t got it?”

Gavin wasn’t surprised. And seriously, it wasn’t because the guy was black.  Gavin wasn’t racist like that.  It’s because he was a football player—Gavin had been notified yesterday by the college’s athletic department—and they never knew what the hell was going on.  He was small, probably a running back or something. In fact, Gavin felt sorry for him, thinking about how scrambled up his brains must be from the concussions.  He vowed to be nice—encouraging—no matter how bad his writing was.

“Share,” Gavin told him.  The football player turned to the Ashley sitting next to him, a fragile blonde  who studied him with narrowed eyes before pushing her coursepack an inch towards him, to the very edge of her tiny desk. Three other students didn’t have theirs either.  One of the nerdy kids, even.  And that Brandon…Braden.  He had moved his seat next to Kayla’s so that their two little desks pressed into one reasonably sized desk, upon which they shared Kayla’s coursepack.  Bad sign.  

Gavin took a deep inhale and puffed himself up.  Look at that kid: he was wearing a muscle-tee in twenty degree weather.   Sitting next to him, Kayla could probably see his nipples. And his hair was weird and frizzy like he’d permed it or something.  Kayla looked like she’d go for a classier guy, someone better groomed, someone with a promising career, someone who was going places.

 “Good. Turn to the first article, first page.  It should say, ‘Approaching Abjection.’ Everyone see it?  This is the first essay in Julia Kristeva’s seminal book—that’s a pun, you’ll come to find out—Powers of Horror.”

There was more shuffling as the students ripped off the plastic wrappers and flipped open their packets. Gavin used the opportunity to check his reflection in the window.  He had worn his favorite teaching shirt, a crisp blue button-up that made his dark hair look darker and his pale skin look paler: Chinese but not too Chinese.  He was tall like his mother’s side of the family, and the shirt was well-tailored to emphasize his broad shoulders and make him look more barrel-chested than chubby.

“Take a look at the first paragraph.   She says that within the abject lies a ‘dark revolt of being.’  That this revolt is ‘ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable.’  Based on this description, what do you think Kristeva means by the abject?”

The shuffling stopped.  Gavin could hear a single tumbleweed bumping its way down a dirt road outside Toledo.  Gazes were averted, eyes shaded, heads tilted downward and away. 

It didn’t bother Gavin.  He could wait all day.  Or at least ten full seconds. One hippopotamus, two hippopotamus.  Don’t rush it.  No matter how much students hated speaking, they hated awkward silence even more.  Five hippopotamus, six hippopotamus.  One of them would crack.  Their answer would be wrong—Kristeva was like Latin, impossible to understand on a first reading—but it was Socratic to let them take a few guesses. 

Kayla raised her hand, shyly, using her left hand to push up on her right elbow. Good girl, so accommodating, wanting to help out.  Her gaze was receptive, her sweater unsettled by her lifted arm.  He was almost sad to call on her. He would love to watch her raise her hand all day.

“Maybe it could be something like a fantasy novel?” she said.

Huh, that was a new one.  It was okay; Socrates’ students never got the answers right, either.

“What made you think of that?”

Kayla’s eyes were like melted chocolate rolling down to look at her coursepack.

“The part about how it’s outside the realm of the possible and the thinkable?”

“What about the tolerable?” Gavin coached.   “Do you know what tolerable means?”

“It means something is okay.”

“So what does that have to do with fantasy novels?”

She looked over at Braden, as though he would be any help.  He was using two fingers to pull long blond hairs out of his forearm.

“She doesn’t like them?” Kayla said.

Off the to side of the room, a hand shot up high.  It was Rona Gomez.  She had finally lifted her head and was aiming a laser stare at Gavin.

“She’s talking about things that we throw out from our consciousness.   Things like feces and blood and death. And semen, like you said.  Abject means thrown away.”

“That’s right,” said Gavin, stunned. 

“We throw them away because we don’t want to be reminded that our bodies are just things and that they’re going to go rotten just like everything else in the world.”

How could she know all that?  

“I read the article,” she said, even though he was pretty sure he’d only asked the question in his head.

“In another class?”

“No.  Last night.”

“Huh,” Gavin said. “That shows a lot of motivation.  But you might have an easier time if you wait to do the reading after I’ve given you some background on it.”

“I read the whole coursepack.”

All the other students were staring at her.  The black guy—he was named DeShawn or DeWilliam or something—had his mouth hanging open in undisguised bafflement.  Even the nerds were leaning away like she was contagious.

Gavin did what he always did when he felt like he was about to lose control of the class: returned to his lecture notes.  They lay on his tiny chair-desk, freshly printed from an ancient file on his computer, a life raft to be used only in case of emergency.

“Okay, so.”  He waded through single-spaced lines, looking for something that corresponded to whatever part of the class this was supposed to be.  “This article will be your reading assignment for next week.  So let’s go over what abject means.  It means, literally, thrown away.”

“She just said that,” said that one Asian kid, the one who talked.  

“Well now I’m saying it,” Gavin said. “Write it down.”

After class, Gavin waited at the front of the room.  Kayla was packing her bag slowly, fussing with the placement of her binder, rearranging her assortment of turquoise and purple pens.  He tried to look busy, too, re-erasing a corner of the whiteboard and willing Braden to stop hovering around smacking his gum and leave already.

“I was wondering…”

Gavin turned, and there was Rona Gomez, polite and inquisitive like some kind of normal student.  He didn’t say anything, just waited for her to continue, still tracking Kayla in his peripheral vision. 

“I had a question about the article by Grover Maloney.  The one about abjection in The Divine Sharpness.”

Grover Maloney?  That was the last—the extreme, ultimate, last—thing Gavin wanted to talk about right now.  That’s all anyone ever talked to him about.  At academic conferences, everyone he met would say, Oh, you work on abjection in Liam Stump?  Doesn’t Grover Maloney write about that?  And Gavin would say, Yes, Grover Maloney is the most famous Stump critic, and yes, he does write about abjection, but my argument is totally different from his.  Everything about Maloney was so obvious: the best-known Stump scholar, writing about dripping bloody hearts in the best-known Stump play, his only truly famous play, the play that was practically synonymous with his name: The Divine Sharpness in the Heart of God.

He had put Maloney’s chapter on abjection in the coursepack—how could he not, in a course about Stump and the abject?—but only as something to debunk.  The students weren’t supposed to go reading it on their own, without preparation, context, guidance.

Rona was reading aloud from her coursepack. “‘To convince themselves of their own divine unity, Bo and Mi must ultimately destroy the very heart that feeds them both, expelling the blood that signifies their grotesque, fragmented materiality.’”  She looked up at him, her eyes less vulnerable than yesterday, more polite and professional.  “So what I was wondering is: if the abject is what we cast off to create a unified sense of self, could we get refragmented by immersing ourselves in blood and vomit and stuff?”

Kayla was doing one last rummage in her bag, bending over so that Gavin could see the lacey edges of the bra that had been working so hard all through class. Braden was standing a few feet away from her, playing with his phone.  Go away, Gavin cursed him.  Dude, she wants you to leave.   But now Braden was showing her something on the phone, pointing at the screen.  She came closer, leaned in to look at it with him, shoulder to shoulder.  And she looked at him, and back at the screen, and she laughed.

“You shouldn’t take this stuff so literally,” Gavin said. “Literary theory is an intuition pump, a way to provoke us into some kind of productive interrogation.  But you can’t use it as a basis for living your life.  Hume famously said that after the skeptics debated the existence of gravity, they still left the building through the door, not the third-story window.   I always thought that example was specious, though.  If you were a true skeptic, you’d leave through the wall.”

Kayla and Braden walked behind Rona and out of the room, now with both of their phones held out in front of each other’s faces, giggling as they walked. Fuck you.  Fuck you, Rona Gomez.

“So anyway, the point is.”  Gavin watched the two of them disappear down the hall, Kayla’s lush dark hair bending in towards Braden’s frizzy nest. “You can speculate about abstract ideas all you want, but in the end, you need to leave by the door.”

Rona nodded and silently slipped her coursepack into her bag. Then she turned and, her expression was unmistakable, considered the window.  If she did jump out of it and break her leg, it would be his fault, like that kid who convinced his little brother to jump off the roof because Superman could do it.  But when she left a moment later, without saying goodbye, it was through the open door. 

<Chapter 3
Chapter 5>

Chapter 3

Someone was knocking at the office door, just as Gavin was about to play the most epic internet Scrabble word ever:

Žižek!!!

On a triple-word score, aw snap!  And sure, one of the Z’s was really a blank tile, but the other one was worth ten points, and the K was worth five, and all told it had to be worth at least fifty.  Žižek was perhaps the only philosopher with a Z (besides Nietzsche, which had too many letters).  Gavin had been gunning for this word ever since Sinder chose the theme for this game: Lacanian psychoanalysis.  He always picked something mega-specific like that: The Frankfurt School, sociolinguistics, 1960s French philosophy. 

When it was Gavin’s turn to choose, he preferred  more general themes—comic books, music, hockey—something you could get a little creative with.   For the theme of time, he had allowed Sinder to get away with money.  But if Gavin played something like Habermas for the topic of postmodernism, Sinder would get all butt-sore: “Habermas was opposed to postmodernism!”  Yes, duh—he was a famous opponent of postmodernism.  If that didn’t fit the theme, then maybe Gavin didn’t understand what a theme was.  It’s not like he had used Cicero or teeth or something.

The office, shared by all the English graduate student instructors, was ugly and undecorated, crammed tight with coffee-stained desks and giant industrial bookcases housing nothing except a few stray copies of the school literary anthology and some old journals nobody wanted.  But this semester he had gotten smart and scheduled his office hour at 5pm on Tuesday, so at least no one else was around, affording him some privacy and unchallenged access to the office’s lone computer.

The door to the office had a giant window in it, which Gavin had been told was for his own protection. No one was allowed to hang a curtain or a poster over it, lest he make himself vulnerable to harassment allegations.  Or herself.  But honestly, himself.  Out of fairness, though, women weren’t allowed to cover it either.

Knocking on the window, timidly like she was afraid to break her fist on the glass, was one of the nerds from English 1A.  That somber girl, the one who had scribbled in her notebook all through class.  As soon as Gavin looked up at her, she tried the door handle, but it was locked.  He switched the computer screen from Scrabble to The Chronicle of Higher Education and opened the door.

“Did you have a question about something?”

Bits of snow were melting trails down her combat boots, her long black skirt, her hair, which was also long but not in a good way, making little puddles on the carpet in the hall.  She had a gray backpack slung over one shoulder and a giant black pea coat over the other.  She looked like she had come to seek shelter in the office.

“A question?”  Her mouth, which was kind of frowny to begin with, turned down at the corners. “No, not really.  I just wanted to talk about some things you said in class.”  

“During the first week of the semester,” Gavin said.  “I believe this is unprecedented.”

She glanced at the computer screen.  “I’m sorry.  I can come back another time if you’re busy.”

See, that’s what his evaluator was talking about. Discouraging.   Gavin and his friends were always complaining about passive, complacent students, and now he was embarrassing this girl for wanting to discuss ideas from the class.  Granted, class had only met once and there was absolutely nothing to discuss yet, but he wasn’t going to get hung up about that.  The university was paying him seventeen dollars to sit in this office being available for an hour, and be available he would!

He slid a stained chair over from one of the empty desks, grinning like a concierge. “No, come in, sit.” 

She propped herself on the chair’s edge, her bag and coat piled high on her lap.  Her back was very straight and she looked ready to make a quick escape.

“Comfortable?  Need some water or anything?”  She shook her head, which was good because he didn’t know where to get her any, other than offering it from his own aluminum bottle, which he had just filled from the strange humming water fountain down the hall.  

“So, what’s on your mind?”

She waited a moment, eyeing him nervously as though to make sure his question was sincere. Spit it out, he wanted to say, but she would probably take it the wrong way.

 “I was thinking,” she said, finally, in a low, gravelly voice.  She cleared her throat, which made her sound louder but not less gravelly. “I was thinking about that question you asked at the beginning of class yesterday. About what’s neither a subject or an object.”

“You were?”  When Gavin told them to think about it, he didn’t expect them to take it literally, to actually think about it.  It was a rhetorical expression meaning I’ve run out of time so we’ll talk about this next class. Everyone knew that.  He supposed there wasn’t any harm in them coming up with their own ideas, as long as they weren’t too disappointed when they turned out to be wrong.

“I think the answer—is it thoughts?”

“Thoughts.”

“Well, I was thinking,” she said, pulling a long tangly strand of brown hair from the front to the back of her head.  “Thoughts are the only things that can make you go beyond your reality.  Like if you don’t like where you are, you can think about someplace else, and in a way it’s like you’re there.  Or if you are hungry but you’re not supposed to eat anything, you can think of the taste of food, and for your brain, that might be the same thing as actually tasting it.  So thinking is a way to create objects that only exist in your brain—the subject.”

“Why aren’t you supposed to eat anything?”

Her frown, which had almost disappeared, crept back across her face.  Yeah, wrong question, he knew, but he was more curious about it than the rest of what she was saying.  

“For whatever reason, like you’re allergic or on a hunger strike or getting ready for a wrestling tournament. Or maybe you’re fasting because it’s Ramadan or you’re a monk.  Food was just an example.  You could imagine you’re rafting down the Amazon, and if your mind thinks you’re there, isn’t it the same as being there?  Or if you’re a woman, you could think that you were a man, or that you were a unicorn or that you didn’t have a body at all.”

Gavin was getting the feeling, the sneaking creepy feeling, that something was wrong with this girl.  It occurred to him that she wasn’t in his office to discuss the class at all.  She was there to fulfill some kind of…personal agenda.

“Um,” he said carefully. “Did you think of all this just since yesterday?”

She shook her head.  “I guess,” she said, her voice shy.  “I guess I’ve always been interested in expanding my mind. It just seems so limiting to be stuck in a body. You know?”

Aha, Gavin thought!  She was a crackpot!  He had located it just now, some craziness in the dark center of her eye, a current of hunger running through the words expanding my mind.  Whatever she was hungry for, she wouldn’t get it from him.  His advisor had warned him, tons of times:

Never get involved with needy undergraduates. They will distract you from your research and suck all your energy.

She leaned towards him, over the mountain of bag and coat on her lap, her eyes wide and hopeful.  “Do you ever feel like that?”

“No,” Gavin said, firmly.  “I think we’ve gotten pretty far off the topic of the course.”

Her backpack banged onto the floor as she jumped up from the chair.

“I’m sorry,” she said, grabbing her coat and hoisting the backpack over her shoulder. 

“Don’t be sorry.”  Just don’t let it happen again.  “It’s just that I have a lot of work to do.”  He motioned towards the computer.  “It was nice chatting with you—”  Her hand was on the doorknob.  “Your name?”

“Rona Gomez,” she said, without turning to face him.  She was halfway out the door, an angry whirl of tangly hair and black clothing.

“Okay, Rona Gomez.  I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”   

The door closed.  

He clicked back to his Scrabble game, but he couldn’t focus. It was that neediness, still prodding at him, making him unsettled. A bad sign for the first week. Not a problem, he told himself.  It was disconcerting, okay, but easy to handle if approached properly.  He would just have to maintain a wall of logic and professionalism to keep her out.  And at all costs, he shouldn’t worry about it. When you wasted valuable time worrying about the needy student, the needy student won.

So. Žižek.  He dragged the letters from the bottom of the screen up to the board.  Z, I, blank, E…

Wait.  Where was the E?  He looked at his remaining tiles: I, R, L.  Fuck.

 “Seriously?” he said to the screen.  And again.  “Seriously?”

What had happened was obvious. He had gotten so excited about the Z and the blank tile that he had imagined an E that he didn’t have. Nothing unusual, just part of the game.  Still, he couldn’t help but imagine that the dark storm that had visited his office had blown his perfect word away.

“Fuck you,” he said, but what was her name?  Oh yeah. “Rona Gomez.  Fuck you.”

<Chapter 2
Chapter 4>

Chapter 2

Act I, Scene I

A lengthy slide, much larger than the kind found in a children’s play yard, descends from stage right to left.  Both ends of the slide extend past the proscenium, so that no beginning or end is visible.  Two men sit on the slide, unmoving.  Thomas McGrew IV is higher and closer to stage right.  Thomas McGrew III is lower and closer to stage left. The rest of the stage is dark. 

Thomas McGrew IV: How long has it been?

Thomas McGrew III (Checks his watch): A minute.

A minute of silence.

TMGIV: How long now?

TMGIII (Checks his watch): A minute.

Two minutes of silence.

TMGIV: And now?

TMGIII (Checks his watch):  A year.

TMGIV: A year?

TMGIII: They go by quickly sometimes.

TMGIV: They never used to.

TMGIII: It will only get worse.

A minute of silence.

TMGIV: How long?

TMGIII (Checks his watch): An hour.  (Holds up his wrist) You should get one of these. 

TMGIV: Don’t believe in them.  Too oppressive.

TMGIII: Well, if you don’t want to know, you should stop asking.

TMGIV:  I will.  I’ll stop.

A minute of silence.

TMGIII: That was a week.

TMGIV: Thank you.

* * *

“Oh, professor.”  A breathy voice, a male Marilyn Monroe, called out from the next  room.  “I want to feel you inside of me.”

Is this how we say hello now?

Gavin closed the front door behind him, threw his book bag onto the couch and unzipped his snow boots.  

“Suck on my tits!”

“Hold on,” Gavin yelled.

Sinder rolled out of his bedroom on his desk chair, his computer on his lap.  He handed it to Gavin.  It smelled like coffee and dirty laundry.   

“Hit play,” he said. “You’re gonna freak out.”                                                       

Gavin took his time pulling off his gloves.  They were Italian lambskin.  Six years ago, right before he moved to Indiana, he had used part of his first stipend check to buy a dapper winter wardrobe of items he had never owned before: heavy wool coat, insulated boots, cashmere scarf and hat in matching austere gray.  Only the gloves remained, the frayed fingertips revealing glimmers of red silk lining.  They were the last symbol of a forgotten dream, the dream of embracing the Midwest with dignity and class, the romance of an anthropologist, being in the place but not of it. 

Now he wore a waterproof Gore-Tex ski parka from House of Coats just like everyone else in New Buffalo. Indiana was all about good deals and practicality, and only some kind of narcissistic asshole would choose their clothing based on wanting it to look good.

“Come on.” Sinder poked him hard in the shoulder.  “Play. Play. Play.”  He was a normally a dusky guy, what with his parents being from India, but he looked pasty and sweaty and his hair was all mushed onto his head like he’d been sleeping in a ski hat.

“Have you been watching porn all day? Tell me the truth.”

 “This,” Sinder yelled, pointing at the screen, “is the best one ever.  You will not be disappointed!”

It had been two point five years since Sinder had moved in, and two point two five years since they had embarked upon their mission to watch every student-teacher porno ever created, and Gavin hadn’t been disappointed yet.  The research process was grueling of course, but it had resulted in an archive whose scope, Gavin felt quite certain, was unparalleled in its breadth and complexity.  It was a nice hobby for two definitely-straight roommates to share—easier than taking up exercise or a sport, and it kept them from talking about things like formal logic all the time.  But Sinder’s qualifying exams were in a month, and Gavin really didn’t want him to get kicked out of graduate school, which is what would happen if he didn’t pass. Sometimes it seemed like Sinder was studying with manic intensity, but then sometimes it seemed like he was just getting way too high on caffeine and playing a lot of Tetris.

Sinder reached across Gavin’s lap and started the video.  The girl was dark-haired and broad-shouldered, and she looked like her boobs had probably been big even before the implants.  She was wearing tight but unflattering clothes that looked like they were about to fall off. The guy was there, too. He looked like a guy.

“Oh, professor,” the girl said.  “I really enjoy your class.  I find it extremely stimulating.”

The guy adjusted his ugly brown necktie. “Stimulating?   Well, I hope it’s not too stimulating.”

She seated herself on his desk.  You could tell by the length of her skirt that her bare ass cheeks were touching the desk’s surface.  “I can handle it,” she said. “The only thing is, I’m having a lot of trouble with my term paper.”

“The one due next week?”

Sinder was clutching Gavin’s arm like he had just won a beauty pageant.  Whatever was about to happen was going to be exciting. Maybe the professor had a twelve-inch dick.  Maybe the girl had one. As long as it didn’t involve shit, Gavin was cool with it.  Shit was okay when you were resilient or drunk, but not on the first day of classes.

“Yes,” the girl said. “The one analyzing Liam Stump’s The Divine Sharpness in the Heart of God.  I’ve been working on it so hard.  I was up all last night.  My back is really sore.”

  
“I’ll show you some Divine Sharpness,” murmured the professor.  Sinder let go of Gavin’s arm and punched it. Holy fucking shit, Gavin thought, but he wasn't going to ruin his cool by saying it.

“What?” said the girl to the professor.

“Nothing, sorry. Just talking to myself.  Let’s have a look at that sore back of yours.”   The video jumped, and now the girl was naked and sucking the guy’s dick.  It wasn’t twelve inches, just normal, and he had kind of a weird potbelly.  But yeah, Sinder was right.  The premise of Stump acting as a catalyst for getting laid made this the most far-out porn ever created.  

“You must use that line all the time,” Sinder said.

“Oh yeah, like three times just today.”

“Well, it’s still early.”

                   

“I’m pretty sure this movie is based on my true life story. Especially this part.”  In fact, there was no way Gavin could move his tongue that quickly.  It must be this guy’s special skill—to make up for the potbelly and average dick. 

“How’d the first day go?” Sinder asked, after the guy ejaculated.  The video automatically forwarded to another porn, with two guys and girl.   Gavin and Sinder let it play, but they didn’t watch it.  They didn’t watch porn together, except student-teacher.

“Predictable.”

“Let me guess.” Sinder put his fingers to his temples and channeled psychic frequencies.  “They loved the Stump, right?”

“You should have seen their faces light up when I announced it. It was like Christmas.”

“Yeah, baby, just like that,” said one of the guys on the computer.  Gavin turned the volume off.

“And then they all pulled their well-worn personal copies of The Divine Sharpness out of their backpacks,” Sinder said.  His feet were planted on the tan carpet and he was rolling his chair forward and back. “And they were all like, No way, that's your favorite book?  It's my favorite book, too!”

“Exactly.  But the best part was when they took turns acting out their favorite scenes from Time Slide.” 

“It was all hot girls, right?  Just like that nice lady.” He pointed at the screen.  The girl was licking semen off a blindfold. 

“Well.”  Gavin shifted his weight on the couch and a spring poked him in the ass. “Ow,” he said.

“Oh my god,” Sinder said, rolling more quickly. “There were hot girls?  What did they look like? Did you talk to them?”

Gavin could feel his face growing warm with excitement like some kind of fucking undergraduate.  Get yourself together, man.  

“A gentleman never tells,” he said.  

“Please.”  Sinder ran his thin brown fingers through his sweaty hair, fluffing it out from his head.  His eyes were bloodshot and his pupils were the size of dimes. “I’ve been reading Kant for seventy-two hours.  I haven’t slept in three nights.  Help me out here.” 

“Okay.” Gavin didn’t like to brag about his romantic life, but if it would cheer Sinder up. “There was this one Ashley who was pretty cute.  She seemed into me. I’ll probably ask her out.”

“Aw, man,” said Sinder, launching himself three feet backwards.  “You always get all the women.” It wasn’t true, but it was sweet of him to say.

                                                                                          
 <Chapter 1
Chapter 3>