Laura Kasischke - The Raising

“You make me sick!”

Randa Matheson had screamed that at him in her parents’ bedroom one afternoon after school. She was naked, standing at the edge of the bed, screaming down at Craig, who was lying on his back with a hard-on, wondering, What? What? Where did this come from?

“Huh?” he finally managed to ask.

“I said,” Randa shouted, “that you make me sick .” She enunciated each word as if she were shouting to a foreigner, a retard. Her dark eyes were narrowed, and her lips, bloated and red from all the kissing they’d been doing, made her look exactly like her mother, whose face was well known to anyone who watched reruns of a very stupid sitcom from the late seventies.

“What? What did I do?”

“Just forget it,” Randa snapped, pulling her thong up over her narrow hips, hiding her perfectly trimmed pussy, which made his hard-on throb even harder, before she turned and ran from the room, holding her jeans and her shirt against her breasts. Behind her, the door slammed so loudly Craig flinched and closed his eyes, thinking for a split second that maybe he’d been shot.

After a while, he got dressed and let himself out.

The Mathesons’ house was immaculate, and enormous, and he got lost on his way out, finding himself in some kind of sunroom with no door. Randa herself was nowhere to be seen.

For months afterward Craig wondered what he had done, although it didn’t really occur to him to call Randa or to stop her in the hallway and ask. The day after the “incident,” his mother pulled her car up next to Randa’s empty Jeep in the parking lot of the Trading Post. Craig slumped down in the passenger seat. “What’s the matter with you?” his mother asked. Luckily, she realized then that she’d forgotten her purse, so they didn’t stay.

But it was impossible not to cross Randa’s path. In school. At parties. At the video store. At first, Craig tried not to look directly at her, hoping to avoid her eyes, but after a while it became clear that she was treating him as if he were invisible, so it wouldn’t have mattered what he did anyway. In the stairwell one day between classes, just the two of them passed each other (she was going up, he was going down) and, stupidly, he sputtered out, “Hey.”

She looked right at him, seeming to register nothing. Not the vaguest hint of an expression crossed her face. She was looking through his head, seeing nothing but the wall behind it.

He tried, now and then, to think about what could have happened, what he’d done or failed to do.

They’d been kissing, he was clear on that, and the shirts had come off, and then the jeans—around their thighs at first, and then around their ankles, and then on the floor—and then he’d eased that thong down her silky legs while she ran her fingers over one of his eyebrows. He’d stood up and pulled his own underwear off, and she’d sort of propped herself up to look at him, and asked, “Do you like me?”

Craig was fairly certain that his answer to the question had been yes (why wouldn’t it have been?), but the question was followed by a long, fast series of other questions, and he was less sure of what his answers to those had been.

Do you think Michelle has better tits, who’s the skinniest girl you ever had sex with, have you ever had sex with Melody, when did you first notice me, is Tess the one you really want, are you using me to get to her, did you just come over here this afternoon because you were hoping you were going to have sex with me?

Craig had gotten back into bed beside her and lay there with his throbbing hard-on, until finally he interrupted her, and said, “Are we going to fuck or what?” And that’s when she’d leapt out of bed and screamed at him.

Craig had hardly been within a few feet of a girl since that day with Randa. The whole summer after graduation had passed without a flirtation, let alone a kiss.

Now he closed his eyes and let the image of Nicole Werner—only two feet away from him—linger on his lids for a minute. He tried to picture her in Fredonia, carrying on a conversation with someone’s actress turned mother or millionaire father strutting around in a suit with nowhere to go but the Trading Post.

No.

He could not picture Nicole Werner anywhere he’d ever been before this minute.

Nicole Werner belonged here, now, in the lounge of Godwin Honors College.

Virgin valedictorian, daughter of the Dumplings’s owners.

Probably that gold chain around her neck held a crucifix dangling somewhere down between her perfect, untouched breasts, in the powder-scented shadows of her plain cotton bra and flowery blouse. At night, she probably said prayers and probably cuddled up to her stuffed monkey. Maybe back in eleventh grade she’d let some asshole grope her ass and stick his tongue in her mouth, but she’d never sauntered out of her parents’ hot tub stark raving nude, stoked up on Ecstasy, and invited every guy from Fredonia High at the party to stick his dick in her—a not-uncommon event back home.

Nicole Werner had never even been to a party like that. She’d never heard of a party like that. They did not, Craig felt certain, have parties like that in Bad Axe.

She sneezed again—a dainty sneeze, all consonants and wheee !—and Craig opened his eyes.

She was looking back at him with a tissue held to her nose.

I’m sorry, she mouthed.

God bless you, he mouthed back.

Shelly went over it again every morning in her mind, and every night before she went to bed. She thought about it as she drove to work and as she sat behind her desk. When the telephone rang, the sound sometimes startled her. She forgot she was in her office, that she had a phone on her desk that might ring.

First, she’d remember the car, solidifying her own description of it in her mind:

Dark colored. Two door.

Then, the familiar road:

A semirural highway. Two lanes, north and south, just on the outskirts of town. She’d driven that road a million times before, and had driven it a hundred times since.

That time, she’d been listening to a country station—a guilty pleasure. (If anyone she worked with at the Chamber Music Society knew her secret, she might not actually be fired, but she’d be chastised so relentlessly she’d eventually have to quit. Sure, it was a free country, but not when it came to certain aesthetic preferences or political opinions and you happened to work at the Chamber Music Society at the university.) One of her favorite country stars was singing about how great it was to live in the U.S.A., and Shelly was singing along.

She remembered the yellow line down the middle of the road.

She remembered noting the small, dark-colored car that was just far enough ahead of her that she didn’t need to pay much attention to it. It wasn’t going fast. There were no other cars on the road.

As she sang the words to the country song along with the radio, she realized for the first time (although she’d heard the song a hundred times) that the subtext of it was that if you didn’t like it in the U.S.A., you should leave.

Personally, Shelly Lockes more or less agreed. Her big brother had been killed in Vietnam. Her parents had never gotten over it and had died young of the kind of diseases the grief-stricken die of: heart attack for her father, stomach cancer for her mother.

Still, Shelly was wondering to herself even as she sang the catchy lyrics at the top of her lungs, if you did decide to leave the U.S.A., where would you go? If you were able to think of a country that appealed to you more, would they be willing to let you in? What if, afterward, you wanted to come back?