Кейт Эллиот - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

The water looks gray; echoed shouts ricochet loud enough to hurt. Emmy’s teeth chatter as they practice front crawl, breaststroke, scissor kick. Gobs of snot drift like jellyfish. When they have free time, Haley bobs on a pool noodle nearby. Not beside Emmy, but closer than anyone else.

Haley sits with Jessica’s friends at lunch, but she kept wolf stickers on her agenda even after Jessica said they were dumb and Spice Girls stickers were cooler. Emmy knows lots of facts about wolves, but when Haley’s around, she can’t unstick her tongue long enough to share them. Instead, she scuttles along the pool’s bottom. The longer she stays down there, the longer she can pretend she’s dead.

But the whistle blows. Once in the change room, Emmy heads straight to her cubby. She’s laying her clothes on the bench when Jessica comes up to her. “You have to change in the washroom,” she says.

“Why?”

“Because . . .” Jessica leans in. The other girls circle. “You’re a lesbo. ”

The word falls into Emmy’s gut, and it lies there, and it burns.

“And . . .” A triumphant smirk dances on her face, daring Emmy’s sin to punch it. “We don’t want you watching. ”

Her skin goes hot. Blood booms in her ears. But she won’t cry, she won’t. Gathering her clothes, Emmy scurries into the single-stall washroom around the corner. Balancing her stuff on the toilet paper dispenser, she gulps silent sobs. But as she stops her shirt from falling in the toilet, she realizes: Haley wasn’t smirking. Not even a bit.

As her hair dries to chlorinated straw, her sin smolders. She wants to flip over the desks. Snap Jessica’s pencil in half. Throw textbooks out the window and smash the glass. After school, her badness keeps bubbling until it boils over and she yells at Mom.

Mom’s face goes cold. “Good girls don’t yell.”

No, they don’t. They don’t sit there, seething, until they want to throw up. They don’t want to punch themselves, just so they can punch something. They don’t hurt their moms’ feelings. But Emmy’s not a good girl. The badness flares too hot and it loops too thick around her guts.

“Did something happen at school?”

She nods.

“Oh, Emmy.” The coldness dissolves to tiredness; Mom rubs the bridge of her nose. “This is basic. Do unto others . . .”

She does exactly unto others as she wishes they’d do unto her. She hides in the corner and doesn’t talk. Why doesn’t that work?

“Don’t scowl at me. Go play outside if you have steam to burn off.”

When she gets to the park, she rips her belly open and the tiger feasts and feasts. Its fur smells like burning and roadkill, but she hugs it anyway, burying her face in its neck. A low rumbling judders from the tiger’s chest. Not purring. A mean growl that envelops her like a hug. By the time she trudges home, the streetlights hum white and dusk spreads like a bruise.

She doesn’t sleep a wink that night. Hidden under her comforter, she pretends she’s curled up in the tiger’s den. Roots for blankets and the tiger’s flank for a pillow. Bad things belong in the dark.

At lunchtime, Andrew M. yells about tigers. “Me and my brother saw it in the park.” He stabs a sticky finger at the cinder-block wall. “It was that big. From here to there.”

Emmy’s stomach knots and she slips her unopened Fruit Roll-Up back in her lunch bag. She sits at the table’s far end, beside the garbage can. Jessica glances her way and whispers, but Andrew M. is so loud that Emmy keeps getting distracted. She shifts in her chair. It squeaks.

“Oh my God, ” says Jessica. “Did you fart? ”

She shakes her head, but it’s too late. The girls spring back from the table, holding their noses and fanning her with their napkins. “She who denied it, supplied it!”

Emmy grips the table with white-knuckled fingers. She’s supposed to show forgiveness and mercy. So she looks inside her heart for a speck of either. Please, she prays. Please let me be good.

“One-cheek sneak! One-cheek sneak!”

There’s nothing inside her but roiling red heat. Unseeing, Emmy shoves her chair back. She needs to get out, or she’ll explode and the badness and sin will drown them all like lava.

She makes it to the washroom before realizing she left her lunch bag behind. Tears spring to her eyes like she’s a baby. Nothing ever goes right, and she reaches under her shirt to split herself open even though the tiger isn’t there, and—​

The door squeals open. Haley peeks in. There’s a wolf patch sewn on her coat. “Um,” she says. “I have your lunch bag.”

“Oh.” Emmy lowers her shirt. “Thanks.”

“What are you doing?”

“Spider bite,” she lies. “I had to scratch it.”

“Oh. Okay.” But at the door, Haley stops. A tiny smile makes her cheek dimple. “Bye.”

For the first time all year, the tiger goes hungry. Emmy slouches against its sharp ribs, doodling in her notebook. When she opened herself up, her insides were smooth and bare. Until this afternoon, she barely remembered what it felt like, not carrying that leaden weight, that magma heat. She floats cool and light as an angel.

“I’ll feed you other things,” she tells the tiger.

Even as she says it, she wonders. If the tiger eats up all her badness, will it stick around? If another kid needs it more than her, she’ll be sad, but she won’t stop it leaving. With one hand, she reaches behind and strokes its matted fur.

It bumps its broad forehead against her, rough tongue licking over her arm like it means to grate her skin. Emmy squirms away, refocuses on her notebook. Drawings of the tiger trail off into hearts and flowers. And a letter H .

Not believing her daring, Emmy lifts her pencil and writes, H-A-L-E-Y. Then she snaps the notebook shut, shoving it in her bag. With a wave to the tiger, she leaves the woods on Jell-O legs. She wants to stare at her notebook for hours; she never wants to open her notebook again. Later, in bed, she presses her hot cheeks to cool sheets and wonders if there’s goodness in her after all.

At recess, Emmy sits under the straggly pine trees, alternately sketching and snapping pine needles. Her chest hurts like she caught a balloon under her ribs. She almost feels sick, but she doesn’t remember the last time sick felt good.

On the playground, Haley hangs from the monkey bars upside down. It’s so cool that Emmy sets her notebook aside. Her heart thunders until everyone must hear it. Jesus certainly does, and she manages to squeeze out a quick prayer: Please let her like me.

Mom would yell at her for that. This isn’t the sort of prayer to waste Jesus’s time with. It’s a stupid wish. But no one else even pretends to listen, so she buries her face in her kneecaps. Please, please, please.

Sudden footsteps scuffle, laughter cracking like glass. Emmy whirls around, but Jessica dances out of reach, waving her notebook. “Give that back!” Emmy cries.

Grinning, Jessica rifles through it, and then stops. There’s a deathly pause.

“You like her,” Jessica whispers.

First Emmy turns to stone. Then she turns to fire. The badness almost shoots out her nose; it almost bursts her eyeballs.

“Hey!” Jessica yells to the other girls. “Emmy likes Haley!”

“No, I—”

They rush her like lions, their mouths gaping red. Perfect painted fingernails flash in the sun as they clap and chant, “In our class, there was a girl, and lesbo was her name-o!”

“Knock it off!” She can’t even tell a teacher. That’s the worst part. If she tells anyone, the whole class will get lectured about “courtesy” and “respect,” Jessica and the girls will laugh it off, and things will be worse than before. So she sinks to the ground, the fence hard against her back. Curling tight around her knees, she waits for the recess bell.