Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

“Let’s go home,” he says.

She doesn’t know whether he means her home, or his home, but she is too tired to protest. Let him deliver her to her father’s doorstep or the Halls’ guest room, let someone who is still alive yell at her the way her mother is yelling in her head all the time. She presses her temple to the window and starts to fade out, only barely aware of Aaron digging through her purse for her keys and settling in behind the wheel, only barely hearing the yelling coming from somewhere nearby.

The person yelling is Seraphin’s current boyfriend, who is pissed that Seraphin went to her ex’s party and invited him as an afterthought. Claire knows him, but not well. He’s a little buzzed from pregaming but mostly he’s angry, so when he sees, as he tells the police later, a huge black guy pulling Claire out of her car and rummaging through her purse and driving her away, he is alarmed enough that he and his friends get back in their car and follow Claire’s, alarmed enough to call the cops while they’re driving.

Claire sleeps through it at the time: Aaron, unnerved by the car behind him, flooring the accelerator; Seraphin’s boyfriend tailgating, flashing his brights, then the car full of boys pulling alongside them, his friends throwing a soda bottle and yelling at Aaron to stop. Aaron only goes faster, losing them for a moment, then, less than a mile from their houses, turning onto Cleveland Street at such speed that he spins out and the car flips into the trees. Claire wakes up, vaguely, to sirens, and then for real, in the hospital, where she has a concussion and a hangover and a starring role in someone else’s rescue story.

Aaron is dead. By the time Claire is awake enough to be aware of this, it has already been determined that he was not a stranger, that he was just above the legal limit, that people saw him chase her out of the party after she screamed, that she was passed out in her own car. The people who give him the benefit of the doubt mostly feel themselves to be magnanimous.

“He should have just pulled over and explained,” Seraphin will say sadly a few weeks later, and Claire will nod, and Seraphin will be quoted saying that in the paper when the Post runs an article about the accident’s aftermath. Mrs. Hall will tell the reporter that a black boy doesn’t get out of the car at night in the woods for a car full of angry white boys in Virginia. Claire’s father will read the paper and say it’s not the 1950s.

It isn’t, it’s the first decade of the new millennium, but Claire’s father is a lawyer, and Seraphin’s boyfriend’s father is Claire’s father’s golf partner. No one is assigned any legal responsibility for the accident. The Halls’ lawsuit is dismissed before Claire has to say anything in public. It’s Angela who won’t talk to her now, and the tenth time Mrs. Hall knocks on their front door and no one answers, Claire’s father gets a restraining order. Claire tells the reporter Aaron was a friend, that she was drunk and he was taking her home, but the bones of that story don’t convince anyone it wasn’t all, at best, a tragic misunderstanding; at worst, a danger she didn’t see coming. Claire tells the reporter some innocuous nice thing about Seraphin’s boyfriend, and the paper calls him one of her best friends, after which she stops trying to explain.

The Halls rent out their house for the spring and Angela finishes her senior year at a private school closer to DC. When Claire sees them rolling their suitcases out to the car, preparing to follow their moving van, she feels shame and relief, in which order she cannot say. Claire rides to prom in a limo with Seraphin and her boyfriend and a date whose name she forgets soon after. A month later the house Claire grew up in is on the market and her father and Puppy are formally engaged. Three months after that she is gone, tucked away at a small liberal arts college where no one has ever met her and anything is possible.

Robert is at her dorm door again. She sees herself as he sees her, a problem to be solved. He is logic; she is x. The internet’s discovery of the accident has driven the attention to a pitched furor. He wants to prepare her for the town hall that has been called regarding her continued presence on campus. Claire is not even sure she likes Robert, let alone trusts him, but she tells him everything. Someone has found a photograph of Aaron, the one that ran with his obituary. His smile melts into the part of Claire that still remembers when he was missing his two front teeth.

Aaron’s favorite joke:

Knock Knock

Who’s there?

Anticipation

Anticipation who?

…

Who?

……

It takes Claire and Angela more than a year to stop falling for it, to realize that the joke is their own impatience, not a punchline he’s been holding out on them. Even as teenagers, they sometimes take the bait; they don’t put it past him to have been waiting years for the right moment of revelation, for the payoff they’ve been promised.

The town hall is held in the library’s rotunda. The evening has been devised as an open mic, moderated by the Vice Dean of Diversity and the Dean of Students. People who do not wish to speak may make comments on notecards and drop them in boxes at the end of each row. The cards will be periodically collected and read aloud. Robert has provided Claire with an annotated list of episodes of Confederate valor or sacrifice, anything she might say the flag stands for, to her. She scans it for highlights: Albert Johnson, who sent his personal doctors to treat the injured Union soldiers while he bled out on the battlefield—don’t mention that he probably didn’t know he was shot—the point is a crueler man might have lived. 3,200 African-American Confederate veterans. Such a young army; so many dead boys.

Claire is wearing a dress marked with yellow flowers. The first person to speak is a weepy white sophomore boy, who expresses how distraught he is to be on a campus that has been touched by hate and personally apologizes to the black students on campus, which apology takes the full remaining three minutes of his allotted time. Claire watches Carmen, who does not look in her direction. Carmen is surrounded by two full rows of black students, more black people than Claire has ever seen on campus before—maybe, it occurs to her, more black people than Claire has ever seen at once in her life. None of them stand to speak. A boy in a vest and fedora approaches the microphone and dramatically reads the lyrics of “Sweet Home Alabama.” No one can determine whether or not he is being ironic.

Robert has told Claire to wait for as close to the end as possible, to let everyone rage against her and then win with the last word. Claire waits.

She is only supposed to talk about Aaron if somebody asks. She is supposed to say accident as many times as she possibly can. She is supposed to say that he was one of her best friends and she is insulted by any speculation to the contrary. She has practiced saying these things as truths and saying them as lies. I killed someone. I loved him. I walked away. A warped version of that icebreaker game. Two truths and a lie, or two lies and a truth.

After the boy in the fedora finishes, two other white students speak, and then the microphone stands unattended. None of the black students move. At first Claire thinks their silence is hesitation, but everyone remains still long beyond awkwardness—ten minutes, exactly. One by one the black students stand. They hand their notecards to the Dean of Students, and then they leave. The Dean turns over card after card after card; all of them are blank. Handfuls of white students begin to stand, gather their things, and file out behind them. Robert is scribbling a note.