Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

Obviously, the Discovery Room would also be where I “discovered” more about Esau Abraham, if you catch my drift.

Esau followed his mother to a small enclave created by an aquarium flanked by two bookshelves.

“Here, Esau, this is a good spot for us,” she said, taking his navy blue sleeping bag from him and laying it on the floor. “We can look at the fish while we fall asleep!” She unrolled hers—red with a tartan print on the inside—right next to his.

My unsinkable heart sank. I had to be strategic. I put my things down on the other side of the bookshelf closest to Esau. I quickly tested the space and realized that if I stretched all the way out, my head would be more or less in line with his, about four feet apart. Three feet and eleven and three-quarters inches too many.

What could I do but wait, which was of course the one thing I was terrible at. My great aunt told me once, when you dislike doing something, you have to do it more, do it over and over, any chance you got, until you not necessarily liked it—liking wasn’t the goal—but just felt neutral toward it. Neutrality, she said, was the whole purpose. Real Buddhist talk for a woman—my namesake—with a severe QVC addiction. But I thought of her now, and tried to make this situation apply. How to wait more? How to wait over and over? Impossible. Thanks for nothing, Aunt Jill.

Most of the other girls in the class had spread their stuff out in a long rectangle on the other side of the room, closer to the brain. Coyness was never a virtue I cared very much about. Once it was lights out, once Ms. Green and the other chaperones were asleep, those girls would have twice as much work to do, with twice as much risk. Me, I was staying right here, close to my target.

Mrs. Abraham was squeezing hand sanitizer onto Esau’s open palms. I had to be careful not to watch him too much when he was with his mother. It was a turn-off. I took off my glasses and cleaned them on the bottom of my shirt. The only thing worse than a girl with glasses, I reasoned, was a girl with dirty glasses.

I was good with boys because I knew what they wanted. I could enter the simple machines of their minds and see how their gears turned. Most of them needed a lot of oil. To be told, a lot, how correct their opinions were, because most of them believed that opinions were like facts—provable and true. Thinking something, for a boy, meant not-thinking all other things. When two even vaguely conflicting ideas rubbed together, they either quickly chose one and discarded the other, or abandoned them both for a new and better topic, often something they felt absolutely certain about, like a cool video game, or whose bra was visible beneath her shirt, or what was I even doing there anyway. Over time, I could make them talk to me, just by simply existing. I occupied a genderless place where I neither quickened the blood like the obvious girls, nor inspired the bravado often necessary around other boys. Around me, they got to take five. Being a safe harbor may seem dull and sexless (so to speak—nobody’s having sex) but it’s actually a place of power. Deep, hard, penetrating power.

(That’s the kind of riffing I had access to, for example.)

Mrs. Abraham went off to use the bathroom.

“Hi, Esau,” I said casually, coming from around the bookshelf.

“Hi,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be over there, with the other girls? It’s just boys over here.”

“Oh really? I didn’t even notice. It looks pretty crowded over there. I might just stay put.”

Esau rubbed his hands on his jeans. “I wish we could sleep in the brain.”

“Are we not allowed to?” This was a possibility I hadn’t considered.

“I don’t think so. There’s not really a lot of room in there.”

Mrs. Abraham came back from the bathroom. “Who’s this?” she asked brightly, glancing from Esau to me.

“Hi Mrs. Abraham,” I stuck out my hand. “I’m Jill.”

“Well hi, sweetie. Did you find a spot for your stuff? Looks like the girls are going to be on the other side of the room tonight. Probably a good idea, right?” Her eyes were roving over my shoulder to where I’d painstakingly placed my things. I noticed from this close distance that the majority of her eyebrows were drawn on. I was a mothers’ favorite and a grandmothers’ favorite and I had to decide whether I would risk my reputation and stay put, or oblige her and move. But before I could say or do anything, Ms. Green was summoning all of us to the doors. It was time to eat dinner, she said—pizzas had arrived—after which we had forty-five minutes to spend as we wished, in approved areas of the museum.

I got my two slices of pizza and fruit punch juice box and sat with a table of girls. My best friend Sarah was dabbing her pizza with a napkin.

“Why did you put your stuff on the boys’ side?” she asked.

I punctured the foil circle with my straw. “I didn’t actually realize there were ‘sides,’” I said. “Seems like the whole point of being here is to, you know, mix it up.”

Sarah chewed carefully. She was a very careful chewer. She told me once that you were supposed to chew every bite thirty-five times before swallowing it. “Well, I don’t think we’re allowed to sleep on the same side. They were supposed to put us in separate rooms but the other rooms have to be kept really cold or something, that’s what I heard.”

A girl named Caroline tossed her long, pretty hair. “They’ll probably come to our side after everyone’s asleep, and try to be gross. I heard Nick say he was going to steal our underwear.”

“Nick’s an idiot,” I said. “Who even brought underwear? It’s not like we’re staying here for a week.”

Caroline shrugged. “I brought extra, just in case. My mom always says to pack extra underwear, because you never know.”

“Yeah, like, you could pee your pants or something!” Lauren shouted out, and everyone laughed.

I didn’t laugh. I tried not to roll my eyes. Caroline definitely wanted her underwear to be stolen. I could see right through her. I didn’t like this kind of game-playing. I didn’t like silliness, the silliness so often ascribed to our sex. I was constantly trying to get out from under it, kill it as savagely as possible, like a slug you pour salt on even after it’s dead.

If you wanted a boy’s attention, you had to get it. You had to take it.

After dinner, I kept my eye on Esau. His mother was talking to Ms. Green and the two other parent chaperones. With a few other boys he headed toward Ornithology, which was fortunate, since it was adjacent to the Mineralogy wing, where I wanted to spend my time. I had some money to spend in the gift shop tomorrow and I was definitely going to get a few new polished rocks and minerals for my collection. Some agate, maybe. I did not want to lose sight of the educational purpose of this trip. I knew, deep in my bedrock layer, that Esau Abraham would come and Esau Abraham would go. I knew I had to keep a firm hold on my interests outside of boys. I stood looking at an exhibit containing necklaces of jade, peridot, and pink topaz, right next to the clusters of Mississippi pearls so creamy they seemed edible, and I felt stirred, filled with longing.

My desire for boys and my desire for certain other things—often inexplicable, sometimes beautiful, frequently plain, occasionally attainable, like a tiny plastic fifty-cent notebook charm complete with even tinier pencil, for my charm bracelet; sometimes not, like these exquisite jewels that came from places in the earth that no longer even exist—were knotted together as intricately as a DNA double helix. I wanted and wanted and wanted. I believed, like my Great Aunt Jill, that objects had the power to protect me from harm—the harm of loneliness and my own impermanence—and I believed that boys had the same power.