Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

Fin

June 20, again

Dear Future Husband,

My cabinmates are away at the canteen. I stayed behind, claiming I had cramps and I wanted to take a hot shower. This is partially true. I don’t have cramps, and no normal person wants to shower in our bathroom facility, inaccurately named the Pink Palace, which is infested with daddy longlegs and flying palmetto bugs. However, I understand that I am expected to be clean and pleasantly scented when I meet Andrew tonight for my private lesson. In lieu of my usual two-in-one Pert Plus—what Pita refers to as my dandruff lotion —I have borrowed from Caroline, by virtue of my Sisterhood status, miniature bottles of vitamin-enhanced shampoo and conditioner that smell like exotic fruit. In my efforts to be perceived as a warm, thoughtful, and generous hostess, I have also secured, in Pita’s absence, two king-sized candy bars from her elaborate under-mattress stash. These will serve as our midlesson snack.

While rummaging through Pita’s stockpile, I encountered what is either a giant vibrating dildo or an extraordinarily complex flashlight. I wish it were a flashlight, and a waterproof one at that. I am off to contend with the cockroaches.

Fin

June 20, late

A zero. A zero. I chanted it to myself all the way to the horse pen, alone. Lights out in the cabin, our counselor gone, and a zero is nothing. My mission nothing short of revelation. I was prepared. No longer would I bumble through my life in a perpetual state of impotence and bewilderment. I took the box of sanitary napkins with me in case anyone lying awake in the cabin wondered where I was going.

Tonight he took off his hat. He asked me to call him Drew, but he didn’t introduce me to the horse. Then something broke in the dark pen. He was fiddling with the saddle, the moon our only light, and I could barely make out his face. “Shoot,” he said. “You want to try riding bareback? I’ll ride with you.” He said it would improve my balance. “Plus it’s natural,” he said. “Think about it.”

It was not possible for me to think about it. My mind was full of Pita and pornos, backwash and cologne, how I was supposed to act, what I was supposed to want. “Yes,” I told him. My cheeks were perfectly round, not that he could see them. He hoisted me onto the horse.

Then we were moving fast and it didn’t feel like flying. I sat in front and his arms around me and his thighs pinning me and my back slamming against his chest and my butt slamming against the horse and all of it hurt. The horse was not fat like Jo. I tried to communicate telepathically with the horse, but she was blank silent running. And Andrew rocking and grunting behind me. Finally it ended. He helped me dismount. We were both breathing hard. I stood still in the muddy pen and felt all the sweat pour out of me. I doubted it smelled of exotic fruit. Then Andrew bent his face down toward my face. “You’re not like the other girls,” he said. “I knew right away.” I could see his eyes, finally. They were glassy blue and strange. “Did you feel anything?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, sweating, silently counting my bruises. He did not ask me to specify but wrapped his arms around me and pressed his hands into my backside. I jumped away. “My butt hurts,” I told him. “Grow up,” he said, snorting exactly like a horse. “You got just what you wanted.” He turned away to tend to the horse, and I walked back to the cabin the way I came, alone. I didn’t even tell him about the candy. The candy is a zero. My apple cheeks are a zero. The horse is a zero. They change nothing.

Fin

June 21

Tomorrow is the last day of camp. The other girls in the cabin have been whistling cheerfully all morning. As predicted, Caroline’s flute song has fully penetrated their brains. Pita claims she overheard the counselors saying that the Colts are going to be named Queens of the Moonflower. I am glad for my team but I cannot bring myself to celebrate. I reflect on Captain Beaver’s first directive of the summer: to wait. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps I could not achieve my milestone because I was not patient. I am left only with these small physical traumas, tender to the touch but invisible to the eye, and my own confounding shame.

Fin

June 21, again

Something terrible has happened. I have been accompanied by whistling all day long. The same Christmas song, ad nauseam, and not just from the girls in my cabin. I thought it strange, but the significance of the tune was lost on me. Finally, on my way back from our afternoon Stain Removal class, I saw the letter taped to the front door of the mess hall. It was handwritten, addressed to Andrew, and signed with my name.

Obviously I didn’t write the letter. The penmanship was curly and fat, a cartoon of a girl’s handwriting, not like mine at all, and my name was misspelled at the end. The letter mentioned how I liked it when you touched my butt and all the guys like my big tits and Andrew won’t you touch them too. It occurred to me, the way that pitch-black water occurs to someone falling down a deep well, that someone had been reading my private notebook, and that this letter was intended as a public indictment. But I had failed, in fact, to like or want these things. I had failed, in front of Andrew, and I had been made to feel embarrassed for failing. Now this forged document revealed at last what no Anatomy and Etiquette lesson could illustrate, no amount of bone-rattling horse sprint could knock into me: I was supposed to want, and not to want, simultaneously. Those were the rules. There was no winning. I would fail either way.

I fled to the cabin, a handful of Evening Primroses running after me, humming loudly. My own galloping pulse was not powerful enough to drown out the sound of their accusation. Whore song. In the cabin everyone was somehow already in their bunks, fake nonchalant, early for quiet hour. No one was whistling now. It was their silence that betrayed them.

I flung open my trunk. It appeared undisturbed. I grabbed the sanitary-napkin box and dumped the contents on the floor and my notebook was there as usual. But Pita in the top bunk was laughing. I looked up at her. She had her fist wrapped around her dildo flashlight. She met my eyes, then brought the dildo flashlight slowly to her mouth and ran her tongue down the length of it. Pita, the prophet of my revelation. I experienced in that moment a naked rage that caused my head to lift and separate from my body. A new vocabulary sprung incandescent from my lips. Cock-faced pervert, I heard myself shriek, I will fuck your hair right off. My next move was to take Caroline’s flute and bludgeon Pita’s face with it.

Before I had the chance, however, our counselor appeared in the doorway. “Josephine,” she said. “Come with me.” I was surprised she knew my name. She escorted me in silence to the office, where Captain Beaver sat behind a scabby wooden desk. On the desk was the letter. “What do you have to say for yourself, Josephine?” the Beaver asked. I looked down at the letter, then up at her worn, lumpy face. The proof of my innocence—the dilettante forgery—was right in front of her. It was self-evident. But to my horror, instead of answering, I burst into tears.

“That’s all I needed to see,” the Beaver said firmly. I was taken away, not back to the cabin but to the infirmary at the edge of the camp. My trunk and bedroll have been delivered to me. I will spend the night on a cot, in isolation. Even the nurse is gone. She mumbled something about chiggers and departed in apparent disgust. Tomorrow is the last day of Camp Moonflower, but if the Beaver tells my parents about the letter, I will be forced to endure this humiliation forever.

Fin

June 22

Though Captain Beaver’s intent behind her letter-writing assignments remains mysterious to me, I now understand that I must retain these letters as a record of the truth. Whether or not the Beaver reports this incident to my parents, whether or not the letter was an obvious fake. I have learned a great lesson: just as Pita is Pita wherever she goes, this story will follow me.