Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

“It was the guy,” Oona was telling her. “With the black hair.”

Alice tried to remember if she’d noticed any particular man. None stood out.

He’d come in that afternoon, Oona said. Had tried to buy her underwear. Oona laughed when she saw Alice’s face.

“It’s hilarious,” Oona said, dreamily combing her long bangs out of her eyes with her fingers. “You should look online, it’s a whole thing.”

“He asked you to email him or something?”

“Uh, no,” Oona said. “More like, he said, ‘I’ll give you fifty bucks to go into the bathroom right now and take off your underwear and give them to me.’”

The upset that Alice expected to find in Oona’s face wasn’t there—not even a trace. If anything, she was giddy, and that’s when Alice understood.

“You didn’t do it?”

Oona smiled, darting a look at Alice, and Alice’s stomach dropped with an odd mix of worry and jealousy, an uncertainty about who exactly had been tricked. Alice started to say something, then stopped. She moved a silver ring around her finger, the cigarette burning itself out.

“Why?” Alice said.

Oona laughed. “Come on, you’ve done these things. You know.”

Alice settled back against the railing. “Aren’t you worried he might do something weird? Follow you home or something?”

Oona seemed disappointed. “Oh, please,” she said, and started doing a leg exercise, going briskly up on her toes. “I wish someone would stalk me.”

Alice’s mother didn’t want to pay for acting classes anymore.

“But I’m getting better,” Alice said to her mother over the phone.

Was she? She didn’t know. Tony made them throw a ball back and forth as they said their lines. He made them walk around the room leading from their sternum, then from their pelvis. Alice had finished Level One, and Level Two was more expensive but it met twice a week plus a once-monthly private session with Tony.

“I don’t see how this class is different than the one you just took.”

“It’s more advanced,” Alice said. “It’s more intensive.”

“Maybe it’s okay to take a break for a while,” her mother said. “See how much you really want this.”

How to explain—if Alice wasn’t taking a class, if she wasn’t otherwise engaged, that meant her terrible job, her terrible apartment, suddenly carried more weight, maybe started to matter. The thought was too much to consider squarely.

“I’m pulling into the driveway,” her mother said. “Miss you.”

“You too.”

There was only a moment when all the confused, thwarted love locked up her throat. And then the moment passed, and Alice was alone again on her bed. Better to hurtle along, to quickly occupy her brain with something else. She went to the kitchen, opening a bag of frozen berries that she ate with steady effort until her fingers were numb, until a chill had penetrated deeply into her stomach and she had to get up and put on her winter coat. She moved to catch the sunshine where it warmed the kitchen chair.

There were countless ads online, Oona had been right, and that night Alice lost an hour clicking through them, thinking how ludicrous people were. You pressed slightly on the world and it showed its odd corners, revealed its dim and helpless desires. It seemed insane at first. And then, like other jokes, it became curiously possible the more she referred to it in her own mind, the uncomfortable edges softening into something innocuous.

The underwear was cotton and black and poorly made. Alice took them from work—easy enough to secrete away a stack from the warehouse shipment before it got entered into inventory or had any tags on. John was supposed to check everyone’s bags on the way out, the whole line of employees shuffling past him with their purses gaping, but he usually just waved them through. Like most things, it was frightening the first time and then became rote.

It didn’t happen all that often, maybe twice a week. The meetings were always in public places: a chain coffee shop, the parking lot of a gym. There was a young guy who bragged about having some kind of security clearance and wrote to her from multiple email accounts. A fat hippie with tinted glasses who brought her a copy of his self-published novel. A man in his sixties who shorted Alice ten bucks. She didn’t have any interaction beyond handing them the underwear, sealed in a Ziploc and then stuffed in a paper bag, like someone’s forgotten lunch. A few of the men lingered, but no one ever pushed. It wasn’t so bad. It was that time of life when anytime something bad or strange or sordid happened, she could soothe herself with that forgiving promise: it’s just that time of life. When you thought of it that way, whatever mess she was in seemed already sanctioned.

Oona invited her to the beach on their free Sunday. One of her friends had a house on the water and was having a barbecue. When Alice pushed open the door, the party was already going—music on the speakers and liquor bottles on the table, a girl feeding orange after orange into a whirring juicer. The house was sunny and big, the ocean below segmented by the windows into squares of mute glitter.

She was uncomfortable until she caught sight of Oona, in a one-piece swimsuit and cutoffs. Oona grabbed her by the hand. “Come meet everyone,” she said, and Alice felt a wave of goodwill for Oona, the sweet girl.

Porter lived in the house, the son of some producer, and was older than everyone else—maybe even older than Alice. It seemed like he and Oona were together, his arm slung around her, Oona burrowing happily into his side. He had lank hair and a pitbull with a pink collar. He bent down to let the dog lick him on the mouth; Alice saw their tongues touch briefly.

When Oona held up her phone to take a picture, the girl who was manning the juicer lifted her shirt to flash one small breast. Alice blanched, and Oona laughed.

“You’re embarrassing Alice,” she said to the girl. “Stop being such a slut.”

“I’m fine,” Alice said, and willed it so.

When Oona handed her a glass of the orange-juice drink, she drained it fast, the acid brightening her mouth and her throat.

The ocean was too cold for swimming but the sun felt nice. Alice had eaten one greasy hamburger from the grill, some kind of fancy cheese on top that she scraped off and threw into an aloe plant. She stretched out on one of the towels from the house. Oona’s towel was vacant—she was down by the water, kicking in the frigid waves. Music drifted from the patio. Alice didn’t see Porter until he flopped down on Oona’s towel. He was balancing a pack of cigarettes on a plastic container of green olives, a beer in his other hand.

“Can I have a cigarette?” she said.

The pack he handed to her had a cartoon character on it, some writing in Spanish.

“Is it even legal to have cartoon characters on cigarettes?” she said, but Porter was already on his stomach, his face pressed into the towel. She palmed the pack back and forth, eyeing Porter’s pale back. He wasn’t even a little handsome.

Alice adjusted her bikini straps. They were digging into her shoulders, leaving marks. She surveyed the indifferent group back on the patio, Porter’s prone body, and decided to take her top off. She chickened her arms behind herself and unhooked her bikini, hunching over so that it fell off her breasts into her lap. She was having fun, wasn’t she? She folded the top into her bag as calmly as she could, sinking back onto the towel. The air and heat on her breasts were even and constant, and she let herself feel pleased and languid, happy with the picture she made.

Alice woke with Porter grinning at her.

“European-style, huh?” he said.

How long had he been watching her?