This article explores how a reading group of pre-service teachers responded to the endings of three contemporary young adult texts and what such responses may imply about the interpretive preferences of teacher education. Set in the context of a Faculty of Education at a Canadian university, and using the lens of psychoanalytic theory, this article considers the kinds of thoughts that pre-service teachers appear to privilege, and what such privileging--here symbolized through feelings of frustration and satisfaction in the creation of literary meaning--may imply about the structures and desires for authority and certainty in teacher education.