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ARRIVES AT OLD COLLEGE
    It was printed in heavy, self-righteous black ink. The paper had infected all of the Old College arcades, and now, discarded copies were flying in the brisk wind like English tumbleweeds. There I was, on the cover page of every paper—too tall, with straight, American teeth. Brown hair, brown eyes, no makeup. The author of the article, an H. Pierpont, must have found my high school yearbook photo floating around the internet. I looked a lot like myself and a little like a man. I snatched a copy off the ground and read:
The only surviving descendant of the family of Patrick Brontë (father of the illustrious Brontë trio) is Miss Samantha E. Whipple , a first-year English Literature candidate at Old College, and the orphaned daughter of the late Tristan Whipple (best-selling author of Convenient Fiction, Tortillas on a Mantel, and This Is a Book!). According to Sir John Booker, former Cambridge University don and present curator of the Brontë Parsonage and Museum, Miss Whipple is heiress to the Vast Brontë Estate.
    A small squeeze of breath escaped me, as though I had developed a slow leak. I silently welcomed Pierpont to my shit list. I was not an orphan , thank you very much. I did have a mother, even if we didn’t speak often, and she was a real live mother—red-cheeked and frizzy-haired. And where, exactly, had he dug up “the Vast Brontë Estate”?
    “Oi!”
    I looked around. The voice came from behind me. In my anger, I had marched to the front steps without seeing the queue that had begun to form. I apologized to no one in particular and fell into line. In their black capes, my classmates reminded me of very small children, or very old men. Everyone else seemed to know to wear college dress robes. It was raining, so I had worn a yellow poncho.
    Once I was in line, my eyes fell upon a girl with dyed blonde hair who was standing directly in front of me. She had also missed the dress robe memo, and was wearing a shirt advertising Thor the Hammer. The guy next to her was a tall redhead sporting a brave attempt at facial hair. I could tell the two of them would be dating soon; her body was leaning toward his and he seemed ready to inhale her.
    “I hear she’s loaded,” the girl was saying with a bat of her eyes. She had a copy of the Hornbeam clutched in her hands.
    “I’m reading her dad’s books for my next tutorial,” said the boy.
    “They’re a bit overrated, yeah?”
    “Do you know how he died?”
    “Wasn’t it an accident?”
    “He was a drunk.”
    “Oh, was he?”
    “I’m Thomas.”
    “Ellen.”
    They shook hands. Samantha Whipple, having served her purpose as Conversation Filler, became irrelevant.
    I glanced down once again at the Hornbeam , which was wilting from the sweat on my fingers. The Vast Brontë Estate . I hadn’t heard the phrase in years. It was a term coined many years ago by a well-known Cambridge professor, Sir John Booker, when he penned a hostile and inane op-ed of the same name. At least, “inane” was how my father described it. Sir John had accused Dad of hoarding an enormous wealth of primary sources, denying the academic world the joy of their analysis. I remembered the article mostly through my father’s reaction to it. The morning after the piece appeared in the London Times , I recalled coming downstairs to find him frying bacon, something he only did when he was angry. Dad was actually a vegetarian, but he enjoyed the way bacon self-destructed in the pan by stewing in its own grease—like all liars, cowards, and idiots, he used to say. When I approached him, Dad turned, brandished his spatula at me, and explained that Sir John was a perfect example of a man who a) didn’t know how to read and b) didn’t know how to think. I remember nodding and adjusting the bow on his apron. We both had an unspoken understanding of what was coming: a slew of inquiries from reporters, fans, and critics, and yet another departure from the makeshift