8 years ago
The list was proof.
Not of potential, but of the systemic, water-logged mediocrity that drowned the arts. A curated selection of the bland and the blind, hand-picked to waste my time.
My eye snagged on a name.
Ásta Njáll.
I'd heard it. A whisper in a hallway, a knowing nod between two professors with bad breath. They spoke it like a password, like it meant something. It was pathetic. The whole institution was a conspiracy of the talentless to worship the least offensive.
I claimed the library's best table at 6:30. The wood was scarred but solid. I'd already outlined my approach to the Shakespearean assignment in my head. It was flawless, obviously, and was mapping out how to surgically assign the idiots their menial tasks.
At 6:51, my foot tapped a staccato rhythm of pure disdain on the floor. The librarian, a woman whose entire existence seemed to be a plea for silence, hushed me. I didn't stop. I just turned my head slowly and fixed her with a stare until her mouth puckered and she looked away. Victory. A small, necessary one.
Footsteps. Not the hesitant shuffle of the inadequate. A crisp, definite tread. I looked up.
Wolf-yellow eyes. Not warm. Not soft. The color of a warning. She had a nest of black hair that looked less like a style and more like an act of defiance.
"Laurus? from group 9?" Her voice didn't ask. It placed me. Calm. Flat. It was the most arrogant sound I'd ever heard. It carried the quiet, infuriating certainty of someone who'd already graded me and found me lacking.
I let a beat pass, a petty show of control I already felt slipping.
"That's me," I said, leaning back in a feigned display of boredom. "And yo..."
"Ásta. Ásta Njáll" She cut me off, not waiting for the finished question, and put out a hand. Her grip was dry, strong. My own palm was cool, perfect. Hers was warm, and her fingers were stained. Blue and black ink smudged into the creases. It felt like touching something that had been working, sweating, living in a way I found faintly disgusting. For a second, I imagined the ink transferring, a permanent mark of her grubby ambition. I let go first.
'Of course, the writer.' I thought, the word a sneer in my mind.
She sat without being asked, pulling a notebook from her bag. It was battered, the cover soft with use. No apology for being late. No nervous chatter. She just opened it and uncapped a pen that had been chewed nearly to the plastic. The silence she brought with her wasn't empty. It was thick, judgmental. It was the silence of someone who found the very air in the room insufficient.
I stole glances as the minutes bled. She was all wrong. No performed vulnerability. No flirtatious eyelashes. Her clothes were simple and clean, but they hung on her like armor, not decoration. Her back was a ruler-straight line of pure, unearned confidence. She was scribbling, completely absorbed, utterly indifferent to my presence, my scrutiny, my very existence in my space.
A hot, familiar knot of irritation tightened in my gut. She wasn't just another idiot. She was a new kind of insult. The kind that didn't even know it was being offensive.
'Fine,' I thought, my jaw tight. 'Play at being a rock. I'll be the hammer.'
The others trickled in by 7:46 p.m., laughing, slurping sodas, wasting my oxygen.
I knew 8 of them. They were here to pass time, not excel. No one took anything seriously in A and H. This was probably the only A these losers would ever get. The other stranger; a willowy girl with a nervous smile, was undoubtedly another playwriting dilettante.
Ásta looked up from her notebook as the girl sat down. "Halla," she said, a faint, actual smile touching her lips. Not the performative kind. A real one. "You're in this group?"
"Looks like it," the girl, Halla said, her shoulders relaxing a fraction. They began a low, rapid exchange about some professor's impossible marking scheme.
A hot spike of pure irritation shot through me. They were forming a bloc. A writers' bloc. In my meeting. On my time.
I slammed the assignment sheet onto the table. The sound was a gunshot in the hushed library. Halla jumped. Ásta's head turned slowly, those wolf-yellow eyes fixing on me, the smile gone.
"Original Shakespearean play. Two weeks." My voice was flat, cold. "We vote on the best draft." It was going to be mine.
Ásta raised her hand. A deliberate, calm motion. "Is there a page limit?"
I didn't look at her. I stared at a water stain on the table. "Wing it."
She lowered her hand, unfazed.
Infuriating.
Two weeks later.
I strode into the library, my draft a perfect, gleaming argument in iambic pentameter. I was the only one who had put in real intellect, after all.
We exchanged drafts. I flipped through the first three. They were cognitive insults. Derivative, emotionally florid, technically sloppy.
The kind of writing that mistook feeling for craft.
I skimmed them, my lip curling. 'Pathetic'
I raised my head, not bothering to read the rest. The other group members were nodding along as they read. I felt a familiar warm certainty settle in my gut
It was over. My work had been chosen.
"We'll take a vote to decide who's draft we'll use." I almost allowed myself to smile
'It's all formalities, I'm the best in any group' .
When the vote was over, I collected the slips of paper. My lip twitched. My name was nowhere to be found.
"Ásta? " I looked up, my voice dripping with contempt."Are all of you blind? Or can you simply not tell an algorithm apart from human creativity? " The words slipped out, raw and unfiltered.
"Actually, it's not an algorithm. Read it yourself. " Ásta's voice was flat. I clicked my tongue and shoved the other drafts aside, and pulled hers from the bottom of my pile. I hadn't opened it. I knew it wouldn't be good. My hand hovered. 'The Hollow Crown.' A pretentious title. My finger twitched.
The first line was a stumble. An awkward caesura. I noted it, a flaw to file away. The second line corrected it, but with a dissonant word, an ugly modern syllable that grated against the verse. I frowned. This was incompetence.
By the third line, the dissonance had purpose. By the end of the first page, the stumbles had become a rhythm of their own, a jagged, living pulse. It wasn't breaking the rules. It was speaking a language that made the rules seem like dry grammar. My own draft, pristine and formidable, began to feel like a beautifully articulated skeleton beside a creature with hot breath and a breathing heart.
Her king didn't soliloquize about power; he ached with it. The betrayal in Act III infected the page. I could feel the cold dagger before it was drawn. This wasn't craft. It was alchemy. She had turned technical mistakes, the very flaws I would have circled red, into the veins and nerves of something alive.
My pulse hammered against my throat. It was a masterpiece. Not despite its roughness, but because of it. The realization was a cold flood in my veins. I had built a cathedral. She had raised a forest. And that forest was swallowing my stones.
"Is that still an algorithm, Laurus? Or are you just blind?" The taunt from across the table was my own words thrown back at me.
I didn't bother with the snickers. I was tracing a single, brutal metaphor with my thumb, my own perfect metaphors now feeling ornate and dead in comparison.
I looked up. The group was staring. Ásta sat perfectly still, that infuriating, absolute calm intact. She wasn't triumphant. She was... waiting. As if my verdict was a forgone conclusion, and she was just waiting for me to catch up to the truth she'd known all along.
"Fine." The word ash in my mouth "We'll use it. " I passed the attendance sheet, eyes tracking her hands as she took it. No ink stains today. Just clean, capable fingers that somehow conducted a symphony out of chaos.
It was her win. Her victory.
But she didn't even smirk. Why was she so stoic? The calm was worse than any gloat. It was a void where my superiority was supposed to be reflected, but it swallowed the reflection whole
'Why does this even bother me'
I stood up my chair, screeched like a dying thing.
"From here on out, we'll complete the rest through the group chat. " I gathered my things, my beautiful, articulated skeleton of a draft. The others shuffled out, a murmur of relief in their wake.
She didn't move.
I paused, one hand on my bag. A challenge. To walk out would be a retreat. I sat back down, slowly, the defeated general refusing to flee the field. I opened her draft again, not reading, just staring at the words until they blurred, pretending to be absorbed.
"Impeccable work," She began, her voice soft, but it cut the silence like glass.
I didn't look up.
"Spare me the patronage."
"I'm not. Your writing has managed to capture Shakespeare's style without losing your own individuality. The structural control is... Impeccable."
I looked up. She wasn't looking at me. She was studying the first page of my draft. Her head was tilted, analytical. She wasn't praising me; she was dissecting a fascinating specimen. It was worse than mockery.
"What would you know about individuality?" I sneered, the last shred of my control fraying into pure spite.
Her yellow eyes lifted to mine.
"WRIT 201, THEA 203, and COMM 210. The core principles are heavily emphasized. I assumed you'd taken those classes?" A beat. "Given your focus."
The air left the room. She wasn't asking a question. It was a diagnosis. She had just summarized my entire philosophy, structure, control, and formalism and presented it back to me as a syllabus entry. Something teachable.
My mind white-hot with fury could only produce the blandest defense.
"Yes, I'm familiar."
She stood and extended her hand across the table. It was the same gesture as two weeks ago, but the balance of power had inverted.
I didn't want to touch her. Touching her now felt like accepting a verdict. But not touching her was surrender.
I took her hand. Her grip was, again, firm and warm. I squeezed a fraction too hard, a silent transmission of war. She didn't flinch. She smiled. A small thing that didn't reach her eyes.
"It was a pleasure, Laurus Daníelson"
"Same," i said, the word a stone in my mouth. "Ásta Njall" I held her gaze, and for a fractured second, i saw my own reflection in her topaz irises, not triumphant, just seen. Truly, clinically seen. I let go first.
And for the first time I could remember, I didn't feel the need to wipe my hands clean. I felt the need to brand it.
That night, in the sterile silence of my room, I spread her draft out on my bed. My red pen hovered. I began to hunt.
A missing comma after an introductory clause. Circle.
A semicolon where an em-dash would add breath. Circle.
A question mark lacking the proper rhetorical weight. Circle.
Each red circle was a foothold. A tiny, reclaimable piece of high ground. My breathing evened. The tight coil in my chest loosened. A thin, vicious pleasure spread through me with every flaw I catalogued. I was reasserting order. I was proving her mortality.
I reached the end. The page was a constellation of red marks, a battlefield I had meticulously mapped.
My pen hovered over the final period.
A cold clarity washed over me, extinguishing the petty thrill.
'Am I… getting off on this?' The thought was alien, disgusting. 'Is her writing so complete, so fucking alive, that the only territory I can conquer is the grammar?'
I dropped the pen. It rolled off the bed and clattered on the floor.
I fell back onto the pillows, the cicadas scream flooding in through the open window. My mind replayed it all against the dark ceiling; her stiff spine at the library table, the unnerving calm, the way she'd said
"Given your focus," not as a compliment, but as a clinical tag for a limited specimen.
I didn't just want to beat her.
I needed to dismantle that calm. I needed to make her see me, not as a course code, but as an absolute.
I looked at my right hand, the one that had shaken hers. I slowly curled it into a fist, the tendons standing rigid in the moonlight.
'You will fall by my hand, Ásta Njáll. I will be the flaw you cannot edit out.'
"Thus, from that hour, began a rivalry, a hate that found its root in something not unlike respect."
-Alexandre Dumas