“Or cardigan,” she said.

“In fact, it was so good, I think we should have a thousand more nights like that.”

“I’ll be in the harem if you want me.”

“Or …”

“Or what?”

“You could be my queen.”

Eleanor waited in the hallway outside of Søren’s office. He’d told her that if she figured out what happened between Xerxes and Esther on her audition night, she should tell him. So she rewrote her story by hand as neatly as she could, put it in a nice new folder and gave it to him. It seemed like such a great idea right up until the moment he opened the folder, started reading and shut his office door in her face.

Why had she given it to him? That whole story was ridiculous. She had Esther talking like she lived in 1993 instead of in ancient Persia, and she put the king in jeans and made him kind of funny and goofy instead of kingly. Regal. Kings were supposed to be regal. And the story … Oh, God, she had a whole sex thing going on in the story with Esther being tied to a bed while the king f**ked her.

And now her priest was reading it.

Eleanor went back to the fellowship hall food pantry and sorted through the donations. Why did no one ever donate Oreos? All she wanted was to eat an entire bag of Oreos and cry for a few hours while listening to Whitney Houston sing “I Will Always Love You” on repeat. Instead she went to the bathroom and discovered she’d started her period. That explained the tears and the Oreo obsessing. Maybe it even explained her sudden moment of temporary insanity when she decided to let Søren read her stupid Esther story.

She grabbed her backpack and sat down on the bench outside Søren’s office. If he was in there calling the men in white coats to come get her, she wanted to be on standby to knock the phone out of his hand and plead her case.

To kill time, she pulled her new math textbook out and flipped through it.

“What the holy f**k is this bullshit?” she yelled as she tried to decipher the precalculus before her.

Søren’s office door swung open.

“Eleanor. Inside voice.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Math.”

“Forgiven.”

She looked up at him. He held her story in his hand.

“You’re excommunicating me, aren’t you?”

“Why did you write this story?” he asked.

“I don’t know. We were talking about Esther and what happened that night and I … I thought it would be fun to write. And then I started writing it, and I couldn’t stop.”

“You couldn’t stop?”

“I couldn’t. It was like some demon had my hand and was racing it all over the paper.” She grabbed her right wrist like a neck and pretended to choke it until it went limp. “Anyway, sorry. I won’t make you read my weird stories anymore.”

“I will read anything you write. You are a better writer than I am.”

“Really? I thought it was kind of stupid.”

“Stupid?”

“Yeah, goofy. Childish. I made hymen jokes.”

“It’s satire,” Søren said.

“Satire? I wasn’t going for satire. I just wanted to make the story funny to show how ridiculous it is to choose a country’s leader by how good in bed she is.”

“Using humor to hold human foibles—usually of a political nature—up to ridicule is satire, Eleanor. It’s a difficult and sophisticated form of humor that very few adult authors have mastered.”

“Oh,” she said. “Cool.”

“If you’re not careful, I’ll put you to work on my dissertation.”

Eleanor blushed. Søren didn’t seem to be joking.

“Don’t you think I’d give those old priests who read your dissertation heart attacks?”

“You nearly gave me one,” he said. He stared down at her story and shook his head. She felt inordinately proud of herself. One little short story and she’d gotten to Søren with it. She felt something, something she hadn’t ever felt before. Powerful. She could put words onto paper and make a grown man think wicked things like how fun it would be to tie a virgin to a bed and f**k her until dawn. She could get used to this feeling.

“May I keep this?” Søren asked.

“You want to keep my story?”

“I think I should confiscate it. You’re too young to be reading such things.”

“I think you’re forgetting something—I wrote it.”

“I’m keeping it,” he said.

“Okay. But you have to give me something in return.”

“What would you like? And please keep your requests above the neck.”

Eleanor sighed in acquiescence. No asking him to bend her over a pew, then. Fine. If she was smart she might get something out of this deal. She’d given him a sexy story she’d written—something private, personal, secret. Secret?

“Tell me a secret,” she said. “Any secret. Then you can have the story.”

Søren exhaled heavily.

“Something tells me I’m going to regret telling you this, but it’s perhaps for the best that you know.”

“Know what?”

“I have a friend,” Søren said at last.

“A friend? That’s the big secret?”

“You didn’t ask for a big secret. Only a secret.”

“Why is your friend a secret?”