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twenty-one-year-old Nora’s eyes, a bore. The blandness of goodness. He would corner you and tell you that the world should be a place in which no one goes hungry, and that everyone should have health insurance, and that everybody should have the right to a job at a decent wage. All of this was, of course, true, but the calm, thorough manner in which he would elaborate on these insights made Nora feel as if she was visiting one of those dentists who use laser technology. The experience wasn’t exactly painful, but she still wanted to get away as quickly as she could.
    In the story, the character based on Sally remembers a more passionate relationship she had when she was young (with a character Nora made up; Sally had never talked about anything like this) and wonders what her life would have been like if she’d stayed with him.
    Sally had expressed an interest in reading Nora’s fiction, and this was the story Nora decided to let her read. She thought Sally would find it amusing to trace the influence of writers they’d talked about—to find herself a character in a story that contained a hint of James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” a hint of Joyce’s “The Dead.” Nora had known that her story about Gina would hurt her, but she was incapable of imagining that she had the power to hurt Sally, a woman in her thirties, an adult.
    Nora gave Sally the story on the last day of the school year. Sally said she was eager to read it, but Nora heard nothing from her for two weeks. Finally, Nora called her, and they arranged to meet at a coffee shop. After they ordered, Nora asked her if she’d had a chance to read it yet.
    “Yes, I read it. I read it the day you gave it to me.”
    “What did you think?”
    “I can’t say it filled me with a fond elation,” Sally said. Sometimes she talked like a book. “First of all, it’s not exactly flattering to be the main character in a story about someone who hasn’t really lived. But the more important thing is, I
trusted
you. Which means that when you were baby-sitting my kids, I didn’t expect that you’d be going through my diaries. I don’t care that you went snooping. Everybody snoops. But to find my keys and go into the closet and unlock the trunk and read my diaries . . . and then to write a little fable in which everything is true but everything is taken out of context. How did you expect me to react?”
    Nora told her she didn’t know what she was talking about.
    “Come on, Nora.
Jesse
?”
    Jesse was the name of the old flame in the story.
    “Holy shit,” Nora said. “You mean there
was
a Jesse?”
    “Yes,” Sally said. “There was a Jesse. His name was Jesse.”
    “Are you serious?” Nora said.
    “Are you saying you came up with the name Jesse out of the blue?”
    “Of course I did. God! How weird. Maybe I’m psychic. That’s incredible.” She was talking too fast. In her own ears she sounded guilty, even though she wasn’t. She’d snooped around in Sally’s medicine cabinet and in one or two dresser drawers, maybe, but she’d never gone searching for diaries.
    Sally finished her coffee and studied Nora as if she was trying to decide about her once and for all. “I’m not sure if I believe you,” she said.
    They sat there awkwardly for a minute, and then Sally gathered up her things. “Well, good luck,” she said. Nora never heard from her again.
    The episode left Nora with a confused wash of emotions. She regretted hurting someone she cared about; she was distressed about being suspected of doing something she hadn’t done. But she was also filled with a feeling of power. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen that her fiction had the power to hurt people—but it
was
the first time she saw that it had the power to root out the truth about people’s lives.
    She never again had such an uncanny visitation of knowledge; she turned out not to be psychic after all. But time and again, she found that once she started writing about