The Best American Short Stories 2018

by Roxane Gay

  Often now, she wants to scream. Sometimes she does, and then the guards come to restrain her. They hold her arms behind her back. They drag her down the hall and put her in a room, a colorless box with spiders in the corners, until she calms down. But that’s going in the wrong direction. The scream is for help, not for hindrance. Why don’t they understand? The woman in the box next to hers is there because she threw up. To throw up is to disobey orders. You disobey, you get the box. The guards think: The smaller the box, the more we can control them. But everyone else knows: The smaller the box, the more out of control people become.

  One day, when the air is damp and the sky is mottled and gray, there’s a protest. People outside hold signs that say ILLEGAL IS A CRIME and SEND THEM BACK WITH BIRTH CONTROL. People hold American flags over their shoulders like capes. Superhero Americans. She imagines them at home in their living rooms, a bowl of dog food by the door, a cup of cold tea that has steeped too long on the counter. She imagines them laying the poster board on the floor, uncapping markers, drawing the letters, coloring them in.

  Esme lost her baby. She left that part out.

  “She had a miscarriage a few weeks after she got here,” a woman named Marta tells her. “Gracias a Dios that she didn’t have to carry it to term. Her body released its own pain.” Marta stops and shakes her head. “They don’t take care of nobody in here, see. They don’t care who we are. It’s easier to fuck somebody than to give a fuck, you know?”

  One morning, a woman in a pale-pink T-shirt approaches her in the cafeteria while she’s getting a tray.

  “I heard you were looking for your son,” she says quietly.

  She looks at the woman—she can’t help it—with delirious hope.

  “I might know something,” the woman says.

  “Like what?” Her heart pounds. She can hear the echo of it deep in her ears, even amid the clatter and scrape of silverware, the grumble of voices around them.

  “Your ring,” the woman says.

  For a moment, she’s confused, but then she understands. “Tell me,” she says.

  The woman nods at the ring.

  “Tell me first.”

  A smile spreads like an oil slick across the woman’s face, but she doesn’t speak.

  She keeps her eyes on the woman, her round face and her widow’s peak, as she touches the ring on her finger. It’s looser now than when she arrived. She twists it gently and slides it off. She closes her hand around it. When she gives it to the woman, she feels part of herself go numb.

  “Tell me,” she says again.

  The woman fits the ring over the tip of her thumb. “I heard about a boy they found on the side of the road,” she says. “They took him to a hospital in Laredo.”

  “How old?”

  “Ten?”

  She forces herself to swallow. “No,” she says weakly. “My son is younger.”

  “Oh, is he?”

  She nods.

  “Sorry,” the woman says. “I thought maybe it was him.”

  She loses track of the dots. She loses track of herself.

  Alicia and her daughter are released. Marta is sent back. She doesn’t see Esme again.

  And yet. Every day she waits for him by the front door. She sits on the floor, knitting her fingers in her lap.

  And then—

  “Gabriel!”

  She scrambles to her feet. Mixed up in a tangle of people, there he is. His dark, combed hair, the freckle beneath his eye. God in Heaven! It’s him! She lunges forward and wrests him from the crowd. She falls to her knees and pulls him into her arms. She’s so flooded with shock and gratitude that she can hardly breathe. Her nose in his hair, the smell of him almost unbearably sweet. Her hands cupping his shoulders, those same slight shoulders, as small and breakable as eggs. “Gabriel,” she whispers again and again. She can feel him shuddering. “It’s O.K.,” she tells him through tears.

  Around her there is cheering. Or is it shouting? Why is everyone shouting? A woman’s voice saying, “Don’t touch my boy! Mateo!” And why does she feel hands on her now, prying her away, tugging her back as she reaches for him—isn’t it him? isn’t it? but it looked so much like him!—hands that carry her down the hall, hands that shove her into a room, hands that turn the key in the lock.

  She crumples to the floor and blinks in the dark. From inside the box, she screams.

  And then one day there are leaves on the trees, and wild-magnolia blossoms on the branches, bobbing gently in the breeze. She will stay in this place, she tells herself, until he comes. Through the window in the dayroom, she watches the white petals tremble, and, in a gust, a single blossom is torn off a branch. The petals blow apart, swirling, and drift to the ground.

  She closes her eyes. Where has she gone and what has she become? The blisters have healed, the bruises have faded, the evidence has vanished—everything dissolves like sugar in water. It’s easy to let that happen, so much easier to give in, to be who they want you to be: a thing that flares apart in the tumult, a thing that surrenders to the wind.

  Kristen Iskandrian

  Good with Boys

  from ZYZZYVA

  I was going to sleep in a museum—with any luck, next to Esau Abraham, a boy so gorgeously Jewish he held the entire Old Testament in his name, in the perfect contours of his face. I had this theory about boys, that if they just got close enough to me, and sort of focused in, they would forget about the obvious deterrents, the glasses, the frizzy hair, the underdeveloped body. I was zany, I really went for it, I knew all the good dick jokes. Everyone talks about personality like it’s a bad thing but the fact is, without one, you’ve got nowhere to go but ugly.

  It’s the beautiful people, isn’t it, who most often wind up dead or alone.

  We took a bus, not a yellow school bus but one of those real ones, with plush red seats and TVs, although we weren’t allowed to turn the TVs on. Esau Abraham’s mom, Mrs. Abraham, was on the bus, one of the parent chaperones. This was a problem but not necessarily a dealbreaker. She loved her son. She wanted what was best for him. We could be allies.

  Someone opened up a giant bag of Cheetos. We were going to have dinner in the museum cafeteria but a bus ride demanded snacks. The bag got passed around, and soon the smell of powdered cheese was upon us all like a pollen. I knew even as a kid that kids were disgusting, the constant hand to mouth, the reckless tactility. Most of us did not wash our hands after we used the bathroom—a fact I’d empirically uncovered by spending a lot of time in the bathroom. I hid in stalls to avoid certain things, which was my right, which was all of our right.

  The bus driver was a middle-aged woman who clipped her turns close. The second time we bounced off a curb, Mrs. Abraham jostled up to the front and rapped on the Plexiglas. “Hey,” she said. “This is a bus full of kids you’re driving. Can you please be more careful?”

  “Lady, I been driving kids a long time. They love it rough.”

  She wasn’t wrong. We did like it rough. The higher we bounced, the better.

  The year before we’d gone to the planetarium. Esau Abraham wasn’t at our school then. I had big plans for Sam Bell—got behind him in line so that I could sit next to him—but as we entered the darkened room, Allison nudged ahead of me. “Sam,” she’d said. “Sam, you dropped this,” and handed him a VISITOR button. His VISITOR button was fastened to his shirt, so we all knew it was a big fat lie. But I gained a lot of admiration for her just then.

  We hit a pothole and I flew a couple inches into the air. “Take it easy!” yelled Mrs. Abraham.

  “Not much I can do about the roads!” the bus driver called back gleefully.

  There was a rumor that the local news team would be at the museum when we got there, since this was the first time an elementary school class—or any class—had been invited to spend the night. As an event, it was just hitting all the right chords for me: a sleepover, not at my house, at the museum of natural history, with boys.

  I just loved boys so much, i
t was a sickness, it was a secret. I had to pretend I didn’t love them as much as I actually did. I didn’t want to be boy crazy. Once boy craziness became your signifier you couldn’t be taken seriously. Your art would be ignored. I worked so hard on mine, I fully expected to have a gallery showing of my gouaches and charcoal sketches within the year. Esau Abraham was a really good drawer and I looked forward to our future collaborations, the font of mutual encouragement we would fill together.

  When we pulled up to the museum and the bus came to an especially jarring stop, I slung my overnight bag over my shoulder, tucked my sleeping bag under my arm, and squeezed into the aisle behind Mrs. Abraham. I leaned in and breathed in to see if I could learn anything additional about Esau. She smelled like Vicks VapoRub and faintly, confusingly, bacon. In the dusk, we gathered on the wide sidewalk in front of the museum. Sure enough, a newsman was talking to Ms. Green, our teacher. What a moment for her, for all of us. She was smiling and talking with her hands, her rosy face exuberant. I could tell she felt famous, and honestly, I think we all did.

  Once inside, we were led to the Discovery Room, where we were told to find a place for our bags and sleeping bags. I was startled; I did not expect this to happen so soon. The Discovery Room had a hodgepodge of hands-on exhibits, some insects and fish, a family of stuffed wolves behind glass, and an enormous sculpture of the human brain that you could walk inside. Each of the four lobes was a different color and came with a mini audio tour.

  Obviously, the Discovery Room would also be where I “discovered” more about Esau Abraham, if you catch my drift.

  Esau followed his mother to a small enclave created by an aquarium flanked by two bookshelves.

  “Here, Esau, this is a good spot for us,” she said, taking his navy blue sleeping bag from him and laying it on the floor. “We can look at the fish while we fall asleep!” She unrolled hers—red with a tartan print on the inside—right next to his.

  My unsinkable heart sank. I had to be strategic. I put my things down on the other side of the bookshelf closest to Esau. I quickly tested the space and realized that if I stretched all the way out, my head would be more or less in line with his, about four feet apart. Three feet and eleven and three-quarters inches too many.

  What could I do but wait, which was of course the one thing I was terrible at. My great aunt told me once, when you dislike doing something, you have to do it more, do it over and over, any chance you got, until you not necessarily liked it—liking wasn’t the goal—but just felt neutral toward it. Neutrality, she said, was the whole purpose. Real Buddhist talk for a woman—my namesake—with a severe QVC addiction. But I thought of her now, and tried to make this situation apply. How to wait more? How to wait over and over? Impossible. Thanks for nothing, Aunt Jill.

  Most of the other girls in the class had spread their stuff out in a long rectangle on the other side of the room, closer to the brain. Coyness was never a virtue I cared very much about. Once it was lights out, once Ms. Green and the other chaperones were asleep, those girls would have twice as much work to do, with twice as much risk. Me, I was staying right here, close to my target.

  Mrs. Abraham was squeezing hand sanitizer onto Esau’s open palms. I had to be careful not to watch him too much when he was with his mother. It was a turn-off. I took off my glasses and cleaned them on the bottom of my shirt. The only thing worse than a girl with glasses, I reasoned, was a girl with dirty glasses.

  I was good with boys because I knew what they wanted. I could enter the simple machines of their minds and see how their gears turned. Most of them needed a lot of oil. To be told, a lot, how correct their opinions were, because most of them believed that opinions were like facts—provable and true. Thinking something, for a boy, meant not-thinking all other things. When two even vaguely conflicting ideas rubbed together, they either quickly chose one and discarded the other, or abandoned them both for a new and better topic, often something they felt absolutely certain about, like a cool video game, or whose bra was visible beneath her shirt, or what was I even doing there anyway. Over time, I could make them talk to me, just by simply existing. I occupied a genderless place where I neither quickened the blood like the obvious girls, nor inspired the bravado often necessary around other boys. Around me, they got to take five. Being a safe harbor may seem dull and sexless (so to speak—nobody’s having sex) but it’s actually a place of power. Deep, hard, penetrating power.

  (That’s the kind of riffing I had access to, for example.)

  Mrs. Abraham went off to use the bathroom.

  “Hi, Esau,” I said casually, coming from around the bookshelf.

  “Hi,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be over there, with the other girls? It’s just boys over here.”

  “Oh really? I didn’t even notice. It looks pretty crowded over there. I might just stay put.”

  Esau rubbed his hands on his jeans. “I wish we could sleep in the brain.”

  “Are we not allowed to?” This was a possibility I hadn’t considered.

  “I don’t think so. There’s not really a lot of room in there.”

  Mrs. Abraham came back from the bathroom. “Who’s this?” she asked brightly, glancing from Esau to me.

  “Hi Mrs. Abraham,” I stuck out my hand. “I’m Jill.”

  “Well hi, sweetie. Did you find a spot for your stuff? Looks like the girls are going to be on the other side of the room tonight. Probably a good idea, right?” Her eyes were roving over my shoulder to where I’d painstakingly placed my things. I noticed from this close distance that the majority of her eyebrows were drawn on. I was a mothers’ favorite and a grandmothers’ favorite and I had to decide whether I would risk my reputation and stay put, or oblige her and move. But before I could say or do anything, Ms. Green was summoning all of us to the doors. It was time to eat dinner, she said—pizzas had arrived—after which we had forty-five minutes to spend as we wished, in approved areas of the museum.

  I got my two slices of pizza and fruit punch juice box and sat with a table of girls. My best friend Sarah was dabbing her pizza with a napkin.

  “Why did you put your stuff on the boys’ side?” she asked.

  I punctured the foil circle with my straw. “I didn’t actually realize there were ‘sides,’” I said. “Seems like the whole point of being here is to, you know, mix it up.”

  Sarah chewed carefully. She was a very careful chewer. She told me once that you were supposed to chew every bite thirty-five times before swallowing it. “Well, I don’t think we’re allowed to sleep on the same side. They were supposed to put us in separate rooms but the other rooms have to be kept really cold or something, that’s what I heard.”

  A girl named Caroline tossed her long, pretty hair. “They’ll probably come to our side after everyone’s asleep, and try to be gross. I heard Nick say he was going to steal our underwear.”

  “Nick’s an idiot,” I said. “Who even brought underwear? It’s not like we’re staying here for a week.”

  Caroline shrugged. “I brought extra, just in case. My mom always says to pack extra underwear, because you never know.”

  “Yeah, like, you could pee your pants or something!” Lauren shouted out, and everyone laughed.

  I didn’t laugh. I tried not to roll my eyes. Caroline definitely wanted her underwear to be stolen. I could see right through her. I didn’t like this kind of game-playing. I didn’t like silliness, the silliness so often ascribed to our sex. I was constantly trying to get out from under it, kill it as savagely as possible, like a slug you pour salt on even after it’s dead.

  If you wanted a boy’s attention, you had to get it. You had to take it.

  After dinner, I kept my eye on Esau. His mother was talking to Ms. Green and the two other parent chaperones. With a few other boys he headed toward Ornithology, which was fortunate, since it was adjacent to the Mineralogy wing, where I wanted to spend my time. I had some money to spend in the gift shop tomorrow and I was definitely going to get a few ne
w polished rocks and minerals for my collection. Some agate, maybe. I did not want to lose sight of the educational purpose of this trip. I knew, deep in my bedrock layer, that Esau Abraham would come and Esau Abraham would go. I knew I had to keep a firm hold on my interests outside of boys. I stood looking at an exhibit containing necklaces of jade, peridot, and pink topaz, right next to the clusters of Mississippi pearls so creamy they seemed edible, and I felt stirred, filled with longing.

  My desire for boys and my desire for certain other things—often inexplicable, sometimes beautiful, frequently plain, occasionally attainable, like a tiny plastic fifty-cent notebook charm complete with even tinier pencil, for my charm bracelet; sometimes not, like these exquisite jewels that came from places in the earth that no longer even exist—were knotted together as intricately as a DNA double helix. I wanted and wanted and wanted. I believed, like my Great Aunt Jill, that objects had the power to protect me from harm—the harm of loneliness and my own impermanence—and I believed that boys had the same power.

  My little voice told me, take what you want. Take what you can. Heal in the long shadows of the taking. My little voice and Aunt Jill’s little voice, maybe, were the same.

  I realized I was standing with my hands and forehead pressed to the glass. I heard a few people enter the room and then Esau’s voice, “Adam—wait up!”

  “Where are you guys going?” I asked, straightening up.

  “Adam wants to go to the dinosaur room, right?” Esau asked. Adam was a shy boy, shyer than Esau, and obsessed with Abraham Lincoln.

  “I’m not sure we’re allowed upstairs. I think we’re supposed to stay just on this floor,” I said, unsure of why I was taking the rule-abiding position, especially since I was planning on breaking a few unspoken rules later that night.

  Esau looked at Adam. “I could ask my mom,” he said.