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at college, I once again felt as though I’d touched down on another planet, and with each successive day I grew more convinced that I’d suddenly be identified as an alien and sent back from whence I came.
    “‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—’” Professor Morrissey proclaimed, as I returned my attention to the Emily Dickinson poem we were meant to be scanning. “‘Success in Circuit lies / Too bright for our infirm Delight / The Truth’s superb surprise. / As Lightning to the Children eased / With explanation kind / The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind—.’”
    As the rest of the class picked out tetrameters and iambs and other smart-sounding things, I thought about the Portrait of Colette Marsh back home, dazzling in its slant of light. I thought about the little smudge I’d left behind. Tell the truth , I wrote in large letters at the top of my notebook. But tell it slant. It sounded profound . . . I just didn’t quite know what it actually meant. I raised my hand a nervous fraction, but Morrissey was busy outlining rhyme schemes on the board: A-B-C-B . . . D-E-F-E . . . I looked over at Julian, staring up at the leaves outside with a vaguely amused smile. Did he know what it meant? I was sure that he must. My hand went down again.
    After Professor Morrissey ended our class that morning, I walked out across the dew-drenched quad with Shelly, a frail girl whose veil of dark hair seemed to pull her head earthward. She’d read my whole story during class, and as I bought her a cup of burned cafeteria coffee, she let loose a surprising deluge of jumbled compliments. I’d never had anyone read—let alone lov e—the things I’d written, and perhaps it was the coffee, but I found myself warmed by a gentle, acidic sensation. By evening I had returned the favor and read her workshop piece, plus another of her stories. Both were about death and both involved highly disturbing sex scenes. Shelly invited me to stay over, as her roommate was visiting an out-of-town boyfriend. I passed a nervous hour trying not to crush her in her dark-sheeted bed, under the watchful eyes of a larger-than-life-size poster of Edgar Allan Poe.
    In the morning I accidentally woke Shelly as I was reaching my free arm into my backpack on the floor, trying to fish out Julian’s story.
    “Sorry,” I said, “I just can’t wait to tear this thing apart. What kind of a title is this? He must have written this an hour before class. It’s not even three pages long.”
    But as Shelly settled back to sleep on a dark waterfall of her own hair, I began to read Julian’s story and was soon astounded to find it utterly untearable. Though “The Thirty-Third Winter” was only two and a half pages, it felt epic. It was about a man skinning a hare out on the moors of Ireland while drinking from a bottle of Epiphany whiskey. I’d never read anything better. It made me so deeply ashamed of my own story that I wanted a stiff glass of Epiphany myself. Impossibly, Julian appeared to know more about being thirty-three and skinning hares in Ireland than I did about cleaning restaurant tables and growing up in the American South, which I had actually done.
    I left Shelly’s room that morning in a solemn autumn funk, which lingered all through the weekend. It persisted even when, in our next class, Professor Morrissey praised my monstrous story for its fine detail. It wasn’t until Julian spoke up that I felt any better.
    “It feels classic but at the same time strangely modern. Like Bach played on an electric violin.”
    I had no idea what to make of this, but it was the most he’d ever said at once in our class, so I took it as a double-underlined compliment. He said nothing at all about Shelly’s piece, “If We Were Birds,” a gruesome melodrama about a married couple who accidentally kill their newborn baby when a bout of their depraved sex breaks the crib to splinters. I said I liked that there were yellow squids on