The Best American Short Stories 2018

by Roxane Gay

  While rummaging through Pita’s stockpile, I encountered what is either a giant vibrating dildo or an extraordinarily complex flashlight. I wish it were a flashlight, and a waterproof one at that. I am off to contend with the cockroaches.

  Fin

  June 20, late

  A zero. A zero. I chanted it to myself all the way to the horse pen, alone. Lights out in the cabin, our counselor gone, and a zero is nothing. My mission nothing short of revelation. I was prepared. No longer would I bumble through my life in a perpetual state of impotence and bewilderment. I took the box of sanitary napkins with me in case anyone lying awake in the cabin wondered where I was going.

  Tonight he took off his hat. He asked me to call him Drew, but he didn’t introduce me to the horse. Then something broke in the dark pen. He was fiddling with the saddle, the moon our only light, and I could barely make out his face. “Shoot,” he said. “You want to try riding bareback? I’ll ride with you.” He said it would improve my balance. “Plus it’s natural,” he said. “Think about it.”

  It was not possible for me to think about it. My mind was full of Pita and pornos, backwash and cologne, how I was supposed to act, what I was supposed to want. “Yes,” I told him. My cheeks were perfectly round, not that he could see them. He hoisted me onto the horse.

  Then we were moving fast and it didn’t feel like flying. I sat in front and his arms around me and his thighs pinning me and my back slamming against his chest and my butt slamming against the horse and all of it hurt. The horse was not fat like Jo. I tried to communicate telepathically with the horse, but she was blank silent running. And Andrew rocking and grunting behind me. Finally it ended. He helped me dismount. We were both breathing hard. I stood still in the muddy pen and felt all the sweat pour out of me. I doubted it smelled of exotic fruit. Then Andrew bent his face down toward my face. “You’re not like the other girls,” he said. “I knew right away.” I could see his eyes, finally. They were glassy blue and strange. “Did you feel anything?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, sweating, silently counting my bruises. He did not ask me to specify but wrapped his arms around me and pressed his hands into my backside. I jumped away. “My butt hurts,” I told him. “Grow up,” he said, snorting exactly like a horse. “You got just what you wanted.” He turned away to tend to the horse, and I walked back to the cabin the way I came, alone. I didn’t even tell him about the candy. The candy is a zero. My apple cheeks are a zero. The horse is a zero. They change nothing.

  Fin

  June 21

  Tomorrow is the last day of camp. The other girls in the cabin have been whistling cheerfully all morning. As predicted, Caroline’s flute song has fully penetrated their brains. Pita claims she overheard the counselors saying that the Colts are going to be named Queens of the Moonflower. I am glad for my team but I cannot bring myself to celebrate. I reflect on Captain Beaver’s first directive of the summer: to wait. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps I could not achieve my milestone because I was not patient. I am left only with these small physical traumas, tender to the touch but invisible to the eye, and my own confounding shame.

  Fin

  June 21, again

  Something terrible has happened. I have been accompanied by whistling all day long. The same Christmas song, ad nauseam, and not just from the girls in my cabin. I thought it strange, but the significance of the tune was lost on me. Finally, on my way back from our afternoon Stain Removal class, I saw the letter taped to the front door of the mess hall. It was handwritten, addressed to Andrew, and signed with my name.

  Obviously I didn’t write the letter. The penmanship was curly and fat, a cartoon of a girl’s handwriting, not like mine at all, and my name was misspelled at the end. The letter mentioned how I liked it when you touched my butt and all the guys like my big tits and Andrew won’t you touch them too. It occurred to me, the way that pitch-black water occurs to someone falling down a deep well, that someone had been reading my private notebook, and that this letter was intended as a public indictment. But I had failed, in fact, to like or want these things. I had failed, in front of Andrew, and I had been made to feel embarrassed for failing. Now this forged document revealed at last what no Anatomy and Etiquette lesson could illustrate, no amount of bone-rattling horse sprint could knock into me: I was supposed to want, and not to want, simultaneously. Those were the rules. There was no winning. I would fail either way.

  I fled to the cabin, a handful of Evening Primroses running after me, humming loudly. My own galloping pulse was not powerful enough to drown out the sound of their accusation. Whore song. In the cabin everyone was somehow already in their bunks, fake nonchalant, early for quiet hour. No one was whistling now. It was their silence that betrayed them.

  I flung open my trunk. It appeared undisturbed. I grabbed the sanitary-napkin box and dumped the contents on the floor and my notebook was there as usual. But Pita in the top bunk was laughing. I looked up at her. She had her fist wrapped around her dildo flashlight. She met my eyes, then brought the dildo flashlight slowly to her mouth and ran her tongue down the length of it. Pita, the prophet of my revelation. I experienced in that moment a naked rage that caused my head to lift and separate from my body. A new vocabulary sprung incandescent from my lips. Cock-faced pervert, I heard myself shriek, I will fuck your hair right off. My next move was to take Caroline’s flute and bludgeon Pita’s face with it.

  Before I had the chance, however, our counselor appeared in the doorway. “Josephine,” she said. “Come with me.” I was surprised she knew my name. She escorted me in silence to the office, where Captain Beaver sat behind a scabby wooden desk. On the desk was the letter. “What do you have to say for yourself, Josephine?” the Beaver asked. I looked down at the letter, then up at her worn, lumpy face. The proof of my innocence—the dilettante forgery—was right in front of her. It was self-evident. But to my horror, instead of answering, I burst into tears.

  “That’s all I needed to see,” the Beaver said firmly. I was taken away, not back to the cabin but to the infirmary at the edge of the camp. My trunk and bedroll have been delivered to me. I will spend the night on a cot, in isolation. Even the nurse is gone. She mumbled something about chiggers and departed in apparent disgust. Tomorrow is the last day of Camp Moonflower, but if the Beaver tells my parents about the letter, I will be forced to endure this humiliation forever.

  Fin

  June 22

  Though Captain Beaver’s intent behind her letter-writing assignments remains mysterious to me, I now understand that I must retain these letters as a record of the truth. Whether or not the Beaver reports this incident to my parents, whether or not the letter was an obvious fake. I have learned a great lesson: just as Pita is Pita wherever she goes, this story will follow me.

  I regret that I can no longer document my current location. I expected my parents to pick me up from the infirmary in the morning, but the Beaver came to me instead. She instructed me to leave my possessions behind and follow her. Because I am not a complete idiot, I asked for permission to change my sanitary napkin. In the infirmary bathroom, I unwrapped a fresh pad, discarded it, folded my notebook carefully into the plastic wrapper, and stuck the notebook into the back of my underwear for safekeeping.

  The Beaver led me to the lake. Everyone was there, dressed in their camp whites, presumably for some kind of closing ceremony where the winning team—Queens of the Moonflower—would be announced. Caroline was sobbing. Pita sat beside her with her knotty knees folded to her chest. At the end of the dock, a male counselor, his head concealed in a burlap sack, held a wooden oar. Beside him was a canoe. “Go on, Josephine,” the Beaver said, nodding toward the canoe. I walked down the dock alone, forcing my chin up like an elitist, pretending like I knew what I was doing, feeling a hundred traitor eyes on my body. The male counselor steadied the boat as I stepped inside. Then, to my surprise, he entered the canoe after me and took the bow position. I didn’t have an oar, so I sat with my arms crossed,
staring down the lake horizon, waiting for whatever came next. He pushed off and directed the canoe through the water with strong, precise strokes. The girls of Camp Moonflower applauded politely.

  “Fin,” Caroline shouted. I didn’t want to look back, with all of them watching. But Caroline called my name again, as if she had to tell me something very important, and I couldn’t help myself. I twisted around in the stern seat. A long piece of metal glinted in her hand. She waved it violently in the air: her stupid cornball flute. When she was satisfied that I’d seen it, she pitched it into the lake. Another milestone. I turned back around and closed my eyes and imagined the flute sinking slowly to the bottom of the lake, where it would torment the undeserving fish.

  The male counselor kept rowing, despite the sack over his head. He wore sneakers, not boots, but he was sporting a fastidious suntan, and by the time Camp Moonflower was nothing but tiny dots on the shore, I had worked up the nerve to say his name. “Drew?” He shook his head. I didn’t know if that meant Not Drew or No talking, so I asked another question, which was “Can you see with that sack on your head?” He didn’t respond at all. By this point I was feeling very antsy, so I kept on. I asked him, “Do you know what the Camp Moonflower motto means?”

  Then I said every swear word that I know. I’d learned eighteen new swear words since arriving at Camp Moonflower. When I ran out of known swear words, I made some up. When I couldn’t make up any more, I began to scream. No words. Just noises. He kept rowing. The lake was a lot bigger than I’d realized. I knew which direction the camp was, but I couldn’t see it. And I still couldn’t see the other shore. Finally he stopped rowing. I stopped screaming. My throat felt like it’d been hacked to pieces. We drifted in silence for a minute. Then he spoke from inside the burlap sack.

  “You gotta get out,” he said. “You gotta get out and swim all the way back to shore.” Why, I demanded hoarsely. “That’s the test,” he said. This was the test. This was the Test of Steadfastness. I had been chosen, out of all the Sisterhood, to represent Woman, and I wasn’t even wearing a bathing suit. The swimming counselor had ceaselessly mocked my floundering attempts at the forward crawl. How long would it take for me to dog-paddle steadfastly back to camp? He shrugged. “They’re all standing out there waiting for you.”

  I took in a deep breath and let it out and felt the full force of the sun on the water. I was so tired, and so hot. I did not want dignae or a provisae iucundae. I wanted the man in the burlap sack to go away. I squinted at him until I could imagine him gone. Then, shameless, I stripped down to my underwear and kicked off my shoes and dropped myself into the lake. The water burned up the inside of my nose like crying. I imagined not the bottom of a well. I imagined the lake all briny. My body buoyant. What is the Great Salt Lake. What is the Dead Sea. What is a girl in repose, floating on her back, making up her mind. The sky stared at me, metal-bright and blank, without any answers.

  I knew the way back. Instead I put my head down and I crawled forward, riding the salt in the water of every queen’s tears.

  Jacob Guajardo

  What Got Into Us

  from Passages North

  Rio is the bravest boy I know the summer we are fourteen. The beach is ours and all its coves and sandcastles. I have bug bites like beads of sap on my legs. It is June in Michigan and we giggle like princesses as we pull dresses on in the bedroom our single mothers share. We clip on earrings and hate their heaviness. We imagine our lives as women and say the things we think they would say. We tuck our penises between our skinny legs and walk with our thighs together. When we are through we hang the dresses up and put the earrings back inside their cedar boxes at his mother’s bedside. We promise not to tell anyone. There is a handshake, a promise with our bodies that I will not remember until years later when I see the neighbor boys slapping hands before they part for dinner.

  The summer we are fourteen Rio kisses me for the first time as he zips me into a dress. The dress is blue and white polka dotted and the zipper snags on my tighty-whiteys. The kiss feels like a bug landing on my shoulder. He kisses my lips after he kisses my shoulder. The smell of his teeth is the smell of our shared lunch, fried bologna sandwiches and rice and beans. We made the sandwiches ourselves, the rice and beans we heated up in the microwave. He does not zip the dress up all the way. My shoulder will sting later—like it had been a bee on my shoulder, not the harmless fly I’d felt. It will not always feel like stinging. When my husband kisses my shoulder it will feel good.

  We kiss when we think we are alone. We flip paddleboats on the beach and kiss beneath them, the seats dripping water on us. We kiss at the playground where there are secret places in the wooden infrastructure of the jungle gym. We get away with too much this summer.

  We grow up on Marlin Street in swim-trunks. Our mothers drive their Chevy with every window down. The wind ruffles our hair like pages in a book. Years from now I will move away from Marlin Street. Not far—a few streets. Close enough that our mothers can walk, thumbing their rosaries, to my house and sip mimosas on the porch, where they will laugh like Spanish witches.

  But we grow up on Marlin Street in a beach house. The beach house is blue and has a screened-in porch. On the porch there are two white plastic chairs and a second-hand end-table between them where our mothers sit with their sangrias. We sit on the splintered wood beside them or sit inside on the couch. Our mothers cannot afford to own two houses—will never be able to afford to own two houses. They sleep on two twin-beds in the master and Rio and I sleep together in our room on one queen size. We never have friends over from school.

  Families rent out the beach houses for brief Michigan summers, but our mothers own a taquería on the boardwalk. We own our vacation home. Our mothers are known by locals as the Taco Sisters. They are not sisters. They are not sisters the way Rio and I are not brothers. They are childhood friends—immigrants’ daughters who grew up translating for their mothers and fathers. They asked for what their parents could not. They are not sisters but they shared beds and sleeping bags on the floors of dirty shacks.

  They tell us we washed up on the shores of Lake Michigan. They say they spotted us lit up by the lighthouse against the rocky shoreline. They say gulls carried us to their doorstep. They fit us with seafarers’ names. Mine is Delmar, his is Rio. Both our mothers’ names are Maria—Maria Carmen and Maria Blanca.

  We will never know our fathers. We know that they were light-skinned and fair of hair. Rio’s hair looks like bleached coral. My hair is black but my skin might as well be butterscotch pudding. The only way we look like our mothers is our eyes. When we ask about our fathers they tell us, in English, that they are no longer a park of the picture—an idiom they’ve grown up saying wrong. We imagine our fathers must have been small men to leave such boisterous women. Our mothers never complained, never cursed men and their unwieldy cocks. I will ask about my father again when I am leaving Marlin Street for college and my mother will ask if they were not enough.

  The locals gave the taquería the unofficial name Authentico. Our mothers had bought a neon sign to advertise their authentic Mexican cuisine: tacos el pescado, camarones rebozados, paella de marisco, arroz con pollo. The gaudy neon sign flickered over the walk-up window. They’d meant to name the place El Lago, but the loan from the bank bought them just one sign. We made fun of the unofficial name. We warned that someday a couple hermanos could open up a place called Genuino and ruin them. We sit outside the taquería on picnic tables and pick gum off the seats. We watch our mothers fry tortillas and wipe their hands on grease-licked aprons. Our mothers shoo us off the picnic table when the stand is busy. Years from now, when our mothers can’t spend every day making tacos for tourists anymore, and I tell them I am too busy to run the place, Authentico will close up. I will buy the sign from them and hang it in my garage.

  The vacation families drive their cars too fast down Marlin Street. They are on their porches smoking sausages, or taking boats out on the lake. They are fucking on th
e beach inside murky coves. We hear them and call them monsters. We call anything we cannot explain that June monsters. In Michigan, summer is only a few months in the middle of the year, but our mothers love the beach year round. It means every winter we have to hear about some gringo trying to walk on the lake and drowning. One year the gringo will be a boy from our high school that we hate and they will never pull his body from the lake and we will feel bad for having hated the boy. Our mothers make the holy triangle up and down and side to side.

  We break into the empty summer houses. We scare the spiders out and play house. We spend the night in the empty beds after our mothers pass out drunk from rum and Cokes. We make the beds every morning, fluffing up the pillows. We take things that do not belong to us. Things we think no one will miss. I take cards from Euchre decks and tape them inside a lined paper journal. Rio cuts buttons from Sunday bests and carries them around in a velvet bag like they are marbles. We are monsters. We carve our initials into the underbellies of the summer homes’ expensive wood furniture. We lie under the giant oak frames of the summertime beds with a set of keys and cut away at the bed flesh. We find out that if the wood has not cured long enough the furniture will bleed. When I am twenty-eight and expecting my first child I will wonder what had gotten into us that summer and hope my child is not a monster.

  When I am twenty-eight and expecting my first child, my husband and I will drive up Marlin Street to show my mothers the first sonogram. The child will be growing inside a woman we have paid through an agency. The surrogate will be a healthy, Latina woman getting her PhD in women’s studies at the college in Kalamazoo. I will believe that this detail will make my mothers proud. I will struggle to find the best way to tell them. I will expect that they will not understand. I will expect that they will have questions I will not know the answers to. I will bring them a flyer from the agency complete with illustrations and a number to call should they have any questions. They will make the holy triangle, up and down and side to side.