Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

I regret that I can no longer document my current location. I expected my parents to pick me up from the infirmary in the morning, but the Beaver came to me instead. She instructed me to leave my possessions behind and follow her. Because I am not a complete idiot, I asked for permission to change my sanitary napkin. In the infirmary bathroom, I unwrapped a fresh pad, discarded it, folded my notebook carefully into the plastic wrapper, and stuck the notebook into the back of my underwear for safekeeping.

The Beaver led me to the lake. Everyone was there, dressed in their camp whites, presumably for some kind of closing ceremony where the winning team—Queens of the Moonflower—would be announced. Caroline was sobbing. Pita sat beside her with her knotty knees folded to her chest. At the end of the dock, a male counselor, his head concealed in a burlap sack, held a wooden oar. Beside him was a canoe. “Go on, Josephine,” the Beaver said, nodding toward the canoe. I walked down the dock alone, forcing my chin up like an elitist, pretending like I knew what I was doing, feeling a hundred traitor eyes on my body. The male counselor steadied the boat as I stepped inside. Then, to my surprise, he entered the canoe after me and took the bow position. I didn’t have an oar, so I sat with my arms crossed, staring down the lake horizon, waiting for whatever came next. He pushed off and directed the canoe through the water with strong, precise strokes. The girls of Camp Moonflower applauded politely.

“Fin,” Caroline shouted. I didn’t want to look back, with all of them watching. But Caroline called my name again, as if she had to tell me something very important, and I couldn’t help myself. I twisted around in the stern seat. A long piece of metal glinted in her hand. She waved it violently in the air: her stupid cornball flute. When she was satisfied that I’d seen it, she pitched it into the lake. Another milestone. I turned back around and closed my eyes and imagined the flute sinking slowly to the bottom of the lake, where it would torment the undeserving fish.

The male counselor kept rowing, despite the sack over his head. He wore sneakers, not boots, but he was sporting a fastidious suntan, and by the time Camp Moonflower was nothing but tiny dots on the shore, I had worked up the nerve to say his name. “Drew?” He shook his head. I didn’t know if that meant Not Drew or No talking, so I asked another question, which was “Can you see with that sack on your head?” He didn’t respond at all. By this point I was feeling very antsy, so I kept on. I asked him, “Do you know what the Camp Moonflower motto means?”

Then I said every swear word that I know. I’d learned eighteen new swear words since arriving at Camp Moonflower. When I ran out of known swear words, I made some up. When I couldn’t make up any more, I began to scream. No words. Just noises. He kept rowing. The lake was a lot bigger than I’d realized. I knew which direction the camp was, but I couldn’t see it. And I still couldn’t see the other shore. Finally he stopped rowing. I stopped screaming. My throat felt like it’d been hacked to pieces. We drifted in silence for a minute. Then he spoke from inside the burlap sack.

“You gotta get out,” he said. “You gotta get out and swim all the way back to shore.” Why, I demanded hoarsely. “That’s the test,” he said. This was the test. This was the Test of Steadfastness. I had been chosen, out of all the Sisterhood, to represent Woman, and I wasn’t even wearing a bathing suit. The swimming counselor had ceaselessly mocked my floundering attempts at the forward crawl. How long would it take for me to dog-paddle steadfastly back to camp? He shrugged. “They’re all standing out there waiting for you.”

I took in a deep breath and let it out and felt the full force of the sun on the water. I was so tired, and so hot. I did not want dignae or a provisae iucundae. I wanted the man in the burlap sack to go away. I squinted at him until I could imagine him gone. Then, shameless, I stripped down to my underwear and kicked off my shoes and dropped myself into the lake. The water burned up the inside of my nose like crying. I imagined not the bottom of a well. I imagined the lake all briny. My body buoyant. What is the Great Salt Lake. What is the Dead Sea. What is a girl in repose, floating on her back, making up her mind. The sky stared at me, metal-bright and blank, without any answers.

I knew the way back. Instead I put my head down and I crawled forward, riding the salt in the water of every queen’s tears.

Rio is the bravest boy I know the summer we are fourteen. The beach is ours and all its coves and sandcastles. I have bug bites like beads of sap on my legs. It is June in Michigan and we giggle like princesses as we pull dresses on in the bedroom our single mothers share. We clip on earrings and hate their heaviness. We imagine our lives as women and say the things we think they would say. We tuck our penises between our skinny legs and walk with our thighs together. When we are through we hang the dresses up and put the earrings back inside their cedar boxes at his mother’s bedside. We promise not to tell anyone. There is a handshake, a promise with our bodies that I will not remember until years later when I see the neighbor boys slapping hands before they part for dinner.

The summer we are fourteen Rio kisses me for the first time as he zips me into a dress. The dress is blue and white polka dotted and the zipper snags on my tighty-whiteys. The kiss feels like a bug landing on my shoulder. He kisses my lips after he kisses my shoulder. The smell of his teeth is the smell of our shared lunch, fried bologna sandwiches and rice and beans. We made the sandwiches ourselves, the rice and beans we heated up in the microwave. He does not zip the dress up all the way. My shoulder will sting later—like it had been a bee on my shoulder, not the harmless fly I’d felt. It will not always feel like stinging. When my husband kisses my shoulder it will feel good.

We kiss when we think we are alone. We flip paddleboats on the beach and kiss beneath them, the seats dripping water on us. We kiss at the playground where there are secret places in the wooden infrastructure of the jungle gym. We get away with too much this summer.

We grow up on Marlin Street in swim-trunks. Our mothers drive their Chevy with every window down. The wind ruffles our hair like pages in a book. Years from now I will move away from Marlin Street. Not far—a few streets. Close enough that our mothers can walk, thumbing their rosaries, to my house and sip mimosas on the porch, where they will laugh like Spanish witches.

But we grow up on Marlin Street in a beach house. The beach house is blue and has a screened-in porch. On the porch there are two white plastic chairs and a second-hand end-table between them where our mothers sit with their sangrias. We sit on the splintered wood beside them or sit inside on the couch. Our mothers cannot afford to own two houses—will never be able to afford to own two houses. They sleep on two twin-beds in the master and Rio and I sleep together in our room on one queen size. We never have friends over from school.

Families rent out the beach houses for brief Michigan summers, but our mothers own a taquería on the boardwalk. We own our vacation home. Our mothers are known by locals as the Taco Sisters. They are not sisters. They are not sisters the way Rio and I are not brothers. They are childhood friends—immigrants’ daughters who grew up translating for their mothers and fathers. They asked for what their parents could not. They are not sisters but they shared beds and sleeping bags on the floors of dirty shacks.