The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “Uh, yeah.”

  Clive looked up from the clipboard. “I mean, are you allergic to strawberries?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, fuck,” said Clive, which felt like an overreaction to Fly. Cursing always felt that way. But Clive wasn’t looking at Fly anymore. Clive was looking down the hallway. He stared at whatever it was, then looked at Fly and took a deep breath. “Okay, man,” he said. “Be good.”

  With Clive now gone Fly could hear what was coming. His door was open, as always, and he could hear the knocking, the cheery chatting, the hesitation, the sweet rejection. He knew they were making their way down to his room. And when they did, Fly was ready for them. Had been preparing for the fifteen minutes it took the pair to make it to his doorway. They didn’t do the Clive lean-in. They stood together side by side, filling Fly’s threshold, like his parents might have if he let them come visit. Fly didn’t even let them get their spiel out.

  “Come on in,” he said, just as he’d been practicing in his head.

  The girl had dark curly hair, and he’d only seen clearer skin on babies. Smooth and white as milk. A Jew, Fly figured. The boy was wearing glasses that he kept pushing back up his nose. The girl did most of the talking. The boy watched her through his slippy glasses and nodded like that was all he was ever going to do.

  “And so we hope you can come to church this Sunday. It’s just off campus. Can we count on you?”

  “I’m there,” Fly said. The guy was Arthur; the girl went by Suzie.

  3. Refusal of the Call

  Fly, finally getting some social life, went to a house party off campus. He went with the World Religion students, though at the party they all gathered on the couch like zoo animals around the one tree in the cage. The tree in this case was marijuana. The sophomore who had brought it called it “Mary Jane,” like it was his girlfriend. The house was dark, but still no one was dancing, and Fly didn’t make out another black kid in the whole place. An actual girl got up on a table and started gyrating, like a stripper. Fly felt gross for her, about her. But he still tilted forward to look up her skirt. Her white thighs were in shadows. He sucked Mary Jane and leaned back into the conversation: “Judeo-Christianity is a way for straight men to admit their attraction to other men,” someone was saying. “Like God is the man you can love without being accused of homoeroticism.” Fly put on his serious thinking face and listened. Getting high in college was definitely better than getting high by himself.

  The next morning, Sunday, passed with Fly in bed—​sleeping. Waking up to eat the last of the beef jerky sticks. Reading a homework essay by Bates on Turkish music, another by Pollard on reggae. He used a highlighter as he read, instead of taking notes. Highlighted most all of the page.

  Fly had forgotten all about the two evangelical kids. Forgotten about church, and the Church, and who needed it? Right? Who needed Jesus when you had Peter Tosh? Christianity had been stabilizing when he lived with his faith-crazy parents, but now—​now, who knew, maybe he didn’t even need stable. He thought on all the ways to become a man—​music maybe?

  But then Arthur and Suzie showed up. Right in the middle of Fly’s midday nap. This time they were a surprise. They came straight to his room, where his door was forever ajar. “I really missed you in church,” Suzie said. Which was the first time anyone had claimed to miss Fly besides his mother, who was always claiming it. I miss you, come visit, I’ll wash your clothes, I’ll cook a meatloaf. It was nice of this girl to say she missed him. And then the girl kept saying more things, like, “Should I come meet you here next Sunday before service?” And, “You can walk me to church. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  The boy, Arthur, nodded at her, his glasses still slipping down his nose. “I’ll be alone,” Suzie said, turning her body more clearly away from Arthur. “Arthur is giving a junior sermon next week, so he’s got to be there before everyone else.” Arthur looked down at the ground; his glasses teetered. He took them off and cleaned them on his shirt.

  “Sounds like a plan,” said Fly, who was sitting on his bed in pajamas his mother had bought him, thankful that he had something on besides his boxers. When Suzie and Arthur left, Fly wished he’d said “congratulations” to Arthur. Fly felt bad about this failure for hours. Must be a big deal to give a sermon, he thought, even a junior one.

  4. Traversing the Threshold

  Clive leaned into the threshold. “I get it,” the RA said, smiling. “I totally get it.” He pulled his body back up and stood in the doorway. His still surprisingly short legs. “You’re not allergic to anything, man. I mean, could it be that you . . .” He looked at his clipboard and shook his head. “Sorry, it’s just I’m trying to find a reason.”

  Fly was lying on his bed, in boxers only this time. “It’s okay,” he said.

  “But you have your own room, dude. I didn’t get my own room until I was a junior.”

  Fly didn’t know what to say. “Sorry?” he said.

  “Thanks, man. I guess you just got lucky. Right?”

  “I guess?” said Fly, feeling something musty enter the room. Though Clive never did. Never did enter.

  Fly woke up that Sunday to the knocking. He opened the door and there was the girl. Suzie. The churchy Christian Jewish girl, whatever that meant, with the milky skin and curly night-black hair. Fly was only in his pajama pants. His chest bare. He still had that muscle, left over from basketball, that lean teenage-boy body that can hold a vestigial tautness for years. Suzie pulled her breath in and then shot her eyes to his. Kept them there like her soul depended on it.

  “I’m too early,” she said.

  “Uh, sorry. What time is church again?”

  “No, I’m early. But you don’t have a cell phone. I mean, why don’t you have a cell phone?” She smiled, though the smile seemed mean. “It’s just that I’m singing in the choir, so I like to get there on time.”

  “Yeah,” Fly said. He wanted to look down at his crotch. See if there was a stain there from sleep. But he didn’t.

  “Should I wait out here?” she asked.

  “Uh, no. Go ahead. You know. I’ll catch up.”

  She nodded. Something was off with her. It was his body, he knew. His body had made her nervous. Had a girl ever seen his bare chest? He couldn’t remember. His mother didn’t count. Couldn’t count.

  “Sorry I was too early,” she said. “I really hope you come.”

  At the elevators she turned to look back at him, and he realized that he was, stupidly, just standing there on his own threshold. He flung himself back into the room.

  No, he wasn’t going to go to some white people’s church with that white girl. No way. His mother would never, ever let him bring her home, anyway. No point. Instead he closed his door, pulled his pajama pants down, and jerked off. He imagined the cum splashing onto her milky face. Imagined her smiling, like a porn star, her enjoying his pleasure through the whole thing.

  He got up to go shower down the hall in the communal bathroom. He took long showers. Good way to break up the day. Shower caddy in hand, slippers on his feet, he turned out of his dorm room door, and there was Clive. Clive had a stack of papers in his hand. “Was about to slip this under your door, man,” Clive said. He slapped one sheet of paper to Fly’s chest.

  Fly walked with it to the showers. Read the list through again and again. Campus cults. No matter how many times he read it, Suzie and Arthur’s church was still the first one on the list.

  After his shower Fly couldn’t find his one pair of Stacy Adams. Thought, Well, that’s that. But then found them. Put on a collared shirt and slacks.

  When he opened the doors to the church, the choir was going, and the place was packed with students clapping and smiling and shouting and dancing, and it was a real party up in there. Real gospel music, stuff Fly was familiar with. The young people at the end of the rows noticed Fly come in and smiled bigger. These strangers were so happy he’d come. He smiled back. He could hear tambourines clanging. And one of thos
e steel pans a guest professor had lectured about in World Music. The light was way bright. And there were more Asian people in this one place than Fly knew even existed on the whole campus.

  Arthur found him. “Oh, man, so glad you’re here!” Arthur looked crazed. He’d also just said the most words he’d ever said to Fly. “Come here, brother!” There was, indeed a space right next to Arthur for Fly. Like everyone had been waiting for Fly. Like Fly was special.

  “Did I miss you?” Fly said, feeling weird about it.

  “You’re here now!” Arthur shouted gleefully. “You’re right on time!”

  Fly found his place, between Arthur and an Asian kid so tall that even tall Fly had to look up to him. This guy gave Fly a fist bump. Then the place went hushed. Everyone looked ahead to the altar. The choir was up there. Robed like a real black choir. In fact, all the members of the choir were brown or black, except for Suzie, who was there now stepping forward to a single standing mic.

  “Suzanna,” Arthur whispered to Fly. The whisper had all the lunacy of someone shouting from a mountaintop.

  She tipped her face to the microphone and shut her eyes tight. “I,” she started. And she held it. The I. Held it there with her eyes so tight. “I been buked, and I been scorned.” There was no music at all holding her up. She opened her eyes and sang the line again a cappella. This time straight all the way through. “I’ve been buked, and I’ve been scorned.” She put her arms out with her hands like she was welcoming them all. And then Fly leaned in to look more closely at her, leaned in even though she was so many pews away.

  By the time Suzanna was on “trying to make this journey all alone” Fly knew. Suzanna was no white girl. Not one bit. Not a Jewish nonwhite girl, even. Suzanna was a girl raised in the Church, singing since she was a toddler. A black church. This was a Negro spiritual she was singing. Suzanna was a straight-up black girl. It was evident now that she was singing.

  Of course, Fly could even see it in her face now that he knew. The full lips, the curly hair. The lightest-skinned black girl Fly had ever seen, but now he could see the color rising to her face. She was getting browner by the octave. She was a black girl named Suzanna who could sing spirituals. And Fly knew she was the girl he was destined to love.

  In fact, Suzanna was, right now, looking at him. Right at him. Which meant that she knew it too. He stared back at her. Everyone around him started sitting; the song was over. But Fly stayed standing. He stayed standing, and she stayed standing. Until the pastor started talking and Suzie backed up, back into the choir. An all African American and Latino gospel choir, though the senior pastor, it turned out, was regular white. Actually white, with waxy blond hair to settle it. Fly sat down. But he stayed staring at Suzie until she looked away from him. Then he looked up at the ceiling. He could feel that his back was wet. That he was sweating through his clothes. There was probably a wet spot at the back of his shirt. But he looked up at the plain white ceiling and imagined that there was no ceiling. That he was out there in the sky because he was the sky. When the pastor said Amen and everyone else said it too, Fly returned from the sky and looked over at Arthur, and Arthur was looking at him. Arthur’s eyes were hooded, like he had something very serious to say. But then Fly realized that was just how Arthur’s eyes were. Arthur was some kind of Asian. Clear now that he wasn’t wearing his glasses.

  What was this craziness? Fly thought. What did it all mean? All the people of color were camouflaged. Maybe they had been around Fly all the time, and he’d been too self-absorbed to notice. Maybe he was camouflaged too.

  After that service Fly started to feel exhausted practically all the time. In the one extra-long twin bed, he would stare at the ceiling and think about kissing Suzie. Practice it in his mind until he fell asleep. Then he would dream about Suzie, Suzanna, letting him touch her. Even after weeks of walking her to church and watching her from the pews, he’d never even touched her through her clothes. Fly didn’t think of his father, Gary Lovett, meeting his first love at church. Of that girl winning Gary’s heart over the Bible. Fly had never heard that story, though he’d lived in its wake. Fly just slept a whole lot. Masturbated like it was a job. Practice, he told himself. Then Fly slept some more. He’d heard somewhere that sleeping a lot meant you were in love.

  5. Tests, Allies, and Enemies

  The Jewish kids from World Religions weren’t camouflaging; they were doing the opposite. They were posing as people of color—​when for all Fly could gather they were really just white. He couldn’t be bothered with their lack of authenticity. Fly lunched now with Arthur and the other ethnically jumbled Christian kids. Arthur was from the Midwest. Didn’t speak Chinese or Korean. Though he wore what Fly knew was a Buddhist bracelet around his left wrist. Fly’s father had worn four or five of them on the same wrist for years. Fly never said anything about it to Arthur, but it surely meant that Arthur wasn’t totally devoted to the cult, if the church was a cult. Though it turned out Fly himself was feeling less nuanced. Actually felt it. He felt solid, manly, sure of his faith now. Like how he’d been as a boy, with Pastor John. No more experimenting intellectually around thoughts. Now Fly would have an unbending thought and then feel real good about it. Fly had been all A’s, but his World Religions grade slouched at the midterm. He couldn’t muster a nuanced thought about Bahaullah or Krishna. He was all in for Jesus these days. Felt good. Felt grown.

  But music was still Fly and fly. The World Music class was in a lecture hall, but the teacher was some kind of famous person who had been on tour for the whole first half of the semester. Every week there had been a new lecturer, delivering what was some kind of straight genius take on K-pop or Vude. Each teacher gave homework, but Fly never did it. Homework was a dumbing down that was for the actually dumb students, not for him. Instead after each class session Fly would go to the library. Look up the guest professor. Check out the book or books they’d written. Then he and Suzanna—​he liked to call her by her full name now—​would sit in his room and read. Just read. He his music books, she the Bible or maybe an education textbook. Though maybe she was the only one reading, because it was impossible for Fly to read with her sitting at his dorm desk with her naked feet propped on his bed. Him lying in his bed, sometimes napping, sometimes not; their feet sometimes touching.

  Too often Clive would lean into the doorway, smile—​“just checking on my chickadees”—​and lean back out.

  6. Approach to the Innermost Cave, or, The Meeting with the Goddess

  Thinking about Fly getting saved by the Lord started to make Suzanna slutty. It got so that whenever they talked about it, she would unbuckle his pants and then close the dorm-room door—​there was always that awkward thrilling moment with his dick straight up and the door wide open. She would kneel to him and say something deflating like, “I really want to be sitting next to you when you receive Christ. I just want to watch Jesus come on you!” But Fly was nineteen, the horniest he was ever going to be, so he could hold the stiffness, despite. Then she would lick and suck until he said he was cumming. She would use her hands that last minute or so to get him there, and after she would climb into his sore sensitive lap. All her clothes still on, she would make him hold her. Then she would say something bananas like, “When you become a man of God there isn’t anything I won’t submit to you for.” Then sometimes she would cry.

  Boy, did Fly want to be a man of God. But to be honest he felt like he was already, had been since he was a child. But Suzanna needed to witness it. Women were like that, Fly figured. So he drove home one Saturday. Picked up his dark blue suit, which was newly snug around his shoulders.

  “A suit,” his father said. “You drove over an hour just for a suit? You going weird on us, boy?” Which was ridiculous coming from his crazy father.

  “Don’t mind that grumpy man,” his mother said, all eagerness and gratitude. She was losing it with joy at Fly’s just being home. Her face was so stretched with the smile Fly thought it looked scary. “Are you stayin
g for dinner?” she asked. “Meatloaf ?” and then she added quickly, chirpily, “my special meatloaf.”

  He stayed for dinner but drove back to school that night. The next morning Fly walked up to the altar when the white pastor opened his arms. Got himself saved for Suzanna, though he’d been saved before. Pastor John had saved him from the back of a van.

  But now it was a whole production. More than Fly had realized. Anyone saved was invited, beseeched, to an ice cream social after church with the “Prayer Warriors.” Arthur was there, and Arthur took over as Fly’s personal warrior of prayer. Arthur’s prayers were loud and urgent and he went on and on, and Fly could see how Arthur might be a pastor, a senior one, someday. Then other young men hugged Fly—​sincere bear hugs that were more male affection than he’d ever received. But the young women hugged Fly too, and that was stranger than the men. Because the girls hugged and held on, seemed suddenly to find him, what was it? Not just cute. Sexy; they found him sexy. They hugged him, met his eyes, gripped him with their fingers. Offered to bring him ice cream—​“What is your favorite flavor?”—​then buzzed around him with what he could feel was a lusty adoration. “Vanilla could be my favorite,” he said, testing out his theory to a white girl. She looked down at her shoes and then back up at him, took a gulp of breath, and he saw that her eyes were watering like she might cry.

  Suzanna came up, held Fly’s hand until the other girl blushed and ran off with the ice cream order. He felt Suzanna’s middle finger loosen in his hand; this middle finger’s knuckle rubbed gently across his palm, again and again. He felt his crotch tingle in anticipation. But there were more prayers and congratulations and welcomings to Christ. And then he had to eat the ice cream.

  When they got back to his dorm Fly pulled Suzanna through the door. “Leave the light on,” she said, even though he hadn’t given light or its absence any thought. “I want you to see me.” And then she took her clothes off with a drama of someone who’d been practicing, which Fly so appreciated. Her underwear dark with wetness when she finally peeled them off. Then she flung herself onto the bed, face first, raised her hips so he could see all God had given her through the soft plump lobes of her backside. When he put his hand to her there at the center, she pressed herself hard against him, but she was slick. It made him think of candy gone sticky in the sun.