Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

After Kirsten had basically spasmed in ecstasy into Lucy’s face, she said, “Could you tell I’d never done that?”

It was less that Kirsten was confiding than that, with Lucy, she didn’t feel the need to feign competence. Lucy was lying on top of her, propped up on her elbows, and she seemed amused—flirtatious-amused, not mean-amused—as she said, “Seriously? Never?”

Kirsten said, “Well, I’ve given blow jobs.”

“Then that really doesn’t seem fair.”

The sureness of Lucy’s hooking-up personality, the way it might even have been more confident than her regular personality, impressed Kirsten; the nearest Kirsten got to such confidence was when things felt so good that she forgot herself.

Lucy added, “Just in case none of the recipients of your blow jobs ever mentioned it, you’re very, very fun to have sex with,” and Kirsten said, “This isn’t sex.”

As she had by the juice dispenser, Lucy laughed.

“I mean, it’s fooling around,” Kirsten said. “I’m not denying that.”

“You think if there’s no penis it doesn’t count?”

Lucy’s apparent lack of anger surprises Kirsten more in retrospect than it did at the time. Lucy explained that she was a gold-star lesbian, which meant one who’d never had sex with a guy; in fact, Lucy added proudly, she’d never even kissed a guy. Kirsten asked how she’d known she was gay, and Lucy said, “Because, even when I was in grade school, the people I always thought about before I fell asleep at night were girls.”

That what was transpiring between them would be kept secret was both understood and probably not very realistic. Before they lay down on the red couch, Kirsten would block the door with a chair, but sometimes dim figures, other couples in search of privacy, opened the door partway. When this happened, Kirsten would freeze, and Lucy would call out sharply, “There are people in here,” and a retreat would occur. Once, someone very tall opened the door all the way and just stood there, not moving, someone else behind him, and Kirsten realized, with one of her nipples in Lucy’s mouth, that the person in front was Sean, and Kirsten’s fixation with him, a fixation that had lasted until just a few days before, seemed distant. Lucy lifted her head and said in a firm voice, “Can you please leave?” Sean and Renee did go away, but the next morning Renee asked, with what seemed more like curiosity than disapproval, “Was that you with Lucy?”

All these years later, while driving to work and considering ruining Lucy’s life, Kirsten thinks that Renee would be her corroboration, and maybe Sean, too. Conveniently, Kirsten is Facebook friends with both of them, privy to the extremely tedious details of their separate suburban lives.

At the time, fake-casually, fake-confusedly, Kirsten said, “With who?”

That fall, back at school, Kirsten opened her mailbox in the student union one day to find a small padded envelope, the return address Lucy’s, the contents a brief, unremarkable note (“Hope you’re having a good semester…”) and a mixtape. Kirsten was surprised and very happy, which made her inability to listen to the mixtape perplexing; the first song was “I Melt with You,” and the second line of the song was “Making love to you was never second best,” and though she tried several times not to, Kirsten always had to turn off her cassette player after that line. She never acknowledged Lucy’s gift.

The next summer, Kirsten returned to the camp, and Lucy didn’t; someone said that she was volunteering at a health clinic in Haiti. Kirsten had a boyfriend then, a guy named Ryan, who was working in the admissions office of their college and to whom she hadn’t mentioned Lucy.

After that summer, Kirsten’s only source of camp updates was a winter newsletter that she read less and less thoroughly as the years passed. She became aware of the Prairie Wife, in the amorphous way one becomes aware of celebrities, without having any idea that Lucy Headrick was Lucy from camp, whose surname had been Nilsson. But, last December, Kirsten read the newsletter in its entirety. It was the day after Christmas, and she was trying to get Jack to take a nap, which he didn’t do much anymore, but he’d been cranky, and they were due at a potluck in the evening. She was sitting halfway up the steps of their house so as to intercept Jack whenever he tried to escape from his room; she’d pulled the newsletter from a stack of mail by the front door to occupy herself between interceptions.

The camp had been owned by the same family for several generations, and an eccentric great-uncle who taught archery wrote the newsletter. The item about Lucy was just a paragraph and not particularly fawning—“It’s always fun to see what former camper and counselor Lucy ‘the Prairie Wife’ Headrick née Lucy Nilsson is up to”—but Kirsten couldn’t believe it. Though she didn’t own any of Lucy Headrick’s cookbooks and had never seen her television show, she knew enough about her to find it hilarious. She knew that Lucy Headrick was gorgeous (she had long blond hair and magnificent cheekbones), was married to a man, and was, in some conservative-flavored way, religious. Kirsten was so excited to tell Casey that she let Jack get out of bed. They went into the den, where Casey and Ian were watching football, Kirsten carrying the camp newsletter. But it turned out that, although Kirsten had mentioned Lucy to Casey, Casey had never heard of the Prairie Wife, so Kirsten’s ostensible bombshell was less satisfying to drop than she’d anticipated.

That might have been that—a funny coincidence—except that a week later, at the digital-map-data company where she works, Kirsten passed Frank’s office while he was watching Lucy Headrick make chicken-and-dumpling soup online. “I’m decompressing,” Frank said. “I just turned in a test tally.”

Kirsten held up her palms and said, “Hey, no judgment.” She almost didn’t say it, but then, pointing at the computer screen, she did. “I kind of know her.”

Frank raised one eyebrow, which was a gesture Kirsten suspected that he had, in his adolescence, practiced at great length as part of shaping his persona. Frank was her age, the son of Thai immigrants, and he was married to a white guy who was a dermatologist. Kirsten liked Frank O.K.—she respected his attention to detail—but she didn’t really trust him.

Frank said, “Do go on.”

She tried to think of reasons that not trusting Frank mattered and couldn’t come up with any. Once, she had considered her interactions with Lucy to be her most damning secret, but now, ironically, they were probably the most interesting thing about her, even if Casey had been underwhelmed.

“I haven’t seen her since the mid-nineties, but we worked at a camp a few hours north of here,” Kirsten said, then added, “We slept together a bunch of times.”

“No. Fucking. Way.” Frank looked elated. He made a lascivious “Mm-mm-mm” sound, and said, “You and the Prairie Wife as baby dykes. I love it.”

“Actually,” Kirsten said, “I looked it up, and I’m pretty sure Lucy lives about forty-five minutes west of St. Louis. Which, for one thing, that’s not exactly the rural farmlands, right? And, also, it’s been a while since I took social studies, but is Missouri even a prairie state?”

“She’s a fraud,” Frank said happily. “A fraudulent butter-churning bitch.”

That was three months ago, and, since then, without really meaning to, Kirsten is pretty sure that she and Frank have become close friends. The reassuring part is that, if anything, he monitors Lucy’s activities more avidly than Kirsten does—surely his avidity has egged on her own—and Lucy represents ninety percent of all discussions between them. The unsettling part is that Frank also follows several other celebrities as enthusiastically yet spitefully; Kirsten isn’t sure where he finds the time.