by Jen Doll
“What is it?” shouts Doris.
“Are you all right?” asks Grant, who is suddenly right next to me, looking down at the plastic man-part that has fallen to the concrete floor of the stockroom. It rests there casually as if it’s totally cool being a representation of a penis, like it hasn’t a care in the world, which it probably doesn’t. “Jesus,” he says. “You found a … dick?” Then Doris is on the other side of me, taking my hands in hers and squirting them liberally with a bottle of hand sanitizer.
“I should have given you gloves!” she’s saying. “We have a whole box of them, just in case something like this—”
“I didn’t touch it!” I say, though I accept the Purell anyway. “It dropped out of the suit!”
“You’re lucky,” she says. “I touched a dirty diaper a year ago, and I still haven’t gotten over it. I’ve never found a penis, though.”
“It’s not a real penis,” I say. “In fairness.”
Grant nods. “She’s right. That would be a truly disturbing thing to find in a suitcase.”
Doris drops my hands, and she clutches her stomach. I’m worried she’s about to throw up, but instead she lets out an earsplitting howl, with some snorts to go along with it. Grant joins her, and suddenly I’m leaning over, too, straight-out ugly guffawing. I realize it’s the first time I’ve really laughed since I moved to Alabama.
“Stop, my abs hurt!” I say, wiping my eyes, and Grant says, “Well. I certainly was not expecting that on my first day on the job,” and Doris adds, “I really want to know why he didn’t pick up that suitcase!” and snorts again.
“Is this a regular occurrence?” I ask, and Doris shakes her head.
“It’s never happened before. Usually the weirdest-slash-grossest thing is, like, um, boxers with skid marks.” She blushes and looks at Grant.
“I don’t know why you’re looking at me. I don’t poop in my pants,” he says, and that sets off another round of laughing. This time, when we get quiet, we all stand there looking down at the dildo, nearly as embarrassed for it as we are for ourselves.
“What should we do with it?” I ask.
Grant pokes it with the toe of his sneaker. “Ladies, ladies,” he says, putting an arm around each of us, “I have an idea.” He smiles like the Cheshire cat, his eyes lifting up at the corners slightly, and he looks both angelic and so beautifully evil. “Let’s hide it in Heather’s car.”
Doris shakes her head violently. “No. You do not want to see Heather mad. I’ve only seen her truly furious once, and that was enough.”
“What happened?” I ask.
“Red lost Freddie,” she said. “She’d been running around the store, and then she just wasn’t. Turned out she’d gone next door to Baskin-Robbins, where they were giving out free samples. I found her there eating enough to give herself a stomachache. But she could have gotten kidnapped or hit by a car.… Heather’s face was as red as Red’s hair. You should have heard her yell.…”
“Hmmm,” says Grant, this time looking directly into Doris’s eyes. “What about putting it out in the store? We can say it’s a personal massager, see what happens. Some of the women of this town might really be into it.”
“Don’t stereotype,” says Doris, frowning again. “Maybe some of the men of this town would really be into it.”
“It did seem like a guy’s suitcase,” I offer.
“Maybe they would,” says Grant. “Far be it from me to judge.”
“I’m the boss, and I’m pulling rank. We are not putting the dildo in anyone’s car,” says Doris. “Nor are we putting it out in the store for sale. Did you know it’s illegal to buy or sell sex toys in Alabama?”
“Really?” I ask. “Not that I’ve ever bought or sold one, but why does anyone care?”
“Morality,” says Grant. “The concept is very big around here.”
“No sale,” says Doris again. “No car. Any other brilliant ideas, aside from putting it in the trash?”
“I know!” I shout. It’s one of those rare moments when I feel like I have exactly the right thing to say, and it comes out of me at the perfect time, not seven hours after the fact. “Let’s give it a proper burial.”
That’s how the three of us end up burying the dildo in the store’s shaggy back lot, just underneath an azalea bush. Grant uses a tiny plastic shovel, part of a beach set we found in the stockroom, and as he digs into the red Alabama soil, Doris and I sing “Taps,” or at least, the one stanza we can remember. Doris, who had grudgingly put on a pair of latex gloves, places the dildo in its shallow grave, and Grant and I cover it up with dirt. We leave a tiny little gravestone made of a piece of cardboard box to mark the location for posterity. HERE LIES DICK, it says.
13
Daphne
After departing the big, gray room, the purple leopard suitcase had traveled from place to place for what felt like an interminably long time in a plastic container with a bunch of other suitcases. The wheels churned underneath as the driver drove, and it seemed this was simply the suitcase’s life now, on the move forever but never getting anywhere at all. The only thing to do, it seemed, was accept it.
But then the truck had stopped, and a human had lifted the plastic container out, and removed several of the suitcases. They were put in a large cardboard box and stored in a smaller gray room. Another human picked them up and put them in the back of another vehicle and toted them to a building where they were placed on a high shelf in a stockroom, along with many other items. The suitcases waited some more in this new place. And waited. Until a boy had reached up high for them and brought them to the floor, and a girl had opened the box and lifted the suitcase out, and another girl had given—her—a name. Daphne.
14
Grant
After a week at my new job, my argument that my bosses might need to get in touch seems to have worked. Mom’s stopped taking my cell phone away at six p.m. every night in an effort to keep me from coming into contact with any of my “bad influences”—it’s way easier to blame other people than it is to blame me, even if she doesn’t know exactly who to blame. So after she picks me up at the store and drops me off at home, before going back out to her Junior League meeting (I got reamed for the casserole, but I think it’s also what ultimately got me out of the house), I head upstairs to my room and start making calls.
The first is to Chassie, who, not surprisingly, doesn’t answer. When her phone goes to voice mail, I leave a short message: “I’m sorry, Chassie. Please call me back.” I’m not even sure why I’m still trying, but it seems important that she know I feel awful about what happened. Then I call Bad Influence #1: my buddy Brod, short for Broderick, who was on the football team about nine hundred years ago, never left town after he graduated, works at the local grocery store as the assistant manager, and nowadays mostly buys booze for high school kids so he’ll stay in with the popular crowd. Brod is one of the few people who knows about what happened in the spring—I was at his house that night, for a while at least—but he’s never acted different or anything. I guess when your main thing is selling alcohol to minors for friendship, reproach is not high on your list.
Call me old-fashioned, but I like to make actual phone calls rather than texting (and don’t even get me started on sexting) because, guess what: If you text, what you’ve said is traceable, especially if your mom is like my mom and has been known to check up on you through your phone. I mean, I’ll text, too. I just have to stay on top of deleting anything incriminating.
Broderick doesn’t answer. He’ll hit me back; he always does. For now, I lie on my bed and wait. I start thinking about Unclaimed Baggage. Pawing through other people’s crap that they never picked up from the airport, deciding what secondhand thing is worth selling, isn’t exactly the dream of the high school quarterback. But in a way, it calms me. There’s no booze around. I have something to do with my hands. And after Doris called me out for my Grant Collins act, I decided to try something new and just be myself. It’s a
ctually kind of nice.
My phone beeps with a text from Brod. Like I say, I’ve learned to stay on top of deleting messages.
What up, buddy? he says. Just got tacos. Hang later?
At least he’s using the code. “Tacos” is Brod’s word for alcohol—usually a case or two of Bud. We implemented it last year before the shit really hit the fan. If he says “burrito supreme,” it means he’s got his hands on a fifth of Beam. “Doing a Taco Bell run” is exactly what you think, though he might pair it with an actual Taco Bell run to keep his energy up.
The thing is, I don’t really want to meet up for fake tacos or even real tacos. What I’d like to do is be normal. Have a family dinner and tell my mom and Brian and Bobby and Michael about my day, and hear about their days, and talk about what the next day might be like, too. I want to be the Grant Collins who is feeling like himself again, whoever that guy actually is. But I don’t know if I know how.
My phone rings, and I pick up.
“Hey, man,” I say, thinking it’s Brod.
“Grant,” answers my dad. I consider hanging up immediately, but I know he’ll just call me back, and then he’ll probably call my mom, and that will upset her, so I stay on the phone, but I say nothing.
“How you doing?” he asks.
I remain silent.
“Talk to me, son.”
“Are you driving?” I finally ask, just to fill the void. He only calls me when he’s on the way to somewhere else, which is appropriate, considering how he left our lives.
“I’m picking Gwen up from her shift at the hospital,” he says. Gwen is his new wife, the one he left us for. She’s a nurse, he’s a doctor—talk about clichés—and they live in South Carolina and have two little girls I’ve never met. About a year after he ditched us, when I was ten, he wanted me to come and visit. He bought me a plane ticket, and I went so far as to get on a plane, but then I freaked. I started screaming and crying, and they had to let me out before we took off. Afterward, my mom told me I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to do. Then I got busy, and I guess Dad got busy, too.
“Your mom called,” he says. “Sounds like you’ve been having a rough time.”
I grunt. This kind of pisses me off. I know he’s my dad, and I know he still sends his monthly support checks, but I feel like he kind of relinquished his fatherly role when he moved five hundred miles away.
“You’re always welcome to come out here for a while,” he says. “If you need a change of pace. Small towns can be rough, all those same stories circling around with nowhere to go. All the rumors—”
I’m pretty sure he’s talking about himself and the gossip that followed when he split with Mom, and I’m over it. It’s always been about him.
“I gotta go. Brian needs me,” I lie. It’s an attempted dig, mentioning my stepfather, not that Dad seems to notice.
“OK,” he says. “Be good, son. I’m here, whenever you want.”
“Sure you are,” I say, and hang up. I stare at my wall a few seconds before picking the phone right back up again.
Pulling an all-nighter, I text Brod, which as a code doesn’t really work that well, now that school’s out, but old habits die hard. It means that after I put in an appearance at the dinner table, and after Mom and Brian turn in at around ten, I’ll sneak out of my room, climb out on the big old tree with branches that stretch right outside the window of my second-floor bedroom, shimmy down, and jog the six blocks over to Brod’s condo, which is on the edge of all the too-expensive, echoey houses in the fancy section of town. He’ll be on his recliner. I’ll let myself in because this is a small town in Alabama and no one locks their doors. He’ll offer me something to drink, and I’ll say yes, and help myself. I’ve done it a million times before. It’s easy. It’s all so fucking easy.
PS, I write. You know there’s an emoji for those things now?
15
Doris
“So what’s the deal with you and Grant?” asks Nell. It’s been a couple of days since what I’m secretly referring to as the Dildo Detente, because even though I’m certainly not about to become a full-on Grant Collins fangirl, the tensions between us have been cautiously eased.
He’s not in the store—he said he had a doctor’s appointment this morning—so I guess now’s the moment. I could tell Nell why I have such a grudge against Grant and his friends, why there’s no way I’m letting him get too close, why I was so hard on him the day I hired him, and why I probably shouldn’t have hired him at all. But how do you know when you can trust someone enough to tell them the truth? If you share your deepest secrets, what might you lose?
So I hedge. “Oh, you know,” I say, reaching into the black-and-white-checkered wheelie bag between us—Nell has dubbed it the Lauren—and pulling out a long, red velvet cape. “We were friends when we were kids, everyone was. But things changed in middle school. And ever since he got football-famous, he’s been impossible. He hangs out with this sketchy crowd, including this guy Brod who graduated years ago but who buys everyone beer so they’ll go to his parties. He’s the chicken-throwing assistant manager I mentioned.”
Nell wrinkles her nose. “Ew.” She takes a couple silk shirts out of the bag, unfolding them for inspection and then folding them again.
“Grant drinks; I’ve heard stories. He flirts; you’ve seen it. And probably a lot more. Why would he stop, you know? Just because he’s working here? I just think we should be careful,” I say, and before she asks more questions, I change the subject. “What’s the latest with Ashton?” Most mornings Nell tells us how he texted her the cutest thing the night before, or how they talked on the phone for hours, or that she’s counting the days until his visit, but today she hasn’t mentioned him at all.
“He’s at baseball camp,” she says. “They take their phones away and only let them use them once a week.” She makes a sad face. “I’m, like, a baseball widow.”
“Except he’s not dead,” I remind her, and she laughs.
“What about you?” asks Nell. “What’s your boyfriend situation? There must be a ton of guys in this town who want to go out with you—”
“Ooh, check out this, um, cool headband,” I say, holding up a herringbone hair accoutrement that matches the Lauren perfectly.
She raises her eyebrows at me.
“My ‘boyfriend situation’ is nonexistent. And no, they don’t.”
“Are you sure?”
I press my hand against my heart, a vow of truth. “I swear to Cupid and Venus and Saint Valentine and the host of The Bachelorette that there are definitely not ‘a ton of guys in this town who want to go out with me.’”
“Why not?” asks Nell. “You’re funny, you’re pretty, you’re smart, you’re an incredible artist.… I bet lots of guys would be into you.” She pauses. “Oh no. I’m sorry. Is it that you aren’t into guys? I shouldn’t assume—”
“I do like boys,” I admit. “Even though I frequently wish I didn’t.”
“Yeah, sometimes it seems like it would almost be easier to be gay, right? So many guys are awful, but all of my friends who are girls are totally great,” says Nell. “If only I were attracted to them. I mean, I know it isn’t actually easier—”
“My friend Maya is gay,” I tell her. “I wouldn’t call it ‘easy’ in this town.”
Nell frowns. “People are shitty about it?”
“Depends who you’re talking to, but for some people, if you don’t ‘fit in’—if you’re not hetero, cis, white, a cheerleader, a football player, a Christian—well, you’re an outcast. Maya’s Jewish and gay, which is a double whammy.”
“I want to meet her,” says Nell. “If you like her, I bet she’s awesome.”
I come out with it. “Boys don’t want to date me because I’m so far from the head cheerleader I might as well be captain of the girls’ football team, but of course there would never, ever be a girls’ football team here. I stopped going to church. Freshman year I organized a pro-choice rally, for w
hich my parents nearly disowned me. I tried to get the school to stop having a prayer before each football game. It didn’t work. I don’t know exactly what I believe about God, but I definitely don’t think it’s right how some people around here use him to justify acting like small-minded bigots.”
“Or use her,” says Nell. “Why is God necessarily a he?”
“You’re preaching to the choir. Or not preaching. You know what I mean.”
“Ashton is biracial,” Nell says. “His mom is black, and his dad is white. There were a few kids at school who said awful things when we started dating. I tried to just ignore them. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You don’t see a lot of that here, different races dating,” I tell her. “When it does happen, certain old-school Southern folks will talk and talk and talk. They’ll be nice to your face, maybe, but you’ll be shunned. Everyone’s supposed to stay in their proper place, whatever that means. White people go here, black people go there, and if you break the rules, you get the silent treatment—or worse.”
“Byron and Nadine are black, though,” Nell points out. “And everybody at the store is really friendly with everybody else.”
“Red doesn’t stand for any racist stuff,” I say. “And everyone who works here is cool. I mean, there are plenty of people who live in the South who aren’t racist. And plenty of people up North who are. It’s not about where you live. It’s about how you think.”
“Yeah,” says Nell. “Sometimes I would get comments from strangers, like when I was with Ashton at the mall or something. Usually from white dudes. I always wondered if that was why my mom thought I could do better. Was she scared? Did she think I should date a white guy?”
“Did you ever ask her?”
Nell shakes her head. “I don’t know if I really want to know.”
“You can’t help who you love,” I say. “And even if you could, you should still be able to date whoever you want. Consensually, of course.”
