Nathan Hill - The Nix

Take Henry.

Why, of all men, Henry?

The two of them sit on the riverbank one night throwing stones into the water, picking at the sand, nervously attempting wit and conversation, and this is what she’s thinking: Why am I here with him ?

Simple. Because Peggy Watson started a dumb rumor last autumn.

Peggy had come galloping to Faye after home ec all smiles and high drama. “I know a secret,” she said, then teased Faye the rest of the day, slipping her a note in trigonometry: I know something you don’t know.

“It’s a good one,” she said at lunch. “Grade-A juicy. Something to write home about.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s better if you wait,” she said. “Till after school. You’ll want to be sitting down.”

Peggy Watson, vague friend since the third grade, house down the street, same bus ride home, the closest thing Faye has to a “best friend.” When they were children they played this game where they used all the crayons in the box and whole pads of paper to write “I Love You” in different colors, scripts, and designs. It was Peggy’s idea. She couldn’t stop. It never got old for her. Peggy’s favorite was a picture of a heart with I Love You written in a circle around it. “A circle, so no beginning and no end,” she said. “Get it? It keeps going? Forever!”

After school that day Peggy was ecstatic, exhilarated with big rumors and alarming news: “There’s a boy who likes you!”

“No there’s not,” Faye said.

“There is. Most definitely. I have it on good authority.”

“Who told you?”

“Lips are sealed,” Peggy said. “I swore up and down.”

“Who’s the boy?”

“He’s a boy in our class.”

“Which one?”

“Guess!”

“I am not guessing.”

“Do it! Guess!”

“Tell me.”

But Faye didn’t really want to know. She didn’t want the hassle. She was single, kept to herself, perfectly happy with that tableau. Why couldn’t people just leave her alone?

“Okay,” Peggy said. “Fine. No guessing. No games. I’ll blurt it all out. Hope you’re ready.”

“I am,” Faye said, and she waited, and Peggy waited, savoring it, staring at Faye, full of mischief, and Faye suffered through the big theatrical pause until she could no longer bear it. “Damn it, Peggy!”

“Okay, okay,” she said. “It’s Henry! Henry Anderson! He likes you!”

Henry. Faye didn’t know what she was expecting, but she was not expecting that. Henry? She’d never even considered him before. He was barely a presence in her thoughts.

“Henry,” Faye said.

“Yes,” Peggy said. “Henry. It’s destiny. You two are destined. You wouldn’t even have to change your last name!”

“I would too! Andresen, Anderson, they’re different.”

“Still,” Peggy said, “he’s pretty cute.”

Faye went home and locked herself in her room. Seriously considered, for the first time, having a boyfriend. Sat on her bed. Didn’t sleep much. Cried a little. Decided by the next morning that, strangely, she actually cared for Henry a great deal. Had convinced herself that she’d always liked his looks. His sturdy linebacker physique. His quiet manner. Maybe she’d liked him all this time. At school he seemed different now — more pink, alive, handsome. What she didn’t know was that Peggy had done the same thing to him. Harassed him all day with hints about a certain girl who liked him. Revealed later that it was Faye. He came to school that day and saw Faye and couldn’t understand why he’d never noticed how beautiful she was. How elegant and simple. What fierce eyes hid behind those big round glasses.

They began dating shortly thereafter.

Love is like this, Faye thinks now. We love people because they love us. It’s narcissistic. It’s best to be perfectly clear about this and not let abstractions like fate and destiny muddle the issue. Peggy, after all, could have picked any boy in the school.

This is what’s racing through her mind tonight on the riverbank, where Henry has brought her so he can, she believes, apologize. He’s been timid ever since that night at the playground. The incident after the prom. They talk about it, but obliquely. They don’t say anything specific. “I’m sorry about…you know,” he says, and she feels bad for him, the way he slumps over when addressing the subject. He’s been irritatingly contrite and penitent. Carrying her book bag home, walking a step behind her, head down, buying more flowers and candy. Sometimes, in fits of self-pity, he’ll say things like “God I’m so stupid!” Or he’ll ask her to go to the movies and before she can accept he’ll say something like “If you still want be my girl, that is.”

It’s all arbitrary. Had Faye attended a different school. Had her parents moved away. Had Peggy been sick that day. Had she chosen a different boy. And on and on. A thousand permutations, a million possibilities, and almost all of them kept Faye from sitting here in the sand with Henry.

He is a cauldron of nerves tonight, clenching and unclenching his hands, picking at the dirt, throwing rocks into the water. She sips a Coca-Cola out of the bottle and waits. He had planned it this far, getting Faye alone, here, on the riverbank. Now he doesn’t know what to do. He wobbles back and forth in the sand, swats at something in front of his face, sits there hard and tense like a nervous horse. It irritates her, his torment. She drinks her Coke.

The river smells of fish tonight — a damp and funky stench like spoiled milk and ammonia — and Faye thinks about this one time she was out with her father on his boat. He was showing her how to fish. This was important to him. He had grown up a fisherman. When he was a kid, that was his job. But she had no taste for it. She couldn’t even hook the worm without crying — how it coiled around her finger and brown goo came spurting out as she pierced the skin.

Henry reminds her of that worm right now: ready to pop.

They stare at the river, and the blue flame of the nitrogen plant, the moon, the light breaking on the water and scattering. A bottle bobs ten yards out. A bug whizzes by her face. Waves come ashore in their rhythmic way, and the longer they sit here in silence the more it seems to Faye like the river is breathing —how it contracts and expands, rushes in and rushes out, water caressing rocks as it pulls away.

Finally Henry turns to her and speaks. “Hey, listen, I want to ask you something.”

“Okay.”

“But…I don’t know if I can,” he says. “If I can ask you this.”

“Why not?” she says. And she looks at him, sees him and realizes she hasn’t done that — actually looked at him — in how long? All night? She’s been avoiding his eyes, embarrassed for him, hating him a little, and now she finds him grim and scowling.

“I want to…,” he says, but stops. He never finishes the sentence. Instead, he leans quickly into Faye and kisses her.

Kisses her hard.

Like he did that night at the playground, and it surprises her — the sudden taste of him, his warmth pressing into her, the oily smell of his hands now clutching her face. It’s shocking, his forcefulness, pushing his mouth to hers, driving his tongue past her lips. He’s kissing like it’s combat. She falls back into the sand and he pushes himself onto her, over her, still seizing her face, kissing wildly. He isn’t rough, exactly. But commanding. Her first impulse is to shrink away. He squeezes her, crushes his body into hers. Their front teeth knock together but he keeps going. She’s never felt Henry so strongly and savagely male. She can’t move under his weight, and now she feels other of her body’s demands — her skin is cold, her belly full of cola, she needs to burp. Needs to wiggle out and run.