Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

“Hey, buddy, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Mom says you two had a fight?”

Nal shoots, whispered the homunculus. He turned away from Samson and planted his feet on the asphalt. Shooter’s roll — the ball teetered on the edge and at the last moment fell into the basket. “It was nothing; it was about college again. What do you need?”

“Just a tiny loan so I can buy Vanessa a ring. Mr. Tarak’s going to let me do it in installments.”

“Mr. Tarak said that?” Nal had always thought of Mr. Tarak as a CASH ONLY!!! sort of merchant. He had a spleeny hatred of everyone under thirty-five and liked telling Nal his new haircut made him look like the Antichrist.

Samson laughed. “Yeah, well, he knows I’m good for it.” Sam was used to the fact that people went out of their way for him. It made strangers happy to see Samson happy and so they’d give him things, let him run up a tab with them, just to buoy that feeling.

“What kind of ring? A wedding ring?”

“Nah, it’s just … I dunno. She’ll like it. Tiny flowers on the inside part, what do you call that …”

“The band.” Nal’s eyes were on the red square on the backboard; he squatted into his thin calves. “Are you in love?”

Samson snorted. “We’re having fun, Nal. We’re having a good time.” He shrugged. “It’s her birthday, help me out.”

“Sorry,” Nal said, shooting again. “I got nothing.”

“You’ve got nothing, huh?” Samson leaned in and made a playful grab for the ball, and Nal slugged him in the stomach.

“Jesus! What’s wrong with you?”

Nal stared at his fist in amazement. He’d had no idea that swing was in the works. Wind pushed the ball downcourt and he flexed his empty hands. When his brother took a step toward him he swung wide and slammed his fist into the left shoulder — pain sprang into his knuckles and Nal had time to cock his fist back again. He thought, I am going to really mess you up here , right before Samson shoved him down onto the gravel. He stared down at Nal with an open mouth, his bare chest contracting. No signs of injury there, Nal saw with something close to disappointment. The basket craned above them. Blood and pebbled pits colored Nal’s palms and raked up the sides of his legs. He could feel, strangest of all, a grin spreading on his face.

“Did I hurt you?” Nal asked. He was still sitting on the blacktop. He noticed that Samson was wearing his socks.

“What’s your problem?” Samson said. He wasn’t looking at Nal. One hand shielded his eyes, the sun pleating his forehead, and he looked like a sailor scouting for land beyond the blue gravel. “You don’t want to help me out, just say so. Fucking learn to behave like a normal person.”

“I can’t help you,” Nal called after him.

Later that afternoon, when Strong Beach was turning a hundred sorbet colors in the sun, Nal walked down the esplanade to Mr. Tarak’s pawnshop. He saw the ring right away — it was in the front display, nested in a cheap navy box between old radios and men’s watches, a quarter-full bottle of Chanel.

“Repent,” said Mr. Tarak without looking up from his newspaper. “Get a man’s haircut.”

“I’d like to buy this ring here,” Nal tapped on the glass.

“On hold.”

“I can make the payment right now, sir. In full.”

Mr. Tarak shoved up off his stool and took it out. It didn’t look like a wedding band; it was a simple wrought-iron thing with a floral design etched on the inside. Nal found he didn’t care about the first woman who had pawned or lost it, or Samson who wanted to buy it. Nal was the owner now. He paid and pocketed the ring.

Before he went to catch the 3:03 bus to Vanessa’s house, Nal returned to the pinewoods. If he was really going through with this, he didn’t want to take any chances that these birds would sabotage his plan. He took his basketball and fitted it in the hollow. The gulls were back, circumnavigating the pine at different velocities, screeching irritably. He watched with some satisfaction as one scraped its wing against the ball. He patted the ring in his pocket. He knew this was just a temporary fix. There was no protecting against the voracity of the gulls. If fate was just a tapestry with a shifting design — some fraying skein that the gulls were tearing right this second — then Nal didn’t see why he couldn’t also find a loose thread, and pull.

VANESSA’S HOUSE WAS part of a new community on the outskirts of Athertown. The bus drove past the long neck of a crane rising out of an exposed gravel pit, the slate glistening with recent rain. A summer shower had rolled in from the east and tripped some of the streetlights prematurely. The gulls had not made it this far inland yet; the only birds here were sparrows and a few doll-like cockatoos along the fences.

Vanessa seemed surprised and happy to see him. “Come in,” she said, her thin face filling the doorway. She looked scrubbed and plain, not the way she did with Samson. “Nobody’s home but me. Is Sam with you?”

“No,” said Nal. For years he’d been planning to say to her, I think we’re meant to be , but now that he was here he didn’t say anything; his heart was going, and he almost had to stop himself from shoving his way inside.

“I brought you this,” he said, pushing the ring at her. “I’ve been saving up for it.”

“Nal!” she said, turning the ring over in her hands. “But this is really beautiful …”

It was easy. What had he worried about? He just stepped in and kissed her, touched her neck. Suddenly he was feeling every temperature at once, the coolness of her skin and the wet warmth of her mouth and even the tepid slide of sweat over his knuckles. She kissed him back, and Nal slid his hand beneath the neckline of her blouse and touched the bandage there. The Grigalunases’ house was dark and still inside, the walls lined with framed pictures of dark-haired girls who looked like funhouse images of Vanessa, her sisters or her former selves. An orange cat darted under the stairwell.

“Nal? Do you want to sit down?” She addressed this to her own face in the foyer mirror, a glass crescent above the door, and when she turned back to Nal her eyes had brightened, charged with some anticipation that almost didn’t seem to include him. Nal kissed her again and started steering her toward the living room. A rope was pulling him forward, a buried cable, and he was able to relax into it now only because he had spent his short lifetime doing up all the knots. Perhaps this is how the future works, Nal thought — nothing fated or inevitable but just these knots like fists that you could tighten or undo.

Nal and Vanessa sat down on the green sofa, a little stiffly. Nal had never so much as grazed a girl’s knee, but somehow he was kissing her neck, he was sliding a hand up her leg, beneath the elastic band of her underwear.

Vanessa struggled to undo Nal’s belt and the tab of his jeans, and now she looked up at him; his zipper was stuck. He was trapped inside his pants. Thanks to his recent weight loss, he was able to wriggle out of them, tugging furiously at the denim. At last he got them off with a grunt of satisfaction and, breathless and red-faced, flung them to the floor. The zipper liner left a nasty scratch down his skin. Nal began to unroll his socks, hunching over and angling his hipbones. It was strange to see the splay of his dark toes on the Grigalunases’ carpet, Vanessa half-naked beyond it.

She could have whinnied with laughter at him; instead, with a kindness that you can’t teach people, she had walked over to the windows while Nal hopped and writhed. She had taken off her shirt and unwound the bandage and was shimmying out of her bra. The glass had gone dark with thunderheads. The smell of rain had crept into the house. She drew the curtains and slid out of the rest of her clothes. The living room was now a blue cave — Nal could see the soft curve of the sofa’s back in the dark. Was he supposed to turn the light on? Which way was more romantic? “Sorry,” he said as they both walked back to the sofa, their eyes flicking all over each other. Vanessa slid a hand over Nal’s torso.