Tomi was a Nigerian woman in her mid-twenties: slim, head shaved to reveal a perfectly-shaped skull, big eyes with unnervingly dark pupils. Her only imperfection was the gap between her front teeth, but what did it matter, when she was Tomi?

I found Tomi’s email in my inbox five hours after the application window for my four-week creative nonfiction workshop was closed. 

“hey is it still open? my dad smashed my phone and i couldn’t steal his until he stepped out to deliver his sermon. true story, i swear. i can tell you about it if you let me in.” 

How could you say no to someone who could write an email, with no capitalization, like that?

The class met online. I read from the script I’d rehearsed, trying to feign a confident, relaxed, organized persona. I was the opposite of it. Writing, to me, was a messy business. It was something I loved doing only when I could do it well, which happened so rarely and ephemerally. Everyday I sat in front of my laptop and typed three hundred words. Some days I left the desk in elation, exclaiming to no one that a masterpiece was born; some days I retyped the three hundred words again and again, and had nightmares where red octopuses hung upside-down from the ceiling of an ice tunnel, mouthing words I couldn’t decipher.

As soon as I read the stories Tomi submitted, I knew that she was better than everyone else in the class by a big margin. The first piece, which did nothing but describe how she tried to get rid of the smell of deep-fried fish that permeated her childhood home, which she left at the age of fifteen by becoming a stripper, was written in a zappy and jazzy prose, just like the way she spoke. Her second one was about how she tried to climb up the social ladder of the strip club world, her third about teaching her codependent sister strip dance and how it failed disastrously. Echoing the comments from her peers, I told her, through my coffee-stained laptop screen, that the second piece, while offering the reader a voyeuristic satisfaction, felt less funny than her third one and less moving than her first. In the little Zoom window, she stared unblinkingly at somewhere I couldn’t locate. “Okay,” she said.

“I guess we’d be more interested to know why the narrator left her father’s house,” I said tactfully. On the first day, I’d told the class to refer to the main characters in the autobiographical pieces as “the narrator,” not “you,” so we could dissect the story from a safe and respectful distance. 

“Okay.”

“The first story is so powerful: the reciting of the Bible, the duplicity of the father, the narrator’s mother’s death. There’s so much to explore!” At some point, I became conscious of my high-strung voice. It occurred to me that maybe Tomi hadn’t come to the class to become a good writer. Or maybe we had fundamentally different ideas about what “good writings” were.

When she didn’t speak, I ventured, “For your Revision Week, can you submit a revision of your first piece?”

“Okay.”

When Revision Week came Tomi submitted an expanded version of the second story. She added graphic descriptions of unprotected sex forced upon her by her clients, semi-nonconsensual sex forced upon her by her ex-boyfriend, consensual but painful sex between her and her sugar daddy. It was simultaneously arousing and disturbing to read. It felt like a vengeful attack on my previous preaching. Two students excused themselves from the class, whether directly because of the piece, I didn’t know. The night before the class, I strategized about how to lead the discussion around the submission. I’d not refer to the fact that what she did was the opposite of my suggestion; I’d invite the class to ponder over the contract between the reader and the writer; and I’d cite examples of works that were meant to offend, to provoke.

When Tomi entered the virtual room, I saw that she looked tired. There were dark circles under her eyes and because she wasn’t wearing any makeup, I could see the acne scars on her skin. She was wearing a wig. The class felt more sluggish than usual: revision was a grueling process, and the fact that none of the students’ writings greatly improved made me question my method. When it was Tomi’s turn to be workshopped, my throat was as dry as sandpaper.

“Tomi,” I said. “Can you tell us a little about your process? Such as why you picked this piece to revise and how you did it?”

She lowered her head as if to think. When she looked up again she said, “Because I don’t care about the other two.”

I should have let it go and move on, but to my regret, I didn’t. In a slightly trembling voice I asked, “Can you tell us why you don’t?”

She twisted a strand of her braided wig absent-mindedly. “I don’t know.” After a second of dead silence, she added, “Maybe some people just don’t have a taste for this wishy-washy stuff.”

“Wishy-washy?”

“Yeah, horrible fathers, weak mothers, clingy sisters, childhood, the end of innocence, coming of age, blah blah blah,” she said in a voice that sounded terribly cruel to me. 

“I know it’s good stuff.” She directed her eyes at the camera. At me. “I know you for one wrote stuff like that, which is why you liked it. But that’s not who I am. That’s not who I want to become.”

Even before she finished I could hear my teeth clattering. Never had I felt so grateful for the almighty technology for separating us in our little cells, so I could be insulated in my humiliation. My sense of self, which was far from sturdy to begin with, crumbled rapidly in the gigantic shadow cast by Tomi’s. What if she’s right? The voice reverberated in my head, and before I could turn off the camera, a pressure that had been developing in my throat pushed the tears up through my nasal cavities and out of my sockets.

I broke down in front of my students. On recording.

I forgot how the class ended. I must have apologized, which I did again a few days later when I canceled our last class and issued a partial refund to all of them. I blacklisted all my students for fear of receiving messages of derision, or even worse, consolation. It took me a year to be able to teach workshops again, and I would never again make exceptions for brilliant email-writers. For a while I followed Tomi’s career judiciously, afraid of coming across her publications by accident, but I dropped this shameful habit after my second novel came out. My sense of self was still susceptible to the external weather, but I’d become more adept at reading and mending its cracks. I’d become friends with my fragility.

One day, I was grocery-shopping at a chain store when a tall, fashionably dressed woman sauntered towards me from the other end of the cereal products aisle. The fluorescent light cast a cool, matte finish on her dark skin. We recognized each other instantly. “Oh my God. Tomi,” I blurted.

She widened her eyes and covered her mouth, smiling as she drew me into her arms.

Seated across a small table in the hot food section, we exchanged pleasantries while busily stealing glances at each other. She had quit strip-dancing and was in town talking to some movie people who’d shown an interest in a script she’d written based on her life story. “In fact, I gave them three scripts,” she said. “Developed from the three pieces I wrote in your workshop.”

“Oh.” I wondered which story had caught their eyes, but felt too queasy to ask. Being around Tomi always had this unsettling effect on me.

“Guess which one they liked?” she said.

I averted my eyes. “Whichever they chose, I’m sure it’s great. Even back then you were a very good writer.”

She examined my face fiercely. Then, as if no longer able to hold it back, she said hastily, “I cried after our first class, you know. The first story was completely made up, so was my email. My father was a high school teacher. My mother is still alive. I love eating deep-fried fish because I wasn’t allowed to have it growing up. Part of the third story was fictional, too. I was the little sister that was being taught. I was a disaster before I got better.”

I stared at her, stunned by this confessional outburst. A familiar tightness seized my throat. I swallowed, trying to gaze through her skin until I could see the Tomi from two years before, trapped in the little Zoom window, the curtains drawn, a blank wall behind her. I crossed the screen and found myself in her apartment, surrounded by brown sofas, hair curlers, books, condoms, cheap kimonos provided by the clubs, paper lanterns and a neon sign that read, “What Up.” I took a deep breath: spicy perfume, sweat and hangover breath, stale food. Was what she just told me a lie, too? Some people use lies to bubble-wrap their selves, but I knew too little about Tomi to airbrush her motivation with this theory. All I knew was that something undeniably true was recognized and exposed in that class, and she had found it unbearable.

“It’s okay, Tomi,” I said with a faint smile. “We’ve all been there.”

She held me in her gaze until her dark pupils began to boil.