Laura Kasischke - The Raising

“Who’s that?” Josie asked, jerking her head in Karess’s direction. “You’re dating a hippie chick?”

“Josie—”

“Look,” Josie said. “I want you to tell Craig something for me.”

Perry looked at the ceiling. He waited.

“I want you to tell Craig ‘fuck you’ for me.”

Perry continued to stare at the ceiling—although, out of the corner of his eye he could see that Karess was still waving her pale hand at him, a bit more frantically now. Her bracelets seemed to catch the light, which danced around on the ceiling. He tried to concentrate on that even as he saw (as if, suddenly, he had panoramic vision and could take in all of Starbucks without taking his eyes off the ceiling) Josie’s equally pale hand rise up and rush toward him, colliding with his face.

The smacking sound was oddly muffled to him because, along with his cheek, Josie had struck him in the ear, but it was clear to him, even in his shocked state, that everyone else in Starbucks had heard it, because they all turned to stare at him at once as Josie’s little black shoes snapped away, back to the corner she’d come from, sounding like claws or talons tapping across the linoleum as she went.

“Oh, my God!” Karess cried out, and rushed toward him as if she thought he’d been shot. She grabbed his arm and body-slammed him toward the door, pushed him out into the street. “Oh, my God!” she screamed again. “That girl slapped you!”

Shelly turned at the sound of a slap to see Josie red-cheeked and openmouthed, heading back toward their table, the boy she’d apparently slapped and his girlfriend careening back out the door into what now seemed to be an actual blizzard.

The same feeling of surrender, defeat, with which she’d sat back down when Josie told her to came over Shelly when she realized she was going to have to walk home in that blizzard wearing only a dress and a thin sweater. Maybe Josie would slap her, too, before she had to go back out there.

Josie tossed herself down in the chair across from Shelly, and the whole room erupted in cheers and laughter, as if the home team had just scored a touchdown. Two scholarly-looking guys at a table near the door high-fived each other. There were a few whistles, and a girl alone at a table in the corner looked up from her laptop, pumped her fist in the air. “You go, girl!” the cashier behind the counter shouted. The guy who was making cappuccinos and lattes stabbed a thumbs-up into the air, and even the mother with the toddler in the stroller who’d followed Shelly in from the cold and spoken to her so kindly was smiling.

Had something been said that Shelly hadn’t heard—something for which the boy deserved to be slapped? And if he had said something, could so many have heard it? Shelly herself hadn’t heard a thing until she’d heard the sound of the slap, and the girlfriend’s alarmed exclamations, and some of those hooting with approval had been sitting even farther from the scene than she was.

Of course, had that boy slapped Josie he would have been tackled by the very guys who were high-fiving one another now. The police would have been called. The boy would have been taken out of Starbucks in handcuffs.

Josie was pink-cheeked, her lips parted. She wasn’t smiling, but neither did she look particularly upset.

“What happened?” Shelly asked, trying to sound more concerned than she felt, more alarmed. What she wanted was to get out of there.

“Fucking asshole,” Josie said. “He lives with somebody I hate.”

“Who?” Shelly asked, and Josie muttered a name. Shelly leaned forward and asked again. “Who?”

“Craig Clements-Rabbitt,” Josie said, exasperated, as if Shelly had been badgering her about it for days. “He’s this jerk who—”

“The boy who was in the car crash,” Shelly said—and as she said it, her own voice sounded to her like someone else’s. A narrator’s voice. The distant voice of a storyteller. An omniscient narrator. A narrator who’d known all the facts all along but had chosen to reveal them slowly. “Craig Clements-Rabbitt,” she repeated, not to Josie, but to herself. “You knew him.”

Josie snorted, and rolled her eyes. “Yeah. I knew him,” she said. “He’s a liar and a womanizer and he deserves everything that’s coming to him—and, believe me, it will be bad, what’s coming to him.”

“You think he killed your roommate,” Shelly said. “Nicole. Your friend.”

Josie didn’t deny it, although she’d yet to tell Shelly that she’d been the dead girl’s roommate. And in all that had passed between them since, Shelly had never asked.

But now, if there’d ever been a reason to deny it, there was no longer any reason, and no more denying it. Josie shrugged, and said, “Yeah. That’s part of it.”

It was a dismissal.

Yes, he might have killed her friend, but there was something even worse he’d done.

“What did he do, Josie?”

Josie waved her question away, and said, “It doesn’t matter now. He’s going to pay . ”

“He’s already paid,” Shelly said, trying to keep her voice from trembling. “I was at the scene of the accident. I saw what happened. And what didn’t happen.”

“Everybody pays in the end,” Josie said, and then she laughed without the slightest hint of joy.

“Is that how you feel about me?” Shelly asked her.

Josie looked genuinely surprised at the question. Her eyebrows disappeared under her bangs.

“No,” Josie said, after considering it for what seemed like an eternity. She then uttered one more sharp, strange laugh, and left her mouth hanging open afterward, still looking at Shelly in surprise. “Don’t you get it by now? This has nothing to do with us. And it’s not some stupid hazing thing like you think. I mean, I wouldn’t degrade myself for something like that, and Omega Theta Tau would never ask me to! God. The thing with us has to do with that: You were at the scene. They want to get you out of here.”

Josie leaned back against her chair and regarded Shelly as if from a very great distance. She had the expression of someone who had just dotted the last i on a writing assignment, stapled the pages, and handed it in:

There you have it, what do you think?

Shelly could do nothing but stare back.

“Iwouldn’t have offered if it was a problem,” Jeff said. “I think your kids are cute, and you’ve got this library full of Camille Paglia. Who wouldn’t want to babysit here?”

“They like you,” Mira said, more out of surprise than as a compliment. Andy and Matty each sat on one of his loafers as he bounced his feet. Jeff was sprawled out on the couch as if the apartment were his, and he’d placed his coffee cup on the floor, where it was sure to be knocked over, but this carelessness somehow made his presence even more beneficent, more welcome. “Thank you,” she said again. “I’ll be back in time for you to get to your class. I swear.”

“Hey, my students never expect me on time anyway, and you can’t run out of the morgue without saying good-bye. Take your time. We’ll just be reading feminist literary theory here and smearing graham crackers all over ourselves.”

“I hope you don’t have to change a diaper,” Mira said. “But—”

“ Butt?! Jesus, I hope not too. But, yeah, it’s all fine. Little secret: I took a Red Cross babysitting course when I was in middle school, hoping to make some extra money for dope, and I did great in the class, but somehow no one would hire me to watch their kids. Until now! Still, I remember that whole thing about diaper changing. Not to worry.”