This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this week's episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Daisy Hildyard read her story,

revision from the December 23rd, 2024 issue of the magazine.

Hildyard, a winner of the Somerset Mom Award and one of the National Book Foundation's

Five Under 35 Awards, is the author of the novel's Emergency and Hunters in the Snow,

and a nonfiction book, The Second Body.

Now here's Daisy Hillyard.

Revision The awakening began for Gabriel in Oxford in May 2009. As final exams approached, everybody was talking about the

girl who had walked up to the front desk of the social sciences library and stabbed herself in the

eyes with a pen. She survived, they said, but was permanently blind and currently lying in the

John Radcliffe infirmary, awaiting the arrival of her

parents. There were rumours that students at Oriole College were being monitored through the

barcodes on their library cards, but the story was spun in different ways. Some saw it as a

dystopian conspiracy, with data being harvested for a eugenicist research project

run by the head of the college. Others told it as a tale of the elite. The students who were found

to be falling short would be quietly expelled so that the college could uphold its excellence

in internal rankings.

If these were extreme responses to the onset of the examination period, it was normal to do the things that Gabriel was doing,

turning off his phone so that his family could not reach him, experimenting with cognitive enhancers

acquired from the teenage supplier who worked in the covered market,

hiding in the college library at closing time so that he would be locked in to study overnight.

...