The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  “Are you an actor?” asks Kara. “I didn’t know they had actors here.”

  “Sure, honey,” says the man who looks like Roosevelt. “Let’s call me an actor.”

  Kara thinks this is a weird answer, but the fact that he’s called her ‘honey’ keeps her from caring. No one has ever called her ‘honey’ before, not in the smirking way FDR just did. Kara thinks she likes it. “How long have you worked here?”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” FDR replies. He tugs at a gold chain attached to his vest and opens the watch hanging at its end. Kara notices that inside there’s just a blank white face, no numbers. “Five years? Ten? However long this wing has been open.”

  “Well,” says Kara. “It’s a great museum.”

  “Yeah, you really seem to love it.” FDR’s voice gets flinty but he never stops smiling. “Such a filthy little mouth on such a pretty little girl.”

  “Oh!” Kara is flustered. “It’s not the museum. I got in a fight with my friends. It’s no big deal. Just girl stuff.”

  FDR nods once. “Human stuff.”

  “Human stuff,” Kara agrees. “You’re right. I never thought of it that way. Not just girl stuff. Everyone can be unhappy.”

  “Are you unhappy, honey?”

  It’s an easy question, but to answer it truthfully is difficult. Kara takes a moment to evaluate what she thinks of as her life—her parents and school, but mostly Ruthie and Olive, her own fat face in an endless stream of mirrors. Whiskey Sour, Lot’s Wife. Tugboat. Eleanor Roosevelt.

  “I’m lonely,” she says.

  FDR reaches out and takes Kara’s hand. Immediately she knows something is wrong. His skin is neither warm nor cold. It feels nothing like skin. It feels slippery and malleable, like a melted candle.

  “I’m lonely, too,” he says.

  At two p.m., the class boards the bus for the trip back to Meadow Ridge. Mr. Olsen stands at the door, making checkmarks next to the names of students as they enter. Ruthie stumbles as she and Olive climb aboard, but Olsen doesn’t notice—he’s too busy perfecting a casual slouch.

  “Basically,” Ruthie hisses to Olive, continuing a conversation they never stop having, “Kara is toxic.” She likes the feel of the word in her mouth. It sounds spiky and diseased. Here on the bus, though, where Kara already sits by herself near the back, staring out the window pensively, Ruthie has to admit she looks pretty harmless.

  “Where’ve you been?” Ruthie asks, sliding into the seat beside Kara. She doesn’t apologize, and neither will Kara. The girls let the moments where they hate each other happen, and once they’ve happened, they don’t remark on them again.

  “We looked everywhere for you,” Olive lies, sitting in front of them. Actually, she and Ruthie went to the museum cafeteria and ate hot dogs.

  Kara turns her head from the window slowly, as if she doesn’t want to tear herself from the view. She looks at Olive’s affable face, framed between the two gray seats, and Ruthie’s, frowning and still hungry. Kara appears utterly at peace, and the sunlight that streams into the window behind her lights up her head like a halo.

  “I met someone,” she says.

  That afternoon is play practice. Mr. Olsen is directing The Crucible, and because their school lists ‘all-inclusiveness’ in its mission statement, everyone who auditioned got a part. Kara and Ruthie and Olive were cast with twenty others as “Hysterical Village Girls.” They have one big scene, where they wail and claw at one another in the courtroom and scream the same words: “Begone! Begone!” They don’t particularly like acting, but they do like this scene—how loud they’re allowed to be, how frightening. Waiting in the wings for their cue, Kara and Ruthie and Olive inhale the sawdusty backstage smell and let their brains go fuzzy; they wake up to their open mouths and sore throats when Olsen bounds onstage with some new direction.

  When the girls are not needed onstage, which is most of the time, they help build the sets. They paint backdrops, cut plywood with a buzz-saw, and construct John Proctor’s jail cell, using a blow-torch to bend the metal bars. When there’s no work for them, they sit in the lobby outside the auditorium and play Categories. But today they talk about FDR.

  “So he’s made of wax?” asks Ruthie. On the bus ride home she got swept up in Kara’s exhilaration and managed to momentarily forget her toxicity—at one point Kara squealed, made a prolonged “Eeee!” sound, and Ruthie couldn’t help but join in.

  “Yes,” says Kara. “At least, I think so. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you can ask a person, you know?”

  “Remember those candy wax lips we used to get on Halloween?” Ruthie says. “Do you think that’s what kissing him would be like?”

  “I’m not going to take a bite out of his lips.”

  Ruthie giggles. Kara’s mouth is a prim line but her eyes beam. Everything looks beautiful to her right now: the fluorescently lit lobby, the red-leaved branches scraping the window, her friends in their starchy costume bonnets.

  “Listen.” Olive has been quiet a while. “Are we going to pretend this is normal? I’m sorry,” she says, because Kara instantly gets that look in her eye, the murderous one, “but there’s nothing sexy to me about a wax figurine. This isn’t a supernatural romance novel. In real life, people don’t have relationships with vampires and zombies.”

  “Maybe you don’t think it sounds sexy, but you weren’t there,” says Kara. “And anyway, no offense? But you don’t always have the best judgment about these things.”

  Olive bites the inside of her cheek. Last year, she had a crush on Nicholas Dawkins, a gawky, big-eared junior. Kara and Ruthie teased her, but they couldn’t ignore the nods he’d give Olive in hallways, the way he’d linger by her locker on Fridays to talk A.P. Chemistry. Olive asked him to homecoming and he said maybe—shyly, she thinks, like he was really going to think about it—but after a week with no answer, Kara told her she was being played and confronted him in the cafeteria with Ruthie, saying if he didn’t treat Olive right he’d have to answer to them. Nicholas never spoke to Olive again, and Kara and Ruthie still consider this their finest, bravest, most legendary act of friendship.

  “I’m just saying,” Olive says. “You barely know him.”

  Kara rolls her eyes. “I know plenty.”

  “Like?”

  “Polio? The New Deal? ‘The only thing we have to fear’?”

  “But is it actually Franklin Delano Roosevelt?” asks Olive.

  “Are you even listening?” Kara snaps.

  “I was listening,” Olive snaps back. “What I’m asking is—is it the spirit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt imbued in this wax figurine? Or is it just a wax figurine that’s come to life?”

  Kara thinks. Besides his admission of loneliness—the thought of which, and the memory of his hand touching hers, sends something soaring in her stomach—she can’t recall many specifics. She remembers the hack of his laugh in the empty corridor; the blue blankness of his eyes. The way he appeared there at exactly the right moment, to her and her alone. Kara has a prickly awareness that Olive’s trying to take something away from her by asking the question. Kara won’t let her: she remembers FDR’s sweetness, and something else, too—some force of character emanating from him as he sat in front of her. Massively confident. Sexy/dangerous. She feels it now. Whatever it is, she thinks, it’s presidential.

  “It was him,” says Kara confidently. “It was FDR.”

  It’s easy to be happy with Kara, when Kara is happy. Ruthie and Olive are at first devoted listeners to their friend’s smitten wonders: do they think FDR would come to homecoming? Do they think he’d like her hair up or down? Do they think he minds that she can walk, that she’s not made of wax? The details of Kara’s infatuation become more and more minute as the days pass. But her moods swing less violently now, and her wax president boyfriend proves a more fascinating topic of conversation than endless rounds of Categories. By Wednesday, something has shifted in Kara—she walks taller, spaces out during class and conver
sation, wears an infuriatingly permanent half-smile. When Ruthie passes her a page of Olsen-Fontana smut in History, Kara writes a note at the top: Can you write one about me and FDR? It’s an alarming request Ruthie pretends not to have noticed. She itches to diagnose Kara with something awful—Narcissistic Personality Disorder? Borderline?—but it seems possible all Kara suffers from is love.

  Olive worries that love gives Kara a sense of authority she does not deserve. On Wednesday, when the three of them walk out into the cold sunshine after school and see Nicholas Dawkins driving by in his beat-up station wagon, and Olive’s hand raises involuntarily in a wave that’s really more of a Nazi salute, and they all see Nicholas cringe as he passes, Kara turns to Olive with a look of sympathy.

  “You guys never really had that spark, did you?” she says.

  And Olive wants to retort. She wants to say, “At least Nicholas Dawkins has bones.” But what’s the point? Kara’s thing with FDR is bigger than a high school crush. It gives her an otherworldly sheen, a glamour. It turns her into an adult. It turns her, Olive realizes with dawning horror, into Cassidy Fontana.

  For months, the girls have waited for a movie that opens on Friday. It’s a revamp of The Castle of Otranto set in high school, starring an actor whose prominent cheekbones and long eyelashes render him androgynous enough to be attractive to them. “Opening night,” Kara and Ruthie and Olive confirm every time they see the trailers on TV. They’ll love every second of it, and at the end they’ll pretend they were only loving it ironically. Ruthie went so far as to order tickets in advance.

  “Otranto High, 7:50,” she reminds Kara on Thursday afternoon.

  “Otranto High, 7:50,” Kara repeats. The girls sit outside the auditorium—Ruthie and Olive with their homework, Kara with an issue of The Economist she is reading to impress FDR. They are waiting to be called to the stage when Kara glances at her cell phone, and sees a text message from a number she doesn’t recognize:

  i miss u

  Who is this? she replies.

  Ten minutes later, a response arrives: lol ur crazy

  Normally, Kara would obliterate this digital stranger for having wasted her time—even now, she imagines the rude things she could say. Eat a dick, moron. Leave me alone. But loving FDR has softened her. I think you have the wrong number, she texts back, adding a smiley face. Then she puts down her phone and tries to get Ruthie and Olive to help her analyze everything FDR said to her as well as the way he said it—she imitates for her friends his gently teasing tone.

  Olive focuses on her textbook, and after a while Ruthie’s eyes glaze over. “Why don’t we go watch rehearsal?” she finally suggests, cutting Kara off mid-sentence. The girls move to the dark auditorium; they watch Abigail Williams and John Proctor read from scripts.

  “I have once or twice played the shovelboard,” says the dark-eyed senior playing Abigail, “but I have no joy in it.”

  The buzz from Kara’s phone is so loud, Proctor stumbles over his line at the sound.

  y r u mad?

  I’m not, Kara texts back. I just don’t know who this is.

  This time the answer comes quickly: met u at the museum, kara.

  If Kara had to visualize the effect this message has on her, she’d picture her heart ripping itself from the veins that hold it steady to hammer alarmingly at her ribcage. I didn’t know you had a phone, she texts.

  got it from the lost n found, FDR replies. when do i c u next.

  Kara puts the phone down and tries to concentrate on the play, to pretend everything is normal, as though she does not have to remind herself to breathe. She wipes her sweating palms on the legs of her jeans. She’s trying to think of a good response, but the only flirtatious banter she’s had with the opposite sex has run a little too heavy on banter. She wants to do this right. Something is happening, finally, to her. Her phone buzzes again.

  kara r u there kara? i need to c u kara when do i c u

  Tomorrow! Kara sends back, and she nearly laughs out loud.

  When she looks up, her face lit white by the glow of her phone, Ruthie and Olive are watching. She sees identical concern in her two friends’ faces, twin grimaces of love and frustration furrowing their brows, and hates them for it.

  On Friday Kara Googles “Franklin Delano Roosevelt favorite drink’ and finds a page that claims it’s Scotch, but when she surveys her parents’ liquor cabinet she’s so nervous she grabs a half-empty bottle of coconut rum instead. She stops at a convenience store before getting on the parkway and buys a disposable lighter, Diet Coke, and trail mix. Her eyes graze over the colorful boxes of condoms hanging in rows behind the cashier’s head, but she cannot work up the nerve to ask for one. It needs to happen sooner rather than later, but she can’t make her mouth say the words. In the car, she feels like laughing and crying. “This is only a first date,” she tells herself.

  She arrives at eight p.m. The museum has been closed for hours and the janitors have already made their rounds. Kara parks in the employee lot. She pushes open the unlocked back door FDR texted her about. She turns on her flashlight and makes her way through a hallway that opens up into the lobby. Kara is the best kind of nervous. What she’s doing feels utterly surreal, partly because she’s told no one else she’s doing it. She considered telling Ruthie and Olive, of course, but in the end it seemed sweeter to hold the plan inside her, secret and safe and all her own. Still, she pictures her friends now, glancing at the time on their phones, waiting for her outside the movie theater, wondering how much of Otranto High they’ve already missed, and Kara regrets not telling them. Not because she’s stood them up, but because she wants someone to call later to describe how good she’s feeling.

  In the In Times of War . . . corridor, the lights are on, and FDR is waiting.

  “Hi,” says Kara. “Right on time!” FDR marvels. “So you’re not one of those dummies who’s always getting herself lost.”

  “Ha ha,” says Kara as she comes closer, and then, “What?”

  In the last week, she’s almost forgotten what FDR looks like. He wears the same dark suit he wore when they first met, the same red tie. He has the bright white rectangular grin of a wind-up monkey. For days she’s scoured the internet for pictures of the thirty-second president, but none of them capture him exactly as he looks now. The pictures show a man tall but bowed, with weak-looking legs and liver-spotted skin. This FDR has those, but also glossy blue eyes, and thick black lines etched into his face. He looks older than Kara remembered. Less real, too. She doesn’t quite know how to proceed. Should she kiss him? She thinks it might be too soon to kiss him.

  “Pull up a seat,” says FDR. “Get comfortable.”

  Kara looks around for a chair, but there are none. She sits at his feet and opens her backpack. She pulls out two red plastic cups and the bottle of coconut rum. “I know you like Scotch, but this was all my parents had.”

  FDR just grins. “I can’t drink. I don’t have a throat.”

  “Oh, my God,” says Kara. “I feel so dumb. I didn’t even think of that.”

  “That’s okay,” FDR says.

  Embarrassed, Kara fills her cup, half rum and half Diet Coke. The result tastes like sunscreen. FDR watches her sip.

  “I’ve never really been on a date,” says Kara. “I know how pathetic that sounds. But I’ve never met anyone like you before.” She waits for FDR to respond, but he doesn’t. “I guess this isn’t new for you.”

  “No,” says FDR, “it isn’t. There was another girl a few years ago. She went to school in Cherry Hill. I can’t remember her name. Maybe Tina?”

  “Another high school girl?” Kara is surprised, but she tries to play it cool. She knows Roosevelt had affairs when he was alive—she’s spent lots of time on Wikipedia this week.

  “Now that I think about it, there was another one before that. Cute,” he says, inspecting Kara. “Thinner than you. But they both went to college. You won’t do that, will you, Kara? You won’t go away and leave me?”


  Kara is confused. “I’ve already started looking at schools.”

  “Well, stop,” says FDR.

  They’re silent a while. Kara can hear the buzz of electricity from the spotlights over each president. She stares at the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner hanging behind George W. Bush at the end of the hall. She stares at the open door.

  “What are you looking at?” FDR snaps. “Are you looking at Lincoln?”

  Kara shakes her head. “No, I—”

  “If you’re here for Lincoln, you can get up and go. I don’t appreciate having my time wasted by dummies who just want a shot at boning Lincoln.”

  “I’m not here for Lincoln,” Kara says. “I’m here for you.”

  The muscles in FDR’s face relax. He hasn’t stopped smiling. “Damn right you are.”

  Kara watches him a long moment, waiting for him to blink. He never does. She tries to remember that she’s having a good time.

  “Hey!” she says suddenly, happy to remember her surprise. She reaches into the convenience store bag and pulls out the lighter, flicking it until a flame appears. Kara moves the flame toward the cigarette at the end of FDR’s holder, but FDR quickly rolls away.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouts. “Are you some kind of an idiot? I’m made of wax, retard!”

  “Oh, God!” Kara drops the lighter and starts to cry. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t even thinking. I just thought you might miss cigarettes.” She’s kneeling in a wax museum on her first date, crying in front of the only man who has ever called her pretty. She is sixteen—too old for this to be happening this badly. You are a tugboat, Kara thinks. She wipes her nose on her sleeve and FDR wheels towards her again.

  “Hey,” he says. “Hey, dummy. Calm down. I’m not mad anymore.” He puts his wax hand on her shoulder and whistles through his square teeth. “Boy oh boy, are you lucky you found me. Other guys wouldn’t put up with that kind of crap, you know. But I love you, Kara. Even though you are a dummy.”