Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

My little voice told me, take what you want. Take what you can. Heal in the long shadows of the taking. My little voice and Aunt Jill’s little voice, maybe, were the same.

I realized I was standing with my hands and forehead pressed to the glass. I heard a few people enter the room and then Esau’s voice, “Adam—wait up!”

“Where are you guys going?” I asked, straightening up.

“Adam wants to go to the dinosaur room, right?” Esau asked. Adam was a shy boy, shyer than Esau, and obsessed with Abraham Lincoln.

“I’m not sure we’re allowed upstairs. I think we’re supposed to stay just on this floor,” I said, unsure of why I was taking the rule-abiding position, especially since I was planning on breaking a few unspoken rules later that night.

Esau looked at Adam. “I could ask my mom,” he said.

“Let’s just go,” I said. Being alone with Esau plus Adam was better than being alone without Esau. And it was fun to take the lead, exciting. “We can pretend we didn’t know.”

The three of us walked quickly to the lighted exit sign. I opened the heavy door to the stairwell and held it for Adam and Esau. I saw Mrs. Abraham craning her neck behind a few kids wandering between Botany and Mineralogy, looking, surely, for her son.

We hurried up a flight of stairs, laughing, which was the sound of our nervous bodies trying to expel their nervousness.

The Vertebrate Paleontology wing was cold and very dimly lit. We fell silent immediately upon entering, tiny insects beneath the impossibly tall ceilings. The air smelled like stone—no, like bone. For a minute we stood there without moving, just inside the entrance. I felt a tingle in my body like a sustained high note, like I myself was an echo chamber for our collective giddiness. This would be a double trespass, I thought to myself. Once for being a forbidden area, twice for being an ancient era. We were moving through time in two directions, forward and backward. I wanted to be in charge of this moment, of being in this ideal place alone with two boys, like some better version of From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, one of my all-time favorite books. Surely it wasn’t too much to ask, to believe, that here under the spell of these skeletons and this flattering lighting they would both fall in love with me, and that although I would choose Esau, we would all remain friends and vow to undertake future adventures together. What good was a relationship, after all, with nobody around to witness it?

Adam broke off, breaking my trance, and hastened toward the crown jewel of the entire wing: the seventy-two-foot long Haplocanthosaurus delfsi. His footsteps were loud and sloppy.

Esau started to follow.

“Wait, Esau,” I said, putting a hand on his arm. “Wanna see the T. rex’s cousin?”

I actually didn’t know anything about dinosaurs, but I had seen a sign earlier: the Late Cretaceous Nanotyrannus lancensis, for which the museum had recently acquired a skull.

Esau glanced over at Adam. “Sure—I just want to check out whatever-that-is real quick.”

“Oh—yeah. Definitely. Me, too.” I followed him, suddenly feeling less in charge. Esau stood close to Adam, his striking cheekbones slightly pink.

Adam reached with his index finger toward one of the dinosaur’s tail bones. He reached and reached, but was still at least a foot off. He hoisted himself up to kneel on the platform and tried again, giggling, reaching. When he started to lose his balance, Esau caught his arm, pulling him down. The two of them in a heap on the floor, their laughter eddying through the room like ink in water. I stood above them, surprised by my anger, which felt like a betrayal to all of us, the same kind of massive bummer that happens when an adult walks into a youth situation.

“Ha ha,” I joined in weakly, wanting them to get up off the floor.

Finally, they did. I tried not to look at how Esau was looking at Adam, tried not to register it as anything but boyish camaraderie. I felt a pang of something—sadness, but also panic, and desperation, like I’d been given the chance to re-enter a good dream and had messed it up somehow. I would do anything to get back in, is how I felt. I studied Adam, trying to memorize him so that I could be more like him, look more like him.

He started to say something, but was cut off by the jarring click of an intercom, a loud voice coming from the walls: All students please report to the Discovery Room. Once again, all students please report to the Discovery Room.

“Crap,” I said.

Esau’s face clouded over, exactly the way clouds cloud over the sky. “Let’s go,” he said.

We followed him quickly, wordlessly. When we got back down to the main floor, Mrs. Abraham was waiting outside the Discovery Room.

“Where were you?” she said. She grabbed Esau in a hug and cast a disapproving look toward Adam and me. “I was really starting to worry!”

“We just,” Esau mumbled, “we wanted to see the dinosaurs real quick. Sorry, Mom.”

Maybe I could win him back with righteousness, maybe I could get his mom on my side. “Yeah, I’m really sorry too, Mrs. Abraham. It was actually my idea.”

“I see,” she said. Her face did something I couldn’t decipher. “Well, you’re here now. Go get in line with the girls, Jill. It’s time for all of us to get ready for bed. Tomorrow morning they’re going to release the monarch butterflies, bright and early.”

Reluctantly, I moved my stuff across the room. I followed the other girls into the bathroom, where we changed into our pajamas and brushed our teeth.

“Where’d you go?” Sarah asked, when we were side by side at the sink. She was wearing a soft pink pajama set with satin trim.

“Just, upstairs. To the dinosaurs.” I spit. I was wearing a giant Snoopy nightshirt.

“Esau’s mom was freaking out. It was kind of funny,” she said, dabbing her mouth on a paper towel. “And, P.S., could you be any more obvious?”

We got in our sleeping bags. Ms. Green gave us one final lecture on good conduct, standing there in the center of the room wearing some kind of a sweatsuit. I lay and looked at the ceiling, listening to the whispers and giggles around me, and felt anxious. Across the way, the boys were mostly quiet. Someone let out an enormous belch, and there were staggered titters around the room. In less time than you would imagine, there was absolute silence, the climax of this much-anticipated day folding noiselessly into itself.

I was awake and grew more and more alert. I thought about Esau, I prickled with Esau. I needed his undivided attention. What was this broken mirror inside of me, that showed me I was ugly, showed me I was wrong, but persisted in its reflection that I was better than other people? Could low self-esteem loop all the way around and become narcissism?

I heard breathing, a body intermittently shifting, rolling over. I felt like I was part of the museum, part of an exhibit, the control group of an experiment—proximity to sleep as a kind of stimulant, maybe, since my head buzzed as if from caffeine. Surrounded by bodies, bones, all the inert matter proffered by our tiny planet, I felt neon.

I don’t know what time it was when I knelt cautiously on my sleeping bag, and then stood, and then tiptoed soundlessly to where Esau was lying. It seemed as though the darkness itself was carrying me. I squatted against the bookshelf and could just barely see him, his face wholly at rest, his lips slightly parted. If I could just get him away from his mother, if I could somehow communicate through the thick silence—

“Get back to bed, missy.” Mrs. Abraham’s voice was a sharp whisper.

I fled. I tried not to cry. I didn’t cry. I slept, a hideous sleep of humiliating dreams.