Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

She found two dusty plates in the cabinet, rinsed them, and put them down on the table. She put slices of pizza on each of their plates, then took a bite of hers. Sebastien did not.

“Are you on a hunger strike?” she said. He looked shiny and a little unwell, and Lily felt—acutely, momentarily, and for the very first time—the paucity of her attraction to him. “Would you care to state your demands?”

For once, Sebastien LeCompte said nothing.

Later, after a fitful and underwhelming round of intercourse, Lily was restless. She sat on the edge of the bed, facing away from Sebastien, and put on her bra. It was still early; the stars were dim topazes in the sky, only beginning to leak their modest light. The fight with Beatriz crouched on Lily’s sternum like the pressure of an oncoming heart attack. She sighed heavily. Sebastien said nothing. Lily wanted to go somewhere. They never went anywhere. She sighed again.

“Something troubling you, my sweet?”

“I’m bored,” said Lily, ferreting into her tank top. “Can we go out?”

“Where would you like to go?” Sebastien was lying on the bed, still naked. He was exotically non-shy about nudity. Before sex, Lily always liked this quite a lot about him; afterward, she liked it a little less.

“I don’t know.” Lily rotated her shoulders in their sockets. They cracked audibly, and she was glad when Sebastien flinched. “Just somewhere. Out. You pick.”

Sebastien sat up and looked at her with an expression of intense mock-seriousness. “Lily Hayes, are you perhaps not your very best self tonight?”

She spun her shoulders again, though this time they didn’t crack. “Maybe not,” she said.

Sebastien sat up. “What’s wrong?”

The straightforwardness of this took Lily by surprise—she’d expected him to maintain his usual tone—and made it seem possible, all of a sudden, to tell him what had happened. Not that it could help—you might as well talk to a Magic 8 Ball about your problems. But she supposed it couldn’t hurt much, either.

“I got in trouble with Beatriz,” she said.

“Again?”

“Yes, again.” The situation seemed monstrously unfair somehow—bigger and more serious than a mere misunderstanding—though Lily still couldn’t quite pinpoint why. Sebastien stood up, put on his boxers—finally!—and came to sit next to her, resting his head on her shoulder. Lily knew he meant it ironically—it was a commentary on, a parody of, such gestures—but his hair was soft, and his skin was warm, and she hoped that he would stay there for a minute, anyway.

“I certainly hope I wasn’t responsible,” he said.

“Not this time, you’ll be relieved to know.” Lily’s fingers wound their way into Sebastien’s hair and stroked his skull lightly—he was so well made, really. “She freaked out because I answered their telephone.”

“The gall!”

“I know! I mean, in general, I understand why Katy never gets in trouble. Katy never sneaks out at night, for one thing.”

Sebastien’s eyes flickered lightly. “Doesn’t she?” he said, and Lily felt again the fleeting, uncomfortable suspicion that everyone around her knew more than she did.

“Well,” she said. “I guess I don’t know. I mean, I do sleep in the same room as her, though. She’d have to be a pretty good sneaker to sneak out all the time. And she doesn’t really seem like the sneaking type.”

“Hmm,” said Sebastien. Lily stopped stroking his hair and patted his shoulder so that he’d sit up.

“But I mean, getting in trouble for stuff I actually do wrong is one thing. Getting in trouble for something like that while Katy is standing right there is just dumb.”

“It’s the principle of the thing, you’re saying? Abstract notions of justice and right?”

“It’s that Beatriz just hates me no matter what I do. It’s like, if Katy and I are both doing the exact same thing, Beatriz attributes benign intentions to Katy and malign ones to me. But maybe I have benign intentions, too. Sometimes, at least.”

Sebastien pulled her to him then. He smelled slightly oniony, which Lily sort of liked; she found herself pleasantly surprised by his moments of undeniable masculinity, and the way they offset his light eyes and freckles and cerebralism. Sometimes she wished she could tell him this; so many times when he went on and on and on she’d wanted to take his hand or grab his thigh and tell him, Stop it. Just stop it. I was impressed already . But she felt that this would disappoint him somehow; that it would be vulgar; that it would be conventional. And sometimes Lily wondered if maybe she wasn’t the person he was actually trying to impress, anyhow.

“Benign intentions?” said Sebastien, kissing her temple. “I thought you were a wicked woman.”

“I guess maybe I am,” Lily said glumly. “I mean, that seems to be the prevailing assessment.”

“All right, my sulking salmon,” said Sebastien, clapping her fraternally on the shoulders. “Let’s go out. I’ll grab my walking stick.”

Outside, the moon was huge and cantaloupe colored, looking too heavy for the sky. Lily had thought the walking stick thing was a joke, but Sebastien had indeed produced one from one of the cavernous back rooms and now carried it majestically, tapping on the ground from time to time. His parents had bought it in Fiji, he said. It had chips of abalone shell that glowed like the eyes of something nocturnal, and Lily gave it a wide distance as they ventured through a thin woods and over a small hill toward where Sebastien had said there was a river.

Lily wanted to frolic. The creepiness of the walking stick made her nervous in a giddy, childish, not entirely unpleasant way. And outside, in this soft summery evening, the trouble with Beatriz did not seem so important. You could not get everyone to like you; you could waste your whole life trying, and still it would not work. Lily did a cartwheel. Sebastien held the walking stick in the crook of his elbow and golf clapped. She did another—passably, she thought. They were pretty hard to do now; she had no idea when they’d become so difficult. But this was like a lot of things, she supposed—you wandered away from something for what felt like a minute and by the time you thought to come back to it, it had already been gone for a very long time.

Lily had only three months left in Argentina.

They walked until they reached the river. Above it, the sky was clear, and the moon was so big that Lily could see its whorls; it looked like a chalky thumbprint in the sky. The moment might have been romantic—Lily could feel Sebastien gearing up to take her hand, to kiss her—but she wanted to shake off the feeling. She felt mischievous, scheming; she wanted to make Sebastien do something frivolous, something that he simply could not look cool while doing. She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought to take him out earlier. It had always seemed too egregiously typical, she supposed. But now she saw that being in the world had wrong-footed Sebastien in a way she rather liked; she felt that she was now on a sort of home field advantage.

“Do you want to play Pooh sticks?” she said.

“What?”

“Like in Winnie-the-Pooh ?”

“I’m afraid I’m unfamiliar.”

“You never read Winnie-the-Pooh ?”

“My parents’ tastes skewed more continental, I’m afraid.”

“You drop a stick in the water and see whose stick gets to the other side of the bridge first.”

“It sounds like a thrill.”

“Well, it was a game for fictional stuffed animals, so yeah. It’s dumb. Let’s play. Find a stick.” Lily had never thought to do this before, either—to just go ahead and tell Sebastien to do something. She was forever being deferential, forever letting him set the terms of their conversations, forever allowing him to lure her farther and farther into swampy and sardonic terrain on which she’d never have a hope of standing upright. But now they were outside, and the sound of the river was making it hard to banter, and Lily knew that Sebastien would do whatever she told him to do.